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Also what is certainly interesting is ethereums difficulty bomb, which should activate later this year. Certainly gives interesting image on ethereums development style, this was implemented to "force" the ethereum devs to implent PoS before it activates. However as far as I understand, the only thing that this forces ethereum devs to do is a hard fork that removes the difficulty bomb somewhere this year.

http://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-difficulty-bomb-smoke-no-f...

There is only one type of difficult bomb for Ethereum (the ice age), and that is already underway. As linked to in that article, block times would reach about 30 s mid-August (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5izcf5/lets_talk_...).

The difficulty bomb/ice age is _not_ to force the devs to implement PoS. The reason the ice age(s) exist is to make sure minority chains eventually die. Bitcoin does not have this problem as much, because the difficulty adjustment is much slower, which easily results in hour long (or more) block times for weeks/months for a minority chain. The difficulty adjustment on Ethereum is much faster, so minority chains that arise after a protocol upgrading hard/soft fork could hypothetically survive. To incentivize miners and users to switch to the new chain, there needs to be some other mechanism in place, which is the ice age. The ice age causes block times to keep rising exponentially on the old chain (if no action is taken), so miners will eventually lose their reward and users will not be able to make transactions anymore. They move to the new chain (which postponed the ice age), and eventually the cycle repeats itself.

This cycle has happened a few times already. Usually the fork would have already happened by now, so the impending Metropolis fork is different in that it's a bit late and the initial effects of the (ever worsening) ice age are felt.

IMO i think there are only a couple of long term solutions for ethereum with regard to scaling. Sharding is one. I think setting agreed markers and signatures at points in time is what they're going to be forced to do though. POS is a big big risk and i haven't heard a solution to those issues yet. Not even close.

I actually hope they figure it out. But they do have to do it quickly. For now we have PoV. Proof-of-Vitalik. That'll just have to do.

I am curious to know what types of "big big risk" POS presents. As far as I can tell, there are several POS cryptocurrencies today and they seem to work fine. The Ethereum team claims to modify their POS approach to avoid known issues like the 'nothing at stake' problem. But it would be interesting to know what other possible risks you're talking about.

They work fine if there's trust.

Non-proof-of-work consensus always ends up depending either on trusted third parties or majority vote. Anyone can create a valid-looking non-PoW chain in a short time, and there's no way to separate valid chains from each other. In Bitcoin, when you want to bootstrap, you connect to n nodes and if just a single node is honest you will get the right chain. For non-PoW, if there's disagreement, you have to trust either a majority on what the right chain is, or add trusted nodes that overrule a majority vote. For proof-of-work there will always be a chain with most work done, provided >50% of miners are honest (hard dependency).

I have written a bit longer on the subject here: https://runeksvendsen.github.io/blog/posts/2017-06-14-bitcoi...

>would have numbers on the scaling improvement column on the scaling efforts list. "3-10x" for ditching EVM for WASM which is at a concept phase, "2-8x" for parallel processing of transactions

Isn't allowing for more variance more honest?

One issue is that not even the devs[1] working on these challenges dare to make claims like "2x scaling". Because it's a ridiculous statement since "scaling" is not just TPS and it's a more complicated topic. The developers are still on design phase, they never said anything about #x'ing the TPS or anything.

It's really unfortunate that Ehrsam made such a horrible post. I'd rather have Vitalik or Vlad making a State of Scaling blog post than this propaganda to circulate among newcomers so they can support the price.

[1]: https://github.com/ewasm/design

The claim is not 2X, it's "2-8X", which is a far larger margin for error, and in my eyes, totally reasonable for a bird's eye analysis of Ethereum's scalability prospects.

I was using "2X" to take the least ridiculous scenario as an example.

It's guaranteed to be more than 2X. That's why the number forms the lower bound of the estimate.