Last week in the midst of the CryptoKitties pandemonium I took the time to investigate the application to gain a first-hand perspective on developing crisis over on the Ethereum network. I put together a post to share my initial experience and give my thoughts on the situation. At the time I was locked in what seemed like a futile effort to simply purchase and then breed two virtual kittens.
In the days that followed we (the EOS supporters) used this frustrating and funny situation to poke fun at this Epic ETH Fail. I created several MEMEs for @OfficialFuzzy's contest and helped from his Tokens for Tweets challenge and even had my MEMEs posted an tweeted out by people all over the internet. Aaaaaand a good laugh was had by all.
As the dust settled a deeper conversation began over on Telegram, a discussion about network scalability and the economical repercussions of this type of network failing due to just one(1) DApp that went viral, not to mention the damage this causes to any developers or companies creating applications on the wrong technology.
I will get back to this in just a bit, right after we experience the pain of breeding digital kittens using ETH.
Creating Kitties
The process of breeding two kitties to make another is very straight-forward. You pick one to be the dad, and another to be the mom. Sprinkle on some ETH along with lots and lots of GAS fees and click submit.
Now I'm not sure if the programmers intended for this to simulate the actual amount it times for real cats to give birth (around 64 days), but it sure felt like it. The transaction process took forever, over an hour just to get to the point where you have to then wait for the programmed wait time for the new kitten to arrive in your account.
To be clear upfront, I do not have any problems with the CryptoKitties application, the intended functionality and concept is great. The problem is with the user experience which is 100% due to the failing of the Ethereum technology and blockchain.
SUCCESS! Almost 2 hours later, Squishy Paws was born.
I decided to continue on with my testing and went through the struggles to buy another kitty from the marketplace and breed a few more combinations to build my CryptoKitties family. Just as the day before, the process was time consuming and frustrating, and plagued with hour-long network delays and failed transactions.
The only way to have a "better guarantee" of success was to crank up the GAS fee which makes the whole process very expensive and NOT FUN at all. Most times it worked out to $10 to breed together two of my own kitties.
Trying to buy kitties is a drawn out process because of the delays on the Ethereum network. The application does not receive timely network replies (success or fail) to give the correct owner/sale status for the kittens on the marketplace. You can find a kitty, click buy, wait, and 45 minutes later get a declined error since apparently someone else already was buying the same one just before you even though the profile page said it was still available to buy.
Notice the 1 hour time difference from the top date/time.
Egg on Your Face
Can you imagine spending all that time to develop the 'first-of-its-kind' crypto application only to be plagued by network delays that cripple your user experience to the point you feel the need to place a "Network Status" alert at the top of your website?
Be patient? This requires more than patience. This REQUIRES a move to a qualifying DPoS technology... one that can handle millions of transactions per day with out breaking a sweat. Can we say STEEM or EOS!
The TRUTH about Blockchain Transaction Capacity
A few weeks ago @OfficialFuzzy introduced me and others to http://blocktivity.info, it is now the only metrics we use when trying to explain the differences between the operational capacities of the various blockchains running loose on the interewebs.
When people get all hung up on market cap, price, and buy/sell orders to gauge the success of blockchain, which is mostly then a contest of misguided opinion, we have to take a moment to focus on the actual performance metrics of the chains to get accurate understanding of how this will all play out long-term.
If a network can be brought to its knees by one(1) single popular application, what will happen when the next one comes on line? How are people going to be expected to wait upwards of an hour to make a single interaction with a website, business application, or game - no less if multiple steps are required for the application to be of any meaningful purpose. This will be devastating to any kind of business or financial system that requires close to real-time transfer of data.
What if you have to wait 30-60 minutes to see a confirmation after each comment you wrote on Steemit, or after every time you clicked the Upvote button before you could do the next transaction because of the STEEM blockchain technology? And then you had to pay a FEE on top of that! Would still be using this platform or any other that used STEEM?
Blocktivity.info snapshot showing a comparison of Ethereum and STEEM at the same moment in time. Ethereum is still at 100% capacity with a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions while STEEM has done MORE transactions and is ONLY using 0.32% of its capacity.
Ethereum made so many promises of current ability and future scalability to handle transactional throughput using a technology that Dan Larimer repeatedly warned them would not be able to, and when it was finally put to the test by kittens, it failed - hard!
Our discussions carry on over on Telegram where Dan even joins the conversation and has given his opinion on the unfortunate situation the CryptoKittes developers find themselves in.
Again, CryptoKittes is a great concept and would have been a great way to introduce the general population (non-techies, non-crypto people) to the decentralized world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. The ONLY mistake they made was choosing to operate on the Ethereum blockchain network.
Let me know your thoughts.
Be sure to check out http://blocktivity.info AND Bookmark it! It is very useful in understanding what is really going on "behind the curtain". I just realized today they have a profile on Steemit 
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