The Ethereum founders do: they've managed to turn themselves into a certification/approval stamp of sorts. I've seen them slapped on as advisors for umpteen of these ICOs.

If I were them, I'd create a regulatory company and take a cut for "Ethereum-approved ICOs."

Vitalik has conceded this was a mistake and has stated he will no longer have any formal role in outside ethereum businesses. He also stated that he was not paid for any of these advisory positions he held.

I've personally seen the price sheets for what he's billed out per hour, and sat through advisory work meetings with him. While it's possibly he wasn't officially paid for those specific ICO advisory positions, he certainly was getting paid for advisory work.

Yes, he meant specifically for ICO advisory positions. Certainly (like almost every other developer) he has been paid for contract work/consulting for some project at some point.

He is 'invested' in a lot of these coins though. Seems to be able to own them before they ico. HMMM

And a lot of those were actually fake / without any sort of authorization. Some projects also just put ppl as a "advisors" because they answered a question that one time.

Btw, Given is the number of Ethereum founders is small, you're probably referring to some of many devs working for the foundation as contractors.

>happens to have

Sorry but ethereum has no use case, nor is technically ethereum's architecture makes distributed computation possible or even is decentralised. There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.

> There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.

Sure there is. ENS, for one example. Plenty of gambling apps for another (I don't find them particularly _compelling_, but they are there and they do work)

ENS is a great example of a centralised system plus its only about eth based names, no application other than just a method by to collect money by the platform for offering services that are only about the platform and work in the platform.

ENS is implemented as a set of smart contracts with some multisig management. Are you arguing that this is centralized? Also, money that is collected by the ENS contracts is only held as a deposit.

Yes, I am arguing it is centralised. Read about the centralised root signature system that is the way to add new TLDs to the system.

Also this is worse than the current system we have in the world because it wastes more energy in doing so!

It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.

> it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc.

The "etc" is important here, because it refers to richer resources such as content hashes. With this, you could load the entire "frontend" for a website from a decentralized datasource, e.g. Swarm. Meanwhile, the backend could be the Ethereum blockchain/smart contract methods.

No etc is not important because it is essentially a centralized mapping of a string of text to another, thats all.

You seem to have very (some would say ridiculously) high standards for 'decentralised'.

If the root multisig was deleted, would it be 'decentralised' in your book?

> It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.

It doesn't claim to be DNS. DNS is not the only naming system.

What's centralised about ENS?

Also, it can be used to resolve any resource you want - although you're shifting the goalposts, since that wasn't originally a requirement.

1. the whole blockchain it is based on 2. root signatures in ENS

Okay, I'll bite. What's 'centralised' about Ethereuem, without twisting the word beyond all recognition?