Ethereum is going to the moon. I'm a PhD educated professor and I've done the math. Ethereum, smart contracts m, and the DAO are going to change the world... for better. I know a s appreciate that many of you fear change, especially against your BTC hodlings however we all need to take a step back and appreciate the present situation. BTC is stalled floundering, and centralised in China. Ethereum is growing dat by dat with new devs, it doesn't suffer 2 hour confirmations. And it's fucking scalable. Ok let's rethink this:
BTC unsalable unscalable stalled.
ETH salable scalable growing.
I am far from convinced that Ethereum has addressed the issue of scalability. What we have at this point is a fixed transaction cost (fixed gas cost for a given computation) in terms of Ether, and a scalable blocksize. I can easily see a situation where Ethereum will simply price itself out of the market if the price of Ethereum does not fall as fast the cost of distributed computing. Of course some will say that a solution is in the works, much as the idea of scalability in Bitcoin was left "to the future" say in 2011.
Developing a market that can scale with a radical fall in computing cost,
without centralized intervention, is the real challenge here.
Edit 1: Please prove me wrong: A long position on Ethereum looks to me a lot like a short position on Moore's Law (betting that the price of computing will increase in real terms over time).
Edit 2: If the cost of computing power is fixed in terms of Ethereum, is not purchasing Ethereum in effect purchasing computing power. I know past performance in not an indicator of future results, but really computing power as a long term investment?
