Read my way through the Ark whitepaper and working my way through other materials as I find them.

Offhand, the majority of it seems like proposing the same solutions to the same problems that many altcoin-as-a-platform projects are also trying to solve. Falls a lot into the "blockchain solves all the things" area (distributed file storage, blockchain databases, identity management, p2p payments, and so forth). I also see nothing consumer friendly. Obviously this is early stage stuff, but if folks have a hard enough time figuring BTC out...

I do like the SmartBridge/Encoded Listener concept. IFTT between blockchains seems like a useful thing (decentralized exchanges, that sort of thing). That said, I think it's useful because the blockchains themselves that are bridged are useful. I'm less convinced that we need an intermediary blockchain to enable these behaviors.

I see the decentralized/trustless premise of blockchains in general, but in terms of putting money into one, I'm looking for use cases where those attributes bring serious value (i.e. BTC as a self-sustaining store of value). Seems like a lot of Ark's features could be replaced well enough by a local (or server) client that scans existing blockchains today (or listens to a server for triggers, or w/e). Not 100% trustless, but could be open-sourced and trustworthy-enough.

I suspect that any eventual decentralized ecosystem will be a mishmash of competing standards all trying to interconnect rather than any one, beautiful solution.

------

Btw, on the Segwit exposure topic, you're watching it carefully more on...principle, yes? In other words, it risks undermining some of the fundamental decentralized model BTC proposed?