[Beyondbits & EOSBits Inside] "Eth Killed by Kittens?" DPOS Meme Challenge (250 $BD in Rewards!) my entry

Here is my entry for @officialfuzzy DPOS Meme Challenge and a bit info about CryptoKitties.

Dapp forces Ethereum to its knees!

In the beginning was the Genesis Kitten and the other generation zero kitten. They were created by the creators of CryptoKitties. For this they use a "genetic algorithm": There are certain genes for properties of the kittens - colors, eyebrows, facial expressions - and these are initially given to the kittens at random. Each kitten is a unique object on the blockchain, a "non-fungible token" according to the ERC721 standard.

Now if you have two kittens, they can breed. Then the parents' genes are taken, mixed with a random factor, and out comes a kitten with unique features. After the mating act the two kittens need a certain recovery time, which increases with each act. They consume their fertility.

To use CryptoKitties you need the browser app Metamask. This was for a long time only for Chrome, but is also available for Firefox recently. With Metamask, you can buy and sell kitties, bid on a mating market, or, if you have two, have them propagated in-house. Each action takes place entirely on the Blockchain as a function of the CryptoKitties Smart Contract.

In the game, the website and Metamask, ie HTML and Smart Contract, flow together relatively smoothly. Maybe for the first time ever. CryptoKitties sets new standards in the user experience of Dapps (decentralized apps), which is probably the most important reason why the kitten market has such a huge success.

More than one million CryptoKitties were sold in the marketplace within a few days. The creators of the app, which produce the kittens of generation 0, should earn a golden nose. The still virgin, highly potent new kittens are going away for multi-digit amounts of ether, prices over $ 1,000 are not uncommon. The Genesis Kitten has recently changed hands for over $ 100,000.

If you want to stay under $ 100 with your budget, you can buy kitten of the higher generation, some of which are already a bit worn and hours, if not days or weeks need to recover from a sexual act.

For the Ethereum Blockchain, the unexpected success of CryptoKitties became a stress test. In recent days, the number of daily transactions has increased to around 700,000. About 25 percent of them go alone on the account of Kitten-Dapp.

One may celebrate this, as Ethereum is apparently used. But the high volume also has its downsides. The network works at the gas limit, which means that transactions take longer to arrive and applications become more expensive as gas prices have risen. Especially for those who want to breed their kittens, the costs of growing cats increase. Because the "birthing" feature is extremely complicated, its price has risen in the last few days from 0.002 to 0.015 ethers. That's more than 4, sometimes even more than $ 10.

But even the requirements for a node are increasing faster and faster. A fully synchronized Geth Node now requires more than 400 gigabytes of hard disk space and often lays more than 3 gigabytes a day. If this continues, it will not take another year for the full node to need a terabyte. Even the lightnode of Geth needs more than 30 gigabytes. I myself use Parity, which synchronizes faster and consumes less space, but stutters my (admittedly bad) Internet connection when syncing, or shoots it all down because it loads and downloads so much data.

Minimal nodes like Metamask are a very good solution for the user. They manage to dock to other nodes with barely noticeable local resource requirements. While the Metamask user interface appears puristic, under the hood it is able to run almost any smart contract.

However, the CryptoKitties wave has also pushed Metamask to its limits. For example, there are occasional problems with adjusting gas prices that have recently risen and, very often, transactions were not feasible. Many users saw the error message that the credit is insufficient ("Insufficient funds ..."), although apparently enough ethers are in the wallet. Probably the fault was that the nodes that Metamask uses to contact the network are overloaded. It helped me set up Metamask on my local parity node, but it's not meant to be the point.

So it's all a bit experimental. CryptoKitties shows that there is a market for non-fungible blockchain tokens and that it is possible to combine Ethereum Smart Contracts and a web interface in a sensible, attractive user experience. But the game also shows that even a single successful app can bring Ethereum to its limits. The scalability issue we're discussing at Bitcoin hits Ethereum at double, triple, tenfold. For where Bitcoin is just a network for transactions, Ethereum claims to be a decentralized computer.

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@danyelk