If Ethereum does not prove its ability to scale, public blockchains can be left without a future.
All hopes in the field of decentralization and decentralized applications are placed on Ethereum. It is doubtful that someone will be able to do what Ethereum did. Nevertheless, the cost of ETH at the time of this writing is at $ 84.66.
Try to understand this, when in January 2018 the value of the asset was $ 1358. In other words, over the past few months, it has decreased by more than 10 times. Of course, someone can say that today an unprecedented number of developers are involved in the project. Of course, representatives of ConsenSys will tell you only the positive part of the story (no wonder, because this is their bread). But do users of cryptoservices or transactions in ETH really have any meaning in the big picture?
Given the changed circumstances, will Ethereum ever be able to scale enough for mass use?
ETH died?
We should ask ourselves whether this iteration of public blockchains has a future. When around the ICO, fraud, network security issues and stupid advocates of “decentralization”, I wouldn’t be close to an ecosystem like EOS, Tron or XRP for a gun shot. I would like to trust Ethereum, but everything is changing so quickly that their technology now seems outdated.
Perhaps my words will sound like a line from a banal article in Forbes or on LinkedIn, but things are really bad: the concept of "cryptocurrency" is strongly associated with many fraudulent schemes of rapid enrichment.
I really think Ethereum is the last chance of public blockchains. I also think that in the conditions of a cryptocurrency “winter” he has less and less time to demonstrate his ability to scale. Ethereum had main hopes for an independent blockchain-ecosystem, but its own blockchain has terrifying technical problems that need to be addressed, and its supporters need to figure out how to self-manage: there are no adequate systems that could replace corporate governance structures, and this factor holding back growth.
Cryptocurrencies may disappear, and the world will not care.
What happens when a crowd of young people tries to reinvent technology with non-existent products, a false ecosystem, and many crowdfunding projects are almost certainly waiting for failure?
The cryptocurrency world is collapsing, and this collapse has nothing to do with the volatility of stocks: we are talking about the disappearance of currencies, altcoins and other things that were only in vogue some 12 months ago. The death of Ethereum is quite likely, and the legitimacy of Bitcoin as a digital asset turned out to be a big question against the backdrop of a fall in its value to $ 3,000.
Ethereum was a pioneer in decentralization, a paradigm that goes beyond centralization and Internet money that seemed magical. Management models and consensus systems allowed for continuous updating of technology, and the size of the community did not matter much. As with hard forks Bitcoin Cash, cryptocurrency is characterized by a strange and viscous self-destruction cycle.
Unlike the blockchain, cryptocurrencies have always been an experiment of the young. For speculators, this was a sign of a tool that could help survive global recessions. Then something strange happened: there were no global recessions for about 12 years.
Ethereum is the most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and ranks third in total value, but does it now have any meaning?
You can be any idealist, but what if your product simply does not scale, because the system is simply incapable of it? Yes, ideological researchers, developers and administrators who are responsible for software support are working on the Ethereum project, and they know that the time to prove the importance of public blockchains to the world expires, and all this is accompanied by many technical problems and potentially unavoidable limitations. Maybe we were happy early? Maybe we were too stupid, forcing the HYIP around the emerging technology, and our emotions were cut off from reality. I am ready to admit it. The idealism of youth can sometimes be tantamount to fraud - this has happened to all of us.
According to etherscan, for the entire time of the Ethereum network, 353 million transactions were conducted in it. Given all the circumstances, this is not the most astounding figure. Since June 1, the average number of transactions per day ranges from a force of 610,000, and this figure is also not very impressive.
Speaking about winners and losers, we always thought that it was Ethereum that would become the new leader of the cryptocurrency sphere, where Bitcoin had recently shone. However, the cost of ETH is tied to the price of Bitcoin, and in this sense the attempt of a cryptocurrency economy to differ from other markets failed miserably. Market forces still reign, and this underlines the flaws in the current “system”. Innovations are constrained by the centralization of the system itself.
Repressive measures by the regulatory authorities and the growing awareness of blockchains' unwillingness to actively use not only scared away many investors, but also deprived us of the freedom that cryptocurrencies could bring us. Instead, we got fraud, disruptions, and technology that does not scale well either technically or in terms of use by real consumers. This is the lowest point of the level of faith in the readiness of blockchain technology to change the world. Round.
Ethereum's mixed community needs to solve the problem of human management, but how can you expect a bunch of bohemian engineers to cope with this task? In 2018, leadership errors were frequent in almost every industry and system of society. We can see this in the example of corrupt politicians, greedy top managers from the technological sphere, unethical engineers and, of course, cryptocurrency speculators, who particularly clearly abused the ICO system. The EOS project is a prime example. Ethereum is more attractive for developers, but its future as a blockchain-like service in the field of cloud solutions, where giants like Alibaba and Amazon are leading, may not be so bright. Before even getting closer to decentralization, the market will need centralized blockchains. Perhaps cryptocurrencies will have to give way to some kind of equivalent when the time comes.
It is not easy to admit, but Ethereum may have to die so that public blockchains can evolve. The project will not be able to organize a dispersed global network of developers and stakeholders without sacrificing “decentralization”. It would be better if it was acquired and financed by Amazon. You can not just take and reinvent the wheel, revising the scheme of work of enterprises and organizations. It is necessary to find a balance with reality.
