Thanks for sharing the article @ethsensei, but, respectfully, you're dead wrong. You're missing the big picture of cryptocurrencies and you are likely thinking too much like a trader. 

The swing traders are going to feel a lot of pain soon, because public blockchains are not like the stock market, they just have not figured that out yet. 

Bitcoin and Ethereum are grand-fathered into the space like Youtube and Facebook. The reason this is true is because these blockchains are more like social network platforms than they are like companies. The network effect is key, and they are vastly ahead of everything else.

Ethereum is second only to Bitcoin in market cap, and second to nothing in development. No blockchain has anywhere near as many projects built or being built on them as Ethereum has. 

Every other blockchain is merely a promise, no different than those lame ICOs that you're talking about as the "ICO craze" of 2017. After the ICO craze came the next thing: the blockchain craze. We have many wannabes out there trying to become the Ethereum killer, but they are not succeeding. 

EOS, TRON, Energi, these blockchains are a joke. DPoS is cool, but its cool for things that are not a *base trust layer* but a layer 2 solution. They are not true decentralized protocols, they are republics. Republics are also good, but they are not good for a *base trust layer*. 

Loom Network is a perfect example of how DPoS can be used to scale things. Ethereum is like a bank, while DPoS networks like Loom allow Ethereum assets to scale in their utility when one wants to use their digital assets, when you want security you put it back on the most secure network , Ethereum. Ethereum is a nice cozy bank, and you can always draw back that $50,000 Wookie Fir Coat from the game *Oh God Another Star War Online* to the safe and cozy bank when needed. 

Now, all that said, I am not saying there are not legit blockchains with actual value in the space. Cosmos can do things that Ethereum cannot do, which means it is not a mere copycat or rendition of the same mission but actually provides an entirely different value. 

Cosmos, however, is not going to be a *base layer of trust*. This is because Cosmos does not actually offer security to the blockchains on it, they are sovereign blockchains. That sucks... We can make blockchains any time we want! A little forkety fork fork and away we go! 

Well, okay, Cosmos makes custom designed blockchains a lot smoother, easier and sleeker. That's cool. But at the end of the day, you have to get your own security. See, that makes Cosmos nothing more than a fancy tool for building blockchains, but that's not really cutting into what Ethereum offers. 

Ethereum offers automatic security. Now, Polkadot is kind of aiming to do that as well, so *BLEEP* those guys. But Cosmos is not really able to offer people what Ethereum offers. We'll talk about this topic more below...

### Ethereum's Niche
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You have seemed to not realize that Ethereum did find its niche. And no, it is not as the ICO craze machine... It is as the main DeFi base layer of trust. Many of these applications have no need for a token to begin with such as Compound and 8protocol. 

DeFi applications do not mind $0.03 transaction fees, but for things such as social apps there are effective methods of getting around charging people fees anyway such as the RelayHub/Gas Station. And there are creative decentralized ways of distributing tokens such as rewarding ETH donators that are donating to the gas paying address with native tokens of the dapp. 

The majority of the companies building things are going with Ethereum. Big companies like Ernst & Young are building on Ethereum and telling people that "businesses will be building on Ethereum." 

Ethereum already has the network effect. Solidity has become one of the hottest languages to learn now, with educators popping up all over the place. This only becomes more and more true as blochchain projects use Ethereum's EVM. 

### No Such Thing As A ShitERC20
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There are shitcoins, but I tell you the truth, there are no shitERC20s... I said it, because it is the truth. Spinning up a blockchain is not the hard part, its making that blockchain worth enough for people to secure it that is key to whether or not its native token holds any value. 

Most blockchains in existence can be 51% attacked by buying hashpower, and often times the cost is less than your last paycheck. Yep, most blockchains are completely vulnerable to malicious attack, but are likely not attacked because that blockchain is not worth attacking. 

ERC20s come with security in the box. You know that the security of Ethereum itself is backing your asset, and that gives people a really good feeling. That's why people are calling it the future *base layer of trust*. Sure, Bitcoin is more secure than Ethereum, but it only secures bitcoins, nothing else.

##### Ethereum's New Motto:
*Some things in life are secured by Bitcoin (really just bitcoins), for everything else, there's Ethereum...*

### Ethereum IS *The Future*
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The ICO craze led to many projects trying to create their own token because that was how you could get your slice of the big money. But that does not mean that ICOs are the only way to use Ethereum. On the contrary, tokenized securities, tokenized assets and utility tokens are just a few use cases for smart contract development. 

Ethereum is ideal for hosting the 2.0 version of the derivatives market, insurance policies, business-to-business arrangements, real estate deed transfers and many other applications. Boring stuff, but its big business and ether can become a major resource to a wide variety of industries. 

### So, Will Ether Ever Return To ATH?
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In simple words, you can bet your ass... But let's get more detailed!

The Ethereum we all know and love is destined to be just a shard of the greater vision known as Ethereum 2.0 that is planned to launch Phase 0 in Q1 of 2020. In a post Serenity world the Casperly, eco-friendly and sharded future will provide a 20,000+ transaction per second performance. That's right, you'll be able to buy coffee...

At the current rate of transaction fees that means the Ethereum fee market would be 18,921,600,000‬ per year. That is nearly the current market cap of Ethereum right now, which means that the real price of ethers would need to go far above that rate to meet demand. 

The more transactions Ethereum can take on the more projects will build on Ethereum, and they will need to raise funds in ether to cover business costs. Bitcoin is being held only as a speculative hedge against the faulty economic system in place, but ethers will continue to be a resource that dapp projects will need to stash away for operational consumption. That aspect combined with the new PoS system will result in some serious *pumpamentals*.

In closing, while there are lots of projects gunning for Ethereum and we have heard, "Could this be the Ethereum killer?" many many times, nothing has indeed killed Ethereum. Emperor Vitalik is yet to be dethroned and development is yet to have waned. 

Polkadot is a threat, one that I am watching carefully, but outside of that single blockchain, yeah, no... So, once more for emphasis, *BLEEP* Polkadot. 

Welcome to Steem! :)