This article has the ominous timeline I've been looking for:
"These core devs argue that at best, the current Ethereum mainnet can sustain growth for three more years. If some drastic breaking changes are not made before then to reduce the disk space burden, then Ethereum as we know it will not survive."
My personal opinion is Ethereum will not survive the hyper fragmentation of adoption efforts across a dizzying spectrum of alternative blockchains. It might not be so if there were a consolidation by commercial enterprises [Fortune 500, multinational corporations] toward one or a few core blockchains; of which Ethereum was chosen as the 'kernel' of the core blockchains.
Or, if Ethereum were transformed into a commercial offering; much like Redhat commercialized Linux; then it's OSS existence could potentially survive decay and sundown.
So, all layer 4 businesses [BxS operates at layer 4] have some tough choices to make.
- For example, we can't sign multiple year license agreements to deploy smart contract templates on Ethereum mainnet if it's going to sundown in 3 years. FYI: Ethereum mainnet is the default deployment target for BxS enterprise customers at the $1K, $5K level subscriptions. Otherwise we own a very nasty migration problem [hurts my head to think about how we would migrate customers blockchain transactions from Ethereum to a different blockchain].
- We also have to be very careful not to commit and legally agree to infinite timeline immutability via Ethereum mainnet. Again let's use an example. What if an insurance company licensed BxS to start building an immutable history of claims processing from which they would offer new insurance products based on this unique benefit? But then the benefit expires [or times out] after 3 years.
I've been thinking for a while that a meta layer that abstracts any hard coupling to a specific blockchain is the future state for this space. Anything less than this is a phase that shouldn’t be considered permanent or from which large scale adoption is based.
More later when the ETH dust settles.
To be clear: a version of Ethereum is commercially viable today - for example Microsoft's offering below:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-proof-of-authority-on-azure/
We just can't control for how long the community version [1.0] will be viable; which is what we were planning to deploy to for our $1K, $5K/yr customers.
Another direction the Ethereum community could take is to let big vendors like Microsoft fork from 1.0 and then the big vendors own maintenance and future development. This is basically what IBM did with Hyperledger. This also means there might never be a single source Ethereum. The Ethereum community could have three versions - 1.0 which is the current version, 1.X which is the basis of the article in this email thread, 2.0 which is the big fork the community has been planning but is delayed yet again - and the big vendors could have their own versions.
Enterprise customers are not going to tolerate this fragmentation; they will do what they always do and trust the big vendors with emerging technology. Which could then lead to a concentration of commercial enterprise blockchain transactions on a vendor's version of Ethereum and not on a community version of Ethereum. We'll make our bet with the big vendors, who are funded for maturing new technology platforms, and know how to attract the same enterprise customers we're going after.