
Scaling: Ethereum’s make or break challenge [video] - dsr12
https://techcrunch.com/video/in-conversation-with-vitalik-buterin-justin-drake-and-karl-floersch-ethereum-foundation/
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Egidius
Great to see these young guys attempting to tackle these huge problems out of
their believe that they can make "the world a better place". Not sure DLT will
live up to its promise, but these guys truly believe the world is better off
with trustless systems. And I cannot blame them, intermediaries, wether it be
Google or Facebook, standing in between the user and the content creators, or
banks, standing between creditors and debitors, haven't got the best
reputation. A lot has gone wrong overthere, but I'm afraid DLT will bring
entirely new problems to the table that we cannot forsee at this point. So I'm
curious what the future will bring.

~~~
pepesza
Offtopic. DLT is basically a marketing fraud. Both "permissioned" and
"permissionless" DLT are packed into one term. Problem is - they are vastly
different. Permissioned DLT is not interesting at all from technical and
social point of view. We knew how to do them for a long long time. Openness,
permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin. "Permissioned
blockchains" are just repackaged tech with lot of marketing sauce.

~~~
robertk
Why is it a marketing fraud? As a mathematician, I can see the solution of a
fully public permissionless DLT as long as (1) there is a PKI — not too hard
to accomplish, (2) the generation time of ZKPs and SMPC can cross below the
network latency threshold — to which I can say that I know researchers in the
space and even a simple run rate calculations indicates this will be feasible
soon...

I wonder whether your stance would update if you were to read Foundations of
Cryptography by Oded Goldreich?

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zby
I think there is some typo in your comment - because otherwise - do you mean
that permissionless DLT was obvious (as in anyone who read Foundations of
Cryptography by Oded Goldreich could create it) and bitcoin was not a
breakthrough?

~~~
robertk
Nope. I simply mean that it is not a fraud, and can provide a legitimate
service in the form of a new abstraction implemented in software.

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cslarson
Ethereum is novel and ambitious technology. In my mind, and I think in the
minds of most in the community, scaling had always been the big, important
challenge on the horizon - but it builds confidence to see just how far the
devs (and community) have brought it till now. It's like everything is in
place for that final push over the mountain.

~~~
baby
Another problem is the size of the blockchain

~~~
pas
[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-
roadmap](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-roadmap)

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SwingingShips
Ethereum is talking about 2020 as its target for scaling upgrades. There are
other projects that haven't launched yet that probably have an advantage over
them, as so long as it can integrate with Ethereum rather than claim it can
totally supplant it.

There are projects like Cardano and Zilliqa, but then there are some like Orbs
that are using blockchain virtualization claiming it can work in tandem with
Ethereum.

I assume Ethereum will implement some of its solutions before that 2020 date,
but they will probably need to rely on more partnerships to do it.

~~~
StavrosK
Cardano has stalled for so long that I stopped waiting. I hear great things
about EOS from people I trust, though, I need to look into that.

~~~
shinryuu
The launch of EOS has not been very well received at all. Lots of mistakes and
the governance is a mess.

~~~
mihaifm
Indeed, EOS relies on a constitution with human interpretable rules [1]. Not
sure how that fits into the crypto sphere, where governance should be done be
algorithms and code.

[1]
[https://github.com/EOSIO/eos/blob/5068823fbc8a8f7d29733309c0...](https://github.com/EOSIO/eos/blob/5068823fbc8a8f7d29733309c0496438c339f7dc/constitution.md)

~~~
rhyzom
and it's also supposed to be hashed in each "legitimate" transaction. while
network resources are so scarce as to stir rampant speculation. idk - the only
thing about EOS that i have noticed is how overtly it screams of greed. the
people that jumped in on that bandwagon did so for no other reason but hoping
it would make them rich (cos Daniel Larimer said "you can run Ethereum on a
single EOS smart contract", lol).

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foobarbecue
Man the TC website sure is terrible to use on mobile. Everything keeps flying
around, there's a white banner in the way of the video with an X that appears
to behave as a back button when you click it??

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nsxwolf
Is scaling the real reason there are no useful applications?

~~~
guiomie
Fungible and Unfungible ERC token are used by a lot of people.

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obituary_latte
Off topic but I am so entirely sick of amp/mobile pages like this that just
fail so hard at delivering the advertised content. Multiple reloads, pop-up
conditionals, auto-scrolling...yuck. Clicking the link briefly flashes the
title of the topic followed by a blank square with a “close” X then flashes a
couple of times and I land on a listing of videos none of which are the op
topic. I’m not using ie4 or something - this is the current version of Safari
on the latest mobile device from one of the biggest phone manufacturers that
exist! All on a “tech” website.

First world problems I know but goddamn is it frustrating.

Sorry for rant.

~~~
plasma
I hate AMP as well.

They’re less maintained, feature less pages (see reddit), and they have
obnoxious script that prevents hold-tap from allowing “open in new window”
from working.

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AltVanilla
I think for a cryptocoin to be useful in the real world, scaling and quick
transaction times has to be a priority from the start of the design. Its not
something you can fix, as an afterthought.

That's why I like xrp. Low transaction times, and it scales well. It is
permissioned in the sense that every validator-node needs to keep a list of
all the other validator nodes it trusts. Which means validators without a
reputatable company behind them, might find it hard to become trusted by
anyone else. Thats a price worth paying for scalability, in my opinion.

~~~
mkirklions
XRP is a currency, ETH is supposed to be a smart contract platform.

I believe in cryptoCURRENCY, as people do pay extra for validation in
currency. XRP and Monero are both designed for payments.

ETH, is being used as a currency, but this is a mistake. ETH is designed to
run apps, and is doing that poorly.

~~~
pietjepuk88
I would say that Ethereum is the smart contract platform, but that Ether (ETH)
is a currency. That's based both on how it's used, and on how the protocol
separates normal transactions from smart contract interactions (including
token transfers).

I like the fungibility that Monero offers (making it similar to cash), but I
just can't wrap my head around Ripple. I always associated cryptocurrencies
with decentralized and trustless (at least at its core), neither of which seem
to apply to Ripple. I would have preferred a "trusted party" system on top of
a decentralized one to get higher transaction speeds, e.g. when the
stakes/amounts are low.

~~~
AltVanilla
Ripple is decentralized, in the technical sense.

If you are a programmer you will appreciate this. It explains the consensus
protocol in detail. I found it fascinating:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4jq4frE5v4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4jq4frE5v4)

