Possibly even negative utility, since the energy required to run these systems is creating lots of pollution.

Well, Ethereum was basically an ICO and you're seeing lots of investment and potential development in that space. Even my company is planning to have a division start using Ethereum as a development platform over the next few years, and it's a large corporation.

As for the rest, most of those just raised their money in the past year or two and haven't had a chance to actually build their platform yet (if they're ever going to, I have a feeling a bunch of them are going to end up being vaporware).

> my company is planning to have a division start using Ethereum as a development platform

Hi! Serious question: can you explain more about what you mean here? I'm having trouble imagining what "development platform" means here, or how/why a division would use Ethereum as one. I'm guessing you mean something other than software development?

Not the person that originally posted this, but the goals of Ethereum isn't to be a currency, its to be a decentralized computing platform. It implements a turing complete virtual machine that uses the blockchain as verification of the output of the software. Smart contracts are actual pieces of software executed by all of the nodes in the system, and they can communicate with each other. Running your software consumes Ethereum which is used to pay the nodes that verify the output.

Perhaps you can help me with my ignorance too; what advantage does it have over existing computing systems, be they centralised or decentralised, or is there a particular class of problem that they're particularly superior for?

The Ethereum platform shines for use-cases in which centralized trust is basically impractical or an impossibility. To me the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) exemplifies the novel aspects of this kind of computation.

Sadly, the whole dApp ecosystem is flooded with initiatives that in practice would run better, and more efficiently outside the EVM. By this I mean the costs of running the contract on the blockchain do not really scale up to the benefits of running it in a decentralized, trustless context.

So your instinct, that it is not advantageous to run applications on the EVM is in fact correct in most of the use-cases I've seen so far (cough cryptokitties)

No, I mean software development. Ethereum has the concept of smart contracts, which are programmable to a certain extent (I haven't dived too deep into it myself, but then again, I'm not a part of that division).

They wrote up a blog post about some practical use cases for it: https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2017/12/05/the-possibilities-...

My biggest concern with the lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war to defend its long-term interests? Or if there's no underlying system of law to protect those that engage in it? Is the plan that sovereign governments use their resources to reinforce a currency that undermines its own?

> lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war

You just described the value in your question. A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.

> A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.

Sure it does. It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time. You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. With no government around to protect the river that powers the hydro dam, or acquire the oil / coal required for the power plants, what is gonna power these blockchains? Solar? Who makes the solar panels? That requires trade... who structures that trade? Government.

Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.

> It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time

There has been a lot of exaggeration around the amount of power used for mining. It's less that the energy used to run Google, Facebook, and many industrial applications and certainly not remotely comparable to the bulk of oil consumption in 1st world countries.

(Don't get me wrong: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I don't use cryptocurrencies.)

> You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. > Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.

This is a complete strawman. You just conflated the efforts being spent by countries to protect their entire wealth including stocks, gold, fiat money, derivatives with the efforts to access energy sources.

It very well might if it were useful as a currency.

Hyper-deflationary token systems that not only don't scale but lose their utility when adopted are horrible currencies. The more people use a particular block chain the less utility it has because the system doesn't scale in either transaction volume or token price stability.

Since Bitcoin isn't a currency and never can be, and seeing as it's a store of value (which matches up to its profile in terms of mining difficulty, scarcity, etc), the question if you believe Bitcoin is going to actually one day be worth $3 or $5 or $8 trillion: which countries own outsized holdings of Bitcoin? The US and China to name two. Very large quantities of Bitcoin were mined & purchased in the US in the first 3-4 years of Bitcoin. And China has represented about half of all mining the last few years as the difficulty has soared.

MakerDAO just launched their token based product, and it's an insanely powerful app, and I use it regularly.

What does it do? I visited the site and I just see a token. What do I do with it? Transfer money? If so how does it differ from a less used higher transaction volume capable coin like Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash?

I see something about price stability but then there's a chart and it does not appear stable at all.

In the startup world we say if nobody can tell what your company does after 10-20 seconds on the site, you have a problem. At the very least they should be able to get the gist like "this is a networking company that does computer network stuff" or "this is for writing web apps."

Hi! I've never used or even heard of MakerDAO. Their page is shiny, but not being in finance, I can't figure out what the point of it is. Can you explain what is so "insanely powerful" about it? And why/how would anyone outside of coin-based investing and finance types "use it regularly"?