I just wanted to get this off my chest because I'm starting to get annoyed by the BTC debates regarding it's economic implications.
First of all, the same arguments have been getting repeated over and over and over with regards to BTC. All of which are most often valid points. The main points being that BTC has no intrinsic value, that is has high transaction fees, and that it's wasteful.
I would love to see the crypto community and especially main-stream media to start debating all of these issues but replace BTC's aspects with those of ETH, or any other smart-contract platform for that matter. I find it disturbing we keep finding these BTC economic-theoretical debates that always end with the same conclussions.
Secondly, Everybody needs to start realizing that because of the very nature of a smart-contract platform, the token which is native to that blockchain has intrinsic value. Ether was once compared to a fuel (gas), with respect to the platform, as in: there is no using the platform or creating a DAPP or DAO if you do not have a proportional amount of it. A smart-contract platform offers certain advantages and properties with regards to applications who may want to benefit from these advantages and properties that the underlying blockchain provides (aka building on top of that specific smart-contract platform/blockchain). Not only that, but in the relatively near future, staking your ETH will give you a return on investment once they've switched to POS. Warren Buffet went viral on social-media with pretty much one single argument ( "BTC is a bad investment because it can't produce him anything", again: VALID point, absolutely) to debunk BTC. Vitalik has mentioned 5% ROI for staking your Ethereum. Thats not a bad return on investment for something that cannot be mismanaged, because the protocol itself which has no single point of failure provides you with 100% certainty. And you can always get it back in the exact same shape or form. Unlike real-estate for instance that has a life-span.
Bitcoins shortcommings as a means of payment, or store of value are effectively rendered mood when you take ETH for instance that DOES have intrinsic value. Mainly to developers, but basically everybody who wants to communicate any form of data over this decentralized network.
To conclude, it's just astonishing that you keep hearing the same 'criticism', the main drawbacks of BTC, and that the resulting piece of information pretty much paints such a grim picture of cryptocurrencies as a whole. Because in the minds of 99% of the population BTC=crypto and crypto=BTC. Even though, one should have moved on and should be 'updating' the caracteristics of cryptocurrency if you will.
Inspired by Ivan's interview with Peter Schiff :
