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March 02, 2016, 09:21:29 PM |
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First of all, let me congratulate everyone who bought Ethereum at $1 and have made roughly 8x your money in the past two months. Amazing, and who knows what will happen next. I did not, and officially am jealous of your mad gainz. I was wrong about Ethereum the first time it crashed; I can't speak from a mathematical standpoint, even though I know a lot of accusations about future problems are flying, but it was undoubtedly a great purchase at a buck: good for you. Who knows what programmable blockchains will do to our future, but I envision this is the next 'altcoin boom': a thousand DAPP coins all trying to repeat Ethereum's success.
But this talk about it replacing Bitcoin as the standard unit of account is silly. Ethereum is not money in its purest form, and the fact that it is programmable on a protocol layer introduces a lot of uncertainty as to whether or not we can continue to rely on its value. When dealing with money, the value of a thing is inherently subjective and the very best money has no useful purpose in the real world... that's why it makes good money.
In a world where we use water, bullets, or wood for money, the inherent usefulness of water or wood can affect the underlying value of the accounting unit. This makes them excellent commodities, but they should not be relied upon to be a standard unit of account.
Ethereum is just like this because it derives much of its value from its usefulness, and its speculated future usefulness. More power to it; again, I am not here to debate the future usefulness of DAPPS and specifically the Ethereum implementation of them.
But Ethereum will not be the last network and the true power of digital currency is not just in its programmability; it lies in its other qualities as well. The world needs a solid digital money for the upcoming knowledge/AI/VR age that can be used purely as money with no inherent usefulness attached to it. And that's where Monero comes in: it is money in its purest form - the best we have ever created.
From what I can see, the internet of the future prizes Ethereum highly, sure: but it denominates it's value in XMR. Both can succeed, because both do very different things.
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