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Isn't that a temporary problem though? With ETH 2 launching probably by the end of the year?

latchkey 7y ago
ETH2 phase 0 _may_ come at the end of the year. It will be many more years before ETH2 is live and trusted with real funds... enough to either absorb ETH1 or switch over to it. Heck, it may not happen at all. Amazing how this group mindset around ETH2 works.
- cryptica 7y ago
  Agreed. I think most people don't realize how massive of a technical challenge it is to shard something as large and complex as the Ethereum blokchain without introducing critical security vulnerabilities. When you combine the complexity of the system, the constant need to try to maintain backwards compatibility and the sheer number of people involved in the project, you have every reason to be skeptical.
  - latchkey 7y ago
    I've also been following the progpow debate rather closely for the last 1.5 years. ProgPoW is supposed to be a simple PoW change to keep ETH1 asic resistant now that asics have been developed. This is a 2 year old codebase that has had a paid audit and tons of eyes on it. Just this week, someone discovered and announced an issue. While the fix is relatively trivial, the amazing thing is that it went unnoticed for so long. I can only imagine ETH2, which is a brand new codebase, whole new consensus model, using cutting edge research (zkSNARKS) and shaped like a rube goldberg machine, will be full of issues nobody has even dared to imagine. I couldn't imagine trusting billions of dollars of value to that literally over night.
cryptica 7y ago
They've been promising this for years. I've been working in the blockchain space for 2 years and I have experience working on scalable distributed systems as well so I'm skeptical of Ethereum's approach to sharding. Aside from major technical challenges that are specific to Ethereum, a major problem with sharding a blockchain in general is that it somewhat obscures the reality that each shard is in fact a separate blockchain with separate network participants and so it might as well have a separate unit of value and not be constrained to a single token. The ideal solution IMO (to really promote decentralization) is to have multiple independent blockchains and networks interlinked together via open source decentralized exchanges - This will mean that any token's value could be instantly determined relative to that of any other token in a trustless way by polling decentralized exchanges.
dylkil 7y ago
It is temporary. Any suggestion to the contrary usually comes from a BTC maximalist who fears his investment in a 'digital-gold' is in jeopardy from a network which is actually achieving useful things.

ETH2 phase 0 _may_ come at the end of the year. It will be many more years before ETH2 is live and trusted with real funds... enough to either absorb ETH1 or switch over to it. Heck, it may not happen at all. Amazing how this group mindset around ETH2 works.

cryptica 7y ago
Agreed. I think most people don't realize how massive of a technical challenge it is to shard something as large and complex as the Ethereum blokchain without introducing critical security vulnerabilities. When you combine the complexity of the system, the constant need to try to maintain backwards compatibility and the sheer number of people involved in the project, you have every reason to be skeptical.
- latchkey 7y ago
  I've also been following the progpow debate rather closely for the last 1.5 years. ProgPoW is supposed to be a simple PoW change to keep ETH1 asic resistant now that asics have been developed. This is a 2 year old codebase that has had a paid audit and tons of eyes on it. Just this week, someone discovered and announced an issue. While the fix is relatively trivial, the amazing thing is that it went unnoticed for so long. I can only imagine ETH2, which is a brand new codebase, whole new consensus model, using cutting edge research (zkSNARKS) and shaped like a rube goldberg machine, will be full of issues nobody has even dared to imagine. I couldn't imagine trusting billions of dollars of value to that literally over night.

cryptica 7y ago

They've been promising this for years. I've been working in the blockchain space for 2 years and I have experience working on scalable distributed systems as well so I'm skeptical of Ethereum's approach to sharding. Aside from major technical challenges that are specific to Ethereum, a major problem with sharding a blockchain in general is that it somewhat obscures the reality that each shard is in fact a separate blockchain with separate network participants and so it might as well have a separate unit of value and not be constrained to a single token. The ideal solution IMO (to really promote decentralization) is to have multiple independent blockchains and networks interlinked together via open source decentralized exchanges - This will mean that any token's value could be instantly determined relative to that of any other token in a trustless way by polling decentralized exchanges.

dylkil 7y ago

It is temporary. Any suggestion to the contrary usually comes from a BTC maximalist who fears his investment in a 'digital-gold' is in jeopardy from a network which is actually achieving useful things.