I feel bad for shitposting so much and making exactly zero contribution to CT since maybe December 2019. So here's an honest assessment of Ethereum from the point of view of a long-term investor.

First off, every investment has pros and cons. If you come across an investment thesis that only has pros, one of two things is happening with writer of that thesis:

1) They are being dishonest with themselves.
2) They are being dishonest their readers.

So let's start with the pros.

At this point Ethereum has a 50%+ chance of winning the smart contract war IMO. The network effect is just too strong.

"WHAT NETWORK EFFECT?" ETH killer supporters ask.

Dev tooling. Metamask installations. ERC20 standard. Composability.

I didn't come up with these out of nowhere. I asked application developers why they haven't switched to other, higher performance blockchains.

That said, I actually don't think Ethereum beating competitors in terms of usage is the most bullish signal. All else equal, it's a positive, but it isn't as big of a positive as you might think. https://twitter.com/robustus/status/753717759444393986?s=20

Instead, the most bullish signals are

1) Transition to proof of stake.
2) Fixing the goddamn monetary policy. (I'm still annoyed this wasn't done in 2014.)

Proof of stake will cause a substantial % of ETH to get locked up. "Yield" is a great meme and will give people a major, fundamental reason to actually hang on to the coin (in addition to using it as gas).

Monetary policy is ultimately based on social consensus and takes a long time to become credible. (ie, once you have a monetary policy, don't fucking change it.)

And it seems to me that the Ethereum community is starting to take this seriously.

I know some people will also bring up fee burning as being another major bullish catalyst. IMO it could be a net positive, but it's not that important because the annual transaction fee is very low relative to the market cap.

Now let's look at the cons.

The consensus view (at least outside the Bitcoin community) is that high usage leads to high network value, i.e., if millions of people use a coin, it must be valuable, right?

Wrong. This is a lethal mind virus for investors and you need to kill it ASAP.

Why is silver substantially less valuable than gold despite its substantially higher industrial usage? Why is ETH not mooning despite an explosive growth in Defi?

The answer to the last question is here. (Yep this December 2019 tweetstorm was that's my last real contribution to CT.) https://twitter.com/QWQiao/status/1210284534085902337?s=20

Repeating "the ETH is money" meme is not enough. People need fundamental reasons to actually want to use ETH as money. Unfortunately more people are using Tether as money.

Well, that's the only major con. But it's a huge one and unfortunately I see no way to fix it.

You could also argue that ETH 2.0 is seemingly taking forever, but it's pretty much priced in at this point and L2s are coming along nicely.

So given all this, how do you play the next few months?

Well first, patiently await Phase 0 of ETH 2.0, or proof stake. If my thesis is right ETH will gradually appreciate during the subsequent months. If I'm wrong I don't think there's too much downside either.

However if I'm wrong I just don't see a major bullish catalyst on the horizon. Your money might be better spent on the Defi tokens themselves.

Disclaimer: I've held ETH since 2014 and I love Ethereum but I hate intellectual dishonesty.