Ethereum's main selling point is it lets you issue illegal unregistered securities. => Well that is the whole point of being decentralized. Anyone can do anything allowed by EVM.
Also the lead developer is some kid who believes very much in moving fast and breaking things. This philosophy may work for a social network site but not for other people's money.
=> Well they have improved significantly. There are 3 implementations - one each in cpp, go and py. There are multiple miner implementation. It is significantly more mature and many people involved. See https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum for example.
'terrible bugs'? there was one terrible bug a long time ago
Additionally the size of its blockchain has already passed Bitcoin. It's file size is growing so fast and will pose a serious technical problem. => Storage is not a problem. We get TB size drives now. Most people use online wallets. There are various pruning measures which reduce the size significantly. There are many proposals to handle scaling if it were to become bottleneck.
Ethereum's main selling point is it lets you issue illegal unregistered securities. Why would a real company want to associate with that?
Also the lead developer is some kid who believes very much in moving fast and breaking things. This philosophy may work for a social network site but not for other people's money.
How many terrible bugs have been discovered in Ethereums short history? Too many. Additionally the size of its blockchain has already passed Bitcoin. It's file size is growing so fast and will pose a serious technical problem.
Proponents of Ethereum ignore the fact that Ethereum fails to address any of the most significant problems in Bitcoin. Bitcoin's major advantage is decentralization, and it's about the only thing that Bitcoin does better than anything else. Bitcoin is an extremely expensive way to build a financial system, and there's no reason to go through the trouble unless you are utilizing the decentralization.
Bitcoin's major problems are scale, miner centralization, and developer centralization. Ethereum is worse than Bitcoin in all three respects. Transactions on Ethereum are heavier, develoepment is very heavily controlled by the Ethereum foundation and by Consensys, and the block algorithm in Ethereum more strongly favors larger miners as compared to Bitcoin (which already favors bigger miners).
Further, the Ethereum develoepment team is under qualified. There have been several ametuer mistakes, including allowing negative balance, leaking private keys, and putting consensus at risk by advocating that different users should be running different consensus codebases. Most of the highly capable developers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem avoid Ethereum because it's not been constructed well, nor does it's design suggest strong resistance to adversarial environments.
Bitcoin did go through similar growing pains. Bitcoin did have many ametuer mistakes when getting started. But those have all been fixed, and there is a positively enormous amount of competent mindshare powering Bitcoin, and the thoroughness of decentralization in Bitcoin is unmatched by any altcoin, including Ethereum.
Ethereum has offered a lot of cool tricks with its turing complete scripting language, but is standing on a house of cards. It scales less well than Bitcoin, it's design more heavily promotes centralization, it's development is more ametuer, and the potential applications offered by its fancy scripting language are not actually that much stronger than what you can do with Bitcoin. The showcase applications such as Augur and Slockit suffer from weak cryptographic fundamentals and under-qualified developers even worse than Ethereum does.
I work full time on Ethereum development, and I don't have any kind of maximalistic opinions about decentralization, the evils of banks, or whatever.
It's just a very interesting technology with a really great momentum. But everything is flawed under the sun. There is no perfect technology that can completely decentralize authority with no resource demands.
Or maybe Satoshi's reincarnation will come and deliver a new mind-blowing concept that makes blockchains completely deprecated. That would be pretty cool. But until then, you know.
By the way, Ethereum's roadmap includes switching away from proof of work towards proof of stake, which doesn't waste electricity. This model has been used successfully, for example by Bitshares.
It also includes a light client protocol so mobile nodes don't need much disk space or processing power.
To be fair, Ethereum looks like a scheme of some kind (not Ponzi necessarily). The vast majority of the ether is controlled by a single company, which is literally just selling it for money.
... I get the other advantages to Ethereum, but it's not Bitcoin where there is actually a distributed number of people managing it.
Ethereum's selling point has always been its advanced features making more complex applications possible, and its Achilles heel has always been that extra complexity is probably not actually a desirable feature here. Think about the endless problems with buggy smart contracts, even for things as simple as multi-signature wallets which Bitcoin can do in a straightforward way.
Ethereum is a scam. Its author received millions of USD in funding, and after a year the only things he has delivered are blog posts that are mostly just PoS propaganda. PoS is a flawed concept, but its proponents dismiss all criticism by saying "we added all these patches and unnecessary complexity and fixed it! Look, no one has hacked it yet!".
Well, Ethereum features a turing complete scripting system and a ton of tools to make use of it, but it doesn't solve Bitcoins most serious problems, and is in fact worse off for most of them.
Miner centralization is a huge problem for Bitcoin. The fact that 11 entities control >90% of the hashrate, and that 2 control >50% of the hashrate is a huge issue for Bitcoin. The pressures we understand to be causing this are more significant in Ethereum at scale. Ethereum is not even at scale and already is doing worse than Bitcoin in terms of hashrate centralization.
Ethereum also has significant scalability problems. Bitcoin struggles to hit 4 transactions per second, and every transaction on Ethereum is substantially heavier per transaction than Bitcoin. That scripting system is not free, and already Ethereum is 20% as heavy as Bitcoin despite being 1/5th the age and having 1/10th the usage. And that's before the fancy apps like Augur have gained traction. Augur is significantly heavier than anything running today, and it's definitely not the heaviest app that people have gotten excited about.
