I know how shit eth is, but nobody seems to care. They all buy it anyway. I never invested in eth, never ever.
But there are facts, eth is about to surpass bitcoin. You can't ignore that.
De market can be irrational for a very long time.
The thing is: most people don't care what coin they use, they just want profit! And profit is measured in dollars, real-estate, gold, Bitcoins, cars, or anything else with
real value. Altcoins only started because people felt like they missed the train on Bitcoin, they want the "from zero to millionaire" train, over and over again! Hundreds of altcoins did that, and by the time they were all called shitcoins, "smart contracts" were (and are!) the next hype. Nobody needs smart contracts, so they make up a non-existing problem that could in theory be solved by a smart contract. But any smart contract they made, failed big time. Let's not forget The DAO!
I think a good indicator of how "real" any altcoin is, is whether or not people install a wallet for it. It's virtually impossible to install hundreds of different wallets, so many people keep their coins on an exchange.
Let's pick a random coin from coinmarketcap: E-Dinar Coin, worth $27M. I have never heard about it, haven't ever seen it either.
Just like any other altcoin, it has a flashy website telling you what they're good for, but the reality is: people only buy it because they hope it will be worth double the next week. Barely anybody cares about what coins really stand for, and that brings me back to your point that ETH is growing
despite being shit.
Take
Vitalik Buterin for example: he only used Bitcointalk to promote his fork-coin, and hasn't been here for a year now. But he is still spreading FUD-lies about Bitcoin on Twitter. He earned
billions from his premine, and yet, he has zero trust score on this site.
He too joined too late to get rich from Bitcoin, so he created his own token. And so far he's doing a great job in getting people to invest in his tokens. Until it pops.
Bitcoin has some problems though. We all know the transaction cost problem, but it also lacks funding for a big development team. That might be improved with side chains, SegWit and Lightning Network, but the main problem is that miners take all the money while nodes get nothing.
Satoshi controls enough coins to fund a dev-team, but he disappeared years ago. Future development needs funding, if just a few percent of fees could be used for development, Bitcoin could grow so much.
Instead, miners get $6 million per day now, which they spend on hashrate and electricity. Millions of dollars per day flow out of the Bitcoin ecosystem, and it doesn't add anything to improve Bitcoin.