While Ethereum launched in July 2015, bitcoin started the crypto revolution already in 2009. Despite its much shorter history, the size of Ethereum’s blockchain now has reached one terabyte, which already represents 60 percent of bitcoins ditto.
This has begun to show, and voices are now being heard that these symptoms may be the beginning of serious and intractable problems that in the long run might threaten the entire platform.
Managing a large blockchain is difficult as it requires large storage space. The system also risks being slow. In addition, according to the site Cryptovest, this has led to problems with archiving and synchronizing the blockchain. This could pose a threat to Ethereum’s security as the verification of transactions is complicated.
However, Ethereum’s creator, Vitalik Buterin, has called the concerns “seriously uninformed”, and he has explained, purely technically, why this lacks substance.
Ethereum has grown tremendously over the last year, and few people probably anticipated how fast the block size would increase. The future will tell if large blocks are generally problematic, but the debate about the suitability of large block size is indeed ongoing in the crypto world, perhaps mainly between supporters of bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH).
