I have been a big fan of Ethereum for along time. I love the idea of building businesses into the crypto currency realm to expand what we can bring to the crypto community. Vitalik Buterin the creator of Ethereum had a much bigger outlook on what a crypto currency should do. Ethereum is like Apple smart phone full of apps, but full of decentralized application. It is a great idea he came up with. But the question is can it succeed?
The biggest problem we have with crypto currencies right now is security. Since we don't have an FDIC insurance program to pay us back when things go wrong, we need high level security to make Ethereum work. Ethereum has faced several DDOS ( Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. "The attacker demands that the server repeatedly compute the same process again and again, until the server is unable to keep up with computing all the requests."(Mary-Ann Russon) What this does is slow the eco system down and creates lagging for transactions. They continue to hard fork to make it more secure, but what if these DDOS attacks continue to pop up? This is something that has to be fixed now before the ecosystem grows into a much bigger roll for transactions in the future.
Ethereum is going through a lot of changes. To many changes can be overwhelming for any ecosystem. It is almost like admitting they didn't set up Ethereum the proper way and many changes have to be made. So they are adding proof of stake to save energy and bring scalability where they can process a huge number of transactions per second. They also will be adding metropolis to make it more user friendly for people who don't have a lot of experience with Ethereum, along with other added advantages to the ecosytem. It sounds great, but when changes are made it is followed by a lot of errors and problems with the new system. Some people will like it and some wont. It causes more division among the community. It makes me wonder if they will ever actually have a product they bring out that doesn't need more forking. Can't fork forever or people will begin to lose trust in it actually working.
What I have not seen with Ethereum is actual results. They have many dapps listed, but do any really work? Maybe there is a few that do work, but with all the changes Ethereum constantly makes, these new businesses also have to change what they are doing to be part of the new fork (ecosystem). We saw what happened to the Dao. And the rest of these dapps are just selling an idea right now. Until we can see a proven dapp on the market that is user friendly and not get hacked then we still have to see if Ethereum actually works.
Competition is turning into a big player going forward. They're many block chains out competing with Ethereum right now and I am sure many coming out in the future to also try take down Ethereum. Technology is so fast these days it wont surprise me if Ethereum keeps hard forking from security issues that another block chain takes over the smart contract industry.
I do think Ethereum can succeed with Vitalik Buterin being apart of the community. He has that passion that is needed to take on all competition that will try to step in the way of what he wants to accomplish. The community is the biggest of any crytpo community by comparison. With the help of so many people along with Vitalik they will figure out what needs to be done to turn Ethereum into something that could eventually even take down Bitcoin. But they have a long road ahead and hopefully can find the right solutions to problems they have run into or another block chain can easily take over the market.
Pictures:
Spock Vitalik - CoinTelegraph
Metropolis- ETHNews.com
Ethereum Dapps- Ethereum Stack Exchange
Crypto Currency Day- www.cryptocurrencyday.com