Ethereum: The Missing Piece of the Internet

With the recent relentless bear market, cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum are taking their inevitable battering from the media. It happens everytime.

Speculative “talk” on Ethereum you should ignore:

• Cryptocurrency is a big con that isn’t backed up by anything.
• Cryptocurrency is a big bubble with no practical use for anything except speculation.
• Ethereum still hasn’t upended and replaced the entire centuries old financial system in its first 3 years of existence so it must be shit.

With prices down 75% the latest wave of investors have taken a beating by the crypto markets and “the sky is falling in” articles get their attention and their arses all puckered up and ready to bail out and sell. Last week one prominent talking head said “that Ether goes from a 3-digit to a 2-digit shitcoin.”

How can anyone say that Ether is a shitcoin? Ethereum is a speeding train with a 200,000 strong community of active developers being led by a card carrying genius who clearly doesn’t waste any time away from his computer. The technological improvements coming out this year will pave the way for Ethereum handling 1 million transactions a second. Plasma, which is Ethereum’s equivalent of the lightning network, could make billions of transactions per second possible.

Ethereum is the missing piece of the internet. And just like the internet did, it will have far reaching effects on business, society and even how humans behave and interact with each other. We can’t even imagine where it will lead. Just like in 1995 nobody could have imagined the far reaching effect that the internet would have on the world.

The internet ended up destroying whole industries and created entirely new industries that never existed before. It changed how humans interact with each other, how they talk, meet, travel, work and play. In just 20 years the internet changed everything.

Ethereum will have the same dramatic effect on how the world handles money and payments. Every financial transaction that currently happens is a contender for being reimagined and improved by the Ethereum network.

Ether to Open New Industries & Sectors

Ethereum won’t only affect current transactions by humans. Just like the internet, entirely new industries and sectors will appear that never existed before. One example of a new trillion dollar industry that will appear from nowhere will be machine to machine micro transactions between artificially intelligent robots.

Those robots will be buying and selling between themselves, and they won’t be using traditional financial tools like checkbooks or waiting 3 days for payments to clear. They will be using smart contracts and cryptocurrency to make instant, regular, tiny payments. The number of machine to machine transactions in the world will dwarf the number of human to human transactions that currently take place in the world.

For example, when you get in your self driving car it will automatically buy a small chunk of insurance from your insurance company. Then your car will constantly negotiate and transact payments with other self driving cars to gain or give up position on your journey. Meanwhile, your fridge will buy a chunk of bandwidth from your internet provider and your robot drone will fly to the supermarket to pick up and pay for the shopping.

It’s impossible to estimate the future effects on cryptocurrency prices of the “micro payments between robots” industry when it doesn’t exist yet. And it’s even harder to estimate the effects of other as yet non-existent industries that will stem from that and others that stem from those etc.

All we know is that intelligent machines are coming and they will need a mechanism for making payments between themselves. And while it’s not guaranteed that Ethereum will emerge as the dominant platform, it is the platform with the most advanced technology and the best community and leadership behind it.

Recent price rises in crypto encouraged widespread innovation like Cardano, EOS, and NEO, and those coins will no doubt play a role in the upcoming seismic shift in the world’s economy. But the most likely winner is Ethereum with its massive developer community and outstanding leadership and vision for the future. Steve Wozniak recently compared Ethereum to an early Apple, with its most attractive feature being that third party developers can build upon it just like they could with Apple 2.

Whichever cryptocurrency emerges as the dominant platform through which the next wave of payment innovation happens will have a market cap valued in trillions of dollars. One thing we can be certain of is that Bitcoin will not be that dominant platform. Bitcoin is a great gateway to crypto and will probably maintain widespread recognition as the grandfather that started everything, but its technology is antiquated compared to Ethereum. Bitcoin cannot live up to the promise of cryptocurrency and the only real contender to take over the top spot is Ethereum.

The Flippening…

The day when Ethereum’s market cap exceeds Bitcoin’s market cap is called The Flippening, which is widely expected to happen soon. We may have to come out of this current bear market before that happens but it will happen for sure. And when The Flippening happens and Ethereum takes its place as the top cryptocurrency by market cap it will be difficult for any other coin to topple it. The sheer amount of developer activity that will be attracted to Ethereum’s superior blockchain technology after The Flippening will be massive and Ethereum will be the only logical platform for new projects to build upon.

Yes we’ve just experienced a bubble that was caused by wild speculation by the public and a new wave of suits. And that bubble did burst and left more than a few casualties. But as Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum, pointed out, “developer activity increased by two orders of magnitude” after the latest bubble. There was also a huge increase in the number of new blockchain developers after the latest price rises.

And besides, volatile price action caused by people who don’t have a clue what they are buying and selling doesn’t negate the validity or utility of the underlying asset. It just means that people who don’t understand something are not that good at giving it a market value. If a bunch of suits pile into the market and then all pile out again it doesn’t change anything, and it certainly doesn’t put Ether in the shitcoin category.

Maybe the price of Ether does go down before it goes up, nobody knows. But at these low prices every dip in the price of Ether is a buying opportunity for those who have the balls and vision to capitalize on the massive change that is coming, while the chuckleheads are running around panicking.

https://blog.digitexfutures.com/cryptocurrency/ethereum-the-missing-piece-of-the-internet/