The reason why I feel tempted to invest big in Ethereum is because:
- The technology is useful and is seeing widespread adoption and active development;
- It has a vision / roadmap;
- Big companies are backing it and building applications using Ethereum;
- Recently the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was created (comprising of Blockchain startups, research labs and global companies) with a goal to collectively develop industry standards and encourage collaboration between its various members (something that bitcoin lacks);
- New Metropolis version of Ethereum is coming.
On the flip side, however, I've found the following risks:
- Speculation and hype are seeing huge dumps of money/investment from China, S. Korea and Russia;
- Ethereum introduced easy ways of raising investments for companies called ICO (Initial Coin Offerings), in which unique tokens that are compatible with the Ethereum network and its token Ether are offered to companies. This means that companies can raise capital without the involvement of intermediaries and mediators. Lately, ICOs have been seen as contributing to raising the unit price of ETH, but given that not all technologies promised by ICOs may be successful ETH price may be negatively impacted;
- As Ethereum has become as easy to buy as bitcoin, people are increasingly using it for alt. coin purchasing/trading on different exchanges which surges the price up a little;
- Exchanges speculate a lot of "over-buying" which is normally corrected making the price of ETH fluctuate a lot;
- Ethereum is planning to switch to PoS and there might be another hard fork (since Ethereum is not immutable) which may result in coin-split such as Ethereum Classic (although this is somewhat unlikely, but still a possibility);
- Companies in EEA mostly use private chains instead of ETH, but it's marketed otherwise;
- Currently, no clear trend can be seen; it is speculated that the price can fall down to $250 or set a course to an upward trajectory of $1000.
It is obvious that the right time to invest in ETH was back in January 2017 when the price was around $8, but at the time of writing the price sits at about an average $385 across different exchanges, and speculation and trends suggest it may surge up to $1000+ by the end of the year (or maybe even sooner). So keeping that in mind, I think it's still sort of a good bet to invest heavy in Ethereum, and pull out when the time is right.
I would love to hear your thoughts, whether you think investing a big amount into Ethereum is a good idea right now or not; and I would love to hear from people who're actively investing right now.
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