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Ethereum Will Match Visa In Scale In a 'Couple of Years,' Says Founder (techcrunch.com)
Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, believes that his cryptocurrency has the potential to replace things like credit card networks and gaming servers. He even goes as far to say that Ethereum will replace Visa in "a couple of years," though he later clarified that "ethereum *will have Visa-scale tx capacity*, not that it will 'replace Visa.'" TechCrunch reports: "There's the average person who's already heard of bitcoin and the average person who hasn't," he said. His project itself builds upon that notion by adding more utility to the blockchain, thereby creating something everyone will want to hear about. "Where Ethereum comes from is basically you take the idea of crypto economics and the kinds of economic incentives that keeps things like bitcoin going to create decentralized networks with memory for a whole bunch of applications," he said. "A good blockchain application is something that needs decentralization and some kind of shared memory." That's what he's building and hopes others will build on the Ethereum network.
Right now the network is a bit too slow for most mainstream applications. "Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second," he said. "Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. It will take a couple of years for the blockchain to replace Visa." Buterin doesn't think everything should run on the blockchain but many things can. As the technology expands it can grow to replace many services that require parallelization -- that is programs that should run at the same time.
Right now the network is a bit too slow for most mainstream applications. "Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second," he said. "Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. It will take a couple of years for the blockchain to replace Visa." Buterin doesn't think everything should run on the blockchain but many things can. As the technology expands it can grow to replace many services that require parallelization -- that is programs that should run at the same time.
Founder is worried that his investment will become worthless if he can't convince people that it's the next big thing.
It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...
It doesn't matter whether or not we learn about history.
Our timeless ability to be ignorant and stupid all but guarantees we will repeat it.
Even with the correction, his claims still seem outlandish. He is predicting a five orders of magnitude increase in transaction processing capability in a relatively short amount of time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Precisely.
Not just that, but it's already very difficult for professional lawyers to write loophole-free contracts, and professional programmers to write bug-free code.
Ethereum wants to combine *both*, with *permanent transactions*??
The "hacks" on Ethereum so far have demonstrated that its problems are precisely these.
It is inherently flawed.
I see it being used by companies internally, running their own mini-Ethereum networks, as a replacement for a traditional DB system, but only for specialized use-cases.