this is kind of old news and mostly was around during the ETH massive initial pump. now you got to include the link to the real article when you say it here. i found something on google, is this it?
www.economist.com/sites/default/files/the_future_of_cryptocurrency.pdfanyways as i said before the study even take place, the problems with it are as follows:
1) the idea of investing in something so volatile and not-so-sure such as cryptocurrencies for 5 years without any additional trading is bad to begin with.
2) investing in an altcoin for long term is even worse.
3) the article states "we analyzed the historical performances of each and extrapolated these values to form a five-year projection." this is a wrong approach right there. the basic of the study is based on false information. because when you study the history of something such as ETH which is obviously a manipulated coin, with whales controlling the majority of that coin (it has bad distribution) and also bitcoin in 2013 which could be easily manipulated by MtGox which had more than 75% of trade volume back then in the whole world; you have to take all these into consideration and that makes "extrapolation" a stupid idea.
4) the article references the market capitalization of ethereum as a positive point in this altcoin which actually is a negative thing for all the altcoins because as i have explained numerous times altcoins can easily have big amount of total coins available out of thin air because it is just code you change
max_amount = 21 million to
max_amount = 100 million and you easily get second biggest market cap.
5) another point that the article keeps repeating as the only good point of eth and claims bitcoin doesn't have it is smart contracts. i am no expert in this area but as far as i know bitcoin is more than capable of using smart contracts itself.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract6) the article keeps saying it interviewed and consulted with several blockchain experts and trading experts yet i couldn't find any names mentioned!
7) the article also has so many false information, that you can even call FUD when you see them on the forum. such as "permissive regulation in western countries" and "ban of Bitcoin in China" and claiming that "bad led to price decline in 2013" now that so called ban is this: "financial institutions and payment companies cannot give pricing in, buy and sell bitcoin or insure bitcoin-linked products" while
"Trading bitcoins by individuals is legal in China." as it always have been.
with all that said, i wish the speculation about ETH price is true because it means i can make more bitcoin from trading it. but i find the study highly hyped up with not so much strong data to support the speculation and as i pointed out above it has so many holes in it.