Vitalik Buterin van Ethereum on the adoption of cryptocurrency

We cryptonerds are right in the middle of it and many of us do our best to convince the rest of the world of the usefulness and power of bitcoin, ether, blockchain and all that other beauty. Unfortunately, the reality is that cryptocurrency is not yet massively accepted. Cryptocurrency is only used to a limited extent as a form of currency, value storage or unit of account.

Scalability, number of transactions lagging behind

Vitalik Buterin, the twenty-five-year-old boss of Ethereum, recently spoke with the Canadian The Star about the adoption of cryptocurrency. He spoke extensively about what he thinks is necessary for cryptocurrency to succeed.

The Canadian-Russian programmer is one of the most respected individuals in the world of cryptocurrency. When he talks, people listen. He tells The Star that scalability remains one of the major problems. This hurdle must be overcome if crypto is to be used en masse.

He is not wrong. Bitcoin can only process seven transactions per second on the normal blockchain. There are already solutions for this, think of an extra layer around the blockchain on which the Lightning Network can run. But most bitcoin companies do little with Lightning and are therefore bound to seven transactions per second.

He’s a pioneer in the cryptocurrency world. The researcher, programmer and writer is known for his work in developing the Ethereum platform and associated digital currency Ether. @VitalikButerin spoke to the Star about his cryptocurrency journey: https://t.co/vT0Qag2vE8

– TorontoStar (@TorontoStar) August 19, 2019

Ethereum comes with Serenity

But in that respect Vitalik also has to put its hand in its own bosom. Although Ethereum can handle the double number of transactions of bitcoin, that is still not very much. Vitalik is aware of this, which is why his team is building a solution called Serenity. This brings many concepts together to achieve improved scalability. This includes techniques such as sharding, proof-of-stake, improvements to the virtual machine and a revision of the Merkle Tree. Vitalik: “The entire protocol is becoming more efficient and a whole series of small technical things is coming up that you have never heard of.”

Even more hordes

But we are not there yet to solve scalability. Buterin says there are also problems with usability, account security and privacy. And the most important question from Buterin: how do you turn technology into something that people will use? In other words, even though the technology is perfect (easy to use, safe, private, fast, decentralized, etc.) how do you ensure that the general public also benefits from this?