An other new technology to watch is IOTA ( https://iota.org ) not blockchain based, no fees and scalable.
Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to me.
IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it "training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any due diligence.
[1] https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot...
Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood and push it off a cliff...
Bitcoin is very new, created in 2009, didn't see any real usage until 2010/2011, Mt. Gox blew up in early 2014, and now in 2017 most exchanges follow KYC laws, are built on real trading systems, and can't be compared to Mt. Gox any more than you can compare a Boeing 777 to the wood gliders that mankind first flew on.
Key differences between Mt Gox and the Wright Brothers are that a) the financial industry was well established in 2010, and b) the Wright Brothers were not offering commercial flights to a general audience on their wooden gliders.
The first means that Mt Gox was run by idiots who ignored all of the established best practices around running a financial company. (And was given money by same.) The second means that even if you were right, that Bitcoin was just too new to do well, then they were grossly negligent in offering services to the general public and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Of course, the incompetence at scale continued long after Mt Gox. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
You may be right that there are now some adults running well-regulated businesses. But that doesn't mean the space isn't full of scam artists, Dunning Kruger goofs, and wide-eyed technoutopian marks. We only have to look at the latest ICO announcements to see that, at best, enthusiasm has run ahead of competence.
But at the same time nobody else was taking it seriously. Look back over the history of banks. Do you really think no "bank" ever lost significant amounts of money? Do you really think there aren't still scam artists and assholes trying to steal people's money? Just the other day my mother got called again by people asking for her social to "fix her credit", does that mean that the incompetence of the financial industry is still at an all time high?
Cryptocurrencies have a lot in common with traditional finance industries, but they are different enough that the previous systems don't work. It's very much the "wild west" right now (which i'll point out there were established "governments" at the time of the "wild west"). The space is still new, and if you are risk averse you should stay away from it, but painting the entire industry as idiots and children makes you look like the idiot.
It's true that Mt Gox might have lost some money even if they had been following known best practices. You're right that Bitcoin is new, and presents new risks. But they wouldn't have been driven out of business with hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. Money given to them by people who were just as credulous, just as believing that the old rules didn't apply.
Yes, there will always be fools and financial scammers. But the proportion and the scope in the cryptocurrency world is much, much larger. In the short reign of the *coins, there have already been enough disasters that somebody has managed to fill a book with them: https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-Contracts-e...
And I'll note that I'm not saying the entire space is "idiots and children". Just that the tolerance for incompetence and scam artistry is much, much higher. Which, given that you defend it as being the "wild west", you apparently agree with.
I think Bitcoin was a great experiment since it brought us the blockchain, but with the exception of being a store of value (i.e. digital gold, and thus not having to worry too much about high transaction fees) I don't see it going anywhere. But since gold is worth about $8.2tn globally, that might be sufficient.
Ethereum on the other hand.. by the looks of it that does seem to have a bright future. It improves upon and fixes many of the flaws Bitcoin has.
The scalability properties of Ethereum are dozens of times worse from a raw resource usage perspective, with each transaction on the Ethereum network taking more space to store, more clock cycles to process + verify, and with the whole system being much harder to parallelize.
Ethereum made a lot of long term sacrifices to achieve their short term advantages, and it's already falling apart around the edges. One or two more iterations of hardforks + block size increases (gas limit increases) and your average desktop computer won't be able to keep up with the chain anymore, let alone catch up if starting from scratch.
And that's just one of the many ameture compromises.
1. Do you really want the average desktop computer to sync and verify the entire Blockchain? These things have gotten so huge, even for Bitcoin it's not really reasonable anymore to store the entire chain on a desktop computer.
I think the answer here is no, but I could be wrong.
2. It probably goes against the decentralized idea behind blockchain, but I believe it is good that Ethereum has a clear leader. Someone who can actually (sort of) dictate the path -- at least until the project has gotten to where it wants / needs to go.
Bitcoin would be in a better place if the founder were around.
3. Bitcoin is already falling apart. Once you have to make a transaction, the pain (generally) starts..
4. One of the downsides of Ethereum is the size of the blockchain, but see 1.
I think at least for Ethereum the potential is still there for it to be good, once they fix their issues. This (to me) seems doable, but if you have things to share on why not, please do!
With Bitcoin, you know what the issues are, they are massive and have been around for a while, and they're only getting worse / not getting fixed because people can't reach a consensus. I believe it would be easier to reach consensus if there was a leader.
Most of these things however don't matter if we just see it as a store of value.