There has been quite a lot of FUD for Ethereum going around these days, whether it be because of the bear market, competitors, or scaling issues.

Ethereum has been also been having a lot of problems recently:

Image from https://ethgasstation.info/

The blocks are completely full, meaning that if any more transactions are created, the transaction time will increase exponentially.

So the question is: is Ethereum dying?

Smart contracts were originally built to be contracts (and allow token and DAO creation). Ethereum is based around that ideology, with its Turing-complete language allowing for any type of contract imaginable to be written.

But currently many people want to use Ethereum for games and DApps. Ethereum just doesn't have the capacity to be able to handle that many transactions, and it also was not intended to be used with DApps.

Smart contracts need to be versatile and you need to be able to have many of them on the same blockchain, so that they can easily communicate with each other. But DApps don't need to be as versatile and you don't need them to communicate with each other as much because they are standalone apps.

Plus, with innovations in blockchain capacity such as Steem, Ethereum could be designed to be a lot more efficient.

What if instead of Ethereum all being on one blockchain, there were multiple sidechains for every DApp, each attached to the mainchain? This would work perfect for DApps, allowing for highly specialized sidechains and keeping the stress off of the mainnet.

Loom Network is doing something similar to this, and they have gone quite far with it, though I'm not sure how decentralized their solution is. But if this solution becomes the standard for DApps on Ethereum, the Ethereum mainnet will no longer require Turing-completeness (the ability to write any type of smart contract), and so will be at a severe disadvantage because it is designed for that.

As is the case with Bitcoin, if Ethereum were replaced by a slightly different project, possibly using some of Loom Network's ideas, it would be much more efficient and relevant going forward. Yet Bitcoin remains the top cryptocurrency, and I think Ethereum will hold its place for a long time as well.

What are your thoughts on Ethereum scaling?

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@magic8ball says that Ethereum will die before 2019!