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The author seems to gloss over the immense scaling issues Ethereum is facing. Furthermore, his dismissal of Bitcoin makes it clear he’s naive on its roadmap.
by freejulian 9y ago
The author seems to gloss over the immense scaling issues Ethereum is facing. Furthermore, his dismissal of Bitcoin makes it clear he’s naive on its roadmap.
First, Bitcoin has smart contracts. Not providing a Turing complete scripting language was an intentional choice to improve security and scalability.
Second, Bitcoin offers Ethereum compatible smart contracts in the form of a layer 2 solution — rootstock. What happens if you want to have a “world computer” with GPU support? That’s not something Ethereum can add without greatly impacting decentralization (for a coin which is already hugely centralized). With Bitcoin, you can define a new second layer network to add that functionality.
Third, he brings up Ethereum’s confirmation times as if changing a constant is beyond Bitcoin’s reach. Bitcoin chose their parameters (1mb blocks, 10min block times) to optimize decentralization. This is a feature. Ethereum doesn’t care for decentralization to the same degree. If Ethereum had the same level of decentraliation as Bitcoin did, they wouldn’t have been able to invoke their VIP function.
Second layer solutions are the technologies which have the full backing of the Bitcoin community. Sure, Ethereum could maybe add second layer solutions as well, but they aren’t fully embraced by the community. Ethereum wants everything and the kitchen sink to be on layer 1. With Bitcoin, layer 2 solutions are the solutions preferred and embraced by the community.
Ethereum is already imploding under its own weight. Syncing a full node, today, requires a very beefy PC with an SSD. Bitcoin can sync with a raspberry pi.
- mhluongo 9y agoRecovering Bitcoin maximalist here. Recall Ethereum has second layer solutions as well.
- freejulian 9y agoI never denied that. However, second layer solutions are an afterthought in the Ethereum community. The Bitcoin community has been very vocal about solutions such as rootstock and Lightning Network being the preferred methods of scaling Bitcoin and adding new functionality.
- skilesare 9y agoI don't think you're up to speed. Ethereum's 'gpu support' on a second layer is called truebit and is supported by the end. It is well into development. Further, ethereum's lightning already has a minimum viable plasma implementation (one of the lightning founders is leading the project)