If ethereum soon introduces the Plasma project, which completely solves the problem with the scalability of ethereum and allows it to conduct hundreds of thousands of transactions per second instead of the current fifteen, and in the future up to millions of transactions, this coin will in general be beyond any competition. Bitcoin on the background of ethereum will generally look like a museum exhibit. This year I received partially free tokens only in ethereum, not in bitcoin and I think this is the right decision. I think that ethereum will soon rise very high.
But will anybody want to perform that many transactions on a coin that basically has no acceptance and is not being used for payments anywhere. What are they hoping for with those hundreds of thousands transactions? That there will be so many new projects to create the demand? I've read somewhere recently that the interest in ICOs is going down. There even was a graph showing how much money did ICOs gather in the last couple months and it was getting lower every month since the beginning of the year.
This is what worries me. It looks like altcoins are running out of steam, and ETH is leading the pack. That doesn't mean that they'll all be useless bits in a few more months though. They've got to slow down sometimes, of course, but when they are going to pick back up no one can tell. I'm holding onto a bit of ETH for now because I haven't lost all hope. I'm also watching to see if any reasonable purpose for using ETH in transactions comes out.
There's a lot of good ideas being put together, but not a lot of action. ETH needs a kick in the ass to get going.