[wanderfowl]

Etherium sounds like a great idea, and a great approach. But I'm afraid it's going to end up like GPG: Technically awesome, strong, capable, and useful - but completely out of reach of most of the people you'd want to use it with.

Every time I read a "Getting started with Ethereum" guide which involves 7 steps just to buy Bitcoin (from a site nobody's heard of) and then set up a wallet, I watch the number of potential users dropping like a rock.

I hope very much that it succeeds enough to justify its learning curve, as it's an interesting idea. But I suspect that outside of a few very small markets where it offers the ability to do something completely impossible with any other method, having an ethereum interface for your product or service will be roughly equivalent to GPG signing all your emails: People in the know weren't that concerned anyways, and nobody else knows enough to care.

[d23]

Someone really has to get a simple proof of concept application made that any dummy can understand and run on their own. I'm a developer that bought ethereum, and even after reading their materials after the launch I couldn't be bothered with trying to get it running or understanding it. That doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the project.

[nullz]

There are a few projects working on this. One problem is key management and giving the app a connection to the blockchain. If you do key management in the webapp and read from the blockchain via a centralized API, thats not much of an improvement over existing systems. Ethereum core's solution to this is a special browser, but it is still under development. I'm working on a project[0] that takes this on, but is still a couple months out from a public beta. Its a bit of a hack but it manages a zero-install solution by having a sort of browser-in-browser that intercepts transaction signing requests and provides access to blockchain data. Can't wait to get it out there.

[0]: https://metamask.io/

[natrius]

Ethereum isn't ready for end users today. Remember that you used to have to wire money to Japan to get bitcoins. Today, you install an app on your phone, put in a debit card number, then deposit funds in the app to access the Bitcoin network, regardless if you hold the funds as dollars or bitcoins.

Give it time. Or better yet, help us! This technology is about to reshape the world.

[DennisP]

Right now it's the "Frontier" release, which is intended for developers. Down the road they want a browser full of graphic apps, looking something like this: http://i.imgur.com/f4ha8Ho.png

[CyberDildonics]

Or Freenet or full disk encryption or security tokens or...

[kristofferR]

Full disk encryption is (thankfully) becoming a bad example. Apple has been pushing it aggressivily and both iOS devices and Macs have full disk encryption by default.

It's a shame that it's not default on Windows or Android yet, but it unfortunately makes sense since they have to run on so many different configurations (unlike Apple which can ensure that everything running their OS' are capable of full disk encryption without a noticable performance hit).