
Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap - jcobber
https://medium.com/@Cobinhood/vitalik-unveils-ethereum-2-0-roadmap-conference-notes-505270a48674
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stupidcar
It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit
from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead,
setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-
participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of
Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required
to move it forward. Because everybody and nobody can claim to be the heir to
Nakamoto's technical vision.

Clearly Ethereum has had more than its share of problems, but as things stand,
I feel it has a greater chance of becoming a truly disruptive technology than
Bitcoin, which seems to have become stuck in a technical quagmire.

~~~
nope96
> Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a
> Torvalds-esque figurehead

If Vitalik got hit by a bus tomorrow Ether price would drop 95%. A currency
does not need a leader who directs it. Also it should be very difficult to
make changes to a 150 Billion $ currency.

~~~
charlesdm
Ethereum is not a currency though. It's a decentralised platform to build apps
on, like the App Store. ETH is the oil that pays for the decentralised
processing resources used by said apps that are run on the platform.

A platform that isn't finished needs a leader, and I would say Ethereum needs
a leader a lot more than Bitcoin. If all development on Bitcoin would stop
tomorrow, it would still keep running and have a potential future as digital
gold. If all development on Ethereum would stop tomorrow, it would most likely
fail as a project. The value proposition is very different.

Also, since oil isn't very useful without something to use it in (a car,
plane, other use cases), it actually makes perfect sense (to me).

ETH could very well also become a functional currency once the supply gets
capped in a future hard fork. But for now, it's more oil than currency.

------
lhl
For those interested, the videos from the livestream are available here:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-
IkQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVmRAQeesq4TA3rdvbz-IkQ)

The presented material by Vitalik is largely similar to his Devcon 3
presentation. Most (all?) Devcon 3 videos were just posted today as well:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOfzGXD_C9YMYmnefmPH0g/playlists)

For those that don't like watching videos, here's the FAQ which summarizes
sharding: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

And here's the actual code for the sharding python poc:
[https://github.com/ethereum/sharding](https://github.com/ethereum/sharding)

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Nokinside
Protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent produce tangible value for the users. In all
fairness it would be nice to see them getting at least something in order of
$10 million for their nice effort.

These new ICO's are manufactured to give the company that develops them
hundreds of millions or even speculative billions in paper.

How long until people realize again that these products have near-zero
marginal cost?

Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and creating
cheaper alternative.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users: transferring money and
ability to create ICOs (just to name two). People value transferring money.
It's a challenging technological task, which the humanity has been trying to
solve for many years. It's a task that many people find useful. You don't mind
paying 3% to your credit card company, do you? Even if you do, evidently many
people around the world don't. Why is Ethereum (or another cryptocurrency) not
considered "tangible value"?

It wasn't clear if you were talking about actual Ethereum itself or any of the
ICOs that are based on it. If you were talking about ICOs, the answer is even
simpler: they are just like stocks. It's like you asking "why are people
giving all this money to that company?". It's because some of those companies
have a business, or a business idea and people want to support it. (There are
scams too, of course, but sometimes it's not easy to know which one is real
and which is a scam, and so people take chances.)

> Artificial scarcity can be circumvented by just copying Ethereum and
> creating cheaper alternative.

You're welcome to try, if you think it is so simple. Ethereum Classic-people
have tried, and they even had an actual legitimate reason (the DAO hack), not
just a vague "we want to create a cheaper alternative" motive. Look at the
price charts and see how well it went for them.

~~~
Nokinside
>Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users

Yes. I agree.

The potential capital efficiency for for these services is vastly greater than
credit cards. You are trying to undersell the potential in distributed
computing platform and smart contract technology if you defend the current
cost structure.

The promise of these technologies is to reduce cost of financial transactions
almost without limit.

Lets look into the future of efficient and revolutionary transaction and smart
contact technology.

If billion people do 10 transactions per day (alternatively 10 billion 1
transactions per day) with cost $0.01 per transaction, the cost of this
service would be only $10 million per day or 3.65 billion a year. Remove the
operating costs in competitive markets and the profit margins will be
extremely low.

The beauty of efficient established markets is that profits will be driven
down. Artificial scarcity created by different coin protocols is temporary
phenomenon. It dies when the hype dies.

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curiousgal
Interesting to see how Ethereum pops up whenever technical aspects are
revealed and how Bitcoin pops up whenever the price crosses some boundary.

~~~
alexmat
Just because you don't know why something is going on, doesn't mean it's
arbitrary.

In this case it's because of a path to mass adoption:
[http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-
high-95...](http://coinivore.com/2017/11/26/bitcoin-reaches-time-
high-9500-top-south-korea-bank-tests-bitcoin-wallet-vault/)

~~~
nwah1
Mass speculation

~~~
alexmat
That's like, your opinion, man.

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nope96
Any time I read about Ether I think about this -

"12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to
early contributors and developers..."

At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors,
how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy
on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some
"early contributors". Where's the list?

On their FAQ, under "Is the ether supply infinite?" there are two paragraphs
of goobly gook basically saying "we haven't decided yet" ("an area of active
research").

How can anyone take this currency seriously? What is so special that makes you
invest in this instead of Bitcoin?

~~~
lnsp
Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of
money since the transaction fees are really low compared to Bitcoin. When you
pay somebody using Bitcoin, you currently pay $5 to $8 as transaction fee and
it needs about 1 1/2 hours for the money to arrive. When you use Ether, you
only pay $0.25 (or even lower) as a fee and the system needs less than 20
seconds to confirm your transaction.

The Bitcoin model is simply unsustainable if the exchange price continues to
explode.

~~~
aquadrop
Bitcoin also worked ok before the number of transactions went high, is ether
protected from that kind of thing? If for example amount of ether transactions
go up 3 orders of magnitude?

And it would be nice to have even smaller fees on Ether and transaction time
less than a second, so it could be better than VISA/Mastercard.

~~~
charlesdm
Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin, very
cheaply, and near instantaneous (e.g. little to no transaction backlog).

The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be
reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to
multiple forks of the network.

~~~
nope96
> Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin

Take a look at the charts here,
[http://bc.daniel.net.nz](http://bc.daniel.net.nz)

It's not "free" to process more transactions. At some point you are no longer
p2p and decentralized when the requirements to run a node go up so high, so
quickly .

~~~
charlesdm
I'm not sure on the exact details, but I believe those are full nodes. I
believe there are also light nodes that are only a few gb in size when you
sync them (e.g. a lot of the historical less relevant data is truncated).

I'm assuming those full nodes will eventually be intended to be run in data
centers.

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SRTP
Great vision. Ethereum still has a long way to go but it's great to see this
roadmap, together with the increasingly crowded Ethereum developer meetups.

