actually I am kind of glad this happened. because finally, either I will be proven wrong and I'll gladly accept it, or we see that I am right and maybe people start looking at other things than just price and marketcap when it comes to comparing an altcoin to bitcoin.
let ethereum become bigger, more used.
let the number of transaction on its network increase to near bitcoin's level.
let ethereum network be "stress tested" for 3 years, something that we have been experiencing in bitcoin with the same name but it is really spam attack.
let the transaction fees grow to $0.75 (currently there) and then $1 and then $2 and so on.
let the size of their blockchain get extremely big and centralizes the nodes
let the mining of it become big and let China get in on it and start their farms with new more efficient equipments.
let another DAO scam and another roll back hard fork and a chain split happen.
and lots more, and then lets see how they will do in real world not just on exchanges and on paper with some numbers showing bigger marketcap because they simply have 6 times more the supply of bitcoin but not even half its circulating supply or distribution.
the point is active DEV is taking place on ETH
The difference is that if the ETH devs were inactive there would be no way out.
Bitcoin has clear alternatives like Rootstock and BU, and whether or not people like them is another matter - the point is that Bitcoin has the opportunity to change, while ETH's development is so heavily centralised that its path seems fully dictated by Buterin.
Well, ethereum has had a split, so there IS an alternative, namely ETC. In a way, ETC could be seen as a kind of back up to ETH, in the same way that litecoin can be seen as a backup to bitcoin.
The nice thing about ethereum is that it has no ideals: it is obviously centralized (so there will not be any fake arguments to "avoid centralization") on the Foundation ; it has destroyed its belief in "immutability" (if Vitalik is involved enough, he will push out a fork that will roll back any problematic behaviour) ; it is hard forking regularly ; it has survived a contentious hard fork.
In other words, ethereum is a battle-hardened real-politic version of crypto, with no illusions, but with a kind of compromise between the easiness of central authority and sufficient crypto to make something that runs very well in practice but has no principles.
It will never run in silly wars with false arguments ; as "proof of stake" is to be deployed in a vague future, no miner cartel will ever be the boss on ethereum. What bitcoin is dreaming off without knowing how to pull it ("changing PoW"), Vitalik can do it in a matter of months. No-one is going to invest in ASIC development when Vitalik can kill that by just changing the PoW algo or by finally launching Casper proof of stake.
More tokens could be created in future versions for all we know, considering that they hard fork at a rate of fifty hard forks per second.
Yup, it is an ugly crypto without principles, that works super like hell. No silly dreams of "taking out the banks", no silly dreams of "blowing away fiat". Just something done by a central authority, that runs smoothly, and has all the bells and whistles that one can think off and that invites you to build whatever you like on top of it. This is a killer.
