A Quora Answer on Ethereum's Prospects
Q: Is Ethereum about to explode, considering the upcoming hard fork on the 18th of January?
My answer: Hopefully not.
That is, hopefully crypto prices will stop “exploding” with every hard fork, and hopefully Ethereum will gain most of its value from its utility and plausible use cases rather than from irrational exuberance over crypto as such. I’m expecting, or at least hoping, that it will be the turtle to Bitcoin Core’s hare and that when the latter’s bubble pops the former will just keep on trucking.
At some point — a point that will come, but who knows when — good cryptocurrencies will get their kinks worked out well enough that hard forks over real value or usability issues become rare, which means that forked altcoins become the equivalent of play money. That is, “the new [insert crypto here] fork” will be perceived as worth so little that hardly anyone notices it, let alone bothers to set up a wallet for it, speculate in it, or use/accept it in commerce, instead of everyone going temporarily insane and bidding up cryptocurrencies over things that aren’t reasonable value propositions.