The recent price movement could be attributed to the formation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance[0].<p>Here's a description from the website for what the EEA aims to do.<p>> "The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Together, we will learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production – Ethereum – to define enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly demanding applications at the speed of business."<p>Some big names that are a part of the Alliance include Microsoft, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Accenture. The rest are on the site!<p>[0]> <a href="http://entethalliance.org/" rel="nofollow">http://entethalliance.org/</a>
Ethereum brought a lot of geeky fun to my life, it's a great hobby for those interested in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, compilers and so on. But, it was just that, a hobby. 90% of the people I met in Ethereum meetups and hackathons didn't really understand what Ethereum is, most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves any of their problems.<p>After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.
I put a fair bit of money into ETH immediately when I saw the NYT article on the announcement of the EEA. If I were to sell now, I will have made a very good bit of money from it. I'm at a crossroads where, given the EEA and their recent white paper about linking private blockchains the banks will potentially be using, with the public blockchain, makes me think I should stay in it.<p>On the other hand, the skepticism in this forum (albeit from people who are far more knowledgeable about crypto currencies and markets than me) makes me feel like I should 1) sell it all, or 2) sell only enough to recoup my initial investment.<p>Either way, the money I put into it was just fun money and wouldn't hurt if I lost it. It's a bit of a thrill to watch an asset appreciate in value that much within such a small period of time. The ultimate question is when to realize the gain or the loss.<p>Humans have a distinct disposition wherein we tend to sell gaining assets earlier than we sell losing ones (the disposition effect), even in circumstances where it's detrimental to us. Is this playing out in my mind right now?
The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin (for those who don't know, ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution) and the development ecosystem is much more vibrant and promising.<p>We haven't seen the last of this.
A lot of things have happened in the crypto currency world over the past three months. A lot of people attribute ETH's breakout to the EEA announcement or the ETF rejection. Those things while I'm sure they had some effect are unlikely the underlying driver of the recent price move.<p>The current ETH price trend started in February. The other thing that happened in Feb. is that ETH's transaction volume started to rise after being essentially flat for the year prior. [0] The rise in ETH transactions roughly coincided with Bitcoin's blocks being consistently full and large backlogs in the Bitcoin transaction mem pool. [1] You can also look at Bitcoin's transaction volume graph and see that it's transaction volume has been growing throughout the year long bull market it is currently in. [2] ETH's price on the other hand was flat until February when it started to benefit from congestion in Bitcoin. Make of that what you will.<p>[0] <a href="https://etherscan.io/chart/tx" rel="nofollow">https://etherscan.io/chart/tx</a><p>[1] <a href="https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year" rel="nofollow">https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all" rel="nofollow">https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all</a><p>[3] <a href="https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice" rel="nofollow">https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice</a>
Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive.<p>Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand.<p>Declarative smart contracts, over at <a href="https://byteball.org/" rel="nofollow">https://byteball.org/</a>
The altcoin trading market went berserk after the ETF decision, so there is likely some correlation. I guess a lot of money was made off the volatility around that time, so it had to go somewhere.<p>P.S. as I write this, poloniex went down.
I see two reasons for this:<p>1) Bitcoin transaction fees increasing and ETH being the main alternative available on Coinbase, even though ETH is not meant to be a currency, more like AWS credits, and its supply isn't fixed so isn't a good store of value.<p>2) Everyone was holding onto their BTC in case the ETF decision lead to a surge of new money into bitcon. Now that is off the table they are seeking bigger returns in alts.<p>Also new money is being pulling in by Dash hyping their version to those who missed out on the bitcoin bull and since Dash is nothing special now people have the idea that any other alt could be next.
I'll get the dumb stuff out of the way.<p>No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles.<p>No it wasn't a centralized bailout.<p>Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all.<p>Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world.<p>Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease.<p>Here's a great list of upcoming projects<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_slowly_starting_to_come_together/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_sl...</a>
Its because of Barry Silbert's Ether trust. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-trust-s-silbert-to-launch-classic-ether-fund-this-month" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-t...</a>
It also did 3x since Feb 1st.<p>I used this spike to cash out half of my ETH bought in July, which basically gave me back in $ my initial investment.<p>Interestingly, since July, roughly speaking both ETH and BTC doubled their prices. I was expecting ETH to go up, but I wasn't expecting BTC to be equally strong.