Hi everyone.
Mass adoption and *significant* demand will be required for value of Ether to rise *at all*
In order for Ether to increase in value at all, there has to be an ever-increasing level of demand of real-world economic adoption in a setting where more and more ether is constantly being created.
In order for Ether to go up one "penny", adoption must be fast, worldwide, outpace the inflation built in to the system *and* outpace Bitcoin adoption.
Disclaimer: Playing Devil's Advocate. Thoughts?
Doge, NXT, Master Coin, Quark etc have all proven that you do not need mass adoption for the value to rise significantly in proportion to the initial investment.
but of course if you want Ethereum to go supernova then yes world wide adoption would be nice, but world wide adoption is also not as hard as one may think given the viral, peer to peer and open source nature of these crypto currencies.
there are only a handful of protocols out there that are capable of implementing the so called "bitcoin 2.0" wishlist.
so Ethereum has maybe a 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 chance of becoming the next truly decentralised exchange platform.. and given the amount of talent involved with the project I would say the odds are much more in Ethereums favor just as long as they don't get overtaken by project creep.
history has already taught us that in any industry, competition is what drives innovation. would facebook be where it is today if not for myspace? would google be here today if not for Lycos? would bittorrent be where it is today if not for napster and edonky? ofcourse not.. each new technology is a response to the failings of an established one. Bitcoin was a response to fiat.. fiat was a response to gold backed paper currency.. gold backed paper currency was a response to solid metal currecy (coins) and so on and so on..
as long as one technology adequately addresses the failings of another it will gain some sort of acceptance.
we have seen this with litecoin which is nothing more than a clone of bitcoin except for the fact that it is ASIC resistant and has faster transaction times.
when the bitcoin mining community switched over to ASICS.. an entire segment of miners was left out of the market... instead of pulling up stumps and moving on.. many of them decided to switch to litecoin mining.
there is nothing at all in the history of cryptocurrency or even the world for that matter that says that for a technology like Ethereum to succeed bitcoin, ripple, mastercoin must die...