The whole blocksize debate is pretty strong evidence IMO that bitcoin's leadership is completely broken. They took what was a trivial to implement, obviously correct (in the sense of program correctness) fix: double the block limit. And turned it into two complicated solutions that do little to address the underlying issue.
It's hard to imagine a more clearcut example of exactly the sort of bad engineering practices that will doom any project.
Ethereum on the other hand has serious issues, but they seem fixable. If Vitalik is willing to seriously rethink the design of Solidity and make greater efforts towards formally verifiable contracts, and then they get proof of stake working, I think there's some chance it could actually achieve some of the hopes of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Unfortunately i'm not sure how willing they are to modify the language to make it more verifiable.
Ya. It's absolute silliness. Rushing in these complicated solutions just to avoid some half-baked slippery slope argument about the block size. You don't need to keep raising the block size forever, just do it until you have a good, clean solution to the scaling problem.
Agree about slippery slope. There has been so much misinformation and propaganda spread that some people are now convinced that a fork to change any consensus rule could lead to the change of any consensus rule - even the 21M coin cap. The result is that the community has become polarized and toxic over something that ought to be noncontroversial.
It's hard to imagine a more clearcut example of exactly the sort of bad engineering practices that will doom any project.
Ethereum on the other hand has serious issues, but they seem fixable. If Vitalik is willing to seriously rethink the design of Solidity and make greater efforts towards formally verifiable contracts, and then they get proof of stake working, I think there's some chance it could actually achieve some of the hopes of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Unfortunately i'm not sure how willing they are to modify the language to make it more verifiable.