I have dabbled extensively in the "traditional" *coin scene, but always shied from eth and the associated ecosystem. Stories like this are the reason why.

While I could articulate -and genuinely believe in- a raison d'être for the alt-finance tools created by blockchain systems, the premise and concrete value of the exceedingly sophisticated mechanisms in ethereum continue to elude me.

Given the primitives of account & transactions through distributed ledgers, one can construct a wide variety of services and use cases that interface with the real world on the user side and on the 3rd party service side.

Are there any services and use cases in ethereum-land that are actually oriented towards users? Because it seems to me that the only group getting measurable value beyond education are actors seeking to extract profit from "legitimate" value store or flow.

And I thought getting away from them was the entire point of Bitcoin et al. for the ordinary man.