Other than that, it is mostly just a cryptocurrency.
Ethereum is novel, but it doesn't solve the right problems.
One of the larger issues with Ethereum is that Solidity, and the EVM as an extension, make it really, really difficult to write correct, cheap contracts.
Off the top of my head, choices like:
* uint256 as a standard word size
* the possibility of reentrancy attacks
* overflowing integers wrap around
* contract upgrades are non-trivial (particularly upgrading solidity versions using an upgradable contract paradigm).
* Operator semantics are confusing
* State mutability is not as explicit as it ought to be
I know bad language features like hoisting were fixed a while back (and maybe some of the stuff I listed as well), but many of us are stuck on pinned older versions of solidity because upgrades.
Questions like: "what transactions are present for a particular address" have non-trivial answers. Key management is difficult even for experienced users, as are addresses and identity management.
There is some momentum toward using WASM instead of EVM in future Ethereum versions, but I honestly think the proper move is to develop and use a standard language for the purposes of building secure financial contracts.
Running a full-node and keeping it healthy (let's say with state pruning, i.e. not a full archive node) is actually pretty difficult. Most people probably use infura because of this. I still don't have a great answer on how to properly determine that a node (geth, unsure about parity) is effectively 1. up to date and 2. healthy (i.e. can be load balanced), making it difficult to automate stuff like load balancer promotion / demotion.
Last week the gas price on the network went up like 20-40x for 4-5 days because of an individual contract spamming transactions with a high gas price. It seems like few people noticed and few people cared.
2017 called and wants it meme back.
That was a consumer facing game and all people did was get smarter about what they store on chain.
The "Gas guzzlers" list changes very frequently.
https://ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php
People and organizations use Ethereum more like a collection of lambda nodes doing discreet processes and saving state in an immutable-enough way. Not really that complicated. If your use case doesn't require that level of immutability and it isn't economically feasible to pay the nodes for processing then don't use it.
I'm watching a video on it and all this financial babble about collateralized debt. This just sounds a lot like someone selling equity in their home.. only instead of getting cash they get some weird crypto.
Ok so the Dai is kept stable by users who are some how incentivized to keep its value at one dollar...
but it that fails another token called Maker comes in..
I;m sorry but this sounds over complicated and insane, almost like it was put together to baffle people into buying it because they feel stupid.
Keep researching, because Maker has been building since 2015. The more you read into it, the more you understand these design decisions and the way the system works. There's nothing overly complicated about it. You need to understand that you've likely just started thinking about crypto and blockchain design, but these guys have been living, breathing and thinking of smart contracts/blockchain since at least 2012.
You need MKR tokens for governance, like to control the interest rates as well as the price oracle whitelist. Maker is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
For example, I can create a smart contract where I can send money (say 10 ETH or USD2600) to my cousin every month. But I want my cousin to use this money to better him/herself. I want her/him to spend it on education (buying books, subscribing to programming course) not on something else (buying alcoholic drinks, etc). With PayPal, I can only send him/her money. But with smart contract, I can create a whitelist of merchants easily. And I can be very creative. I can create a condition on which on Sunday only, my cousin can spend some money to buy ice cream.