A six day old Bet on whether Ethereum rides into 2016 as a continuing economically viable thing has managed to so far draw more than 129 Bitcoin in wagers. The criteria assigned for Ethereum to fail include the value of Ethereum tokens falling under 0.001 BTC per Ethereum token during December 2015 or if the volume of Ethereum tokens traded during the month of December 2015 being less than 100 Bitcoin in value. At the present 23 Bitcoin have been staked on Ethereum's failure while 106.11 Bitcoin are staked on Ethereum surviving December. According the the wager on BitBet price information is to be taken from Poloniex. As of this writing Ethereum is trading for around 0.004 Bitcoin per token with an all time low price of 0.00243990 Bitcoin per token on August 10th shortly after Ethereum's release.

The action this bet has seen is a stark contrast to a similar bet started last month on whether Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin fork would succeed. That bet managed to start with an initial 100 Bitcoin wagered on XTCoin failing and has since attracted minimal betting interest on the other side with only 2.9 Bitcoin wagered on XTCoin succeeding. By contrast the initial bet on the Ethereum wager was only 1 Bitcoin and through a flurry of wagering activity it has managed to outgrow the XTCoin bet in less than a week.

The discrepancy between the wagering activity suggests that there was never any serious moneyed interest anticipating the XTCoin effort succeeding. Even though Ethereum has been a cavalcade of disaster since its initial token presale, there are still people with money who believe the thing can at least continue through January 1st. This is especially damaging for the XTCoin effort as it suggests that any one with money advocating it did not actually believe it would succeed and anyone believing it would succeed had no money and therefore no business at a table deciding the future of money.