It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Ethereum (ETH) has reached a serious milestone passing 1 million blocks mined by users in a bit more than half a year since the official launch of mining. This is possible thanks to the fast block times on the Ethereum network as compared to Bitcoin for example that is just approaching block 400000 for more than 5 years of existence. Looking at the file size of the Ethereum blockchain data files we see that they have already grown to reach about 8 GB which is already pretty big, tough it is just about 12% of the Bitcoin blockchain that is already getting close to 65 GB in size. Passing the 1 millionth mined block means that about 5 million of Ether coins have been mined by users so far, but since there have been 72 million already available prior the start of the mining the total coin supply is currently at about 77 million already. The 60 million of these coins were sold to users prior the official launch of the Ethereum network, and the rest 12 million of the initial 72 million coins were used for developers and contributors and a s along term reserve.
Currently 1 Ether coins is being traded for about about $4.8 USD bringing the total market capitalization of Ethereum with all available coins to about 371 million USD positioning it at the second crypto coin just after 6 billion USD Bitcoin market cap. Leaving market capitalization aside, looking at the 24 hour trading volumes alone we can see that Ethereum is doing about 18-19 million USD while Bitcoin is currently at about 66 million USD. So while the gap in total market capitalization is quite huge, Ethereum is not that far behind in terms of trading volumes at the moment, meaning that there is really a lot of interest in it. What we need to see is if this peak of interest in Ethereum is going to last temporary or it will be going even stronger in the feature… we are ready to go for the latter.
With Bitcoin’s blockchain data files already over 50 GB in size and Litecoin’s blockhcain size approaching 7 GB there are some concerns rising about the rapidly growing in size blockchain of Ethereum. While BTC and LTC are already a few years old and established and used crypto currencies, Ethereum is still fairly new and in just little over 3 and a half months the blockchain size has already reached 2.9 GB in size. Now, imagine what will happen in a few years of use with the adoption rate and numbers of transactions increasing… it could easily catch up to the size of the Bitcoin’s blockchain. In fact the amount of data that the blockchains of crypto currencies take is starting to become an issue for everyone that is running a full local node and things will get worse as crypto currencies will need more and more space to store the data on your hard drive. This will make online wallet services and light wallets more attractive, but we do still need a lot of full nodes running in order to secure the network of any crypto currency. So not only the matter about the block size for Bitcoin should be discussed, but also the matter about the total blockchain size and that goes for other crypto currencies as well. It is even more of an issue with crypto currencies such as Ethereum that have faster block times, making them generate more blocks in less time.
Source: 仮想通貨の次に流行るもの