Ethereum Underestimated the Scaling Debate

Vitalik Buterin (Co-Founder of ETH) was recently on “The Hashing It Out” Podcast.

In the interview he mentioned a lot of regrets in terms of the roadmap for Ethereum. Mentioning that the primary developments of ETH2 are taking far longer than they ever expected.

ETH 2.0 is probably the most anticipated thing in crypto. Possibly rivaled only by speculation on crypto assets going to the moon.

The ideas of ETH2 are solid and two of the most awaited updates are sharing and proof-of-stake.

Sharding is essentially a mechanism where the ETH chain will be split off and sectioned out to handle more transactions on what is basically a network of “side chains”. I personally like to envision them as a bunch of blockchains running in parallel. All of these chains will make up the entire “main net” that is the Ethereum Network.

The idea of creating a smart contracts platform and “global supercomputer” is only possible when scaling is an issue of the past.

As of this writing, ETH gas fees have been highly unstable and many users (including me) are complaining about paying fees as high as $25 to send the simplest of transactions over the ETH network.

Hive: Showing the Value of A Clean Slate

When you live in the crypto space, anytime you bring up one of the projects you’re invested in, people will call you a shill.

People call me a shill all the time. A shill for Hive. I don’t mind this classification entirely, but I hope the message still penetrates.

I value the Ethereum network to a great degree. Ethereum has so much potential and that’s what drew me into the blockchain space in the first place. 4 years ago, I learned about Bitcoin and got excited. Shortly after that, I learned about Ethereum and got enthralled.

While Ethereum deals with all of these scaling issues and development setbacks, I still am an avid investor and in fact, continue to increase my stake in the ETH cryptocurrency. I can’t help but be reminded of the Steem-Hive situation at a time like this.

With Steem, we were chugging along. Making decent progress on our goals. Of course, we were at the mercy of Steemit, Inc. and horrible leadership over there, but we were still on a blockchain that had 0 fees, scalability and an incredibly vibrant community.

Much like the Covid-19 pandemic, the move to Hive accelerated a lot of what was already taking place on Steem. Over the past few years, Steemit, inc. played a lesser and lesser role in the development of the Steem blockchain.

After 2 or 3 years of vibrant community developments, we saw most of the users flock to applications like Splinterlands, 3speak, Actifit and Tribes. We saw a decreasing dependance on Steemit-managed developments and an increasing role played by the community.

When Steem collapsed, Hive rose from the ashes.

With Hive, we accelerated the process of community ownership and development. We took many of the issues that plagued Steem and eradicated them (seemingly overnight). Don’t get me wrong, Hive still has issues and is far from perfect, but I am very confident in saying that Hive is 10x better than Steem ever was. Look no further than the community efforts across other social media, new Hive-based projects, trending page and DAO wallet to verify that.

My point here is that the clean slate allowed us to start fresh and rebuild what was already here but in a better image. It lit a fire under our asses to do something incredible.

While I don’t think it will take a full clean wipe on behalf of the Ethereum network to make their ETH2 changes happen, I do believe that what Vitalik is trying to say in this interview is that he wishes he could build a time machine and go back to the early days and map everything out better.. and who knows, with Vitalik’s brainpower, he may actually be able to make that time machine.

Whether or not he does that is beyond the scope of my intelligence, but what I do know for sure is that a clean slate saved our Hive community and made us better than before. I wonder what the future holds for Ethereum.

Will it need a full clean slate wipe or will Vitalik and his team of super geniuses pull off one of the greatest network upgrades the world has ever seen?

LeoFinance is an online community for crypto & finance. We run several projects that are powered by Hive and the LEO token economy: