As a miner, I though Ethereum would be an excellent alternative to bitcoin when it first started gaining popularity. The DAO technology is intriguing, but for me, i always thought that it was just a fun coin to mine with my AMD Fury cards.

Things turned sour when I had lost a significant amount of coins due to a bug in the wallet. The wallet would generate a random address when an ETH transfer was initiated. Many individuals who followed the guides on the Ethereum Website collectively lost, hundred of thousands of ETH to unowned wallets. Our only option would be to "Ask the wallet owner nicely, WHEN the wallet becomes activated."

My disappointment mainly comes from the the developers and how it forces the community against itself. Individuals seemed to rejoice in the fact that I had lost coins. To some degree, i understand this. my lost coins would ultimately increase their coin value (at the time, I was selling, ETH was a little over $14. It's never hit that high again.) However, this was described as a bug by developers in pretty much every case it was brought up by the community. (i'm going to be a little bit lazy right now and not site every instance i've come across in the last 5 months. I'm sure this part will get chewed up by some keyboard warrior.) There was no contrary information to how to send ETH. Ultimately, it was not a reliable form of exchanging funds. Instead of generating an error, the money literally goes into the Ether.

I'm not entirely sure what happened recently with ETH and ETC because, frankly, i just haven't been that interested. The problem once again seems to stems from development and then forces the community against itself. I can see the unique aspects of ETH and how they can help the cryptocurrency community, but ETH and ETC are NOT user friendly coins. Their software and technology has never been completely understood by the public. It's a strong cryptocurrency because of it's market cap, but i am afraid that it this money is a transfer of funds rather than new people gaining interest in a new cryptocurrency. ETH was designed to replace Bitcoin, but it never will. There's still not a wallet and miner that consistently works today, and with the hardfork, I'm still not sure what to expect.

Many people might be thinking, "Hey, this asshole just lost his money and now he's sour! Just shut the Fuck up!" It was it a little over $300 of the equivalent of pokemon cards that I mined. I'm good. I've never spent a cent of any other currency on ETH.

I do not mean this as some sort of brag either. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that made out like bandits and had nothing to worry. My worry is just that this mentality doesn't offer a future for an expanding community. Not acknowledging significant bugs and loss of funds during the infancy of the coin can be a huge turn off for people, obviously including myself.

Sadly, this will not change. I'm eagerly waiting the next crypto boom.