You were being sarcastic but I agree - it's a new take. The author is saying crytocurrencies shouldn't be about their valuation, yet that's the sole focus of attention (in the media) these days.

I'm bearish on Bitcoin yet bullish on Ethereum because of other factors besides their valuation such as roadmap, potential and usability.

Usability is also the biggest complaint of the author. It's one of the biggest factors preventing mass adoption.

There are a few altcoins out there focusing on ease of use and trying to bring in users/early adopters who are not just crypto-junkies. The ones I can think off of the top of my head are:

- DASH (Digital Cash)

- Vertcoin

- NAVcoin

Of those, DASH is probably the most likely in my opinion to eventually challenge bitcoin or ETH.

Eth? the one that keeps getting hacked?

ETH has never been hacked. In fact, it can't be hacked. What you mean to say is that DAPPs can be hacked. DAPP's can have unintended functionality that can be exploited, but that has nothing to do with ETH. It would be like going back to the mid 90s and saying, "this World Wide Web thing will never work because it keeps getting hacked." Doesn't make any sense, it illustrates your unfamiliarity with the subject.

Eth hasn't been hacked, but the technical parties developing it have yet to deliver a smart contract platform which is reasonable to write a verifiable contract on. And as a consequence: contracts are being exploited either due to implementation bugs in the language or code that has no obvious testing or verification plan.

In many ways this is worse. There is a lack of competence in executing on the single most important feature of Etherium: it's ability to home other cryptocurrency.

And without this, what exactly is the value eth adds? To me, this is an attempt to control and force the ecosystem. It's there to facilitate overvalued and underveted ICos and sidecar it as a revenue stream.

It's not there to build something sustainable, it's there to extract value. If they cared about sustainability, the lack of rigor and correcness in eth contract building tools would be seen as a crisis and it would be much closer to resolution.

"On Wednesday 19th July, 2017 a bug found in the multi-signature wallet ("multi-sig") code used as part of Parity Wallet software was exploited by parties unknown. As of the time of writing, three wallet accounts holding large balances of ETH have been compromised and the balances moved into accounts held by the attacker."

https://blog.ethcore.io/the-multi-sig-hack-a-postmortem/

Parity is a 3rd-party wallet application and is not Ethereum.

Parity accounts for roughly 5,000 of all Ethereum nodes (of which there is no "official" "1st-party" implementation) [0]. As a result of being so popular, Parity users were collectively robbed of $30,000,000 of Ether due to the multisignature (typically used to secure funds versus single-signature-required transacting) smart contract bug.

[0]https://www.ethernodes.org/network/1

[1]https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-pa...

ETH itself has never been "hacked"...