Answering Vitalik Hard Questions For the Blockchain World Part 2: The Scalability Barrier

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin put forward a series of open questions to the cryptocurrency community in a recent discussion with Mars Finance International WeChat group, postulating seven issues present within the blockchain ecosystem.

Erin's "Hard questions for any blockchain people" deal with some of the biggest obstacles that stand between the current state of blockchain technology and widespread adoption, highlighting hashpower centralization, the lack of "Useful" large-scale apps, the high frequency of hacks, dApp scalability and latency, issues with consensus methods, and the inefficiency of on-chain governance.

Erin's second question appears to be partly directed at the dApp development ecosystem, in which novelty apps and games dominate, and partly due to the lack of transaction throughput that limits the functionality and efficacy of large-scale dApps.

The top five most popular blockchain dApps active in the last 24 hours consist of gambling games or exchanges, neither of which can be considered large-scale applications in the grand scheme of global adoption.

The lack of active large-scale dApps within the blockchain ecosystem doesn't mean they don't exist.

There are many highly promising dApp projects holding significant potential for widespread adoption - provided the transaction throughput is present to support them.

Erin's key point in his question regarding blockchain applications highlights the primary obstacle that prevents the distribution and use of large-scale apps - transaction throughput.

Until scalability solutions such as Ethereum's Sharding project allow for dramatically higher transaction throughput, dApps are largely limited in what they are able to offer users.

Projects like Loom Network are currently working on the creation of application-specific sidechains that hold the potential to create dApps of virtually limitless size, rivaling games such as World of Wordcraft or social platforms like Twitter in scope and scale.

Tomorrow, we will be answering Buterin's third question: "Why are there not yet good solutions to account security? When will the problem of account hacks and thefts be solved?".