Bitcoin was so poisoned by civil strife, dead ends and storing overly large amounts in just a few wallets, which turned out to be irrevocably spoiled. The demise of Ethereum can occur under any possible scenario, primarily due to the inability to scale or have time to do it before the appearance of something better. These guys are not well thought out long-term and could not foresee future problems. Decentralization was a spontaneous whim, to which the world and technology were not ready.
No matter how much we trade in cryptococies, the world is changing by itself. Ethereum is no longer perceived as the leader of the public blockchain model. There is no worldwide computer, and if it is, it is more connected with cloud technologies and the future of artificial intelligence, which will become the main macro trends of the next decade. In comparison with them, the blockchain is at best a microtrend in the technological field. And let's not forget that cryptocurrencies exist in the era of exponential technologies. If they do not fire, it will seriously harm the value proposition of decentralization and the idea of decentralized distribution of the blockchain, but the world will not collapse: intellectual property theft takes place every month for amounts exceeding the entire capitalization of cryptocurrency markets.
We live in volatile times, and of all the possible long-term rates, with respect to public blockchains like ETH, uncertainty is greatest. The sad truth is that capitalism does not need change, not to mention the crisis of democracy leadership. The world, because of its inertia, underestimates cryptocurrencies, which, on the contrary, overestimate themselves.
For the most zealous dreamers and supporters of Ethereum, cryptocurrency is something of a religion. In their dogma, there is a promise of an absolutely new type of democratic society, where it is much more difficult to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the elect, to hide corruption and to exert a secret behind-the-scenes influence. However, in the process of becoming in a cryptocurrency environment, everything that was supposed to be eradicated in the corrupt and mercantile corporate world was spread. Cryptocurrencies have turned into fraud with our money, and this deserves punishment. Therefore, the current prohibitively low prices for these assets are in some sense justified.
A year ago, which corresponds to several centuries on the cryptocurrency timeline, investors poured billions of dollars into promising projects that create decentralized applications, and Ethereum was a kind of angel of the blockchain innovation. How quickly things change! America ostracized these projects, the banks called them pyramids, and everything else is history. The Securities and Exchange Commission targeted the most dubious ICOs and projects, and pessimism reigned in the community (much of which, by the way, were ordinary speculators).
Ethereum, perhaps too quickly became too popular and, being tied to the success of ICO-projects, lost its essence as a solution that seemed to be the obvious heir to Bitcoin. CryptoKitties craze revealed the ugly truth: Ethereum technology was immature and unable to cope with the loads that large decentralized applications would require. The realization that the release of the second version of Ethereum, Serenity, could take years, was frightening.
It may happen that by the time Ethereum 2.0 is ready, there are no cryptocurrencies left.
Probably, the white book of Vitalik Buterin from 2013 has already been forgotten. Satoshi Nakamoto must be shaking his head. How did we find ourselves in this position? Ethereum can disappear, like all other cryptocurrencies, and we should deal with it. What happens next?
Part of the problem may lie in the youthful immaturity of the founders. Buterin, the young and mysterious creator of Ethereum, uses a rather derogatory comparison, calling him "the 1999 smartphone on which to play Snake." What kind of heresy? I did not even understand what he was talking about. Talking about “global computers” and decentralization bothered me when I realized what projects like EOS and Dfinity really are.
We were misled by speculators? The creators of the fake "new Internet", which was originally doomed to failure? Investors and entrepreneurs overestimated the potential of the Ethereum blockchain and its revolutionary nature. The 2019th may be the last year of the Altcoins. In the whirlpool of cryptocurrency fraud, we forgot what they originally thought. Ethereum can serve as the last refuge and model, but you can’t call it a paradise either. Perhaps now we are witnessing its sunset, and I speak about it without any preconceptions - I don’t have ETH tokens.
There is something cynical and ridiculous about what cryptocurrencies and blockchains have become. Where are the real product guys? Show it to me!
Finally
Decentralized computing platforms are good in theory and fantastic communities may have gathered around them, but what is the point if there is no technology that would provide them with scaling and support? Reinventing the concept of decentralization, we found that the corrupt world turned against this idea, seeing in it a threat to its hierarchy, banks, false authority, and the corrupt world order. If Bitcoin and Ethereum disappear, I am not sure that in the coming decades someone will be able to take their place.
Perhaps freedom from online censorship, supervision and other forms of centralized power does not exist in principle: we are only entering the era of centralized technological corporations, and not leaving it. In the courtyard of 2018, not 2063, and the world does not have the slightest intention to become more decentralized or allow a handful of twenty-year-olds to get the keys to the portal into the future.
Ethereum is beautiful and it has its flaws. Bitcoin cannot be called decentralized, since most of its coins belong to just a few people. The public blockchain is not developing as fast as cloud technologies, and it will not have such an impact on the world as machine learning and a number of other important technologies.
3000 developers and entrepreneurs, the bulk of whom are young men aged 20-30 years, can not save the world. Ethereum does not scale, and in 2019 the situation will not change much compared to 2018. This is a fact, so let's leave the illusions and hype around the cryptocurrency. Ethereum may not be the same.
