It's not about the money, it certainly is with Bitcoin, but Ethereum goes beyond that. There are tons of possible applications (decentralized DNS, decentralized forums, marketplaces, etc..) that do not involve money in the same way a DAO does.
As Vitalik put it:
"An important point about this project is that we see ethereum as being a platform first. If you approach it from the perspective of ether being a coin, with all the smart contract stuff being just bells and whistles on top to make the coin more valuable, you are going to have a hard time understanding this community; it's really all about the applications first and foremost, and ether is there simply as a token to facilitate payment of transaction fees and incentivize mining."
Ok, I wouldn't attach anything of value to such a rigid contract system—money is far from the only pitfall here. There is simply no benefit to me over existing arbitration. At least with DNS I can contact my provider if someone steals my domains.
In terms of control the contract can as centralized or as decentralized as you code it to be, with the difference that it runs on a truly decentralized platform.
It does goes both ways as well, if you can contact your provider to get your stolen domains back, then your local dictator can also take them away from you because of something you said.
By pre-mine you mean crowdfunded to fund development ofc...
If there is a way to do something like Ethereum or Maidsafe WITHOUT the freaking money I would LOVE to hear about it. It would be nice if we could work on this type of technology without all the toxicity of get-rich-fast trolls and the silly tribalism.
>If there is a way to do something like Ethereum or Maidsafe WITHOUT the freaking money I would LOVE to hear about it.
Bitcoin started with a bunch of people running some hobbyist cryptographer's buggy cpp to generate worthless tokens. You don't need millions of dollars to build free software.
As Vitalik put it:
"An important point about this project is that we see ethereum as being a platform first. If you approach it from the perspective of ether being a coin, with all the smart contract stuff being just bells and whistles on top to make the coin more valuable, you are going to have a hard time understanding this community; it's really all about the applications first and foremost, and ether is there simply as a token to facilitate payment of transaction fees and incentivize mining."