In contrast to Bitcoin, one explanation why strategist and investment guru Lyn Alden is not investing in Ether is that she finds the Ethereum network a “unfinished product.”
Alden’s Ethereum economic analysis published yesterday, January 17, compares the Concorde jet to the smart contract network: practical as it has “a ton of smart developers working on it,” but is doubtful to become an economically sustainable project in the long run. As proof of her assertion, she ran down some of the main features of Ethereum, calling the use-case of many decentralized applications “circular and speculative.
Furthermore, she said that the nodes of the network are more likely to be at risk of a centralized attack “if there were to be some government crackdown on third-party node services.” Alden said authorities would not “necessarily bring down Ethereum,” but by making the applications harder to operate, they could effectively threaten the use case.
On Twitter, Alden summarized her thoughts: “Ethereum could indeed do very well over the next year in terms of price, but as long as it’s transforming its base layer, it remains a speculation in alpha development, rather than a finished/stable product.”
On the other hand, the investment guru said that Bitcoin did not have the “arbitrary monetary policy” of Ethereum with its fixed supply of 21 million coins, in addition to saying that there was a “cultural divide” between the two networks.
“Ethereum attracts more of a gamer culture and more experimentation,” Alden said, adding that some of the network-built projects have contributed to disappointment. Maybe it should be considered largely a finished project like Bitcoin in another 5 years after Ethereum 2.0 is in place and running for a while, with stable monetary policy for the same time. It’s experimental until then.