Whalepanda: I was wrong about Ethereum medium.com/@WhalePanda I was wrong about Ethereum because it’s such a good store of value… no wait, let me try again. I was wrong about Ethereum because it’s such a decentra… nope. I was wrong about Ethereum because everyone is using it as a supercomputer… No. Ethereum’s sole use case at the moment is ICOs and token creation.

What’s driving the Ethereum price? Greed. What will the price do next? It can go quite a bit higher, there are so many coins being taken off the market by these ICOs, that it can still continue for a while and everyone is seeing this and thinking: “Why aren’t I doing an ICO”. There are lots more coming. At one point it will crash, hard. What the trigger will be? Bug(s) in smart contracts, major hack, big ICO startup that fails/fucks up, network split, even something as silly as not having a decent ICO for a couple of weeks which creates sell pressure from miners and ICO projects can cause a big crash. The responsibility here is with the developers [who] use their own celeb status to actively promote token projects as advisors, for which they’re compensated well, luring in people who have no clue what they’re buying. Have you heard of primalbase? It’s an ICO with a token for shared workspaces. Why would a shared workspace need its own token? It doesn’t, it really really really doesn’t. Let’s take a look at the advisors: On the 15th of June Vitalik said he won’t be doing organic PR to any other future ICO projects. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/875328160325279744 Ethereum vs Russia livemint.com/Opinion Russian President Vladimir Putin and his economic team have long been under the impression that, to wean the country off its oil dependence, they needed a major leap in some specific area of technology that wasn’t yet dominated by Western, Chinese or Japanese tech giants. Their latest hopes are being pegged to the Ethereum blockchain platform. In 2007, Putin thought it would be nanotechnology. In typical style, he set up a giant state company to develop the tech and put former Kremlin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais, reputed to be one of the country’s best managers, at its helm. It didn’t work.

During Dmitri Medvedev’s interim presidency, the Kremlin […] made a feeble attempt to create a Silicon Valley clone near Moscow in partnership with global tech companies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Oligarchs and state companies were forced to invest.

[…] Putin became president again. Last year, he hit on Elon Musk’s hyperloop idea as something Russia could put into practice. Then the project ran into trouble […]

Lately, Ethereum has become the arena for a boom in capital-raising through the sale of digital tokens which can be used within a certain application. Though large global companies got there first—the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance [which] includes UBS, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Intel and other giants—Russia has a chance to be ahead of others. At last week’s St Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin talked to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. Buterin thinks of his project as the safe medium for all sorts of transactions that can be validated through a distributed system, the way Bitcoin transactions are. This includes bets, option deals, insurance contracts, the government registration of property rights and copyright—pretty much any kind of deal that requires validation or that can be automatically executed when certain conditions become right. Ethereum provides a universal blockchain upon which various projects can be built.