Here are some thoughts on Ethereum from someone who hasn’t actually been paying much attention to it. (But I’m not one to let a little thing like that stop me from having an opinion.)
When I first learned around Bitcoin back in early 2012, my reaction was something along the lines of: “holy shit! This changes
everything!!!” To me, Bitcoin’s value proposition was pretty apparent and pretty huge. Money is really, really important. Our current monetary system is deeply, deeply flawed. And Bitcoin seemed to, at least potentially, offer an alternative that didn’t suffer from those flaws and was just vastly superior across the board. Assuming it actually worked, it was taking the reliable scarcity of a commodity like gold (and improving on it by providing something with a
perfectly predictable and finite supply) and combining it with the transactional convenience of a purely-digital medium. And doing so via a decentralized and censorship-resistant network. I mean, holy shit! That seemed like something that might prove to be a really, really big deal.
On the other hand, when I hear people talk about Ethereum and “smart contracts,” my reaction is more like: “Huh. Yeah, I guess that might be kind of cool. Possibly. One day.” Maybe I lack imagination, but the value proposition just isn’t as immediately obvious to me. Is there some super-compelling future use case for “smart contracts” that I’m missing? (So far, the biggest
actual use case seems to have been an $80 million clusterfuck.)
I’m not trying to claim that “smart contracts” won’t prove to be useful and important at some point in the future. But it does seem clear to me that, at least in the near- to medium-term, the significance of the cryptocurrency use case of “smart contracts”
absolutely pales in comparison to the cryptocurrency use case of “sound money.”
Because of that, my intuition (as an admitted non-techie) is that you really don’t want the smart contracting stuff occurring at the “base layer” (and thus, Ethereum is taking a fundamentally misguided approach). Instead, that functionality should be moved to a “layer two” that operates above the blockchain. Now
it might be the case that moving the smart contract stuff to a “layer two” has certain downsides for the smart contracts themselves, e.g., in terms of convenience or security. (In other words, it may be analogous to
the problem you have when you try to make Bitcoin a “settlement layer” and move most payments to a “layer two.”)
But, more critically, allowing the smart contracts to execute on the “base layer” seems likely to have downsides for the far, FAR more important “sound money” use case (if for no other reason than it adds additional complexity and thus inherent additional risk). So it seems like the choice is probably a clear one (and Bitcoin is getting it right).
By the way, I just visited ethereum.org for maybe the first time and this is literally the first paragraph on the home page: “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that
run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.” Seems like that statement might be due for an update, no?
EDIT: And of course, another flaw with Ethereum as an investment, and a point I've made many times before, is that "Bitcoin" isn't really the current protocol that's used to maintain the Bitcoin ledger. It IS that ledger. Even if the Ethereum protocol represented a significant improvement over the current Bitcoin protocol (again, something I strongly suspect is not the case), that would simply be an argument for forking Bitcoin to copy Ethereum's protocol while preserving Bitcoin's ledger. It would NOT be a good reason to migrate to the less-mature Ethereum ledger.
"Scrapping ledgers and starting over every time a new protocol is invented would be madness. It would defeat the entire purpose of money which is to preserve a record of value given but not yet received. It'd be sort of like deleting all of your files every time you upgrade your operating system or buy a new computer."