> I believe in 50 years, cryptoeconomics may be a discipline as widely studied as physics and Satoshi may be as widely revered as Galileo.
Holy cow. I stopped reading at that point. Did the author read that over before publishing?
But then on top of that there's this Turing-complete language that basically makes every client hugely complex while enabling use cases which are little more than zero-sum games.
It's totally possible that Ethereum will be wildly successful and overtake Bitcoin -- the advantages above are significant. But I have to imagine that just as non-standard transactions in Bitcoin never took off, so the contract support in the future will be seen as a slightly embarrassing anti-feature that continues to exist but is increasingly rarely used, like 402 "Payment Required" or any other similar remnants.
It has never made sense to have turing complete currencies. Ethereum will continue to be a great idea in the short term and a terrible idea in the long term.