Ethereum has never appealed to me since it seems like a bag of nails. Ethereum is a great mess—how could it not be? Ethereum is a currency-powered global decentralized computer. The idea and software project are so fantastic I get frostbite thinking about it.
Bitcoin is Microsoft and Ethereum is Apple in my dinosaur brain, or Bitcoin is the Atari ST and Ethereum is the Amiga, where everyone lost.
I appreciate POW (proof of work) crypto currencies where processing power is used to sustain the system. I’ve avoided Ethereum because it’s moving toward POS (proof of stake), a system where oligarch-sized coin owners make the shots and likely poop on the little people and fight to the death. Cryptocurrencies are politics in software, hence their political framework matters to me. Long-term, Ethereum’s POS future kills me, but for now it’s visibility of the long term that’s crucial, not “in the long term we are all dead”.
The “ultimate depression,” I’m coining now, is coming. So we can just look at midterm. In the midterm, Ethereum is exciting. I buy.
Why? Is inflation fear motivating me? No. Ethereum has a new crypto winning trend. Decentralized finance. It’s called DeFi, but much of it is boring and pointless. The fascinating part is crypto lending, where you can store your cryptocash on a blockchain system and get paid interest “risk-free”
This portion of DeFi feels like a new market. Everyone is invited to join. If it looks, waddles, and quacks like a duck, it’s a bright tech casino with no KYC/AML issues. All markets are casinos, but if you can create one that’s entertaining, thrilling, instant, and can be utilized intelligently or recklessly, win large/lose big, you’ll win. And they do. All powered by Ethereum.
The first Ethereum value driver was the ICO, another Meth casino. Crypto allows value creation outside of fiat monopolies, which regulators did well to suppress. Snuffing out ICOs didn’t kill Ethereum; it just kept running until the distributed computer acquired another hit app. Here it is.
Drop by AAVE and Compound to see two DeFi platforms. I had some Ethereum scattered around, so I put $23 in and watched the value rise 79 billionths of a dollar every second. It will take a year to make $1, but that’s not important.
But ignore the term and enthusiasm.
This will boost Ethereum. Transaction cost will drive it. Chronic dollar transaction charges raise the coin’s long-term value in dollars. Because increased coin utility raises its “fiat” value, transaction costs rise.
The recent history of Ethereum transaction charges is here.
DeFi is moving, Ethereum transaction fees are rising, and block size is at record highs.
In conclusion, use case equals value in crypto, and Ethereum’s new hit use case will boost its price. Short to medium term are the essential timeframes for trading right now.
