Re: valuation. The biggest contributing factor is speculation. I think it dwarfs every other possible factor. The second biggest one - fees are paid in ETH, and fees will continue to be paid in ETH. More, EIP-1559 will actively decrease amount of ETH in circulation by requiring miners to burn ETH to include transactions via base-fee mechanism.

Re: new chain / forking. Just network effect. Ethereum currently secures huge amount of value in DeFi. Any new network will not have those funds in it. There are also stablecoins. If blockchain-native assets (BTC, ETH, DAI etc) can be "doubled" by forking (e.g. BTC to BTC+BCH) it's not possible for fiat-backed assets such as USDC, USDT, EURc etc. Issuing bank has to pick a side of the fork.

There are already new Ethereum-compatible blockchains like Avalanche but they're missing out on the network effects that exist on the original Ethereum chain.

The only use of crypto is to get rich by being an early adopter. It's easy to design a new system that doesn't benefit early adopters but no one will care about it.

I'm interested to know more about a system that doesn't benefit early adopters... Do you have any sources? Thanks :)

Basically either stablecoins or some kind of volatility dampening which would increase emission in sync with adoption. Nobody wants this so there's not much work being done on it.

> wouldn't someone just start a new blockchain with the Ethereum protocol?

Sure, and many have, but they don't have the security, decentralization, dev mindshare, community, tooling, or ecosystem that Ethereum has.

> To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every human a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for staking (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast majority of people than a blockchain where the early adopters are the new rubber barons of the Internet.

That sounds awesome. If you can securely deliver a cryptographic key to every human on the planet and teach them to use it, I'd happily invest my life savings towards that ends. Unfortunately due to disparities in education, safety and access to technology, I think this is a near-impossible task in 2021.

Cardano is issuing cryptographic student IDs to 5M students in Ethiopia though! The future is bright!

In the internet, the more websites and APIs exist, the greater the utility of the internet as a whole - the sum of its parts is worth more than each individually.

With Ethereum, every time a new smart contract is added to Ethereum, the whole network becomes more useful, as each contract can communicate with each other. You can assemble new applications based on the building blocks of existing contracts.

Are the smart contracts not out in the open? Can you not just copy over the good/useful smart contracts as well?

You can copy the code but not the money. A distributed exchange with no traders isn't very useful, for example.

People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi. Binance has their own network thats growing similarly. Both do have a huge amount of speculators. There are other up and coming complements to the market aswell including Polkadot.

Some like ethereum for its maturity and dev team.

> People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi.

Serious question - what does this actually mean? What defi apps are people running to make money besides minting other coins?

One of the significant and first ones is compound.

https://compound.finance/

Uniswap being another

https://uniswap.org/

A more comprehensive lost of ether based defi apps

https://www.blocksocial.com/ethereum-defi-platforms/

There are also other blockchain ecosystems with their own defi projects.

In general, you have some cryto assets, you loan those to someone or some decentralized system that uses those assets to make money(like banks, financial institutions, and market makers).

Imo Polkadot is "obsolete" now with Ethereum moving forward with a rollup-centric roadmap since L2 rollups are pretty much the same as parachains.

What is your take on Near?