Ether as currency is a disaster waiting to happen.
https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-...
People are speculating on it because they have confused companies using the technology as using the currency itself.
In the meantime they're being careful to stay compatible, and contributing development resources to the public project. JP Morgan is working on an open source client that bridges private chains with public.
Even using the public chain doesn't mean they're using ETH, but lots of startups on the public chain aren't using it either; nevertheless ETH seems to be maintaining its position as the dominant Ethereum currency, and it will play a unique role in proof of stake.
BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now and while it's still not nearly large enough to fend off crashes, it's there and it's growing. I don't see the argument for why Ethereum is different in this respect.
Perhaps I'm just not getting the real point of the linked article?
Does it? Why? I mean, people currently want to buy it, but then in the early to mid noughties people wanted to buy securitised junk mortgages; simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth.
If anything, it has less of a worth than before, in that its "success" has made it largely useless for actual transactions. Look at the current costs to actually get anything through; it's stormed past SEPA and threatening to hit Western Union levels of expense (it's already exceeded Western Union and friends for small transactions). What is it _for_?
Just to serve as devil's advocate here:
Nothing has an inherent worth, unless you postulate the existence of "worth" as an immaterial label, like "soul".
BitCoin clearly has worth to some people right now. They keep buying it.
Well, tulips are also quite useful. You can't decorate your garden with Bitcoins...
It seems odd to me that if the utility of anything were a physical thing as measurable as the mass of any physical object that thing wouldn't still have an "inherent" utility/worth. Are you thinking about "inherent" in the sense of have some sort of Platonic existence? That would be a very odd way of using it.
Either way, since utility is unique up to scalling (e.g. Johnny could get as many times of it from a sandwich as Paul does from a near-identical sandwich), at least in choice theory "worth" is closer to having an "inherent" character than otherwise. Though this is somewhat of a stretch because these kind of comparisons are invalid.
Johnny, who is dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara desert, would get much more utility from a bottle of water than Paul, who is sitting in a bathtub in his apartment in NY. So what's the worth of the bottle of water?
There still doesn't need to be an appeal to anything in material in order to define worth, not anymore than one needs to appeal to something immaterial do define weight in terms of mass. Have the utility of water be proportional to the thirst of the person, where thirst is also a definable physiological state, with "worth" being a scale factor. Thus "worth" would have a uniquely defined value regardless of person or situation.
Or at least that's one way to do it.
Valuations 101, by William Shakespeare.
That worth may fluctuate and it may not be worth something to you in particular, but it has a value.
Cryptocurrencies only have worth because they have demand, not utility. There is not inherent worth based on their existence. This doesn't make them less valuable, it just means their value isn't inseparable from what they are.
But one can always invalidate arguments by taking to them to the extremes. After all, you can't prove anything exists, so how can any of it have inherent anything?
It's a global immutable ledger that allows for the irreversible transfer of funds without needing to trust a 3rd party with the control of those funds.
Additionally, there's a cap on the total units of account that can exist.
Many people find a lot of value in all that, especially when compared to the slowness, surveillance, and inflation of traditional electronic monetary systems.
Furthermore, aren't the "lite" alternatives more functional in this regard?
Huh? It does?
Beanie Baby valuations looked stable for a while until suddenly they weren't.
(Disclosure: I bought ETH one month ago for development using these 3 tools).