> Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Sure, plenty. First "coolness" and tec

> Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Sure, plenty. First "coolness" and technological advantage are not correlated with price. You can make it correlated by selling to idiots, it works. Secondly, Ethereum is the computational network and database. Ether is the toll to use that database. Market cap takes the last price someone paid to top up their Ether inventory, and multiplies it by all Ethers in existence. Okay [maybe] you know this, next: Third, you simply don't need that much Ether to write to the database. Ether is not a scarce resource. You can run extremely complex operations for extremely cheap. IDEX - one of the most sophisticated and popular decentralized stock-like exchange - was launched by the most sophisticated Ethereum developers and it only cost 0.026916422 Ether to deploy that and force all Ethereum nodes to process for all eternity. [1] (for pedants, yes other people transacting to that contract use additional Ether as gas). They could launch 5 whole startups with 1 Ether. Basically, if the most sophisticated power users who also feel like being entrepreneurs don't even need to own 1 single Ether to use the world computer, you don't ether. So when you can explain who the other 106 million Ethers are for, you can understand how much someone will pay for this easy to acquire and cheap resource of which more will always be issued. Only speculators and third party finance apps hoard Ether and even they don't need to, as there are better assets issued on the Ethereum network for speculation and finance apps. The final point is that Ether is only expensive and scarce when the transactions which use miniscule amounts of Ether skyrocket. But they can't skyrocket that much because the network can't handle that many transactions! D'oh! So it is almost all speculation fuel supporting the price. [1] - IDEX 1 deployment transaction - https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc7d1bea467b5242352c9c53e85c5283 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc...