The enthusiasm for Ethereum is quite naive. Here’s my impersonation of an Ethereum fan boy:
Ethereum is like a VPS, except it costs 10,000 times as much, only uses JavaScript, and can’t communicate with the world that exists outside the blockchain.
If you think Bitcoin has scalability problems, it is a model of efficiency compared to Ethereum. People talk about smart contracts being developed on it. Automated contract execution is and will be a thing, but most people haven’t thought through how extraordinarily difficult they are to implement on a blockchain. This is because a blockchain is its own isolated world that knows nothing about the rest of the world.
Consider the ability of Ethereum to parse if statement. Let’s say we want to use the Ethereum blockchain to execute a smart contract that will allow two people to bet on the outcome of a major political election. This is actually a pretty straight forward smart contract (when described in human language), but Ethereum can’t do it. Among the multitude of problems is even determining who won. The entire world will agree about who won, but the blockchain will remain unaware. Think about how this swarm of redundant computers can evaluate the statement “if candidate A wins”. It can’t resolve that if statement to true or false. How would it, even if every human on the planet knows the answer? It could be modified to resolve that statement, but this is impractical. Ethereum miners would all have to agree on a way to determine who won. They could agree to have CNN publish the results using a predictable API so that each miner can call the CNN API to determine who won. Given that Bitcoin miners can’t even agree to increase the transaction capacity of Bitcoin, it is silly to think Ethereum miners are going to standardise on an API to determine the outcome of specific smart contracts. Even if they did, the data source is still centralised and constitutes a single point of failure. The entire approach is simply impractical.
I pity anyone who attempts to do what we have done with a Peershare on Ethereum. Any such attempt will fail regardless of the quantity of funding involved.
Ethereum has done well because of the hype it has offered and also because it offers a solution to the currently very limited transaction capacity of Bitcoin. Ethereum scales better for simple transactions that transfer value merely because it doesn’t have its transaction capacity capped at 1 MB per 10 minutes. For Ethereum, hype + transaction capacity = success.
Proper functioning as a DAO requires proof of stake and a dedicated blockchain. Dash, which I consider to be the most developed DAO besides NuBits and B&C because they adopted a version of our custodial grant system as best their architecture allows, has confirmed this by adding a proof of stake system on top of their proof of work system using masternodes to develop their DAO functions. There is room to evolve, and Ethereum has a lot of money to do it. But the current structure and foundation are absolutely abysmal for the purpose of supporting DAOs.