Not ignoring Ethereum

Not ignoring Ethereum

Whether one likes Ethereum or not comes second. Try to understand it - and see why it is important not to ignore it.

Ethereum is a platform, but it is also an impressive ecosystem of projects and organizations that are building on it and with it. So much so that it's getting nearly impossible to imagine a future where all this would collapse. If we build it, they will come is morphing into Too big to fail. Worst case, more compromises will be made. Best case, oh, you know ...

A quick and incomplete glance into it reveals quite an image ...

Ethereum platform is obviously at the core of it and Ethereum Foundation is keeping a relaxed governance over development and over the permissionless blockchain network. There's a permissioned/private subgroup with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), which is trying to bring some order into various private Ethereum-based networks, most notably with the Enterprise Ethereum Client Specifications. Quorum and Pantheon are two options here.

EEA has recently partnered with Hyperledger, manifesting years long efforts of bringing Ethereum closer to the Hyperledger umbrella. There's lots of options here already: Sawtooth to Seth, Ethereum to eris to Burrow, but also fabric with EVM.

Combining Bitcoin's stability and payments-orientation, RSK is a possible bridge to the EVM. Scalability in mind, there are lots of further options, in various stages of maturity: stand-alone sidechains like Loom or increasingly popular POA.Network, or any of the Plasma designs for hierarchical sidechains, e.g. UTXO-based Plasma Leap or accounts-based Plasma EVM.

A fascinating potential lies with Cosmos, where we can have (or will have in the future) an isolated blockchain Ethermint, or reference the EVM simply as a library (how far have we come to!), or interact with Ethereum mainnet through a dedicated peg zone.

Then there's a whole alternative (or complementary, if you prefer) ecosystem around Parity. Talking about diversity ...

There exist a future scenario, where Ethereum will no longer be relevant, at least in its current form. Do all decentralized applications really need to share the underlying protocol? A game doesn't need the same security guarantees as a financial application, in which case using the same platform for both would incur unnecessary overhead to them.

Application-specific blockchains, is that the future? If they are reasonably well interoperable, where do they meet? Certainly not on a network that is unstable. Anti-forking is a way of life, even for a fridge.

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