The average politician probably has little or no understanding of cryptocurrencies. Some might understand the basic idea of a blockchain and its decentralized nature but the percentage of lawmakers who know the difference between a private key and a public key, the process of setting up cold storage wallets, or how multi-sig should be implemented securely is almost certainly very, very small.

So if cryptocurrency does become regulated and businesses like exchanges are forced to implement security practices such as having most of their funds in cold storage, then who will decide what regulations should be implemented and how? Surely, it won't be the politician.

Do you think they will attempt to have one of the Core devs on board or invite someone important in the cryptocurrency community like Vitalik, coblee, or Roger Ver (eek!) to write the regulations and then just take their word for it? What will they do if they decide not to participate? Heck, many (if not most) of those who are well-known and respected in the field are distrustful of governments and will probably refuse to participate since it could be seen as betraying the libertarian and anti-authoritarian ethos of the community.

Your thoughts?

For the Ethereum vs. Lisk comparision:

I believe that on Lisk, applications are coded using JavaScript which is already a very popular programming language whereas Ethereum uses its own language called Solidity which is specifically designed for building smart contracts. And applications on Lisk operate outside of the main chain (more scalable) whereas with Ethereum, they all run on the single main chain.

Ethereum seems to be where all of the action is at. Lots of projects are happening on Ethereum right now and they have many talented people working on it and improving it.

That being said, I'm currently more invested in Lisk because I see it as having more upside potential. Ethereum went from a $20 million crowdsale to a $5 billion market cap in just a few months. But in the long term, it could be worth much more if the technology is found to be useful.

Both coins are nice.

I edited your post with the approximate fiat values for each masternode to put things into perspective.

It's probably too late to get on the masternode train now. Nearly all coins using masternodes have already exploded in price in recent weeks.