>>What's interesting about this ruling with respect to Ethereum is that one of the main reasons Ethereum has done so well is because of the development team. If

>>What's interesting about this ruling with respect to Ethereum is that one of the main reasons Ethereum has done so well is because of the development team. If they were terrible, Ethereum investors could have lost all of their money, but instead the developers have done a wonderful job and that has resulted in substantial profits for those holding ether. It is certainly one of the main reasons, but it's not clear it's the majority of the reason. The community around Ethereum was very large from the very start. Much of the value generated has been as a result of independent teams creating DApps and various utilities (e.g. blockchain explorers like Ethercan, browser extensions like MetaMask, web-based wallets/DApp-browsers like myetherwallet.com), and unpaid volunteers contributing to its EIP process. The token sale smart contract template that set off the token sale boom was created by one of the early independent projects, I believe Digix.