I haven’t seen any conversation related to the money thesis in this thread, yet this is where the underlying value of BTC seems to resides (just ask the BTC community). The idea: a sufficiently hard (difficult to inflate) commodity asset can become a money by first becoming a Store of Value, then a Medium of Exchange, and finally a Unit of Account. This is the path taken by Silver, then later dominated by Gold. Gold itself has low utility value, but high monetary premium due to its history as a Store of Value. It is moated by strong network effects.
Monetary premium can quite literally be memed into existence.
Why does this matter?
If Ether does not become some form of money, it will not have a monetary premium. If no monetary premium, the security of the Ethereum network will be less than the security of a similar network whose underlying asset has monetary premium, thus Ethereum will not be most secure. If Ethereum is to continue hosting currencies (e.g. DAI) and high value financial assets (a decentralized world financial stack), it must be competitive as the most secure network.
Given this, it seems we should encourage Ether’s use as a money, both in protocol economics & monetary policy.