Disclaiming the misunderstood "marketcaps:"
Crypto currency market cap descriptions are comedic. As soon as you actually try and sell your coins into the market, you see that you've eaten through the order book and driven the whole market down 10 percent. With thin markets like cryptocurrencies, if you market sell a million of coins, you actually make quite a large dent in the order book. Thus, a disclaimer should be included that crypto market caps are very not like the market caps you're used to seeing in the stock market.
The blockchain is not a way to "arrange a lot of computers to do the same thing." it literally is just a chain of blocks. Moving them is the nodes job, and you can sibil attack the nodes if you wish. ALso, when machines drop offline or get hacked, the network notices quite dearly, as I'm sure you noticed when your ETH network was non functional a couple times this year right? You guys [formed a choir and forgot the chorus] when you rolled back the dao transactions...
Please don't use the highest ever seen price to describe the block reward for mining, its usually not $500 every twelve seconds right?
"A smart contract is a tool for changing the world." So far it seems they've only changed thew world for the worse? Is there a successful smart contract yet? Is the net gain going to exceed the loss from those poor dev's that learned how easy it is for a program to do something you didn't think it would, and now all the money is gone. Maybe, or maybe you could use safer languages for the contracts.
"Systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum have many, many implementations. As long as they can all smoothly work together (and bugs at this level are, indeed, very rare) the whole thing works like a single machine. That nobody owns."
It is surely owned. The chain itself exists on drives that are owned, the nodes and their bandwidth is owned, bitcoin has *many implementations? hmm. If no one owns it, who are these people voting for BIP's? Seems like ownership to me. The coins, the nodes, the miners are owned, and they lobby.
"Nobody owns the internet, and we get along just fine." Some citizens don't have this view, or the freedom to see it.
"[btc]The mining thing rapidly centralized in the hands of a relatively small number of miners, " You are avoiding that in ETH how?
"The ideas behind Bitcoin certainly ran into trouble as they encountered regulation" avoiding that in ETH how?
"And this is the core vision of the Ethereum community: a world in which two people can deal directly with each other, and the systems that support their interaction don’t distort the message as they carry out our instructions. You say what you want, and the machines carry your instructions to the person on the other end of the deal. Directness is the real fruit of disintermediation: people dealing as they would face-to-face, but with the benefit of a network."
Uh. I think the darknets are doing this at scale already?
I don't think the libertarians will like this: "I went to Norway recently, and I suggested at a talk I did that we could move Scandinavia very quickly to experiments involving a blockchain for payments, fully supported by their government, on the basis that taxation could be built directly into the platforms they might use (it’s unlikely, today, the Norwegian government could collect taxes in Ether not Kroner!)." When the Russians take out your internet, I guess you just won't have commerce for a while.
Your arguments for a blockchain seem to support BTC better than they do ETH. Your arguments for peer to peer commerce seem to support the darknet markets more than they do ETH. You hand wave oracles with your "internet of agreements" You will end up with human judges. Oracles solution on its own is worth more than all crypto currently.
"I think Ether at $100 means that so many people believe in the world they think Ethereum will create, that it is becoming inevitable." Dogecoin appeared pretty inevitable for a while.
Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles. If you can't trust your oracle, you can't trust your contract. Period. No hand waving.
Thus. If you want to build crypto products that are useful, like shapeshift, timestamp, and lots of other things, great! Don't think that it is ETH that you need to make that happen. Also, what exactly do I need ETH for if I want to use the ETH network for all its dreamed majesty? Isn't all I need gas, and how correlated is gas likely to be with ETH? You have humans setting that relationship no? ETH is where smart people go to throw away their BTC gains.
That being said, you're a smart dude and I like lots of what you've worked on. If you have to trust a human, you'll need a human judge. If you want to not have judges, you need to not need to trust humans. If you dont' want to trust humans, than you must determine the state of the "real world" for your "smart contracts" to make decisions. That thing that measures the real world is an Oracle. Since your oracle can be cheated, or ddos'd or make a mistake, you're back to human judges again.
Until you can create a digital oracle that is trustworthy and can translate real world events into data to be plugged into logic in your smart contract, you are wasting your time. You will, end up with judges. Hell, the DAO didn't even get to fail at the oracle level, it failed before it even got to make its first "smart investment."
All the talk of smart contracts is merely hand waving away the oracle problem. All the talk of blockchains is sadly also hand waving of lots of issues as well, which is why we've really only seen one successful one, and some of it's users nearly have a gun to their head, so it's quite compelling for them to eat the risks and make it work.
Thus the more brain power and money power that go into things that are useful instead of smart contracts with no oracles, the happier I'll be.