Ethereum's Next Upgrade Could Be the $29 Billion Blockchain's Biggest Test Yet

• Coindesk reports on the debate in the Ethereum camp ahead of October’s expected ‘Constantinople’ upgrade to Ethereum’s code.
• Ethereum’s developers are set to implement four Ethereum improvement proposals, including proposals that improve scalability. However, the proposals are raising concerns among Ethereum ‘stakeholders’, with miners concerned about a reduction in the compensation they receive for validating transactions.
• Miners are arguing that too great a reduction in their ‘reward’ will reduce the security of the Ethereum network, and potentially price some existing mining hardware (e.g. GPU-based miners) out of the Ethereum mining market.
• An added complication exists in the form of Ethereum’s ‘difficulty bomb’ (an adjustment scheme, put in place to incentivise the community to quickly adopt a new technology), which is predicted to activate sometime in 2019, and will start to steadily make Ethereum’s transactions less efficient to mine, unless the Constantinople upgrade is adopted.

Comments

• The Ethereum community has historically managed to avoid the internecine warfare that has plagued the Bitcoin community (see my post earlier this week about the pending split in the Bitcoin Cash community).
• What the current debate around the Constantinople upgrade illustrates is how different managing platform development is in the world of blockchain.
• In Ethereum’s case, it’s very public! The developer group receives proposals, a public debate among the community evolves, and popular upgrade proposals receive backing while others are denigrated. Interested parties take to social media and the blogosphere to express their opinions, and vested interests are called out.
• But what stands out to us is the clear existence of three ‘third parties’ in this world of supposed decentralisation which was meant to dis-intermediate all powerful third parties. Blockchain technology’s claim to remove trusted third parties does not bear up to scrutiny – there is always a new third party somewhere in the new eco-system.

In Ethereum’s case we have

1. the developer group,
2. the miners, and
3. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as influential ‘third parties’ who will most likely influence how the network develops

What do you think?

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