Does Ethereum still have a future? Read this before you answer

[goldencrypto7100]

Given the state ETH is in, we are still hopeful that ETH will recover and will be up and running in the market. We just need to be patient and HODL.

[1715134030]

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[qazgroup]

I do not agree with you, personally im sure soon ethereum will come up with solid solutions to its current isssues, team is acti e and work is going on just have some patience and belief and good times will surely come ahead.

[ganlianshifu1]

Ethereum founder V God even sent dozens of tweets to explain the history and status of the Ethereum Casper research!
ETH is the second-largest cryptocurrency market value, which is the best proof of the market!

[el_lobo]

- Proof of Stake is not as secure as Pow because the blockchain is not anchored in the outside world through the consumption of an external resource. In PoW this resource is Electricity, which makes sure that it is very very expensive to attack the blockchain and makes this attack economically unrewarding. Using energy burnt to back a block allows us to view immutability objectively. Whereas any non-energy-based method ultimately requires someone’s subjective interpretation of immutability. By attaching energy to a block, we give it “form”, allowing it to have real weight & consequences in the physical world. And PoS also leads to centralization as the power is concentrated with the people who have the most money. The entrance barrier to staking is 32 ETH, this is a fundamentally different system as PoW where miners compete throught the use of energy (cost) with each other. I personally consider Ethereum's economics broken at the base layer.

Concentrated with the people who have the most money is too a problem with a pow network, or?
Only the people who have big money to buy asic miners and cheap electricity earn by mining and centralization is also limited to a few pools.
The higher eths price increases, the more expensive it becomes to attack it in a pos system.
Maybe im missing the experience, but thats how i would see it.

[learningcrypto5421]

The state of ETH is not in a good place right now. But this does not mean that the future is dark for ETH. As long as this coin is desired by the people, it will stay in the market.

[justspare]

I think you are creating good questions and issues with ethereum however you are forgetting that these are the people who also solve the issues. For example if you think 1TB is a big deal you have never seen or read anything from the developers because they are working on it and trying to find a solution or at least a middle ground to solve it, is it there now ? no, will it be soon ? Hopefully.

Also when you look at the ICO projects they are still using ethereum because it is the most known version and the other ones like neo or cardano is not making any new differences aside from being less heavy in blockchain like ethereum.

[herurist]

I don't know if any of you know a Telegram group called "Blockchain Whispers", it's actually a big group with over 150k subscribers and they often share good stuff, and a few days ago they have released their thoughts regarding the current and future Ethereum status, and they aren't exactly good news.

I'm not an expert so I would like to know what you think about it.

You can find the original article here: https://blockchainwhispers.com/the-state-of-ethereum-i-am-bearish-on-eth-here-are-my-reasons-1-scaling-ethereum-does-not/


The state of Ethereum
I am bearish on ETH, here are my reasons:

- Scaling
Ethereum does not scale on the base-layer. One halfway popular dapp woulrd force the whole network to its knees, as seen with Cryptokitties or popular ICOs in the past. Ethereum as it is now, cannot handle even one single decentralized application that goes mainstream. The Ethereum blocksize has exceeded 1 TB and this is a very big issue. It is a known fact in blockchain technology that larger blocks centralize validators, and this is exactly what is happening here. There are fewer and fewer FAN-nodes (full archival nodes), and these nodes update the state of the Ethereum network. Because of Ethereum’s exponentially growing blocksize, the bottleneck is not regulated below these external factors and as such results in a shrinking and more centralized network due to network demands that increasingly exceed the average users hardware and bandwidth.

Ethereum full nodes are getting fewer and fewer because the clients can't sync. And light nodes are not a full substitute of full node verification. This will lead to a weaker and more insecure network. Planned scaling solutions are Casper PoS, Sharding and Layer2 solution.

- Proof of Stake is not as secure as Pow because the blockchain is not anchored in the outside world through the consumption of an external resource. In PoW this resource is Electricity, which makes sure that it is very very expensive to attack the blockchain and makes this attack economically unrewarding. Using energy burnt to back a block allows us to view immutability objectively. Whereas any non-energy-based method ultimately requires someone’s subjective interpretation of immutability. By attaching energy to a block, we give it “form”, allowing it to have real weight & consequences in the physical world. And PoS also leads to centralization as the power is concentrated with the people who have the most money. The entrance barrier to staking is 32 ETH, this is a fundamentally different system as PoW where miners compete throught the use of energy (cost) with each other. I personally consider Ethereum's economics broken at the base layer.

Look at this picture to see how centralized ETH gets with Pos:

- Sharding comes from the world of databases and describes a technique where a database (or a blockchain) will be split in multiple parts (called "Shards") where each of the parts has a different area of task. Validating responsibilities are split up among various groups, each with their own shard. The intent is to relieve the amount of work a single validating node must do so there can be more of them, but it only results in prolonging the issue, and not fixing the problem.

Furthermore, there’s now a huge cost for some of these nodes, as staking is required to be one of them. Sharding takes a single blockchain, turn it into multiple blockchains called Collations, then puts a twist tie on top and hopes mold doesn’t grow.

- Layer2 solutions are the only viable scaling solutions. For Ethereum we have Raiden and the Loom Network. Loom is especially promising as it enables sidechains on top of the Ethereum base-layer. BUT, if Ethereum adopts PoS (which is highly untested) we have an insecure base-layer. You can build a insecure second-layer on top of a secure base-layer, but not the other way round.

Ethereums on-chain scaling solutions were delayed again this year. Casper PoS is now expected in 2019, sharding in 2020/21.
issuance policy is another major negative point for Ethereum. The issuance of ETH is not capped! This means there is a constant flow of newly minted Ether, this goes on indifinitely in theorie. This makes Ethereum an inflationary asset, which is bad.

- Use cases for Ethereum: the number one use-case is tokenization. And this used 99% for ICOs which create tokens with articificial demand and no real usage. This trend is declining and so i expect the price of ETH to decline. Tokenized securities and cryptocollectibles (ERC721) will be potential markets, but in my view they will get nowhere as big as eexpected by the public (but this topic is stuff for another article).

Now we come to smart contracts, a clever idea but without the potential of mass adoption. here is why:
- they are incredibly hard to write (see the Parity and the DAO hacks for example)
- altough in computer science "code is law", smart contracts are NOT legally binding. They are NOT real contracts.

Execution in a Turing-complete context is extremely tricky and hard to analyze. Securing a Turing-complete smart contract becomes the equivalent of proving that a computer program does not have bugs. We know this is very difficult, as nearly every computer program in existence has bugs.

Consider that writing normal contracts takes years of study and a very hard bar exam to be able to write competently. Smart contracts require at least that level of competence and yet currently, many are written by newbies that don’t understand how secure it needs to be. This is very clear from the various contracts that have been shown to be flawed.

And we have the "oracle problem", smart contracts rely on the correctness of outside data. Who feeds this data to the Ethereum system? What prevents these oracles to be corrupt or malicious? how do we prevent centralization?

Blockchains have advantages in a very specific field, namely censorship-resistance and immutability. The killer use-case for this setup is Money. We do not need a decentralized internet. Because a centralized service is ALWAYS cheaper and more easy to use. Implementing a blockchain makes only sense in specific fields where immutability and the prevent of government control are important. I cannot imagine a future where everyone holds a Ethereum wallet with 345 different tokens for 345 specific services. And i highly doubt Ethereums capability to handle this kind of data load.

Ethereum is not leaderless (Vitalik Buterin and dev-team), not entirely immutable (DAO-hack and subsequent fork because of transactions that were rolled back), not a Store-of-Value because of an uncapped supply and it does not scale on the base-layer. Another thing is that BTC increasingly cuts into Ethereums use-cases with Rootstock (smart contracts) and Drivechain (side chains).

And with the death of dapps Ethereums second use case (capital rasising platform) also dies. This is the bearish case for Ethereum.
Thank you for reading Blockchain Whispers (t.me/blockchainwhispers).

They can say anything about Ethereum but this coin is the main asset and income I have since enter crypto market at 2016. This one have future, users and also benefit that we can use to save our life. Ethereum has bad progress but it doesn't mean we should dump it ( sell all we have ). I still believe in this one even every day I read negative news about ethereum. Just go and enjoy the journey.

[qumeijia]

I am expecting much that Ethereum will have good in future. There are many opinions about it, one says that it will hit and replace btc, other says that it will be lose from the market because there are many altcoins that better than it. Whatever happening in the market, I still believe that Ethereum will maintain the existence on crypto.

[QueenCryptomarket]

Actually, Ethereum platform is working and systematically works and Ethereum team is improving. Such news can be customized information from competitors Ethereum to reduce confidence.

[bitcoinbuyer]

I believe in Eth and nothing can change this fact. Eth is the first strong alternative cryptocurrency and I consider that it will be the first in the future too.

[Weirdwas]

Ethereum definitely does have a future. A good one at that. I like to not follow every single information that I come across in the internet, especially if they have not been verified, because a lot of these information tend to be false at the end of the day. Ethereum is a really good project, and it does have a good future ahead of it.

[atliens99]

lol the number 2 cryptocurrency won't fail, if eth fails then everything else will fall.  Exchange pairs are always in btc or eth, dont be an idiot please.

[hermes006]

I do not really believe in negative predictions, because I understand that Ethereum does not have decent competitors among altcoins yet. This is still cryptocurrency number 2 and of course there is no reason to think that this is its end.

[Rongelweng]

Ethereum has a future off-course. We must not think negative about it. It is still the best alternative coins for bitcoin and nothing can change it. It is still the cyptocurrency 2nd rank altcoin.

[carlzhao]

There are too many discussions about Eth's current position and I believe in its restoring, it just couldn't be the end. It would be so easy way for losing money.

[DevelopmentBank]

-snip crap-

Ethereum has a clear and bright future. You list down issues like "scaling" or sharding but forgot to look at the fact that THESE ISSUES ARE BEING ADDRESSED. Just look at how the LOOM sidechain has worked and brought almost instant transaction confirmation time without bogging down the ETH network at all.

TLDR; Original post is bull crap.