It is true that Ethereum has a more powerful scripting language. The real question, however, is if that feature has practical value.
I think the jury is still out on that question but I personally lean towards no. If and when there are profitable applications of this technology, ones that wouldn't have been possible without ethereum scripts then I will be glad to change my mind.
I agree that it is still an open question whether the EVM will have profitable applications. I lean towards yes.
It is (in my opinion) no question that the feature has theoretical value. I think the only question is whether that feature's value will outweigh the considerable costs of using a blockchain.
I think there are definitely cases where it will be profitable, but think blockchain tech in general is probably overhyped right now.
I would lean towards no but perhaps I will be surprised.
We have had about a year of dapp development gone by so far and there isn't a single dapp with any meaningful userbase.
I think if another year goes by and we are 2 years in the dapp development cycle and there is no successful dapp that will probably mean it's not a successful model.
I am also concerned about these dapps having insane valuations and raising huge sums of money just by releasing a vague whitepaper, without having a working product with users.
Normal startups would usually start with a seed round of hundreds of thousands USD but raising 50 millions or more is just obscene, that's a series B or C round for a fast growing startup with tens of millions real users and hundreds of employees usually.
I am interested how this whole situation plays out but remain skeptical for now.
I agree with you. I wonder if the best use case for ethereum scripts is actually with private block chains. For private chains the trust problem with external input to the scripts (which is needed for any serious dapp) would be minimized.
I've seen so many technologies hyped, fail to live up to expectations, and then disappear. Etheruem has some interesting ideas, I'm worried that they have grossly over-stated its potential and it will soon fall off the hype cliff.
I've been looking into this question. Szabo first proposed "smart contracts" in 1994, but Ethereum is basically the first practical smart contracts platform ever - the first one that people actually use a whole lot.
(You can squint at things and say "well that's a bit like a smart contract", but that's retrospectively applying a label - like calling Git a "blockchain". I'm speaking of things that were expressly labeled "smart contracts".)
Too bad it's not the first secure smart-contract platform; that honor probably goes to the folks who developed Joule, E, etc. in the mid-90s. Szabo and his contemporaries were steeped in capability theory, but Ethereum glossed over all of that in favor of hype and cash.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#scripting