> Why? Because Ethereum isn’t just a store-of-value. The Ethereum network also contains smart contracts that execute native code on the blockchain.
It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade work done for other agents for transfer of "hosting costs."
Ethereum would still be doing what it's designed to do, even if the price of ETH tanked. (In fact, dapp developers would probably prefer ETH to tank, since that'd mean transactions would be cheaper and less crowded by speculative traders and selfish miners.)
The other funny thing is the common misconception that Bitcoin does not have smart contracts. Bitcoin transactions are actually pretty programmable. You can have a coin be unspendable until a certain date, or have it require n cosigners to be spent, or have it become spendable only once a secret is revealed which matches a hash.
This is true in the same sense that grep is extremely programmable, but comparing grep to C would be strange indeed. Ethereum is a Turing complete VM, allowing you to build extremely complex systems (we, for example, are trying to build a more transparent and distributed directory for a Tor-like service), while Bitcoin lets you sort of control transactions a bit with what amount to something closer to "rules" than "programs" (due to the explicit lack of looping control structure).
It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade work done for other agents for transfer of "hosting costs."
Ethereum would still be doing what it's designed to do, even if the price of ETH tanked. (In fact, dapp developers would probably prefer ETH to tank, since that'd mean transactions would be cheaper and less crowded by speculative traders and selfish miners.)
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