And the development is almost fully centralized. The current state of Ethereum is that what Vitalik says is what will happen, and while there are people who could shut him down... they won't. At least not in the near future. Ethereum has already performed hardforks and has several more planned.
I agree that Bitcoin has taught us a lot of lessons that have paved the way for its obsolecense. But I don't think that Ethereum learned them, and I think that Ethereum will seem a lot less attractive after it has to deal with demand matching what is currently demanded from Bitcoin.
I would almost go as far as saying they are orthogonal products. Bitcoin, above all else, prioritizes decentralization. Ethereum prioritizes features and flexibility, at the cost of scalability and centralization.
Well, Ethereum features a turing complete scripting system and a ton of tools to make use of it, but it doesn't solve Bitcoins most serious problems, and is in fact worse off for most of them.
Miner centralization is a huge problem for Bitcoin. The fact that 11 entities control >90% of the hashrate, and that 2 control >50% of the hashrate is a huge issue for Bitcoin. The pressures we understand to be causing this are more significant in Ethereum at scale. Ethereum is not even at scale and already is doing worse than Bitcoin in terms of hashrate centralization.
Ethereum also has significant scalability problems. Bitcoin struggles to hit 4 transactions per second, and every transaction on Ethereum is substantially heavier per transaction than Bitcoin. That scripting system is not free, and already Ethereum is 20% as heavy as Bitcoin despite being 1/5th the age and having 1/10th the usage. And that's before the fancy apps like Augur have gained traction. Augur is significantly heavier than anything running today, and it's definitely not the heaviest app that people have gotten excited about.
And the development is almost fully centralized. The current state of Ethereum is that what Vitalik says is what will happen, and while there are people who could shut him down... they won't. At least not in the near future. Ethereum has already performed hardforks and has several more planned.
I agree that Bitcoin has taught us a lot of lessons that have paved the way for its obsolecense. But I don't think that Ethereum learned them, and I think that Ethereum will seem a lot less attractive after it has to deal with demand matching what is currently demanded from Bitcoin.
I would almost go as far as saying they are orthogonal products. Bitcoin, above all else, prioritizes decentralization. Ethereum prioritizes features and flexibility, at the cost of scalability and centralization.
Agreed. Ethereum seems like a pretty cool iteration on what bitcoin was able to achieve, but just like with bitcoin we're left with a gigantic deficit when we subtract real-world-applicability from the incredible levels of hype.
Running arbitrary decentralized code on a shared public ledger... I have to admit that this is pretty damn cool and I feel confident that there will be some useful projects or developments that will eventually emerge from this technology, but at the moment there aren't any obvious problems that this technology solves better than the existing centralized solutions. I saw a lot of talk about "autonomous corporations" in previous Ethereum threads, but it seems pretty clear that these entities are not capable of much autonomy beyond shuffling around eth between other Ethereum wallets/entities.
Ethereum as a platform has made many bad design decisions. It's not really suitable for a lot of things; including, well, things it was marketed for (unstoppable, uncensorable, scalable applications).
Can someone convince me that this article isn’t hype? What’s so good about ethereum that it can be compared to the internet? Is the shift from centralized to decentralized going to bring me tangible benefits?
Rebuttal: Ethereum has far worse properties as a store of value.
-More complex codebase, which makes assessing vulnerabilities more difficult, and security more difficult.
-Ethereum broke trust and "code is law" when self-interested parties were able to rewrite history. Transaction malleability is a terrible property for a "store of value." It leaves the currency open to government interference, manipulation, etc.
-Ethereum has an inflationary schedule. Given a choice between holding an inflating or deflating asset, it seems straightforward which to choose.
-The utility of a given currency is dependent on the number of holders (like Metcalf's law)
-The hashrate and mining power securing bitcoin's network is far greater.
It's a shame people don't understand that there's multiple aspects. Ethereum is much more decentralized, secure, have more dev mindshare, better community, tooling, and ecosystem. Let's also not forget that Algorand is powered by and centralized around team-run nodes.
Well Ethereum has enabled a sea of scams and a carnage of Web3 hype, ICOs, NFTs, Tokens, DAOs, DeFi rug-pulls and everything else using so-called 'smart contracts' (that are not what they say they are) that all ruined it from the very start.
90% of the creations on Ethereum are useless and there is little there that is worth looking at. From the start, it was not designed to scale at all hence its sluggish throughput and high fees. Now it is going to become even more centralized when it moves to PoS.
Might as well drop the decentralization claims then.
Also the lead developer is some kid who believes very much in moving fast and breaking things. This philosophy may work for a social network site but not for other people's money. => Well they have improved significantly. There are 3 implementations - one each in cpp, go and py. There are multiple miner implementation. It is significantly more mature and many people involved. See https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum for example.
'terrible bugs'? there was one terrible bug a long time ago
Additionally the size of its blockchain has already passed Bitcoin. It's file size is growing so fast and will pose a serious technical problem. => Storage is not a problem. We get TB size drives now. Most people use online wallets. There are various pruning measures which reduce the size significantly. There are many proposals to handle scaling if it were to become bottleneck.
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