I really wanted to like ethereum, but all the rumors and signs of behind the scenes powers and manipulators with direct contact to or even part of the group "founders" are giving me the heebie-jeebies. Also, even somebody like me who has next to no clue on trading, the ethereum and dao price after the dao-malfunction looks artificial to say the least.
Bitcoin has it's fair share of manipulators and power struggles, but I get the feeling that ethereum is a way more coordinated and well funded attempt at a coup.
Might just be that I've been put in the wrong frame of mind when Charles Hoskinson was talking about pulling all of crypto in their sphere of influence and drawing comparisons to monopolies like Microsoft and walled gardens like the Apple AppsStore. But that stated goal of wanting to create a new walled in monopoly gave me a big scare and I can't help to keep seeing ethereum in that light. Despite some people in the ethereum camp professing no bad intentions towards bitcoin, I can't shake the impression of an attempted power grab. The vocal group of people insisting that ethereum should wipe out bitcoin and rule the world aren't really helping either.
I'm not a fan of the bitcoin elitists camp. I don't like the idea of any monopoly or one chain to rule them all philosophy. But if the powers that be are behind ethereum in an attempt to control this new system and are so successful at marketcap manipulation combined with their pervasive marketing, I can't help seeing them more as a threat to cryptocurrencies in general than a boon. Also despite the argument that it's none of anyones business argument by the vocal majority in favor of manual intervention (including shockingly people like Andreas Antonopolous from the looks of it) and slamming everybody outside their group, the precedents they are trying to set do affect all the other cryptocurrencies. So why wouldn't those communities react?
Sorry for the long rant, apparently I needed to vent. In short if the price of ether had dropped more as a consequence of this wake up call in respect to "smart" contracts, it would have made me way waay less apprehensive about ethereum and more willing to help in their endeavor. But with these blatant price manipulations and sliding arguments in favor of manual interventions (mostly driven by greed than anything else from what I've seen), has the complete opposite effect on me. I do fear for the future if "the market" really falls for tricks like these, despite all the discussion about the problems the bitcoin-revolution was supposed to solve. I really really hope this revolution doesn't end up creating a bigger pile of shit than we have are already.
PS
I've been asking and looking around for a while now without finding any satisfactory answers to these questions.
How has ethereum "solved" the consensus and decision making process?
I've been bombarded with statements that Ethereum has solved the problems like the blocksize debate, but I can't find anything in relation to that. I really hope they aren't talking about the technicality of the blocksizes, instead of the challenge of governance. As I see it, wouldn't the increased complexity of their model make it an exponentially bigger mess than bitcoins simpler situation. Please don't tell me their solution is having a centralized party or foundation control everything.
How has ethereum solved scaling?
I'm not a computer scientist so it might be I missed it due to information overload and me lacking the means to separate wheat from the chaff. But from what I understand about how the network is supposed to work it sure sounds inefficient to me. No matter how I look at it, but for all the verifying nodes in the system having to individually recalculate all the onchain scripts/programs does sound more redundant than efficient to me. Isn't there a more efficient way to do it instead of having a massive amount of cpu-power redoing the exact same calculation on every separate redundant core/node? Is it really possible for that to be the best scalable and most effective solution? Sounds very counter intuitive to me.