[crazydoggers]

Well, as I understand it, there's no technical reason Ethereum can't do the 56,000 tps. Ethereum has no fixed block size. Realistically, obviously, you'd need more and more compute power.

The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)

And I'm not saying that Ethereum has it all solved, just that the system is different enough that some of the issues are not applicable. It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". First because there's no absolute limitation for scaling, only things that make it costly. Back in the day, if you asked someone how the early Internet was going to scale, it would have seemed like an equally impossible task. There's plenty of time to work on the issues before we need 56,000 tps.

[Anonobread]

> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)

Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction.

> It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!".

But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.

[crazydoggers]

> I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable

But I did answer what it does different. I cited a few of the many things it does different, one of which is an account based model. Another is faster and unlimited sized blocks. And if you care to read more of the development threads, you'd find lots of other solutions. Ignoring facts and continuing to say "The answer is, of course, nothing" is just FUD.

Here's a quote from Vitalik in October:

"Scalability: using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs and asynchronous calling in order to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, a theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid;"

> But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud"

Who said anything of the sort? I'm saying it's a hard problem, but it's tractable and takes resources and time. What's that got to do with the cloud??

Ultimately I don't understand the whole negative attitude on scaling. Obstacles are not a reason to not attempt something, and certainly not potential scaling issues. Making the Internet was hard. In 1993 people could have said "computers are expensive.. and think of all the cables you'd have to lay! It's going to be millions of miles of cables! It'll never happen! This whole WWW thing is just a toy fad!"