The cryptosphere is devolving into an eternal dick-measuring contest and I am officially sick of it. This toxicity needs to end. There is no competition. No, I couldn't care less about how many transactions your blockchain has processed. No, XRP is not the future. No, it doesn't matter what your trading volume is. No, the market cap is irrelevant.
This flagrant my-dad-can-beat-up-your-dad attitude is unacceptable. Tron figurehead Justin Sun is the absolute worst offender. The hype to fail ratio of this guy is legendary. He is constantly talking trash about Ethereum and EOS in a futile attempt to establish dominance.
During the last bull run Bitcoin hit a brick wall of scaling issues. Transaction fees where out of control and reached as high as $50. This turn of events led many people to believe that scaling was and still is the biggest concern of the blockchain.
So what happened? Now all the DPOS blockchains (Steem, EOS, Tron, Bitshares, etc) are running around exclaiming, "Hey, look at me! Look at how many transactions I'm processing!" Too bad this metric is totally irrelevant! It's far too easy for a DPOS blockchain to shill up false volume in a sad attempt to feign real-world relevance. Nobody should care that we have high throughput because that throughput has little to no value.
The world wants so badly to quantify value. Well, too bad! It's not going to happen. Instead, this is what we get: Fake transaction volume where BitMEX shuffles a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin a day and Coinbase doesn't even register (#32 on that list with $39 million a day). Uh, yeah... we all know that Coinbase is one of the biggest exchanges so all these fake measurements are completely worthless now.
Transaction volume is only a useful metric when looking at on-chain POW coins. Why? Because every one of those transactions costs money. In addition, because of mining competition, there is no way to create a fake transaction loop where the sender/receiver would be able to reclaim the fee spent.
I've been doing some research on the Lightning Network, and I've come to realize that this technology will allow Bitcoin to scale far bigger than it ever needs to be. Ethereum's scaling solutions, Plasma and Sharding, will also allow the chain to scale near infinitely. I can't wait for that to happen because then we can begin to focus on topics that actually matter.
The number one problem of the blockchain (of the entire world) is trust. Trust is the thing that doesn't scale. Our tribalist evolution naturally makes us distrusting of "the others", and for good reason. Can we trust the Fed? Can we trust miners? Can we trust stake holders? Can we trust witnesses? These are the real questions that need solving.
The number one value of DPOS isn't increased throughput. It's the ability to allow stake holders to control inflation with the click of a button instead of having to set up complex hardware solutions that validate and secure the network. This is the strength we should be playing into.
Until we all learn that cooperation trumps competition in this realm we'll all be weaker and divided. It will take a while but we'll get there eventually. Once these dev teams realize they'll make it a lot farther working together than stabbing each other in the back the world will become a much better place. It's bound to happen eventually, even if by force. Open-source architecture can't be patented and hoarded.
