TL;DR poo-pooing eth is justifiable, but it is a strong competitor that is not to be dismissed.
It is not.
Do you want to actually debate this statement, or like everyone else do you want to make a blanket generalized statement without evidence to support it?
Momentum in price is not evidence that ETH contributes anything.
since I am in favor of btc and NOT in favor of eth, what is there to debate?
We don't have to like it or acknowledge the existence of ETH, but I can tell you that while BTC will go to $100k or higher soon, in the same time frame we are also going to see ETH go to $10k or higher.
I too, saw it from the beginning, but decided not to buy any of it, or even mine it because I did not understand what it was supposed to do, or what it could achieve. What I do understand is that it is a platform for some smart contracts and all sorts of other things, and while I do not like the monetary issuance of supply and all sorts of other things about it, I know it's going to stick around for awhile, quite possibly long enough for many of us here to die of old age.
The "smart" thing to consider now is if you want to or can you make profits out of this or not, or are you willing to.
The maxi's inside of us (and around us) are going to stick to the "safety" of bitcoin, or that's actually the smart thing to do, stick to bitcoin. Don't bother with anything else no matter what their numbers say. No one understands them, and the guys who think they do, a lot of them lose money anyway.
About the only thing even considered smarter than this, is to simply buy and hold them if you want to play with different allocations among shitcoins. Buy and hold some BTC. Buy and hold some ETH. Hold for 5 years. Do not day trade or whatever. With the understanding that there is the possibility you will lose whatever you put into any shitcoins, including ETH, but you will most likely profit from just holding bitcoin for longer than 5 years.
I agree with your premise that ETH has interesting properties that make it worth studying in spite of it's flaws which are many and quite great.
The biggest one, in my opinion, is the SAME one that all the big block chains will try to do. And that is to cram the entire operative data-set onto the blockchain.
If ETH continues to be relevant, or even successful then it is destined to centralize. By the looks of it we will see it centralize both by miner centralization as well as stake centralization.
This is dangerous because it will attract the folks who recognize that this can be exploited, and therefore make certain people rich at the expense of those who will not be. This could include governments, and the super wealthy business folks.
In fact it's very genesis is anchored in that reality. And ALL the changes since inception have enforces that. Pre-mines Chain splits. Edicts. Changes to issuance. All of these things "justified" by the leaders. This will CONTINUE to go on, and fool the fools until ... well forever.
So the biggest most "feature rich" centralized chain will be the ultimate enemy of bitcoin. Whether that is ETH, a CDBC, or God forbit some sort of combination.
Bitcoin's biggest problem is it is not well understood by not only the masses, but even it's faithful. It is misunderstood why it is important. And why ETH is fundamentally NOTHING LIKE IT. in fact it's opposite ultimately.