Quote from: BigOrangeBee on July 30, 2014, 05:07:20 PM

Quote from: mcjavar on July 30, 2014, 12:53:48 PM

In this case, the 8000BTC you already got, should provide enough motivation to answer all questions here.

Hehe, I think the opposite rule would apply. Why should he answer all questions here? They already got 8000 BTC.

I keep wondering about what this ether sale really is, though. It very much looks more like a crowdfunding event than an investment or a software sale. There has been a lot of attention given to the financial and legal aspects of Ethereum, not to mention the massive PR effort on the part of the developers/founders. A lot of the technical issues, like the problem of blockchain bloat are problems "to be dealt with in time" but these are problems that absolutely cripple the chances of Ethereum even working and fulfilling its endeavors.

Unlike past large scale explosions of technology from the open source community, for example, Linux, the business side of this has not been ignored, and the product is not being offered for free as all open source has been in the past. The Ethereum client (inside a browser or eventually an OS) might be offered for free, however, you would not be able to use it without ethers, which cost money.

So there are huge efforts in the business, legal, and PR aspects of this, which we have never seen before in the past. And many of the technical problems with actually making the software work are being pushed off to be dealt with at a later time. That undermines my confidence in it.

Although, I do believe its time for developers and the "smart people" of the world to get the financial compensation that they deserve. And this might be why the founders have put so much effort into the business and legal side. Developers, techies, and "geeks" worldwide have been exploited and forced to take small compensation for work that their employers or clients would never be able to do or even understand. The true order should be that the smartest people should be the bosses, and not be exploited by people less intelligent than themselves.

So in that way, I respect how the Ethereum founders have taken the business side very seriously, and hopefully they will raise the standard for open source software globally. There's too many intelligent people doing hard work for zero or very little pay, trying to support their efforts on only donations. It's certainly time to change that, when their efforts are so important, for example, Wikipedia is a huge and very important source of information for the world and they live on donations.

Back to the ether sale. Despite what I wrote above, I think 2000 ether per 1 bitcoin, is a very HIGH price to pay for a token that has no value yet in anything but Ethereum, which is a software that still has so many technical issues to accomplish if it will survive long term.

But my confusion lies in whether I believe the founders really care whether Ethereum survives long term. This I can't decide. From my research, it seems to me that all the effort put into Ethereum has culminated to this point, the ether sale, and this is the harvest for the seeds that have been planted many months ago. I have heard things being mentioned by the founders (they like to be called founders, not devs) which suggest that their efforts were to get to this point and after Ethereum goes live, they seek to recruit a new team to take over and continue the project. I'm not sure if that is correct, but that was my impression from some of things being said by them. I could be wrong there.

But 0.005 bitcoin per 1 ether is a very high initial price for something that will only be used by developers at first to build applications. But if you're quick enough, it may be worth it. My feeling is that hype and PR are a huge part of this, and very key and important people who were responsible for getting bitcoin off its feet and into the mainstream are the same people who are involved with Ethereum. There are certainly HUGE whales behind this project.

So regarding the value of ethers: I think it will pump above the pre-sale price initially with help from PR and hype, and several large whales who want to see this project succeed. Then after the dust settles, a few weeks or months after it goes live, I believe the value will fall to below the pre-sale price.

This is all pure speculation and I really have no idea. Just trying to work out my thoughts on this in a public space and hopefully get some feedback from people who have no investment in its success or failure, and are able to give an objective opinion.

>But 0.005 bitcoin per 1 ether is a very high initial price

You either made a mistake typing, or will be happy to know it's 10 times cheaper than what you think:
1/2000 = 0.0005