Questions about the future of Ethereum

ifreedom

Hi,

I have three questions:

1. Why would big banks & corporations implement Ethereum(open source) instead of creating their own copycat versions of it?
2. If the banks/corporations will create their own forks and standardize them will they have to use the current "ethers" as fuel or will they have their own "fuel". If latter then would in this case the value of the current decrease or even be rendered worthless?
3. VISA currently handles 2000 transactions/second. If Ethereum intends to be the base technology behind the "Internet of Everything" it should be able to handle millions of transactions per seconds. In this case the blockchain size would explode very quickly. Like +1TB/day. In other words: is Ethereum scalable for this amount of transactions?

Thanks.
Greg

Toadie

Here's my 2 wei, I'm a blockchain noob so read with caution!
#1. Banks will of course be required to fully secure any blockchain they use. So, yes, it will be private/closed distributed ledgers only available to trusted institutions (akin to SWIFT today). Certainly for investment/capital markets anyway. If they decide to offer BITCOIN/similar on a retail basis that would need to be more open obviously.
#2. If you go to the trouble of created a closed private blockchain you might as well hijack the gas concept too and bend it/eliminate as required. I don't personally think this would necessarily diminish the value of Ether..
#3. This is the elephant in the room right now AFAIK. I heard in a podcast Vitalik et al are working "flat out" on scalability. Personally, I'm confident scalability is surmountable problem. Well there's a will there's always a way (or wei)

o0ragman0o

@ifreedom

1. The banks are already working on their own block chains as a consortium with the Linux Foundation called HyperLedger. JP Morgan is leading the charge with an adaptation of Juno using a consensus algo called Tangaroa. Most of the Australian big banks are also in on Blockchain dev.
2. Nothing wrong with private Ethereum block chains. That's the pitch of the Eris Project
3. Vlad Zamfir, the lead on Casper (Ethereum POS algo) development says it's potential is 1s block times. During Olympic testing, transactions topped out around 25 per second. One scaling strategy being heavily researched is that of 'sharding'. I don't know the details but I believe it fundamentally splits the network into 'shards' each having their own set of validators. I don't known what effect this will have on blockchain size

ifreedom

Then what is the goal of ethereum? I would like to hear you opinion about that?

o0ragman0o

@ifreedom to provide a global decentralised and abstracted turing complete computer that maintains a canonical history of trustless transactions and on which anyone or any connected device can program and participate.

The first port of call for anyone interested in Ethereum is the Whitepaper

ifreedom

@o0ragman0o

Thanks for your reply.

The white paper is a hard nut for somebody who does not have technical expertise in the crypto-field.

IMHO scalability is the "elephant in the room" which needs to be addressed. The Whitepaper discusses this issue in a separate section however does not provide a specific solution for it besides near-term approaches(every miner is forced to have full nodes, no light-nodes allowed etc ). IMHO if no solution will be found for the scalability issue then we will see banks and corporations creating hundreds of forks of Ethereum for their own purposes. Do you think this would be a realistic outcome?

o0ragman0o

ifreedom said:

@o0ragman0o

Thanks for your reply.

The white paper is a hard nut for somebody who does not have technical expertise in the crypto-field.

@ifreedom You rekon that was bad....here's Gav Wood's formal description Yellow Paper

IMHO scalability is the "elephant in the room" which needs to be addressed. The Whitepaper discusses this issue in a separate section however does not provide a specific solution for it besides near-term approaches(every miner is forced to have full nodes, no light-nodes allowed etc ). IMHO if no solution will be found for the scalability issue then we will see banks and corporations creating hundreds of forks of Ethereum for their own purposes. Do you think this would be a realistic outcome?

Very true. Scalability is a deep concern and one of the primary active research areas along with Casper PoS. The likely outcome will be 'Sharding' where (I think) the block chain 'Shards' into kind of intercommunicating side chains ... or something. But for the moment it's such a cute little baby elephant with it's cute little trunk, can't we just keep him in the loungeroom for a few years?

Ethereum is a public transparent network, so don't expect that you're bank is suddenly going dump all your accounts into Ethereum. But there is nothing wrong with organisations running private Ethereum/Eris chains and a large consortium of banks have partnered with the Linux Foundation to created their own blockchain called HyperLedger. (I still get blown away thinking about such an unlikely partnership).

ifreedom

@o0ragman0o

I understand what you mean. Indeed blocksize growth is currently a non-issue so we should overreact but Ethereum has world-changing ambitions so IMHO this issue needs to be dealt with well in advance! Also from the investor's point of view the less forks exist the better. Or do you think there is a possibility of "forcing" forks in the future to using the current Ethers(tokens) as fuel?

o0ragman0o

@ifreedom, Not quite sure what you mean by 'forcing forks'. I haven't really followed what Vitalik's intentions are with Sharding, but the address space should remain the same and ether spendable across the shards.

As for forks of Ethereum itself (rather than blockchain forks) there's at least 4 other altcoins already out there using the Ethereum code. Why??? I don't know.

ifreedom

@o0ragman0o, what I meant by "forcing" is to write the Ethereum code so that the forks must use the current Ethereum tokens as a fuel. If such a solution is possible at all...