State of Ethereum
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Did a bit of research the other day on Bitcoin and got some nice comments so i've done another on Ethereum. Feel free to let me know if i've missed anything! How well does it appeal to people? Pretty well. Ethereum lets you decentralise anything. The idea of smart contracts, where transactions happen when certain conditions are fulfilled is pretty strong, eliminating middlemen. Imagine if you have a smart contract that says you get paid 1 eth when the contract finishes, then it just happens automatically. Ethereum has the potential to be a big part of the next generation Internet. And developers realise this. The majority of dApps are run on ethereum (over 75%) How well does Ethereum work? Cost of transaction is about 9 dollars at the moment which is a lot compared to the likes of doge, Ripple and Litecoin which are all usually under a dollar. The EIP 1559 update in next few months is going to lower the fees hopefully. This is because some of the fees will be burned instead, eliminating them. Ethereum works pretty well and the trend is upwards. Can see here that over 1.5 trillion settled using ethereum so far this year How good is Ethereum for people and planet? For people, the fact that there is an increase in supply of ethereum means that people have to keep buying just to keep the value the same. Source: https://coinguides.org/ethereum-supply/ Having said this, the long-term plan is for Ethereum's supply to be more and more limited in the future. This is because 18 million ether released yearly to miners, is less and less a percentage of the overall ether. This means the supply growth rate tends to zero. Source: https://www.finder.com/ethereum-inflation-rate For planet, it is good that they are moving to a Proof of stake, which has less negative impact on the environment. However, this isn't a perfect consensus mechanisms since it leads to inequality with those people rich enough to stake, keep earning more and more ether. How well it is governed? Buterin's leadership seems to be key, after Vitalik said about increasing the gas limit to 15 million just over a week ago, miners promptly did this. This should increase capacity and make transactions cheaper. Unlike other projects like Bitcoin who can't seem to agree on increasing the block size, Ethereum are going ahead with developing version 2.0 which should lead to significantly reduced fees and an increase in speed. I am a cryptonoob so please help me learn if i've got anything wrong.. hope some of this helps you. submitted by /u/glennherriott |
