That was very informative, thanks! I was having the same impression about Ethereum, that the ecosystem was becoming wider and ever more complex, but still not very practical to actually use.
How does Stellar compare to EOS? AFAIK EOS uses the same approach of federation / trusted nodes, and is also a platform for smart contracts, so it would be interesting to see a comparison.
I haven't got much experience with EOS. My feeling is that they are a bit newer to the scene than stellar in terms of adoption/traction. They only launched this summer and stellar has been gaining traction since late last year so they are a bit ahead on that front. Regardless of what you pick, you are taking a leap of faith in long term viability/stability of what you pick.
We went for stellar because we saw some traction there, kind of liked the notion of being in an ecosystem with a bit more serious players, and we liked what it did functionally.
I tend to look at developer traction: people converting money into code as a good signal that smart people are deciding to give it a shot. Logically, since it has been only about 3 months since they launched, there cannot be a lot happening yet in terms of companies launching products based on EOS, running EOS related infrastructure, etc. I did not look at Stellar for the first half of this year for the same reason. That changed when I started hearing about people using stellar or switching to it from Ethereum around the same time I started having serious doubts about being able to run our product on top of Ethereum any time soon. I wanted to understand why stellar was suddenly a thing and found that there was a pretty mature ecosystem of companies and developers using it already. I'm not getting that kind of vibe with EOS yet.
In any case, a lot of blockchain related trading is speculative and most of that is not based on technical merit but the investors irrational perception on the chance of exchange rates going up or down. Speculators make lousy CTOs, so I tend to ignore them for technical decision making.
So, EOS doing brisk trading beause ETH holders are panicking and acting like lemmings, or because Vitalik farted in a particularly interesting way, or whatever madness of the day drives the market does not constitute meaningful developer traction in my view. It just means EOS core development is likely well funded for the next few years. Good for them.
So are you considering developer traction to be platform age and what people you know are working with?
I'm not trying to be argumentative. I personally like Stellar over EOS as well, but I haven't seen the same developer traction advantage that you're seeing. At least on Stack Exchange, EOS is more active despite being half the age.
