Ethereum

"Rather than pay a big company to run your app, Ethereum lets you host it on thousands of computers around the world."

1. You can pay multiple big companies to have a multicloud deployment strategy
2. It is more expensive and less scalable to use Ethereum to host your app

I was adamantly against the DAO hardfork for this moral hazard reason. Ethereum is no longer unstoppable code as advertised on their website. How much in $/% is enough to do a HF? And who gets to decide? No longer uncensorable payments.

Agree — Ethereum works vs. those shitty/centralized systems. Though multichained DApps will be a reality, probably as soon as 2018/2019, I think that's a different convo.

PayPal helped bring money into a digital age by creating a digital front-end for legacy infrastructure but PayPal didnt create new infrastructure. Bitcoin and Ethereum *are* new financial infrastructure: Digital infrastructure for a digital era. “Time-locked” and “multi-sig” transactions are two early examples of advanced functionality that is possible with programmable assets. They replace hours of legal time and cost with a couple lines of code. Programmable money is finally here.

Vitalik is both a genius and a class act. That’s why I sold a portion of my BTC for Ethereum in addition to lots of Bitcoin Cash.

Computational scalability and a governance model that violates immutability are both huge problems for Ethereum. That and the finance/crypto culture gap are why Turing-complete smart contracts have not yet gained traction.

When it comes to Ethereum, I’m increasingly convinced that stickiness may be accentuated by developer adoption... and while “faster,” “more scalable” blockchains exist, I’m not seeing meaningful developer adoption. It’s yet to be seen whether interoperability and time lead to Ethereum’s diminished dominance as the smart-contract chain, but right now it owns tokenization and dapps. Winning either of those categories makes ETH a good long-term bet for the same reason BTC is the “SOV chain.”

Several banks have had the engineers sitting in their "innovation labs" play with Ethereum (cursing the whole way, might I add) in order to justify investment in a blockchain-based solution. Ethereum forks are quick and easy to spin up a quick POC, but I don't think anyone actually intends to build anything off of the EVM. Breaking into actual production use requires better engineering infrastructure than the EVM provides. . . . Talk to senior employees at banks in areas that materially impact their P&L and you'll find very few people who would be impressed by the EVM. Barclays' financial contract representation is built in Haskell, not Javascript :-P

If Infura goes down (or is shut down), the Ethereum network will grind to a halt. Running an Ethereum node is expensive, so many (most?) companies/DApps have chosen to outsource that responsibility to Infura rather than run one themselves.

People probably underestimate the simplicity of integrating Ethereum payments as a basis for future adoption and growth. Stripe was so great because it was way simpler than PayPal for developers to integrate, but Ethereum is simpler than Stripe even. If you want your hackathon project to take payments, Ether is simpler than dealing with credit cards, PCI compliance, charge-backs, etc.

Ethereum is sucking the wind out of every other coin's sales.

Bitcoin took off because it preached Ideology. Ethereum took off because it preached Practicality. The fallacy is in thinking one is RIGHT and the other is WRONG. A new social construct needs BOTH.

Ethereum makes it so simple to issue these tokens that they are the first example in the Ethereum tutorial! Nevertheless, the ease with which Ethereum-based tokens can be created does not mean they are inherently useless. Often these tokens are a sort of public IOU intended for redemption in a future new chain, or some other digital good.

The investment case for Ethereum (ETH) is that it will become the most liquid token in a digital economy built atop a Turing-complete decentralized computer that can execute smart contracts.

Ethereum’s momentum and lead are real and distance other ecosystems by orders of magnitude, but even that sheer momentum cannot on its own pull the industry forward. I’d like to see the Ethereum ecosystem continue to extend itself into others.