Ethereum: a shitcoin that returns to the “Drop to zero” plan?

During the virtual conference on Friday, October 19, the developers announced that the implementation of the Constantinople update of the Ethereum was postponed until the beginning of 2019. The team members, who originally planned to conduct hardfork in November, decided to postpone it since several bugs were found in the code running in the testnet.

Conference:

How big is the disaster?

It feels to be the right thing to do and the heading should be explained as you probably opened this article only because of it. Let’s go back to the whole story with Ethereum over the past few months:

• Ethereum was called as shitcoin and its price is estimated below $100
• The less-optimistic claim that ETH will go to zero
• Vitalik Buterin agrees that “Eth could have gone down to zero” but only “if the cryptocurrency stood in one place”

This was an awesome thing to see that Vitalik agreed on that. It was the brave action – to accept the blames. And it wasn’t easy to do for sure. This action calmed down the community as we realised that Ethereum developers know about this problem and are already working on this issue. My sympathy to Vitalik increased greatly after that and I’m sure, I’m not the only one with this. So, Constantinople update was supposed to be “the solution for all the problems” and we’ve waited for it. It was delayed a bit, but that seemed to be ok. No one is perfect.

Friday’s news about postponing the Constantinople till the end of January 2019 was like the lightning out of a blue sky.

What now?

“Ethereum is a shitcoin” confirmed? “Going to zero” plan is still active? How can we stay optimistic about that? How several bugs can be so huge that it will take three months to fix it?

Some may point to EOS that failed to launch the mainnet with the first attempt and postponing updates are some kind of the average practice for bitcoin. But we are talking not about decentralised – governed cryptocurrency as bitcoin where reaching the agreement is a huge pain in some areas of the network. We are talking about Ethereum, the “first after the king” cryptocurrency that’s being developed for a long (in crypto world) time with the group of the skilled developers that implement the update of the already running network.

Instead of pointing at EOS here, that actually fixed the bugs and launched the mainnet in much less than three months, by the way, let’s point to Monero. I tried to find such fails and my search wasn’t successful. If you remember any fail that Monero developers had while implementing the update of the network, please share in comments, that would be interesting to read. Oh, just keep in mind that Monero team has less than 30 developers involved, according to what I’ve found.

Optimistic part

Recalling the latest optimistic news about Ethereum, such as:

• Turbo-Geth that can greatly simplify the usage of Ethereum wallet
• new scalability solution that’s really revolutionary for the whole crypto world

we can hope that some of these awesome solutions for Ethereum will be implemented in the upcoming update. This will greatly increase the value and the usability of the network and Ethereum will be saved.

Let’s keep in mind that crypto world is the brave new world, and there are no ready solutions and every development team is going their own way being pioneers in that. They have to invent something new and tackle the problems with the solutions that would be tested by time.

I hope that Ethereum developers won’t postpone the Constantinople update anymore or there might appear the strong concern to rename it to Istanbul already.