Can Cosmos be bigger than Ethereum?
by hipster on 2019-03-14
Today for most humans is just another day. But historically this day is important because the Genesis of Cosmos Hub happens.
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Almost 4 years ago in a day of Ethereum Genesis, I wrote a post on its bright future. This accelerating future is happening right now.
Current post is not the comparison between Ethereum and Cosmos or Polkadot or other amazing p2p technology. Nor it is an overview of the technology. It is not speculation though. This post will be shorter thus more concise. Let me speak from my heart, and I will give you my personal story and impressions on the 5 years long (almost) silent development of the technology which I believe will be more impactful for the future of web than HTTP and HTML combined.
Story
It happens that I meet amazing humans before they impact the state of the world. The same was with Jae and Brain. I met those guys in Bucharest in February 2017.
Those time I were looking for more efficient consensus alternatives because lighting (not LN) hit my brain one month before: I realize that thanks to IPFS a better Google is finally possible. One piece was missing though: efficient consensus algo. I started a comparison of DPOS based chains as the most performant at that time and finally came to a Tendermint chat with a question on performance for a search engine. Guys in a chat answered me that it seems that 30k-40k tps is achievable under some setting. I was happy because that was clearly enough for PoC. I start to dig, and to the moment I met guys after one month I was already impressed by Tendermint developments not only because of the consensus engine. I saw that guys were thinking deeper.
It was February 22, 2017 when Kostya, me, Jae and Brain spent almost 2 hours on the discussion of the beast.
The resume was that cosmos based search engine is crazy but clean enough, and undoubtedly doable idea.
After the talk I made this selfie:
Looking into the past, I want to thank you guys for this talk. Because those talk gave me belief to work last two years on the cyber protocol and the power to spend on it (almost) all my money I earned on Ethereum :-)
Impressions
After two years of discovering the technology and launching a working network using it I have the following impressions:
- cosmos-sdk can be a bootstrap 2.0: you can build a planet-scale performant, sovereign and intelligent thing in minutes.
- tendermint is the cruelest consensus algo with cosmos hub slashing settings. It will suck all validator blood in the name of the liveness and safety of the network.
- inter-blockchain communication is essential but still missing piece of the stack. I cannot see a bright future without this piece.
- the architecture of consensus computers with a clear distinction of network, transaction and block protocols will rule them all.
- cosmos community is the most thoughtful, buidling and responsible in the industry, so I am happy to be a tinny particle of it.
Conclusion
How do you think if there exists a technology that makes an almighty Google just 7 kloc app using cosmos-sdk and tendermint how far we can go with it?
Let us work together on The Great Web and see what happens in the next 5 years ;-) But I will start to think on a crazy adventure to Jupiter and Saturn moons.