Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment

"Ethereum is an unsecure, trust-requiring, centralized, mutable platform that runs stoppable apps and censors people Ethereum Foundation (EF) dislikes - the opposite of what it advertises itself as. Ethereum Foundation misrepresents what Ethereum is to prospective investors for increasing the value of the traded asset ETH while profiting financially. This means, by definition, Ethereum Foundation is participating in fraud by continuously misleading investors. Furthermore, the act of suddenly changing the properties of the unregistered security after the sale of the security in the initial coin offering (ICO) and/or on exchanges while profiting personally constitutes securities fraud. Additionally, Ethereum Foundation is connected to damaging the value of sold assets, damaging the value of competing assets, theft from competition, and market manipulation of competing assets for profit."

Nope. See below.

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic

https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited

https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/tree/segwit2x

If code has bugs (and sufficiently complex code will always, always, always have bugs) you simply have to suffer the consequences (sorry for your loss) or the entire community can choose to execute a hard fork and rewrite history (see DAO). If a vanilla legal contract has some typos or even some semantic differences that lead to ridiculous outcomes, lawyers and judges will hash it out. People, not computers, make the final decisions in our legal system, so human errors are mostly tolerated. If I sneak a clause into a contract saying that the other party must pay me their entire salary every year, it would be voided in an instant. Not so if placed in a "smart" contract.

Perhaps you could say that Ethereum is better than our legal system because it's decentralized. But I don't think it's enough to say something is better simply because it's decentralized. Why should I be afraid of a centralized legal system? We elect politicians, who choose judges (who have to be confirmed by legislative bodies whose members we also elect). Sure, it's not perfect, but it's hardly the tyrannical system that would make me turn to the bug-ridden wild west of Ethereum smart contracts.

I think the only reasonable argument in favor of Ethereum contracts is that they are easier to create (less friction, don't need to hire a lawyer, etc), but that's hardly a good thing. Real life contracts are expensive for a reason, not because Rothschild & Co. have some other nefarious plans. You need lawyers to write good contracts and think through their consequences, as well as reasonable, human judges to decide issues when they arise. Ethereum, to me, seems a purely ideological creation, not one rooted in actual needs that people have. Sure, it's decentralized and immutable (unless a contract hurts the wrong people, lol) but did anyone really want that (except for those with ideological reasons, i.e. libertarians)?

Not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to hear a strong opposing viewpoint on this.

Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.