I'm looking forward to it. I have some ideas of actual use-cases for smart contracts, but the volatility of crypto-currencies is a major turn off. I want the speculators to go away so Ether can normalize at a reasonable value and it becomes sane to use them for their actual purpose.
How would you know what a reasonable value is for Ether or any other crypto currency ?
Such a value that real-world use case transactions don’t require the purchase / selling of a significant portion of all ether in the market, I’d say.
I doubt ether will ever be valuable for smart contracts with the high fees.
Anyone wanting to do it will build their own platform for it, like IBM and Maersk. Because why wouldn’t you?