Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe Ether is a great store of value as OP claims because it has uncertain scarcity. OP neglected to mention that supply of Ether is unlimited and tends to change readily with scaling updates and is hence unpredictable.

Currently, the argument for scarcity looks good with EIP1559 where the gas fee will consist of a burned base fee and a tip to the miner resulting in overall lower fees causing a potentially deflationary supply. But Ethereum's scarcity is to a larger extends a moving target than say Bitcoin or Monero.

The other reasons for investing OP mentioned were enough for me to go deep a year ago: cash flow, network effects and developer tooling/adoption like no other L1 chain. I looked at other smart contract chain's developer resources for dapp dev and no other's come close to Ethereum. I have been learning Solidity dapp development in my free time since and can recommend the experience.

I don't think scarcity is a realistic point in the investment thesis.

To be fair, I don't think you can really compare many others to Monero, which is the only major cryto with the property of fungibility. Personally I consider that property so important that if a crypto doesn't consider it a first class citizen, I don't buy much or any of the crypto.

>the only major cryto with the property of fungibility

Yes agreed.

Both Bitcoins and ETH tokens can be "tainted" and that taint takes for ever to "diffuse" in the chain.

This makes some Bitcoins/ETH less valuable than others.

For example, most valuable Bitcoins are newly mined coins (they have no history), whereas a - say - Bifinex hacked Bitcoin carries a pungent smell.

Remember when we called laundering money that because laundromats were used? Just tumble your coins!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler

> Just tumble your coins!

Much easier said than done:

   - it costs money
   - most tumblers aren't safe at all (who's to say they aren't operated by the govt or that they don't keep logs)
   - in some cases, you might not get your coins back at all

Coinjoin for BTC is a better approach, but it's also far from easy to use (need a special wallet) and is basically useless until it sees mass adoption.

Tumbling crypto never made sense to me: "I don't want the government to know that I made this $50 selling weed, so I'll trade it for $49 dollars from another weed dealer to make it look 'clean'!"

Shouldn't you expect that most people paying to use tumblers have a reason to do so, and thus the vast majority of coins from tumblers are tainted as well?

I agree (an unknown amount of Monero is also a fair bit of my portfolio) but more for ideological reasons: privacy is a requirement for individual financial sovereignty. Fungibility follows privacy of course. I also think it's interesting to wait and see how the fixed tail emission supply works out.

>privacy is a requirement for individual financial sovereignty

What does "individual financial sovereignty" mean though? Money is only useful as part of a social system and therefore requires some sort of social contract.

I'm all for privacy when it comes to storing and transferring amounts that are consistent with personal consumption. I'm not in favour of letting people move millions or billions anonymously unless they are willing to renounce all protections they enjoy under the law.

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