EDCON 2019 Highlights: 8 Key Factors To Takeaway From Ethereum Core Developers

EDCON Highlights: 8 Things We Learned About Ethereum From Core Developers

EDCON (Community Ethereum Development Conference) has passed and there is some particularly worthy news from the core developers of Ethereum. A Q&A at the event was held with Vitalik Buterin, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Virgil Griffith and Danny Ryan answering questions related to the world's second most popular cryptocurrency.

This was a good way to hear directly from the core developers on where they see Ethereum going and what problems they are facing (along with potential solutions that they might have up their sleeves).

Impossible Is Nothing For These Devs

Proof-of-stake as a theoretical concept was impossible up until very recently. It was first proposed in 2011, but Buterin said that it only really became feasible in 2015 when he published his paper supporting the idea. That paper was still theoretical, and he says that it is a measure of how far this team of developers has come since then. The implementations of something once thought impossible has been slow, but steady. Most importantly, it has become possible.

Buterin also talked about oracles and stated that the problem is far from unsolvable in his eyes. They are a difficult problem, but just like proof-of-stake once being thought impossible, it was never good to think about how hard something is, rather how can it be overcome. Buterin thinks that Oracle has the potential to be a framework for the implementation of an oracle. Above all else, however, was that oracles needed to be secure, otherwise the data that was input would be invalid.

Buterin went on to talk about the situation with the governance of Ethereum. There have been some minor controversies and issues but nothing that had impacted the project in a major way. He qualifies the current governance as a success, and while he does admit that future issues might split the current consensus apart, there is nothing on the table right now. That means for the foreseeable future, and without any great changes in the overall ecosystem, the consensus will stay.

Regulation Still A Problem For Blockchain

The legality of smart contracts is still an issue and will be for some time. The regulatory world has only just gotten to grips with cryptocurrency. Various methods have been used around the world to try and control how companies that deal in cryptocurrencies and digital assets are treated. That same thought has not gone into the wider blockchain technology – and one big problem is that a smart contract, while immutable, is not recognized as such by law. The community is hoping that regulators can hurry up with introducing laws relevant to blockchain and not just dealing with cryptocurrencies.

This could also be an issue of marketing properly. There is no massive public knowledge of how useful smart contracts are. Danny Ryan has said that Ethereum marketing could improve drastically in the near future. He admitted that the core team could improve how they communicate with the community as a whole. There are community members who have taken an active role in communications for Ethereum, but the core team has been looking at alternative measures to market Ethereum better.

The team members were also quite vocal about any partnership with Sun and his TRON blockchain. While Sun did allude to a partnership with Ethereum members, only saying that Buterin wouldn't be involved, this has been refuted by other members of the core dev team. Griffith himself said, jokingly, that “if Justin Sun was a less compromised asset, I would love to have him as a chief marketing officer of Ethereum.”

Rivalries aside, Buterin then went on to say that the team was moving at a breakneck pace. The Ethereum Foundation does not have unlimited time as it does not have any revenue streams. They do have sizable capital to lean on, luckily, so the Foundation won't be closing down any time soon.

Buterin joked that eventually, the money will run out, the party will be over and they would all have to go out and find real jobs. The community hopes that that time is a long, long way off.

The final, and perhaps most important, talking point was the development of Dapps. Many on the team think that dapps have reached a tipping point. The hackathons that Ethereum has sponsored have shown the power of decentralized applications and while 2018 might not have been the best for dapps, 2019 has already proven to be completely different. More and more are being built, with greater uses than ever before. The future looks very promising for Dapps.