Your opinions are at extremes, friends. Even if Ethereum may have a limited use, it does by no means mean that it's a pure pump&dump scam. You should know that it's a novel and great thing to achieve at least from a geek's perspective.
On the other hand, the other extreme is to claim that Ethereum will be Web 3.0, or will have as widespread use and functionality as the Internet.
All we need is to think through some real-world use cases. There is a potential in smart contracts; this is the sure part. How this potential can be actualized; this is the question.
Sorry, but no, this is not an "extreme". Closed entropy systems do not even fall under the category of decentralized currencies in the first place. All recursive systems are permissioned ledgers. This means the most Eth could possibly hope to be is a shareholder owned company. It's like someone going public with a stock from their basement without even having a viable product. Unless they're somehow grandfathered in, the legal system will probably throw all these people in jail once the law catches up to this sector.
Having said that, even if you don't care about the law at all, Eth cannot scale, and scaling is far more important for Eth than for BTC. Even if you wanted just a shareholder owned company and not a decentralized currency, it is not a valid product because it would struggle to handle the load of financial services for just one large company, let alone integrate many together. It is 100% a scam.
Even Gmaxwell finally came out of the closet calling it a scam:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.14601127When I said IOTA is a permissioned ledger extortion scheme, I was not kidding about that either. I'm one of the few people on this forum that doesn't just flat out lie about everything:
Add another refutation concerning the validity of IOTA to the thread:
r0ach: I wouldn't worry about permissioning, Iota doesn't have any kind of consensus or UTXO set...it's entirely unworkable.
http://bob.mcelrath.org/