what's up with the ETH? why this pump?
"Because tens/hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of smart contracts are being created by mega corporations and elite financial institutions all across the world using Ethereum's exclusive, bleeding edge smart contract technology!"-said no one ever
To be fair, I don't think Ethereum ever targeted mega corporations or elite financial institutions with those.
Even worse. Smart contracts from Average Joe's mom's basement then?
Small to mid sized businesses I would guess.
So let's go down this rabbit hole. Reality and truth are buried deep somewhere down there.
How many small businesses? 10? 20?
And for what specific use case? A smart contract that did what exactly? Give example.
And for what benefit would this have outside of the legal system?
Would this smart contract even be legally defensible in court in such case of a dispute? What if there is no legal recourse? Who would take that risk if it wasn't?
And what ROI benefit would there be that would justify buying ETH at $400+ to make this smart contract happen?
People that want to believe the ETH hype really need to walk through a few "theoretical use cases" of ETH smart contracts to even see if any of it makes any sense whatsoever, from a legal perspective, risk perspective, ROI perspective, etc., etc.
And it's not clear that the Ethereum blockchain or its tokens (as ETH traded on the exchanges) is even needed for 'smart contracts' functionality.
It's actually clear that Ethereum is not needed for that type of functionality.
However, creating your own equivalent is something that wouldn't make sense unless you were already a large corporation and had the funds to solve that problem yourself in a more customized and efficient way.
Meanwhile, the main benefit of Ethereum over Bitcoin (as I see it at least for now), is that it allows much simpler and more efficient collection of funds and allocation of tokens.
And while there's probably hundreds of absolute garbage and/or outright scam tokens around on the market right now, the basic principle still applies.
It will probably still take some time, but I can see some serious companies being birthed from the utility side of platforms like Ethereum that would've had a very hard time to even be conceived without those.
As far as the law is concerned, I don't see why a clearly defined contract should not hold in law depending on what the application of it is. But I'm not a lawyer so that's not something that I can even speculate about given how absurd some of the loopholes over there are.
easy choice<<< 
stay chuuned