Prahasaurus wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 10:56 pm
SlowMovingInvestor wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 8:20 pm
txhill wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 8:04 pm
Ethereum behaves in many ways like stock in an AWS competitor. The Ethereum network is a platform on which apps can be deployed and used, and the act of using them requires spending ETH on transaction fees. Once Ethereum switches over to a proof of stake model (ETH 2.0), the transaction fees will be distributed to ETH holders who use their ETH to validate transactions. And even though it is in its infancy, Ethereum accounts for a huge amount of transactions and thus transaction fees--comparable to AWS in 2015.
The level of functionality in Ethereum is not remotely comparable to AWS in 2015, let alone AWS now. In terms of supporting live applications at reasonable throughput with reasonable latency, it's not comparable to AWS in 2012. Possibly not even comparable to AWS in 2010 although I didn't actually use AWS at that time. As for fees -- the amount of stuff that I could get done in AWS in 2012 (in terms of running servers with decent storage space, database/web servers, running time) for the fee required to complete a very simple transaction now in Ethereum, well it's a near laughable comparison.
Could Ethereum grow to become a major platform for running apps ? Maybe, but it's far from that now, and has some limitations that are hard to overcome while maintaining it's one advantage -- trustless consensus (which needs good use cases beyond speculation).
You are comparing a kangaroo to a sloth. Can sloths bounce at high speeds for hundreds of meters while carrying a baby? Can kangaroos climb?
AWS will never be the backbone to global finance, since nobody will trust Jeff Bezos to be a fair actor. With Ethereum, there is nobody you need to trust. Just the open source code. Visa or MasterCard have no need to "partner" with Jeff Bezos and hope he plays fair. The government of Uganda has no need to trust a US domiciled, centralized entity.
I was responding to a comment about how Ethereum is comparable to AWS, I personally would not have thought of comparing them. But the appropriate comparison might be comparing a highly versatile animal like a primate, which can do lots of things very well, to a sloth since Ethereum can really do only one thing better than AWS. Any cloud service is orders of magnitude better in terms of throughput, speed, functionality, as an application environment and vastly cheaper. The amount of functionality I can get on pretty much any cloud service for what it costs to run a simple transaction on Ethereum is very notable. [ Heck, I can get a decent amount of functionality from the free tier of any cloud service]
Even NetFlix which has Amazon Prime as a direct competitor uses AWS. But if you don't trust AWS, you can use Azure or GCP or Oracle or IBM cloud.
FWIW, I think Mastercard uses Azure.
Don't trust a megacorp ? Use a smaller cloud service like Linode (which is what I use personally) or Digital Ocean, half a dozen other cloud services, a federated cloud service (which can work across multiple clouds), or set up your own open source cloud stack. You're the government of India and don't want to rely on non-Indian cloud services ? Use an Indian domiciled cloud service (*) -- after all, why would you trust a largely non Indian network like Ethereum for a vital service? Countries don't outsource vital services willingly to the UN any more than they do to the US.
Could Ethereum overcome it's limitations ? Certainly ! But one should recognize these exist.
(*) I was curious enough to do a quick Google and I see there are lots of local cloud service providers in India besides local subsidiaries of the large US providers.