Problems With Ethereum, a 100 Billion Dollar Protocol

This post is for cryptocurrency folks who take an active interest in ethereum.

To be clear, I’m an engineer, not a developer/programmer/or software architect.

I do not read code, but I have a way with reading communities to understand systems and I often participate to learn more.

Here’s what surprised me about Ethereum by forming a group.

I’ve chatted with a lot of blockchain developers I have in a small fb group about ethereum. I had 2 PhD students in distributed systems that I made Admins. They turned down 300+ member applications to the group.

The group currently has 50 people in it.

The developers all seem to have the same set of complaints that have seemingly gone unaddressed for the past few months…..

1. Speed up TXs by improving DAG Architecture.
2. Fix JSON RPC problems.
3. They need to build a real javascript framework.
4. Replace Web3 with better JSON RPC API.
5. Need to reward developers to have better incentives to contribute.
6. Difficult to integrate with server side systems because extracting transaction data is very complicated.
7. Ethereum seems to need a lot more developers working on the problems of sharding, proof of stake, plasma, etc….
8. Ethereum didn’t incorporate a checksum digit to ETH Addresses
9. Solidity was just audited in November
10. The Ethereum foundation has 300M USD, but it seems mismanaged, especially the developer onboarding.

Now, I didn’t know if my survey of developers was good enough, but at the very least I recorded their observations. I tweeted it to one of the founders of ethereum — Vlad Zamfir.

To my surprise, he actually responded.