I'm in to prediction markets, but both Augur and Gnosis look like vaporware. Almost no volume on Augur and many poorly defined events to wager on (cost of having user generated content). Gnosis just looks like a fancy landing page and attempt to fundraise via ICO.

I have long-term hopes that decentralized currencies let us build some interesting products, but there's massive volatility against fiat when holding crypto, which makes it hard most people to want to use these auxiliary services

It'd definitely not computational efficiency. Vitalik has repeatedly pointed out that the total computation available on this network of thousands of computers is less than that of a first-generation smartphone.

But it doesn't say "computational efficiency." It's talking about efficiency of the industry, which is a completely different thing.

As a developer, I have various ideas for startups that would handle money. The easiest way to implement them is to build on Ethereum.