I'm a pretty big proponent of bitcoin and enthusiastic about 2.0 applications. But I've got serious doubts about Ethereum. For one it's still pretty much vaporware, little has been released and there's a ton of hype that puts style over substance. For example you'll hear 'turing complete' used 500 times in any piece about Ethereum, but speaking to core developers it turns out that this isn't really significant at all.
Besides this there have been some doubts about the development and governance of Ethereum. Let's be clear. Bitcoin is mostly developed by developers funded by the foundation which has a total budget of about $1.5m a year for 2013 and has been doing this for half a decade. Ethereum has already raised as much money as the BF spends in a decade on development, legal, lobbying, evangelism etc. In short, they've got way more money than they need.
And then there have been some complaints about how the team handled things, e.g. an investment round they tried to do earlier but failed. And how there's no real reason to need such a large amount of expensive ethers for actual development purposes, particularly not a long time before actual development start.
Don't get me wrong, not trying to hate on the team. But I can't find a good reason why people buy ethers like they do. They're supposed to be for development, not as an investment, and we really don't need so many of them. It's the equivalent of Google selling developer Google Glasses for $10k a piece, and regular joes buy 10 of em 'just to hold as an investment, who knows it might take off.' It's ridiculous. Only then it was a pre-order, and there'd be no way to start developing for it, the team behind it is talented but unproven, and in a classic hype scheme the price goes UP over time, not down, despite it being already overpriced and sold as an investment instead of as a dev-resource.
You've got a 100% working testnet and hundreds of interesting apps/projects with released code in GitHub. Obviously the Ethereum team is not going to release "all the code" immediately if they want to keep the first-mover advantage. It's just about keeping a competitive advantage before clones start popping up like mushrooms. (common sense)
> But I can't find a good reason why people buy ethers like they do. They're supposed to be for development, not as an investment, and we really don't need so many of them.
I know a lot of people like me are buying ETH for time-to-market reasons. We already have toy-ether in the testnet, but this is a whole different thing. Believe it or not, there's a lot of people building things for ethereum. If you are serious about launching something on top of Ethereum, and like the idea, why not support the final stage of development? This is a crowdfunding campaign. That's all.
Obviously there's a bunch of other people just trying to get some ether for speculation. This is normal, and can't be prevented, just like in bitcoin (march'13 & november'13, remember?).
I'm not recommending to buy ether to anyone unless they believe in the project and want to see a team pushing the boundaries of cryptocurrencies development.
> there's a lot of people building things for ethereum.
Are you sure it's ready? There seem to be critical pieces missing in the execution model. Specifically, arbitrary code execution by strangers.
From the white-paper: http://www.gavwood.com/Paper.pdf
"the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a quasi-Turing-
complete machine; the quasi qualification comes from the
fact that the computation is intrinsically bounded through
a parameter, gas, which limits the total amount of com-
putation done."
This all sounds very interesting and novel. You buy credits for hosting, this goes further then using Bitcoins to rent bare metal servers. It's integrated in the architecture.
Reading on in that whitepaper. "The machine does not follow the standard von Neumann architecture. Rather than storing program code in generally-accessible memory or storage, it is stored separately in a virtual ROM interactable only through a specialised instruction."
Quite exotic and no re-usage of existing code. What does that mean for IO and networking? Are you allowed to create TPC/IP listen sockets? This is undefined.
Moreover, "For the release series, we use a more complex proof-of-work. This has yet to be formally defined, but involves two components; firstly that it concerns the evaluation of programs on the EVM."
The developers aims for an ASIC-proof proof-of-work system and link it to their arbitrary code execution ability (EVM). However, they are still working on this.
If you're asking these kind of questions you're a few steps removed from appreciating the purpose and intent of ethereum... though you certainly are asking the right kinds of questions. I think this presentation would clear things up for you a bit more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGIeSCgskc
Obviously it's not vaporware but there are many discussions about their implementation behind the scenes such as "Ethereum “Dagger” PoW function is flawed" [1] and "Changes in Ethereum scripting language" [2].
Besides this there have been some doubts about the development and governance of Ethereum. Let's be clear. Bitcoin is mostly developed by developers funded by the foundation which has a total budget of about $1.5m a year for 2013 and has been doing this for half a decade. Ethereum has already raised as much money as the BF spends in a decade on development, legal, lobbying, evangelism etc. In short, they've got way more money than they need.
And then there have been some complaints about how the team handled things, e.g. an investment round they tried to do earlier but failed. And how there's no real reason to need such a large amount of expensive ethers for actual development purposes, particularly not a long time before actual development start.
Don't get me wrong, not trying to hate on the team. But I can't find a good reason why people buy ethers like they do. They're supposed to be for development, not as an investment, and we really don't need so many of them. It's the equivalent of Google selling developer Google Glasses for $10k a piece, and regular joes buy 10 of em 'just to hold as an investment, who knows it might take off.' It's ridiculous. Only then it was a pre-order, and there'd be no way to start developing for it, the team behind it is talented but unproven, and in a classic hype scheme the price goes UP over time, not down, despite it being already overpriced and sold as an investment instead of as a dev-resource.