I think ETH is being pulled down by association with BTC, in the minds of investors.<p>Bitcoin growth is being stifled by those who will do anything to prevent an increase of blocksize, up from 1MB. We could turn 4MB max blocksize on next week, but the core devs have delayed this simple change for 2.5 years.<p>When you have 20MB of transactions in the mempool waiting for the next 1MB block, its like 2000 people waiting for a single train carriage .. fees go up and transactions take too long to process. This sets up a low usage equilibrium - people wont use the system as a currency when it takes 3$ to send $300, eventually they give up and go back to paypal, banks or try an altcoin [ Ethereum, Litecoin ]<p>This change is not a deep complex engineering issue - you _could_ get 10x to 30x transaction volume and several years of rapid user growth on the same linear blockchain by increasing the blocksize on a fixed schedule, well before you hit real architectural scaling issues.<p>After endless debate we now have all out chaos and civil war in the community, with SegWit/LightningNetwork/blockstream battling against 'BigBlockers', rather than a clear upgrade roadmap all parties can live with.<p>Politics and greed - and the lack of a benevolent dictator in the core dev team who will make hard engineering decisions - seem to prevent us from having good things, just as Bitcoin is poised to go mainstream.
My random thoughts on the reason for the plunge:<p>1) Bitcoin August 1st uncertainty is leading to vast capital outflows from crypto in general.<p>2) Capital outflows are more significant due to so much dumb money coming in from people who just came in for a fast buck and are now scared.<p>Obviously nobody knows for sure, but fun to speculate. :)