Ethereum brought a lot of geeky fun to my life, it's a great hobby for those interested in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, compilers and so on. But, it was just that, a hobby. 90% of the people I met in Ethereum meetups and hackathons didn't really understand what Ethereum is, most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves any of their problems.
After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.
>most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves any of their problems.
I disagree. First let me say there are two types of companies, those that make use of IT and those that are themselves about IT (ie Microsoft, IBM). Now those that only make use of IT often ignore what their own tech people tell them, and so they are susceptible to tech fads.
But the IT companies pay very close attention to their IT people. And the IT companies have lots of IT people as smart or smarter than you who are quite qualified to look at Ethereum and figure out if there is anything valuable there. The fact that lots of IT companies are getting behind Ethereum says to me it is really going to be valuable, at least for their sorts of businesses.
Let me add that nowadays, banks and other finance institutions are basically IT companies that happen to also have a lot of people that deal with customers directly. So if they think they can use the blockchain to eliminate intermediaries and in the process save billions of dollars, I tend to believe they are correct.
You may be right, however, that a lot of the people at Ethereum meetups don't really understand it.
I especially dislike the "let's make spotify, but on blockchain" approach the community has. They simply don't get that people won't switch over to their solution just because it's running ethereum blockchain.
Are you kidding? Who doesn't want an Uber for the Blockchain, where they can enter into a smart contract with their driver before getting into the vehicle?!
I've wanted that. Barring privacy, safety and quality concerns.
If it is possible in ETH to build smart financial contracts but also encode state into the "wallet", such that reputation was earned or lost, then they really might have a winning strategy.
There is no real reason why distributed Uber/Lyft shouldn't exist.
I want that. Then it would be truly peer-to-peer. Where intermediaries are needed, the services the intermediaries offer can be debundled so that there's competition for the various services, driving fees down and quality up.
After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.