Crypto is a hard space. Most people's startups have lost them money compared to what they would have made had they just bought btc and held. Other's have left the btc ship with predictions of failure (Falkvinge, Hearn) and their doom predictions haven't yet and perhaps may not come true. I feel that many the great mind is lost to boredom with boring old BTC, the crypto you can actually buy things with. This makes me sad, for surely BTC is not yet where anyone would like it to be. The braindrain has a cost.
Massive amounts of braindrain have funneled into ETH, and not just dev's but dollars. It's like 21 inc. They failed so hard that they pivoted into a payments layer. I literally paid them a 6 percent fee to send some BTC to their founder. I could have just sent him btc directly, but then they wouldn't have a profit model right?
Thus. Time and money can be wasted. I believe that much of ETH is such a waste. And even worse, it's actually a risk magnet that convinces others to do unsafe things, like tie millions of dollars up in smart contracts, that are quite unsmart.
Bitcoin's not exciting enough, so let's iterate all the xyz thing but with bitcoin ideas. They nearly all fail, so then we're on to, lets have shorter block times, or lets tie proof of work to something that's not electricity, like storage or selfies. Then there's the "smart" layers like colored coins, branded tokens, and mastercoin, and ETH which layers on itself.
So the situation is, everyone wants to get rich, but you can only get rich in crypto if you A. start with lots or B. Get in really early. Since most people don't start with lots, and most people aren't "early" to BTC, they venture into altcoin land, also known by a diminutive term I won't use here. You could C. ico, pump and dump as well.
Thus everyone wants to get in early, and get in on the pump, few want to work with boring, slow, nearly impossible to change BTC, corners get cut, and sheep get shaved.
The growing pains BTC had cost a couple orders of magnitude less financial harm?
Value comes from scarcity + demand. Open source software is by definition not scarce. Thus if a cryptocurrency has value, it's not it's code that its the value, it's the network effect of users using it that prevents other copies from outcompeting them at lower fees. Thus for any cryptocurrency token to have lasting value, it must derive that value from something external to it's bad ass code.
Take a look at how many things you can buy with BTC that you can't with ETH, that is the value, that is hard to replicate, hard to penetrate. Even lower volatility due to giant order books is a plus. Thus, when I see open source projects try to make money on the quality of their code, they're missing out on where the value comes from.
Now, could ETH be amazing, sure. Would it be amazing if the tokens were worth $1 or 10 cents, or 1 cent? Probably, the same way tcp packets are amazing, and worth pretty damn little.
SO when people hop on the pump, on a currency that is only hitting 1 metric, the pump one, it's dangerous and risky.
Then there's the risk that your'e enticing dev's to write smart contracts, when smart contracts are hard to write. And you're giving them all the tools they need to hang themselves.
Then there's the risk that you say lots of things that are inaccurate, which I guess I'll just tackle in a giant post next, lol.