About
Who decides what's the "real value" if not people who either use the platform's contracts / dapps or simply speculate ? Keep in mind that nothing happened in eth's history that could cause constrain of the supply to artificially increase the price ( like in dash's case, for example). And the volume is big enough to really balance the price so an artificial pump to artificially increase token's price wouldn't hold.
Are you saying that it is really possible that the price of ETH does not justify the real value of the platform? You said it yourself. Also do not be very naive when you are trying to imply that no one is pumping ETH. There will always be pumps as long as it is listed in an exchange.
No. I am saying the price is defined by what investors believe it's worth, like for everything else in this world. Ofcourse, in cryptocurrency/blockchain part of the world, because it is so easy to become an investors, projects mcaps are much bigger than they could have been if they were private companies.
You do remember the times where these other wannabe projects were pumped with news like "omg X was mention on Y cryptocurrency news site" or "omg X has a wallet omg omg". Ethereum changed all that, now these shit projects had to actually do more to actually stay competitive, so basically ethereum dragged them all from the mud.
This could be subjective because coders from Blockstream could say Ethereum is a wannabe project.
No, because ETH constantly delivers for almost 2 years now and made more progress than all other projects combined. Blockstream is chasing tail and doesn't deliver.
If you follow their development, even if you're not technical you will notice constantly they are solving "problems" that other developers think of as "unsolvable", and the best example is that almost every developer out there or random wannabees that think they know shit they talk about byzantine general problems. They were simply not skillful enough or maybe not good enough researchers to find solutions themselves. It's solved.
There's even a simple version of casper already ready. Ofcourse, a work in progress. I wouldn't underestimate vitalik at all.
https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simple_casper.v.py
https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simulator.py