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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

It has the second-biggest market cap at $6 billion, it's been in production for a couple years, it has multiple open source implementations, its inventors and other developers are known to the public, it has much more powerful smart contract capabilities than Bitcoin, and it doesn't have high fees and backlogs.

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The multiple implementations exponentially increase the breakdown of consensus. The network is literally unusable often. Their consensus is so bad, that the last breakdown of consensus created the nunber 6 crypto marketcap "currency" "etherum classic" which has "value" of $485 million as this is written.

It has no high fees, for there is no demand for what it does, and if there was demand, no limit to the supply to fill it. Have they decided how much "gas" it takes to run things yet, or are they still manually humanly moving that number around, you know, the only number that would give an ETH any scarcity and thus upward price potential?

NASA knows how to build software that is unlikely to fail, and saves or costs human lives. Little to none of the lessons NASA has learned regarding mission critical software development is used by Ethereum. Being turning complete is the enemy of consensus. The halting problem pretty much makes writing smart contracts that do what you want and nothing else in a turing complete language extremely difficult to the point of near impossiblity.

Thus, ETH may some day be useful for something, but making ETH tokens valuable isn't one of those things.

It's also worth noting the quality of the thinkers at work on it:

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/

...and it's a vaperware scam. Their technology just doesn't add up. No way it does what is claims.

Then I make my living on vaporware. My full-time job is writing smart contracts for Ethereum.

I'm curious where? Someone actually pays you to do this?

There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.

VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.

I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.

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