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].
This is vaporware for you? https://github.com/ethereum
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.