It's nice to see companies building on Ethereum acting professionally in times like these: https://twitter.com/ambisafeco/status/786570218625572864

I like how their logo is just Chrome + Ubuntu

It looks like three breasts.

To play devil's advocate, where does it say that Ethereum is still in beta? Or is that meant in a "perpetually beta" sense?

Not nearly as exciting (read: politically contentious) as the last fork.

This time around it's mainly repricing opcodes that were cheap enough to effectively spam the network with.

TL;DR: Another API break to fix glaring protocol holes.

Why are people entrusting money to this?

It's a non-contentious upgrade to reduce attack surface. The more of these they do the more reliable they become. Every popular blockchain will get attacked, simply because there is a strong economic benefit to do so. Bitcoin is trusted so much in no small part due to surviving so many attacks. Nobody gets it right the first time.

The more of these they do... the more obvious it will be that its design is fundamentally broken.

Same reason people invest in VC and other high-risk/high-reward asset classes: it may not work, but if it does, it will be immensely valuable.

Yup. You'll see tons and tons of people excusing this behavior, those folks are zealots.

The reality is that the system is broken. If Ethereum wanted to add a management and regulation process into the system they should have done so explicitly, from the start. Instead they've used these forks to massage the core problem: which is that relying utterly on code as a binding contract is unworkable. It's not going to stop.

> The reality is that the system is broken.

> If Ethereum wanted to add a management and regulation process into the system

> they should have done so explicitly, from the start.

From TFA:

".. hard forks are arguably part of ethereum's DNA, as many in its community view the action as a way to upgrade the software in a way that supports its larger goals.

"The ethereum project always stated that it will hard fork often to progress the technology," Heiko Hees, a developer working on ethereum's Raiden Network, explained."

If people weren't speculating in the currency, it wouldn't be such a holy war every time.

Bitcoin also had a fork due to a bug in 2013. It wasn't perfect in its early years either, and yet it's a useful platform/technology now.

What is bitcoin useful for now? Legitimate question; I still see it as a research project. I can't think of any day-to-day activity that is made better by bitcoin (yet).

Personally I'm paid in bitcoin from an asian company I work for and use them with a bitcoin pre-paid/debit card for a big part of my expenses.

I used to be paid by wire transfers, but it's faster this way and less fees (especially the currency exchange ones).

Some few companies also have rebates if you pay with bitcoins so that's a nice plus. But it really is refreshing and interesting how free you feel in a sense.

Is Bitcoin any more volatile than a "normal" currency in regards to value on the time scale of when work is done and work is paid?

Usually when I hear the dollar is down its cents on the dollar over weeks but what I hear about Bitcoin sounds more like a stock market, with sudden crashes and rallies

Depends where you live. The pound crashed 6% last week in a matter of minutes, and is down 8% this month and 17% this year. The Swiss franc jumped 40% against the euro in a matter of minutes in 2015. The ruble crashed 45% over 6 months in 2014. Icelandic kronor crashed 35% vs the dollar in 2008. Venezuela is in hyperinflation right now.

But changes to international exchange rates don't (immediately) impact your cost of living. If you're paid in bitcoins, and the price goes down, that means you're effectively making less money (in local currency) to pay for food, housing, transportation, etc.

It depends where you live and what currencies you use.

I live in Finland, which uses the Euro currency, but I get paid in British pounds sterling. The recent rate crash directly impacts me - when I get paid at the end of the month I literally receive less salary.

(Exactly the same as the poster above, getting paid in Bitcoin if the rates fall.)

If all of your transactions are made in one currency (which is the case for most people) most of those situations have little impact. Very few goods are priced in Bitcoin, so the price fluctuations are much more meaningful.

I have experienced a lot of volatility with the bitcoins I bought. Namely, they're all worth 100x what I paid for them, while fiat currency continues to lose value every day as central banks print money non-stop.

In my country, the government requires that I use bitcoin to buy drugs online, gamble, and buy backpage ads.

International money transfers between two parties who mutually trust each other.

it's pretty great for buying drugs to be honest. well, the actual experience of buying bitcoin is an insane and wasteful hassle and it takes for-fucking-ever for confirmations but it's better than copping on the street at least.

Timestamping documents can be useful:

http://proofofexistence.com

(the site isn't necessary, but quite convenient unless you do it very frequently)

Compare that to going to a notary or something..

Shameless plug: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement and for Git commits https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-git-integration

Bitcoin timestamping can be a lot more convenient and efficient than that site, and totally free too.

That's a pretty in depth version, will have to check it out. Looks cool.

I transfer money internationally using it. I also pay for my hosting with bitcoin, because paying with bitcoin is the easiest thing in the world - it's way easier than CC, PayPal, anything else I've tried.

Drug trade?

> Bitcoin also had a fork due to a bug in 2013.

True, but misleading. That multi-hour outage was due to a subtle db library issue.

This is much more like writing software then trying to secure it later when you discover people are exposing it to the internet :(

Couldn't the same thing have been said about the Internet in the early days?

No. The Internet never claimed to be a bastion of immutable objective truth, unlike Ethereum. Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not. It's also poorly designed even though we know better, whereas at least the early internet was more or less as well designed as we knew how to do at the time.

"Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not." Really? I recall them having 3-4 stages before they called it done, the first of which called itself "frontier" precisely to discourage folks from thinking it was ready.

That said, I was somewhat horrified to see something as large as the DAO launch on an alpha platform, and not surprised to see it tank. Maybe Ethereum core developers in unofficial channels were more cavalier about its current state, but as a casual follower who read their blog for a while, I never got the impression presented in your comment.

"Information Superhighway"?

I guess the point is that the Internet was not nominally valued at $1B in the early days (depending on how you define that).

It doesn't matter that the Internet wasn't valued at $1B. What matters is that it was just as crazy in the minds of some to trust your money on the Internet in the early days.

Sure. It also could have been said about pets.com in the early days.

Because they're sure they can sell to a greater fool