Well 2018 has not been a very good year for cryptocurrency miners and you can see that just by looking at how the prices of graphics cards have reacted to the slump in pricing.
With difficulty of mining almost all chains going up across the board and prices continuing to decrease. People are left wondering, is there a future for cryptocurrency mining?
How To Stop Ether Going To Zero: Defusing The 'Difficultly Bomb'
Credits: Forbes.com
Interesting point is that if the Ethereum blockchain collapses due to it's inability of self regulate it's monetary protocol, due to it's lack of ability to incentivize miners to continue to produce blocks on the blockchain not only does the Ethereum chain collapse but all of the initial coin offerings that raised money contained within the Ethereum ecosystem lose out on that as well. So the investors get burned, the new companies get burned, the new cryptocurrencies get burned. It's really just a loose loose loose for everyone involved.
The biggest holders of Ether are some of the people who are most heavily involved in the project and you have to wonder if they will look out for the best interests of the community of ethereum as a whole or if they will act in their own financial best interests and whether or not proof of stake will ever actually be a superior consensus model to proof of work, is still up in the air.
And this is where the question really starts to com in with this protocol if they choose to make these types of changes in scaling, why do we need a decentralized protocol if we are increasing the amount of data that's passing over the blockchain and completely reducing the ability to keep the blockchain decentralized and adding these huge completely off chain solutions to solve ethereum primary chain issues.
Why does Ethereum need to be on a blockchian to begin with? It's a question that needs to be asked.
And again we are running into the exact same problem where we are wondering why is the system decentralized to being with, if we are unable to make it scale and it has to become more centralized as it continues to get bigger and bigger, whereas ideally a system like this would get more and more decentralized as it continues to scale.
In one opinion, Ethereum is on it's way out the door and is set to be replaced by more robust protocols with a more developed scaling solution built from the ground up in mind.
You hear a lot of these people talking about, oh bitcoin is the myspace of internet, which is just first of all is completely ridiculous because bitcoin is the protocol which the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem is built upon. Ethereum is more like an application that will go away with time, it's life-cycle is coming to an end, unless Vitalik can find a way for people to cling to the proof of cat consensus model out of their love for their future companions.
