I told rpietila back at the start of 2013 when Bitcoin was < $10, that I approved of his decision to sell $100,000 of silver and buy 10,000 Bitcoins.
Would you approve such decision for Ethereum today? rpietila would only have to sell $10,000 of silver for ~10,000 ETH.
Bitcoin clearly had momentum at the start of 2013, and it was a technological concept that was so revolutionary that it was clearly going to take the world by storm.
Ethereum not. The conceptual technology isn't even threshed out yet, and they are adding more and more complexity on top.
If I am somehow wrong about some killer app that requires a programmable block chain and some way that Ethereum's complex design process is able to solidify (and for all that to occur this year), then I will be quite shocked.
We tend to get so excited about a programmable block chain because we think that implies that there are unbounded cases of apps that can be written, but as Ethereum is discovering as they go through the research process, is that so many limitations have to placed on the scripts in order to achieve scalability that I argue much of the generality is also lost. For example, scripts can't be allowed to read/write from any state that any other script could, because then commutativity of block chain ordering is lost. There is the Tragedy of Commons issue around fees (gas) that I raised. Etc..