I was just laughing with my buddies about how this is a funny experiment in Austrian-Economics. Unfortunately, it's total market cap is still so small that it could manipulated as easily as a penny stock, so outside influence may really hurt a lot of people in the long run.

You see, everybody wants the latest and greatest. You know and I know it, yet the masses continually look to governments for approval.

I agree on your comment about the sheeople, but I still think that this could be a massive strength to some currencies. As I suggested in my Rpple(XRP) analysis, there can be high gains for usage coins which are accepted as legal tender. This is because 'legal tender' means forced mass market acceptance.

Ethereum has proven that it can be hacked and seems to be attracting more corporate interest which in my opinion will slow it down.

I think that the opposite will happen, especially as more smart-contracts are successfully executed and more programmers consume Ether to fuel their blockchain projects. Eitherway, I guess that we will see by the end of this year!