Are we going to see Ethereum at $300 only with the approach of PoS? When will the PoS systems start? What can we expect if things are not so good on August 1st? It's sad, but ETH price still depends on the price BTC!
The PoS will only start next year. If things are not so good for bitcoin, people will use ETH a lot.
Why, I thought ETH was for smart contracts and ICO's, for for payments. Also ETH itself buckled under higher transaction load a few weeks ago, why do you think ETH could handle it better than BTC?
You can use Ether to pay for anything, just like Bitcoin.
Where Ethereum is IMHO more powerful than Bitcoin is because you can implement smart contracts or dApps directly on the main blockchain without having to create a side blockchain.
ICO are just a way of crowdfunding some dApps or DAOs (or scams) by using some smart contracts. Its a sub-use of smart contracts, but not a purpose of the Ethereum blockchain per se.
Ethereum had indeed some trouble to handle some huge ICOs during june. Hopefully it's more or less temporarily settled now that the vast majority of miners agreed to increase the gas limit per block. It will be more definitively solved during Homestead or Serenity release with the implementation of sharding and/or Casper (see
the official Ethereum blog or
the official subreddit for more information).
IMHO, again, I think it will be easier for Ethereum than for Bitcoin to move forward because Ethereum is still in a relatively early (2 years old comparing with the 8 years old of the Bitcoin blockchain) stage of developpement where the thoughts of the core devs and founders are still proeminent which make it easier to reach a consensus (but didn't prevent some crisis like the one after the DAO's attack).
In fact, we saw that Bitcoin paid for its success on the past few months with all the more or less early adopters and miners trying to reach consensus which is almost impossible given their number and will, eventually, split the blockchain in two or more sub-chains.
[EDIT:]A short answer to Gekkoo.
To see the up-to-date roadmap go on the subreddit or on the blog (links on the previous lines of this post).
Ethereum price (or any crypto price) will rely on Bitcoin's as long as Bitcoin remains (by far) the biggest crypto out there and as many trades are made between Bitcoin and others cryptos. Here is a small graph showing the relative weight of the 10 more capitalized cryptos (according to
today's version of CMC).
[/EDIT]