Can Ethereum Scale?
Ethereum, with a price close to $800 now, is worth over $75 billion. But can it scale to meet the growing demand?
Recently we had Cryptokitties clogging up the network. Those Cryptokitties were accounting for over 15% of all transactions on the network and the average transaction spiked to over $1.
And then Kik announced it was moving its KIN token from Ethereum to Stellar because Ethereum was unable to scale to meet the needs of KIN.
Ethereum knows full well it needs to scale and it’s a top priority of its founder Vitalik Buterin. He spoke about it recently at the Beyond Block Taipei Conference in Taiwan.
The scaling solutions being proposed now include sharding, the Raiden network, and Plasma. But they all hinge on Ethereum going to proof of stake. While that’s supposed to be part of the Serenity upgrade, Vitalik did say at DevCon3 that it could happen during the next hard fark, which is the second half of Metropolis called Constantinople.
There’s actually a couple different versions of Casper being worked on. Vitalik’s is called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget. His version is an overlay on top of the Ethereum network so it’s technically a hybrid model.
Then there’s Casper Correct by Construction from Vlad Zamfir. It starts as a partial protocol and uses input from a safety oracle for secure protocol architecture.
The final implementation may end up taking ideas from both. Once Ethereum goes proof of stake then it can move onto sharding, Raiden and Plasma.
Sharding makes it so that nodes and transactions can be broken down into smaller groups. Every node on the network won’t have to validate every transaction and that will increase transaction capacity.
Raiden is an offchain solution that uses state channels. It basically takes transactions off the network and only validates on Ethereum when needed. The best analogy I’ve hear is that it’s like a bar tab. The tab is like Raiden and validating on the Etherum chain is like squaring away the bar tab.
Plasma is the creation of Joseph Poon and uses sidechains. The benefit is that it gets rid of unnecessary data in the root chain and will only broadcast completed transactions to the Ethereum network. It will likely be used in conjunction with sharding to make the network more secure.
No one knows for sure if Ethereum can scale but I wouldn’t bet against them. There’s a lot of people vested in Ethereum scaling and they have a lot of support with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
Based on the chart below it looks like they done a pretty good job so far.
What about you?
Do you think Ethereum can scale?
EOS will take a lot of coins from the Ethereum network. Mark my words.
You may well be right. I like EOS and own that too.
Even if EOS does take a lot of ETH coins it will still boost ETH overall since its based off of the same tech. Notoriety for EOS means notoriety for ETH (I also hold some EOS because I like the technology).
Ethereum is nothing compared to bitcoins scalability issues, the fees and time is insane. Long live Litecoin!
BTC 100% uptime w no hacks... securest network in the world... that's valuable even if it doesn't scale.
It's not valuable if it takes 6 hours to make a transaction with $13 fees. The network won't get hacked, but wallets and services do all the time.
Depends on how much your moving. $13 on $100 sucks, on $1m, not so bad.
True, but as a smaller investor it really sucks
Agreed... maybe we can make LTC a spending coin and BTC a savings coin.
That seems to be the way its going :)
Of course Ethereum can scale - it's just a matter of time. Cryptos are in the baby state, like internet in early 90s and those "other" cryptos got nothing on Ether, so it's just the time to relax and to open up Solidity textbooks and learn how to code, cause this is long-term.
Stellar has a great potential, but does it have this kind of support? Stellar devs are the unicorns. Ether devs are in plenty. Any games on the Stellar?
EOS and Bitshare got even more potential, but we got dev shortage around. I'm not saying about building distributed computer around something else of Ethereum.
Complete POS is a perspective of a year, but scalability remains one of the main ETH network issues! Until then:
LEARN SOLIDITY!!! LEARN SOLIDITY!!! LEARN SOLIDITY!!!
Great reply, thanks!
Learn Solidity likely the best advice on Steem!
Wow Nice Post.Great Job...... Well done. Thanks for the post.
Thanks!
I hope they get to it quick. There’s a lot of competition out there
EOS and ADA should be coming in 2018... time will tell.
i think ETH will ride as same BTC does. Supporting all other Crypto based on the POW and comes with POS. Sure it have lots of potential in 2018. Im on ICO , TIO trade token. Cheers
Cheers!
thanks for sharing the experience you had when first starting out. i will keep that in mind for any future comments i might be making. thanks for preventing new steemians from making those mistakes :) by the way i like what your doing here on steem, you keep it real, i can appreciate that for sure :)
thanks for sharing your experience :) ..
Appreciate the kind comments... Cheers!
etherum has alot of potential
At present out of 100 coins, 43 coins out of top 100 coinmarket depend on Ethereum. It is necessary for it to survive for the greater good.
Great point
I've been in crypto for a while, and I just dislike ERC20 tokens, the wallets suck and they just aren't as good as NEM currency's.
We can classify cryptocurrencies in 2 categories.
1st: Ethereum, Neo, Cardano and Nem.
2nd: Coins that are going to be dependent of them.
This means the 1st category is already a winner.
That's a great point of eth @g-dubs