One theory I have on the hate towards Ethereum (and cryptocurrencies / blockchain in general) on HN is that it's a radically different way of solving problems, something that is alien to software engineers who have put decades of time becoming experts at solving problems a certain way. So rather than invest more than 15 minutes learning about it, they say "Blockchain is just a distributed database and it's useless!" or attack it from a variety of minimum-thought / minimum-effort angles.
There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas. Decentralization, immutability, protocols monetized with market forces, fee-less payments that cannot be prevented, to name but a few interesting areas.
And of course there are numerous downsides. Difficulty of keeping keys safe, bugs that cost millions of dollars, issues with scaling.
But these are problems that people are solving right now. As a technologist, you should be looking at the possibilities! Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.
There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas. Decentralization, immutability, protocols monetized with market forces, fee-less payments that cannot be prevented, to name but a few interesting areas.
And of course there are numerous downsides. Difficulty of keeping keys safe, bugs that cost millions of dollars, issues with scaling.
But these are problems that people are solving right now. As a technologist, you should be looking at the possibilities! Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.