/u/Dunning_Krugerrands's 'FUD list of doom' from early 2016
This is part of a series where Taylor pulls sweet comments she has made or found over the years in the hopes that they can be useful, searchable, remembered, referenced, and/or aid in creating the future knowledge base posts.
Ok so I'm bullish but I'l chime in with my FUD list of doom! :)
Technical risks
- CASPER POS is challenging and not 100% certain it will work.
- Scaling & sharding is challenging and not 100% certain it will work.
- Maybe despite being batshit crazy Paul Sztorc could be right that oracles are impossible
- Possible long term security holes of fundamental flaws might be discovered
Resource & cashflow risk
- Foundation has limited funds.
- Key developers could be poached.
- Still not seeing evidence of significant VC investment.
Competition risks
- R3 may win financial market
- Hyperledger may win IOT market
- Ripple could win international settlement & remittances market.
- Some anon coin may win the darknet market
- Could have a million ethereum alt coins indeed consensy could themselves fork Ethereum
- Bitcoin might finally sort out their politics
- Rootstock & counterparty
- Some new unknown coin could be a better ethereum than ethereum.
Regulatory risks
- Goverments could clamp down on crypto exchanges
- Goverments could require permissioned system or back a rival system
- Goverments could clamp down on IPO or crowd shares
- Goverments could clamp down on issuance of assets or create more onerous KYC requirements
Reputational risks
- If Kraken or Polonex is the new Mt Gox
- If some scam or pyramid scheme gives Dapps a bad name
- If a significant number of wallets are hacked
- If Ethereum community becomes as toxic as the bitcoin community
Barriers to adoption
- It is hard to communicate what Ethereum is
- Press insists on using the term 'blockchain' or 'bitcoin'
- Ethereum PR sucks.
- It is still hard for 'normal people' to buy Ether and securely store it.
- There is not yet a killer app
- Maybe nobody actually wants Dapps or even crypto currency they just want an investment opportunity
- Even if there is a killer app the advantages of decentralisation are unclear
- Maybe noone actually cares about decentralisation apart from nutjob bitcoiners and they only care about bitcoin
- Still no major exchanges listing and hard to buy in directly from fiat
- Major Chinese exchanges may never add Eth because they make all their money from mining BTC so don't want Eth to succeed.
Risk Ethereum could succeed without Ether becoming really valuable
- Stable coins, gold & other currencies will be used for payment & wealth storage not Eth.
- Eth will lose it's monopoly for buying gas
- Because of competition & scaling transaction fees will fall to the cost of operation & capital.
Although even with the above I still put us way above Ripple & even BTC.