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Background. Even though PoS solves the mining scalability problem, there are other scalability issues that limits Ethereum from replacing, say VISA:

  • The blockchain will grow many gigabytes per day, possibly even terabytes (depending on the size of each transaction). This means, in order to prove that your coin is legitimate, you will need many terabytes and it keeps getting worse over time. You may prune your local database, but in order to prove the legitimacy of your coin to a new comer, you'll have to give him those many terabytes.
  • The transactions are currently broadcasted globally. E.g. if I buy one coffee cup at the local store, the entire world hears about its transaction. We need to have some scalable transaction summarisation.

Questions. Does Ethereum have any plans to address such scalability problems? If so, what are the plans so far?

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I have no knowledge about their actual plans. But both of those problems can be easily solved.

Problem number 1: You can adapt the protocol to require only the last-year worth of transactions as proof, not the entire history of ETH.

Problem number 2: This could be solved by sharding (many chains that form one) For example, each country and its financial system could be its separate blockchain that updates globally only if there is a transaction between two such blockchains.

Those are ideas just from the top of my head, and I am far from an expert, so I doubt people who have created ETH couldn't come up with something even better.

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  • (1) How will you verify if a coin is not counterfeited if all you got is its transactions history since 1 year? Without tracing it to the genesis block, how can you know its legitimacy? (2) How do you decide which transactions go to which shard? How will this affect the security behind confirmations (e.g. a local shard may not have any PoW or PoS power to offer strong confirmations)?
    – caveman
    Mar 18, 2022 at 13:59
  • Your last point is a logical fallacy. You being a non-expert who gave an optimistic answer, doesn't mean that experts will give an even more optimistic answer; it could be the opposite: experts could give a much more pessimistic answer, as your ignorance made you overlook the difficulty of the task.
    – caveman
    Mar 18, 2022 at 16:28
  • (1)Well of course you can't do it on today's ETH. You would need to modify the protocol (that is the whole point). But I might try to explain it better with a drawing.
    – Sky
    Mar 20, 2022 at 8:29
  • (2). Not sure how to answer this. Sharding is already implemented in number of Blockchains, and its a well established concept (unlike my first answer). But Imagine if you have a shard for Germany vs shard for Poland. Even if you had to verify both of them for a transaction between countries, you would still save a lot of computing power as all transactions inside the Poland would not have to verify German transactions to be valid.
    – Sky
    Mar 20, 2022 at 8:34

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