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Is there money to be made by owning Ethers?
Investor
Member Posts: 7 ✭
As a nontechnical sort of guy, I am wondering if owning Ethers is like providing funds to help develop the Linux operating system. After it is released, will a bunch of hacker dudes copy it and run it on a side chain or will another alt currency copy it and run it in competition. If it is open source, what makes it so it won't just be copied and run many times over? Where does the value lay in owning Ethers if Hacker B just copies it an sells his own currency and system calls it Ethuruem with Ethurs?
Post edited by StephanTual on
Best Answers
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StephanTual
London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod
Nothing, and that's a good (tm) thing. It forces the Ethereum team to be the best possible custodians of the protocol and spirit of Ethereum, and prevents us from stepping out of line (i.e., do evil by making the software proprietary for example, or introducing features that would benefit us or our acquaintances personally). Everyone can (and is) reviewing the code for such shenanigans.Investor said:If it is open source, what makes it so it won't just be copied and run many times over?
And yes, anyone can make their own copy. In fact it has happened twice before: IBM is doing Adept using the codebase from Ethereum PoC5, and Eris' Thelonious.io is a heavily modified fork of our very own Jeffrey's Ethereum Go codebase.
The value (by that I mean its utilitarian value) of the Ethereum ecosystem lies in itself - i.e, if you @Investor were to fork the code today (you could), the community would have to decide if they wish to deploy their dapps, or simply use, your own version of Ethereum rather than the one we are building. I realize this might sound rather counterintuitive on our part, or that it could even be frustrating, as any other person out there with zero skills can claim to have the same code as ours! And, unsurprisingly, this has happened, too (but I won't link them up here as unlike the two projects mentioned above, these cynical copies add no value to the protocol, and some of them even trick people into purchasing 'subscription fees').Investor said:Where does the value lay in owning Ethers if Hacker B just copies it an sells his own currency and system calls it Ethuruem with Ethurs?
Finally, it's important to note that the Ethereum project does not have any investors, per se. We garnered revenues from selling a software product, ether, a cryptofuel which is required to power decentralized applications (DApps) on this new kind of web. In order for the Ethereum platform to properly function, every computational step and storage operation must be paid for with very small amounts of ether. Otherwise infinite loops and excessive storage demands will quickly cause this global singleton computer to grind to a halt.
