I agree with the overall sentiment of the piece. The one thing I disagree on is the perception that there should be "killer apps" for bitcoin. I think this perspective views Bitcoin as the the technological breakthrough, looking for apps to be built on top of it. But really the technology is the Blockchain, and Bitcoin (decentralized currency) is the "killer app".
Ethereum is different because in addition to being a currency, it is also a platform. It needs "killer apps" to differentiate itself, otherwise it's just a currency, and can be discarded like litecoin and doge. I think Fred has given us reason to believe it will succeed in providing the ability for killer apps to be built on top of it, but we still have to see. None exist yet. The DAO has yet to do anything real.
Maybe just a detail, but it seemed like an important one to me.
Ether is not a currency like Bitcoin. Ethereum is a pure platform play that enables multiple Bitcoin competitors to rapidly experiment and find the product-market fit of crypto-currencies in the real world.
I believe there can be a crypto-currency with better properties than Bitcoin.
Once one of these Ethereum apps finds their hockey stick, Ether will continue to play its role in securing the Ethereum network for this killer app which removes the need for both Ether and Bitcoin to play the role of crypto-currencies.
While you are distracted by one DAO, there are many other DAOs successfully in operation on the Ethereum network. There is only one that made a lot of noise because it had to, the others are silently building their products after raising money from a passionate set of users.
What other DAOs are there and how much have they raised?
The thing with tokens is that because Ethereum is so young, the companies being built on top of it are by default super early stage, with no real traction or product market fit to show. So anyone buying tokens at this stage because they want a shared revenue stream of the companies profits, is making very risky bets which have a high likelihood of failure (on average).
I think it's the lure of secondary markets for DAOs that is behind a lot of the interest in, at least, The DAO - people buy the tokens early because there is anticipation of the token prices going up relatively soon after the crowdsale, fear of missing out etc.
I think a lot of it is driven by speculative motives rather than long term investment in Ethereum companies themselves.
The other major DAO was Digix, which set a target of $5.5 million and raised it in 14 hours.
They've got a more definite revenue plan: DAO token holders get transaction fees from transfers of the gold-backed tokens Digix plans to issue. For various reasons I don't think this is going to work out very well for Digix DAO holders in the long term, but it's an interesting experiment.
Yes, the bets are risky. It is an opportunity to rethink your portfolio like a VC where few investments could return 10x easily and a lot will lose the capital allocated to them.
I think this is better than buying IPO stock in public markets which are so bad these days that only zombie companies are being listed and investors are being screwed very regularly.
You can create whatever structure you want. There's no reason (other than that it doesn't make good financial sense) that you couldn't sell special preferred tokens, etc.
Ethereum is different because in addition to being a currency, it is also a platform. It needs "killer apps" to differentiate itself, otherwise it's just a currency, and can be discarded like litecoin and doge. I think Fred has given us reason to believe it will succeed in providing the ability for killer apps to be built on top of it, but we still have to see. None exist yet. The DAO has yet to do anything real.
Maybe just a detail, but it seemed like an important one to me.