To me Ethereum is still in a sort of alpha state. It is being built and tested. We will know if it works once it is productively used.

What does using Ethereum mean?

Quite simple to me it means are there dApps that are being used. But "used" is quite a subjective term.

Clearly people are using Ethereum to send transactions. Also clearly many teams are building dApps. Many are worth many millions of $. And that is the crux! Is the value we put on the projects justified by the value they generate? This in turn should be reflected by the usage, which works sort of as an approval by and end user that the app is providing use.

So when it comes to usage it is not just the transaction count that matters, but also the relation between value and usefulness.

DappRadar

A recent find lets us actually analyze this a bit, with some hard facts. A list of all the dApps on Ethereum and the amount of users can be found on DappRadar.

This is interesting as it lets us check actual progress of the value the Ethereum blockchain brings to end users.

One interesting chart they present is the amount of dApp users as well as money used by such apps

It looks like about 10k users are using dApps every day on average with a volume of maybe 15k ETH per day or a few million $.

Puhhhhhhh…..

I have used Ethereum recently

There are two examples where I have used Ethereum recently other than to invest into the platform itself and sending money from one wallet/exchange to another. I have tried to make a bet on the world cup using Augur and I used Dai to ... ummhh how do I put it .... print money into existence.....

This is in contrast to Steem, which I use daily to read and blog every once in a while.

So here I want to quickly talk a bit about my experience and potential conclusions from it.

Let's Gamboolz!

Augur to me was one of the early and interesting projects. I am a gambler (poker player) so somewhat familiar with the topic. I think blockchains can really change the game as it suffers from high levels of corruption and lots of money grabbing in conjunction with resulting bad user experience.

The think is, that in order to make prediction markets works, you are competing against existing solutions such as Las Vegas as well as online gaming and the new kids on the block that offer such services via bitcoin to work around banking and legal restrictions.

As a blockchain project one has to solve the technical aspect, but also need to be able to roll out and market the new product to compete with the old gard. I kinda saw only a partial solution by Augur, which is why I did not invest in the ICO.

But I was still going to use it.

So when it launched during the world cup I tried to make a bet.

Augur is too complicated

Augur has two issue in my mind: First the UI is way to complicated. I have download an app, that seems to be a wallet. Then I need to use browser with a wallet integration. It took a million steps just to sent my money to the bet, and it was confusing as hell. And I did not really see what was going on. it was kinda like betting in the dark.

I had to use a blockchain explorer to see that my bet was actually sent to the smart contract.

Every action requires an Ethereum transaction, which often does not go thru, because the fees are not set correctly. Its a mess.

Obviously the money I used was not huge, so I was fine with blowing an amount that did not super matter, but I cannot imagine sending any amount of value that matters. Given the fees however making bets under a few hundred dollars does not seem to make sense.

So this was horror from the perspective of having to use Ethereum, as well as Augur itself. Its just bad UI.

The usage of Augur according to dappradar unfortunately reflects my experience.

Conclusion

I think the evaluation of Augur is crazy high. 60 users per day is not worth 300M USD. At least I would not want to pay for this. This to me seems like one of these projects that have great idea but part of the solution is just missing.

In this case the onboarding of users as well as the user experience in general are lacking.

Unfortunately this is also a bad reflection for Ethereum, because many of the issues come from the transaction experience with ETH. I have sent several transactions several times, not knowing if they went thru. When you are making a bet this not tolerable.

I am not sure of Augur can be fixed. It would surely be amazing to have an open betting platform that cannot be manipulated.

What do you think?

I want to know If you think Ethereum is usable and what the impact fundamentally is on its value? Do you think Ethereum is failed or do you think it is on a good path and its price is justified.