> There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes.
Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process?
Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast.
It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.