Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
August 30, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Ethereum is facing
perhaps the most extreme crossroads in its history, that goes
beyond its next upgrade called
Constantinople.
With Casper, the Difficulty Bomb, and the
general question of if and when to implement Proof of
Stake all on the horizon, the network’s troubles appear to
have just begun.
The previously mentioned
Constantinople, which is a part in a series of upgrades that are
designed to increase network performance and reduce overall fees,
is now part of the seemingly never-ending debate on Ethereum’s
future.
On top of all of this, the key
issue remains: the network’s participants and leaders cannot seem
to agree enough to implement any of these changes or even draw up a
general plan that reflects the majority opinion.
The question of why this is
happening relates to what Blockchain networks are at their core.
They are decentralized and no one organization controls them. Even
the Ethereum Network, with the backing of the
powerful Ethereum Foundation, still needs
most of its users to agree to implement any future plan.
If it does not achieve this soon,
it is logical to say that it will be risking a majorly contentious
fork akin to what happened with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in
2017.
Even closer to home is what
happened in 2016 with Ethereum’s DAO being hacked. As you may
already know, this resulted in the current network called Ethereum
Classic, which is simply Ethereum, without the code changes that
developers implemented to recover funds as a result of the
hack.
What both of these examples
illustrate is that in the Crypto space, new networks have
consistently come forth from old networks when issues cannot be
solved in a way that most participants can agree on.
With this in mind, what can be done
to prevent this? A recent piece by
Coindesk that appeared today suggested that contentious
factions have even formed within the network on social media, with
people grouping around the concerns that they identify with the
most. One prime example of this would be a mining company called
Atlantic Crypto, which stated that they will only support proposals
that do not reduce network security in any way.
On the other side of things, the
well-known founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, was quoted as
saying that the particular proposal that Atlantic Crypto is
referencing with this statement, which is called EIP 1295, would
risk further centralization of the network related to mining pools.
If you want a current example of why this is detrimental to the
success of the industry at large, look no further than the
stranglehold that Bitmain has on the mining space.
Overall as we have already
suggested, if enough Ethereum nodes, or users who run the
blockchain on their computers, decide not to support the upcoming
versions of the network software, then a new network will be
created by those that stay behind.
With no viable solution on the
horizon that satisfies the network’s majority as of yet, one can
only hope that Ethereum can find a way to survive this controversy
as a multitude of projects that ran ICOs with the network depend on
its success.
If not, we just might see a market
crash, the likes of which has not occurred since Bitcoin lost 71%
in 12 hours in April, 2013.
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Ethereum
(ETH)
Cryptocurrency