The less than two years old digital currency has now become the most profitable blockchain to mine and the most secure, according to a measure called the Köppelmann Constant, named after Martin Köppelmann, founder of the ethereum based Gnosis project which is now valued at around $200 Million.
According to a flippening website, which measures the point when ethereum’s market cap overtakes bitcoins, currently standing at around 38% of the way, the constant is explained as:
“The ETHBTC rate where Ether PoW mining yields the same value as Bitcoin mining. Also, it is the ETHBTC rate where Ether PoW expends more economic resources on PoW than Bitcoin.”
Which basically translates to the point when ethereum’s blockchain becomes the most secure out of all proof of work based blockchains, making eth the very first platform to overcome bitcoin in this measurement.
That is a significant development because a higher level of security means that a higher level of value can be stored due to an increased cost for a 51% attack, but that’s just in proof of work (PoW).
Ethereum intends to move to proof of stake (PoS) which will make the network even more secure while also providing users with confirmation times of as low as potentially 2 seconds, making it as good as instant and the fastest of any other public blockchain based currency.
On top, it will further increase capacity which may soon be needed as eth’s transaction levels are reaching new highs. Ethereum can already handle more transactions than bitcoin and will probably be able to operate finely with 1 million transactions a day, but might struggle at higher levels.
Proof of stake will change that, increasing its capacity further, followed by even more capacity increases with sharding which may allow the network to potentially handle 100,000 transactions a second, far more than Visa currently processes.
Estimates of proof of stake deployments vary. Ethereum is first to upgrade to Metropolis, which has its own features, such as increased privacy by incorporating Zcash’s Zk-Snarks, on top of some other nice features for developers.
After that, PoS is to be deployed in the Serenity upgrade with time estimates given by some for this year, but realistically it will probably be sometime next year.
Once that all goes through, then ethereum is ready for wide use, including mainstream applications in heavy demand such as banking services, but the road should be expected to be bumpy.
This is just code and codes do sometime have a comma which shouldn’t be there but ends up causing problems. However, it will all probably be heavily tested and if there are any problems eth has shown they can quickly make decisions and resolve any issues, so it would most probably be just temporary.
No wonder no one wants to wait, with the rate of adoption potentially increasing faster than development can keep up, but the Ethereum Foundation should now be the best funded blockchain company in the entire industry, so they are expanding, according to Vitalik Buterin, who publicly stated they are taking on new people.
