Re: Is it just me?
It's not just you. I've been surprised by El Reg's lack of coverage (and I think they commentary in this article is far below their usual standard).
The Economist had a nice piece called "The great chain of being sure about things", but the ecosystem and its funding have expanded quite a bit since it was written.
You can think of ethereum as a global singleton virtual-machine-cum-ledger that styles itself as an "unstoppable and uncensorable" "world computer". Filtering the genuinely useful applications from the hopelessly idealistic ones the subject of much debate right now, but I can imagine that automatically and instantly executing "smart contracts", between parties that need not trust each other, could be a boon. And not just for the worlds under-/un-banked and/or those in countries without strong legal systems.
At he same time, the "unstoppable and uncensorable" styling will make it plain why mitigating today's theft might be controversial.
Some see ethereum's Turing complete execution environment as a security worry, but so far the biggest problems have been in the smart contract code written by third parties running inside ethereum's virtual machine (the JVM doesn't stop you writing buggy Java code).
The Ethereum Foundation has an extremely ambitious road map to scale the system by a few orders of magnitude, which would open up micropayments and far more complex applications than are currently viable. If they can pull that off -- and if those building applications can avoid further multi-million-dollar screw ups like the today's -- then ethereum could be genuinely world changing. But it's a massive if.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
