[ETH_start]

ETH launched in 2015, which is 7 years ago, and has been working through fundamental limitations of the technology, building out the technological primitives that will enable mass-consumer blockchain applications in the future.

A list of areas where Ethereum has made huge progress:

* building secure smart contracts - more sophisticated auditing programmes by more experienced companies, improvements in programming languages, including Solidity, and improvements in formal verification techiques, have reduced the prevalence of major hacks of blue chip smart contracts significantly since 2015

* enabling privacy with public validation. Zk-SNARK and other zkp based mixers have gone from theory to reality with the launches of Tornado Cash, the AZTEC Network, and CAPE.

* Protocol fine-tuning, like the implementation of EIP1559, to improve fee predictability

* The creation of a Proof of Stake consensus protocol that maintains the same decentralization of Proof of Work, while providing a given level of security at a much lower economic cost

* Scalability technologies like Optimistic and ZK-Rollups

* Protocol upgrades like sharding to expand the capabilities of Rollups

These all took time to build, and will take more time still to reach production quality, but are shaping up to provide a vastly more useful blockchain platform than what was launched in 2015.

[thematrixturtle]

Your bullet points list a bunch of navel-gazing crypto improvements for crypto, but the previous poster was asking for examples where "crypto actually solve[a] a real problem any better than a plain old database". Got any?

[hirako2000]

Be your own bank cannot be solved by a plain database, as it doesn't ship with the trustless features most blockchain networks offer. The network is there. When bitcoin came out it solved that problem but the network took years to expand enough to guarantee integrity.

That's what has been happening in crypto, in the early years, network expansion, fed by speculative investment (speculation can have its merit, see).

Then came more elaborated DeFI and non DeFI supporting techs. (Smart contract, faster and cheaper blocks networks for micro transactions, anonymity/privacy networks etc).

Yes, business use cases continue to lag, but in a decade the progress is to me so astonishing, not so disappointing.

Perhaps worth mentioning, the traditional system via, via regulators working for we know who, and massive media fear mongering is not to be ignored, the injustice will lose in the long run, but it's pretty clear it has contributed to limit adoption, hence the emergence of more concrete, useful to socity use cases, other than auto generated Punk Monkeys for degenerated moneybgrabbers.

[mmcnl]

What problem does being your own bank solve? You're posing crypto as a solution to crypto-defined problems that no one actually has. How does crypto improve my life? How will it make me happier, healthier and how will it help me contribute more to the wellbeing of others and the planet? I can easily answer this question for PostgreSQL.

[hirako2000]

Well over 1B people remains unbanked, either excluded from banking or due to non intentional accessibility issues. That alone means crypto may be a solution to a signicant issue so many are having. Would that be enough?

Even among the banked, and in the very developed world, the traditional system has caused the loss of people' life long savings, loss of the ability to even continue business operations, that day someone in a centralised office decided it was OK to unilateraly freeze their accounts without notice (the many reporting their anecdotes but somehow rarely making mainstream news), or even the sudden withdrawal of the funds for dubious or faulty reasons (Greece, and other countries which faced economical turmoils and saw even democratically elected administrations basically steal people's money to recover from their own mismanagement flaws).

If you aren't impacted by any of the freedom and justice proven serious freedom and justice infringements listed above, which sometimes put people in life threatening positions, at least of financial tremendous distress, then Good for you! If you don't see any benefit in adopting blockchain technologies in your day to day life, fine! It will come around. And for now, billions would disagree with your perspective.

On PostgresQL, amazing solution,my favorite RDBS I think. Worth pointing out the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression, he would probably have to say that PostgressQL is a beautiful solution for what it solves, and that blockchain is a revolution pending to solve many other issues, if only he could have access to this thread and not be inhumainly restrained in jail for many years with very questionable treatment, decided by the same clique of tyrants who sold us the banking system we still have today.

[cldellow]

> the main original author of this software was/is a hero in the fight against system oppression

...is this a reference to Assange? IIRC, his contributions were ~0.7% of the commits in 1996, focused on psql and libpq. Promoting him to "main original author" is quite a leap.

[hirako2000]

My mistake, not the main contributor or orignal author, just a mere contributor. Assange, yes. All there rest stands I think.

[wadefletch]

PostgreSQL was created by Michael Stonebreaker and Larry Rowe, neither of whom are imprisoned. Who are you talking about?

[peyton]

I won’t make secret deals with Citadel. Unlike my broker.

[ogogmad]

I'm still not sure why all of that is useful. A lot of clever infrastructure, but for exactly what?

Also, it's worth reminding people that ETH might be useful, but still worth less than its current price. There's a ton of speculation propping up the current price.

[ETH_start]

Right now Ethereum is only useful for niche applications, like using your ETH as collateral for an autonomously issued DAI loan.

This is because its disadvantages, like lack of privacy and very limited throughput capacity, make traditional finance better for all but the highest value blockchain applications, where the extreme integrity of process provided by its highly redundant and collectively managed ledger outweighs its disadvantages, like extremely narrow write bandwidth.

But once those disadvantages disappear, as a result of the aforementioned infrastructure development, I believe that will change, and we'll see Ethereum's advantages make it the preferred platform for mass-consumer applications.

[lupire]

I think you mean "if", not "once".

This is somewhere between self driving cars and flying cars in the feasibility scale.

[ETH_start]

The solutions to throughput limitations are already proven out in testnets and alpha releases, and well understood conceptually.