I'm a little bit ashamed at myself at how horrible I am at prognosticating anything crypto-related, but the current issues with ETH, overall, has led me the seriously ponder; "Is ETH truly and honestly dead, and it just doesn't know it yet ?"
I can't see how it survives 2019 without plunging to at least half it's current valuation.
It almost feels like all the individual elements that have plagued ETH over the last couple years, have recently come together, and left it teetering on the edge of being declared a failed project.
The fact that it's nigh-impossible for the average joe to run a full, modern ETH node is a catastrophic oversight in retrospect.
Nah.
I'd say ETH is BTC-like right now.
BTC can't die because that's the entry gate to any crypto related project. For BTC to die it means all altcoins must die first.
ETH can't die because it's the baseground of all the shitcoin ICO projects. And there is too much potential (appart from all the stormshit) for it to die.
You have few coins that have any use, BTC and ETH are some of them.
I understand what you are saying, here, yet I still have conceptual difficulties with your placing BTC and ETH on similar grounds.
Sure, there is an on-boarding utility aspect to each coin, yet BTC is sound money, and as you acknowledge, ETH is a platform used to pump scams.
We can acknowledge these on-boarding similarity dynamics of both coins, and especially considering the sound money differentiation of bitcoin, and recognize that it could take 20 years or more for the various ICO scams to play out and for the sound money differentiation to magnetize the vast majority of value into BTC.
I'm a little bit ashamed at myself at how horrible I am at prognosticating anything crypto-related, but the current issues with ETH, overall, has led me the seriously ponder; "Is ETH truly and honestly dead, and it just doesn't know it yet ?"
I can't see how it survives 2019 without plunging to at least half it's current valuation.
It almost feels like all the individual elements that have plagued ETH over the last couple years, have recently come together, and left it teetering on the edge of being declared a failed project.
The fact that it's nigh-impossible for the average joe to run a full, modern ETH node is a catastrophic oversight in retrospect.
Bitcoin has a valid use cases TODAY, thus value and incentive to hold it and use it TODAY.
ETH has ??
Nothing but future promises on supposed future use cases for solutions for problems that don't really exist (because idealized, ivory tower bullshit, not reality), therefore no incentive to hold it or use it TODAY nor in the FUTURE. It's valuation at any time has zero to do with its utility, which is really nil.
ETH's "valid use case" today is it's facilitation of scams (including ICOs), so whether we like it or not, ETH has a "valid" (even though scam dependent) "today use case," no?