Will be interesting to see how event unfold.
Will it replace bitcoin? or will it bust in a spectacular manner?
Either way, some will get hurt badly.
It took Bitcoin five years to get where it is today. Maidsafe did a $8 million IPO in like 24-48 hours and today it's only $12 million capitalization, you might say that's good ROI but people who invested bags of money into Maidsafe would had made more investing into Dark coin. Mastercoin was the same way where people would had made more money off NXT and Dogecoin. Mastercoin in some ways is very comparable to Ethereum that on the surface it appeared to have a huge developer team and a big media presence and yet it didn't go anywhere.
This Ether as we know is a POW/POS hybrid (which is something Peercoin and many coins have done for ages). The only exciting thing about Ethereum is this Ethereum language project but the language is technically distinct from the Ether coin. It's not 2009. Before Ether has any chance of getting big it'll probably be overtaken by a fairer distribution or a more innovative coin based on the same language.
Ethereum back in January wanted its' $30 million IPO and possibly it'll get that in 40 days. The question here, much like Maidsafe and Mastercoin, is how do you make any ROI in a grand IPO? I have a gut feeling that anyone who invests into Ether will probably make more money buying NEM, NODE and ORA when those coins are released. Heck even Monero and Reddit can probably see 20x return if you invested today.
Ethereum at $30 million IPO has very limited ROI potential, like just to get 10x return Ether would have to hit $300 million which no alt other then Litecoin has ever done.