Ethereum

Nice to see that Ethereum devs are taking the social costs of blockchain seriously. I would like to see Bitcoin devs do so, too.

The pace of innovation in Ethereum > the pace of innovation in Bitcoin.

Make no mistake — Ethereum would never have existed without Bitcoin as a forerunner. That said, I think Ethereum is ahead of Bitcoin in many ways and represents the bleeding edge of digital currency.

Whatever happens to bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies are gaining ground and more respect. Ethereum, for instance, has far more transparency.

There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can't. While Ethereum is less battle-tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare.

We set up a small bitcoin and ethereum mining operation…that miraculously now is actually making a lot of money.

Ethereum has taken what was a four function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full fledged computer. We now stand only 9 months out from the beginning of the Ethereum network and the level of app development is already faster than Bitcoin’s.

Ethereum is between a rock and a hard place. It isn’t as good at being SoV / Sound Money as BTC, and it is likely not going to be as smooth / cheap / frictionless at being a dApp platform as more centralized platforms like your beloved EOS.

Ethereum has been injected with a lot of money, talent, good-risk over the last 2 years which has vastly improved it's quality. But it is still a nonsense premise and, as an investment, no one has addressed main problem of Bitcoin-imitation, either though soft fork or sidechain.

Another huge issue that Ethereum has is with scaling. By putting “everything on the blockchain” (which stores everything forever) and dubbing it “the world computer”, you are going to end up with a very slow and clogged up system. By now the Ethereum bloat is so bad that cheaply running an individual node is practically impossible for a lay person. ETH developers are also imploring people to not deploy more smart contract apps on its blockchain. As a result, and despite the claims that running a node in “warp” mode is easy and as good as a full node, Ethereum is becoming increasingly centralized... In my view, Ethereum is the Yahoo of our day - an unscalable “blue chip” cryptocurrency.

The big development since the emergence of Bitcoin itself is that the underlying enabling technology, the blockchain, has been turned into a developer platform. The leading platform is called Ethereum. It's a platform for creating new kinds of decentralized apps and cryptocurrencies (or "tokens" or "coins"). It's also created a new funding source for this innovation in the form of initial coin offerings (ICOs). So we have all the ingredients necessary for a whole new wave of innovation. For those of us who lived through the dot-com era, this feels reminiscent. You have some of the same speculative excess and random enrichment. But you can also feel that something revolutionary is happening. Money is being made programmable. That's a fundamental change with implications we can still barely see.

Saying eth has network effects is like saying Linux distro Slackware and Debian has network effect. Still used but not as relevant. It’s the last smart contract platform that wins. Network effects is highly misused.

Because Ethereum is a prototype for VM blockchains. If they mess up their implementation the world will simply pivot to competing VM smart contract platforms, the demand won't go away. My interest is in smart contract platforms. Ethereum is the most interesting today.

If decentralized apps become the dominant use of cryptocurrency, Ethereum has two main moats: 1/ API moat for developer ecosystem and 2/ end user moat around use of Toshi/Metamask wallets. All would-be challengers will need to overcome those two early advantages.

But the best story behind ethereum is all of the creative experiments being built on top of it. the cases of DAI, MANA and ZEP are worth following closely. unlike bitcoin conservatives, ethereum’s community is more welcoming to new ideas.