Nice article and very good points for the eth bashers to think about. Although steem-engine has a long way to go before it could even be called decentralized let alone distributed, the potential for true smart-contract capability to come to steem via sidechain is really exciting to me (and MUCH more so than SMTs on the mainchain). But as you say, eth has already had smart contract capability for a long time and has a huge number of devs working on the platform.
I purposely did not bring up Steem here because I always do that and we are so far removed from this topic. Steem is a project that games could run off of and things like that. The price we pay for our functionality comes from less decentralization.
Again, all networks have their own niche. You wouldn't buy a house on the Steem blockchain but you would play the lottery or do p2p gambling. 3 second blocks are nice for these kinds of dapps.
What, you don't think Dan's evil plan for crypto world domination is about to come to fruition?!? Heresy! :)
I was actually thinking precisely about games when I mentioned I was excited about possibility of (more than the current very limited set of) smart contracts coming to steem-engine. Would be really cool to be able to issue non-fungible tokens both for games and also even for creative types to be able to do limited edition / unique artworks and what not. I think it would dovetail nicely with the niche that Steem has carved out for itself. ETH gives a good example of how much value smart contracts can bring, to the point that even if the ETH network itself is kinda crappy in terms of scalability and block time, it is still the #2 crypto with a bullet and isn't going anywhere
It's so true... if any valid decentralized game comes to the market it will moon so fast. The problem is decentralized organization is so difficult. How do you pay random developers for their work? How do you even gauge how much work they did?
We need serious logistics added to these governance structures before they start to make sense.