Ethereum at $1000

A few points about Ether at $1000 USD:



















1. Ethereum hasn’t yet changed the world.



I went back and read some of the posts when Ethereum crossed $100 just seven short months ago. Some claimed things like “we’ve changed the world.”



That’s wrong. It hasn’t happened yet, even at $1000.

We have a working proof of concept and for better or worse, we have democratized startup fundraising to some degree.





2. Many people buying don’t really understand what they’re buying.

The incontrovertible proof here is Ripple. It’s quite odd to see XRP temporarily do so well. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve never held Bitcoin, but at least that’s a vision which makes some sense. Ripple doesn’t.



Yet it’s still getting bid up by people who want to gamble on hot things the way they do in the stock market.

Our goal should be to convert as many Ether buyers into decentralization advocates.



Because centralization is power. And power corrupts.







3. Demand is real.

In the early days of Ethereum, many critics said that no one would ever use it.

It’s quite clear that Ethereum is the most used blockchain. It runs at near capacity, doing 1.35m transactions per day recently. If limited to simple value transfers, it could do even more.

On some days Ethereum does more transactions than all other blockchains combined. See here from a few months ago:





There’s lots of demand for decentralized computing.







4. Scaling matters

To achieve the web3 vision of decentralizing the web, we need scalability, both from on-chain (sharding) and off-chain (state channels, Plasma, TrueBit, Cosmos/Polkadot, etc)



The price going up does help scaling. Price increases draw more attention to both the technology and to decentralization. It also means more resources to pay people – which very nearly was a big problem not long ago.



A greater talent pool and ability to finance progress are two huge benefits of seeing the price go up.







5. Time to get apps live

After what seems to be forever, we’re going to start seeing dapps (decentralized apps) go live in Q1 and Q2 2018.



Many of them won’t take off immediately like their token valuations might suggest. Building products and use cases takes time. I’m quite confident that Augur and Gnosis will build very liquid hedging markets, but it may not happen overnight.



The dapps that do take off may seem trivial, but they point to bigger visions. Crypto Kitties is a great example. It didn’t make the world a better place by itself, but it showed that people can get interested in unique digital assets. Then things that we can’t even imagine yet can be built using those unique digital assets. [For example, perhaps every time you kill an opponent in Halo you get whatever digital goods they hold, and each of those goods has a monetary value.]

It’s also possible that some of the early use cases will be in non-mainstream uses. The somewhat misleading banality is that porn led to VHS winning over Betamax in the 80s. We’ll see some of this – much like Bitcoin saw gambling be the first big use of its chain.



Much like the price has been a series of ups and downs, so it will be with dapp adoption. But the dapps are coming.





Conclusion



The price of Ethereum is the least interesting aspect of the project.



The goal is for decentralization to make society more free, more fair, and more efficient. That’s the promise of Ether at $1000.