[tgb29]

Investing in crypto currencies because you believe in blockchain technology doesn’t make sense. Any good use case I’ve thought of doesn’t require public chain.

So why invest in a specific crypto? How is Bitcoin fundamentally more valuable than Ethereum? How are either fundamentally more valuable than EOS? As a currency or store or value, each have essentially the same properties. Leaks in the ecosystem, like scam ICO and products like Tether only siphon money from the market. At least gold or silver doesn’t have this problem.

[52-6F-62]

I'm generally with you— but the value in a public chain is probably just not having to set up the larger infrastructure yourself, and rather just tie into the existing network.

Couldn't you say, why invest in companies that support the internet backbone rather than Cisco?

Definitely couldn't answer why one is more valuable in dollars over another. There does seem to be more practical use and development of Ethereum out there than the others (at least from where I've stood).

But that more or less would support your point—I've definitely seen more groups just creating their own private fork or networks rather than directly tying into the public chain— JP Morgan, Microsoft, etc...

Disclaimer: I do own a few Eth, I bought some time ago and have just been sitting on. It was never to be a serious investment, just wanted to play along. Never bought into the ICO madness.

All that said, I always thought this was interesting as a use case (also further supporting your point):

https://qz.com/1118743/world-food-programmes-ethereum-based-...

> Building Blocks replaced the payment part with a ledger that records the transactions on a private version of ethereum that it developed.

[tgb29]

IBM, Microsoft, and AWS each have private Blockchain solutions that can be launched in under an hour. It’s not easy to build your own network, and it might not have a native currency, but I’ll use one of these solutions if the business case requires privacy and permission controls. Public Ethereum is an amazing invention for many reasons, but asking users to pay for their transactions is a tough sell from a UX perspective.

[52-6F-62]

I definitely agree. Though I will say, even though I can't easily picture a use case—that fact hasn't entirely convinced me there isn't one.

[acjohnson55]

I also continue to believe that true value will be in firms and products, not tokens. Token prices reflect an assumption that people will actually need to own these tokens at some point in the future, which is extremely far fetched to me.

[ahartmetz]

Ctrl-F gold... This movement may answer the question whether Bitcoin will react to a bear market like gold or like oil. There are good arguments for both and no past behavior to analyze because Bitcoin appeared after the 2008 crash.