The Blockchain Bottleneck Effect
The ERC 20 token system on the Ethereum blockchain is by far the most used token system out of all crypto currencies and probably the only one able to atleast attempt to cope with the amount of users this kind of technology is gaining each day.
This outstanding performance without any other similar technology competing with it brings up a few risks. Especially, because there is no alternative. I have been wondering for a while already why there is nobody able to compete with Ethereums ERC 20 technology. By now there even is a very very big list of enterprises, BIG names on it, which are working in a network called Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. There are British Petrol, intel, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, the Nationalbank of Canada, Samsung, Santander Bank, Scotiabank, Dash and many many others, but these are just a few names that you might recognize. Obviously the leaderboard of this alliance concists out of high ranking employees of the companies I just listed up.
I am just wondering why there is nobody developing an alternative, while it feels like we have a hundred blockchain bank startups we slow down on the technological progress of the most important thing, the most promising project of all - the blockchain technology itself.
The last days have been terrifying for a lot of people using EtherDelta and other exchanges.
Transaction hashes (Tx) were disappearing.
Transactions went into a loop that kept counting up to about 3-4 minutes of the existance of the transaction and then kept starting again from zero.
People have been raging in the EtherDelta chat.
One of them, a former free chat supporter claims to have lost about 10 ETH to EtherDelta's malfunction.
While TRADE.io already decided not to trade their tokens (TIO) on EtherDelta, on request of their customers.
CoinsMarkets went offline a few days back. People that were interested in selling the coins they have there, simply can't even log into their account. This is supposed to last until the 23rd January. Lots of exchanges are flooded by new crypto enthusiasts and had to suspend registrations until now. While lots of people benefit from this boom, there also are lots of frustrated people, because of their handicapped situation about accessing their coins and the fear of losing them.
All this is making it really difficult to actually enjoy trading, especially when you look at the rise of certain coins and you just cannot buy them, because the exchange you are registered at just went offline for a while and the other exchange that offers them decided not to accept any registrations at this time.
In general we are currently stuck in a bottleneck effect caused by the amount of new people in our crypto world and just started investing. We have to improve the capacity of the blockchain and our exchanges as fast as possible otherwise we will start to stagnate and slowly drop down into a crash,
since nobody is willing to pay a gas price of 70USD of which the unused gas will be refunded, but what happens when all this gas is behing used and your 70 bucks are just.. gone?