1) They've conveniently ignored many crypto coins with high transaction levels
2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by just one system - https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c - A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide ownership.
Which coins with high transaction levels do you mean?
I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.
Lots to do and hard to find talented hands to work on things. But great overall - both on seeing adoption in real world use cases and development side.
As for the other question: once the network is more - next year?
>I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
but the title says "Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined". note "Digital Currencies", not "blockchain currencies".
Is it really a cryptocurrency though? It seems more like a paypal alternative (i.e. the ripple foundation can roll back any transaction at will and has done so in the past)
The difference is that the DAO hardfork was not done by the Ethereum Foundation. It was recommended by the Ethereum Foundation and the actually done by the vast majority of miners, in consensus.
No, seriously; which transactions were reversed? I'm unaware of any such thing occurring on the network.
The construction of the network/consensus protocol means that Ripple would have to get a majority of all validators on the majority of everyone's UNLs to lie to reverse a transaction. Ripple likely does not have such influence /or/ if they do, then you are free to select a larger UNL set, along with the rest of the community, such that they /do not/.
It is a Merkle DAG of transactions secured by cryptographic protocols. It very much is a blockchain -- it just doesn't use proof of work as a mechanism to exclude bad actors. The fact that it uses UNLs and consensus to achieve a consistent view of valid transactions does not make Ripple "not a blockchain" and, as XRP relies on cryptographic mechanisms to secure rights of ownership on that blockchain, XRP, the native Ripple asset, is by definition a cryptocurrency in the colloquial sense.
And transaction value is a very different thing from the number of transactions. In this case, that exchange system has been estimated to be doing about 10% of the total number of transactions, not 68%
BitShares and Steemit are both highly centralized. Their architecture is very similar to a traditional server client set up: they have a small number of trusted nodes, and non validating clients that depend on them.
And the transactions in Steemit at least are generally very low value, with 1-cent upvotes and article/comment entries making up the bulk of them. In comparison, the average value of an Ethereum transaction is $10,000.
Centralized or not, they are still digital currency, or crypto coins, both use a blockchain. The centralization is a moot point, you are picking at hairs.
The value of the transactions may differ, but at least the Steem transactions are more likely to be 'real', that is to say they are transferring value from one person to another. See my earlier comment about how a large proportion of ethereum 'value' is merely shuffling coins between different wallets of the same owners.
Sia does an estimated 100,000 transactions per day doing uploads and downloads via payment channels. Fully decentralized and trustless, yet because it's layer 2 these transactions are often overlooked.
Have you a source for that? I'd be interested in reading about it.
In any case, the end result is the same. There's a large amplification factor in ethereum transactions, since many transactions are just the shuffling of coins without any value actually changing hands.
I did a quick google and didn't find the article I was thinking of. But it's actually only 10% of transactions, which is the metric the OP's article is about, and 68% of transaction value. But if it's just the normal operation of exchanges I don't think we can really conclude that there's no value changing hands. If you transfer funds from one account on Coinbase to another on Kraken or whatever, there's a temporary address involved, just like the article is describing. And it's the same with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The article implies that there are more transactions going on than would be expected for an exchange with lots of user accounts. The first diagram suggests that there is a rotation of transactions, i.e. coins are churned through multiple addresses many times. That kind of thing is not needed to operate an exchange; you just need to gather money from deposits, send money to withdrawals (many exchanges fail at this point :) and shuffle the rest between a hot wallet and an offline store from time to time. In other words, the ethereum transactions are far in excess of what a typical exchange would need. A bitcoin exchange doing so many transactions would probably go bust from the fees alone!
(However, the story isn't crystal clear about what they mean by the 'rotation' of transactions. It says 'rotated 80 times' but I'm not sure if that means each input address goes through 80 transactions before going to an output.)
No, it's something called "privacy", which can be used towards good ends or bad ends... I don't want to live in a world where anyone who values privacy is immediately viewed as suspicious, where we say that "anyone who tries to maintain privacy must be a criminal"
Well, unfortunately you do live in one of those worlds, at least as far as the flow of money goes.
As we see with the adoption of credit and debit cards, mobile billing, and things like ApplePay, most people don't mind having their transactions recorded. Indeed, for a lot of people it's a benefit; I avoid paying with cash so that I can easily use things like Mint to have a better understanding of my spending.
Criminals, on the other hand, strongly value secrecy over convenience, and tracking money is one of the best ways to keep crime in check. So unless you find some way to eliminate crime, being secretive about money flows will always put you in company with criminals.
IMHO, lack of anti-crime controls was one of Bitcoin's biggest early mistakes. It was much worse for, say, buying a book online. But it was much better for crime, including digital extortion and fraud. It quickly picked up a taint that it's never really been able to shake. Let that be a lesson to startup founders everywhere: your early adopters can easily define your company.
Not necessarily true in the USA. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act#Affected_tran... for example. I can only imagine how suspiciously any normal bank would generally treat a customer that walks in and tries to withdraw, say $50,000 in cash, for example.
For small amounts of cash, it's not a problem. But any cash transaction over $10k must be reported. [1] (Structuring your transactions so as to sneak under the limit is illegal.) The same goes for traveling across a US border with over $10k in cash or cash equivalent.
Even under that level, though, some level of suspicion attaches to large wads of cash. I've had vendors ask for cash payment for things in the $1-5k range, and it was pretty clear to me that they had tax evasion in mind.
> ...being secretive about money flows will always put you in company with criminals.
It matters what is being kept secret from whom. I don't tell the general public about my finances. I do accurately tell the tax authorities what I am required to disclose, and I can back that up by accounting for all (material) transactions that I have made. This is what distinguishes me from money launderers.
It's perfectly reasonable to attempt to hide in a public blockchain while simultaneously maintaining private records and making the appropriate declarations to the authorities.
As you're not an authority, you will never see the legal side of it. But that doesn't put anyone in the company of criminals any more than the fact that you don't publish your finances online puts you in the company of criminals.
> It was much worse for, say, buying a book online. But it was much better for crime, including digital extortion and fraud. It quickly picked up a taint that it's never really been able to shake.
I would argue that it is the most useful cryptocurrency that attracts legitimate and criminal users alike. It's not a "taint" caused by a consequence of some criminal-friendly design. Any higher level of criminality is a direct consequence of being the most used cryptocurrency. If something else takes over, then the criminals will switch too.
I agree that some people have reasons for keeping blockchain transactions private. But criminals have much stronger reasons to keep them private.
The most useful cryptocurrency is not as broadly useful as other means of moving money around. So if it has advantages for criminals, criminals will use it disproportionately. Ransomware generally doesn't take Visa and Mastercard. The Silk Road was Bitcoin's most prominent early adopter. And the early Bitcoin market was also rife with scams, fraud, Ponzi schemes, and all manner of other criminal idiocy: https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-Contracts-e...
If you can work strong anti-crime controls into a digital currency while still maintaining privacy, I encourage you to do so. Otherwise, anything allowing secret movements of large sums of money will be hugely appealing to criminals, exactly as we saw with Bitcoin.
You must be a joy at parties. Although your last sentence is profound and intuitive advice for startups as a general rule, you must be pretty insufferable in person.
No. They would have to prove the source is from "unlawful activity". But knowing the creativity of the DOJ, I am sure they could come up with something.
"Whoever, knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity—"
It achieves a weaker level of privacy than cash's. Hiding transactions from the public at large is necessary, but not sufficient, to hide transactions from the government.
Wikipedia's article on money laundering states that in some countries obfuscating the sources of money is considered money laundering. This means that at least in some countries this fits precisely the definition of money laundering.
Forgive my ignorance but how does mixing achieve privacy? The blockchain is public, so you should be able to trace back ownership regardless of the number of addresses it's been through?
If X people send to an address and then the amount is distributed by a different number of outputs (for example 3 addresses for 1 person, 4 for another, etc) you can see how it can make hard to track down who has what.
A good distinction to make, 68% of the value is going through the mixers. I saw a calculation that it's only about 17% of the actual number of transactions.
Bitcoin was a good proof of concept, the true value will come from things like Ethereum and others.
Even thought the ICOs are in a clear bubble right now, the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one and could provide low friction VC funding for the next generation of Start Ups. Taking out rent seeking institutions like Private Equity banks, VCs and traditional banks will create a lot of value.
Ethereums first mover advantage for the ICO market will proof to be of a huge value in the race for the dominating world crypto currency.
...the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one...
Only if you ignore the very large risk of SEC enforcement, given that most ICOs are securities. (and claiming that ICO investments are 'donations', like some have tried, isn't going to cut it!)
just like the market corrected after Bitcoin hit
1$ the first time
10$ the first time
100$ the first time
1000$ the first time.
8000$ the first time.
Sure markets correct, but somehow the ride continued.
I love how Silicon Valley was ridiculing industries like print, brick and mortar commerce and old-media for not adopting to the new future technologies.
But now that something appeared that challenges SVs status quo, they do just the same and dismiss it.
I think this shows that legacy thinking is a psychological problem and not an IQ problem.
I find quite entertaining how you just generalized every company and individual in SV as dismissing crypto. There is no undenying VCs have always been a central part of SV, and tons of them are invested in blockchain companies, their are tons of blockchain startups in SF/SV and some big tech companies like Microsoft are also involved.
Couldn't agree more. Although to be more precise, ETH/ICOs are threatening the standard financing model proper in Silicon Valley, and not SV as a whole.
I basically see the future as being both really dystopic and utopic at the same time:
So (mostly rich) people will be able to invest their money without any friction, but this will destroy the rent-seeking institutions that weren't meant to exist in the first place
=> power to the geeks and the rich, but you won't be able to make any money by just making "deals".
"ETH/ICOs are threatening the standard financing model"
ICOs are challenging nothing.
ICOers are selling 'numbers' for real money - and the value of those 'numbers' is going to zero pretty quickly.
BTC will be around for a while, but these ICO-ers are selling nothing in return for real money, and that won't last. It will end soon.
Nobody has a 'lock' on the 'VC' model. Anyone can invest - including you. The issue relates mostly to regulations, which are there to protect you - and also actual ownership of assets, which is a pretty big deal.
Thwarting, undermining, and ultimately abolishing the violent habits of the heavy-handed and centralized state infrastructure is obviously a part of the vision for this tech.
In other words, it's not really production-ready until the SEC is unable to harass, intimidate, and target.
One of the things I have heard a lot nowadays in the blockchain scene is that people like to call it "utility tokens" trying get a pass from the SEC and CSA (who also recently ruled that ICO's tokens are securities)
I’ve had the same thought—what’s the value of a decentralized ledger when you can trade digital assets just as easily? Why use digital cash when you can pay for your coffee with your Tesla stock or your Linode credits or whatever.
But I’m not nearly as certain as you that a pure digital cash will have no value in that world. Yes, Ethereum’s practical value (as a token redeemable for computation) adds volume and provides a price floor, which could make it a more stable store of value. But it also places it in a competitive landscape with other tokens that can perform the same function.
Bitcoin is a pure finance play, which should make modeling it much easier, which should give it some unique appeal. Plus the first mover advantage is huge.
Even if BTC never works out its transaction rate issues, I think it could solidify as a simple, auditable, modelable store for large value transactions.
Sometimes adding features makes a product worse. Twitter was more than Blogger even though it ostensibly did less. In the same sense, I’m not convinced Bitcoin++ will beat Bitcoin.
I am very intrigued though. The “BTC is Friendster” hypothesis is an ok one.
No - selling a 'fantasy number' in exchange for real currency is not 'solid' model.
ICO's have been big recently because buyers were hoping to get in early on a pyramid-like scheme. (Yes, I know it's not quite pyramid), i.e. it's been hype.
Because ICO's offer no ownership of assets ... well ... in the long run they're not worth much.
And 'ownerhip of an economy' is not saying much if there is no economy.
Kik's Kin coins are down 80% and not only that - Kik has 900 Billion of the Kins they can dilute the 100 Billion in market with, meaning another 90% devaluation is coming.
And Kin's get you a share of what economy exactly? The 'Kik' economy? There is no Kik economy.
If you were around 20 years ago, or more like 25 years ago, you might remember any number of micro-payments platforms that are no nowhere to be seen. Believing that most of these ICO's will lead to failures is more akin to believing that most of those would fail than it is to having believed e-commerce overall was set to fail.
A lot of people will lose a lot of money, and some will come out of it with huge profits. The problem is we don't reliably know which will fail and which will succeed.
ICO sales took of this summer, early stage startups usually, so would be naive to think that most of them should be profitable already.
But here are a two.
Startup that issues you a Mastercard that is backed by your BTC, ETC. So you can shop at any store that accepts CCs, but never hold actual Fiat currencies.
You recieve tokens as a form of cashback for your CC revenue. And all tokenholder get a share of all the revenue that happens on all the TenX issued CCs.
https://www.tenx.tech/
Why does anyone think that anyone will be interested in buying 'Kin' tokens?
These tokens are magic numbers that someone made up.
You people are buying Monopoly money. Worse - Monopoly money is at least made of paper you could use for something possibly.
Kik's Kin tokens are way down, and they are not coming back up. Why on earth would they?
Billions of people around the world are going to start sinking all their money into thousands of fantasy tokens that have no use, and have no value? I don't think so.
Stellar (https://stellar.org) - is trying to solve real problems: low-cost cross-currency payments, micropayments, enabling mobile bank branches, mobile money and services for the underbanked. Their tooling for integration with FSPs is looking very good.
>Dismissing ICO in this early stage is equal to dismissing eCommerce 20years ago because someone got scammed buying something online.
no, that's dismissing the mechanism (buying stuff over the internet). the problem with ICOs is that they're essentially penny stocks, but worse (at least penny stocks are somewhat regulated). ability to raise funds anonymously + promise of riches + unregulated market = maximum potential for scams.
a more accurate description would be to dismiss online pyramid schemes (not saying all ICOs are pyramid schemes, but bare with me) because their offline counterpart is flawed, and doing it online doesn't address any of the issues.
I think your opposition is a political one.
I would argue that the free market will sort it out.
Sure people will get scammed a ton. But we can't ignore the insane liquidity that those types of fundraises allow.
This has huge overall benefits for the society, after the first few waves of mania settle down.
After a while some people will stay away from it, others will benefit.
We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
There are maybe guys in Israel, Ukraine, Singapore, Japan etc. that want to raise money with an ICO or that fund to fund an ICO with 100$ or 10000$.
I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
Your point that most ICOs so far were shitty companies actually shows how much potential this mechanism has. Serious founders with a track record will be able to raise billions this way.
>I think your opposition is a political one. I would argue that the free market will sort it out.
that seems like a liberterian cop-out, and it doesn't take into account that it takes time and energy to do due diligence, most people are naive and can't do due diligence, and there's a huge incentive for ICO founders to lie, which creates an asymmetry of information.
>We have a ton of high variance financial instruments on the market already, like options, and tons of people got burned. We kept the financial instruments because they were overall beneficial for price discovery and liquidity in the market. The people that got burned now stay away and we didn't need to ban anything.
at least with those instruments, you know what you were getting into. all of that goes out the window when it comes to unregulated securities, where the seller can outright lie to you.
>What I always notice is that those discussion tend to be very nationalistic, which means that its usually 95% of the world is excluded from the picture.
how? is it the mention of the SEC?
>I think the next silicon valley will be the jurisdiction that will offer the best legal structure to run serious ICOs. It will be a no-brainer for the founding teams to move to this jurisdictions. Just like many international startups setup offices in Silicon Valley to get better access to capital.
SV = in US = SEC jurisdiction. the ideal jurisdiction would be somewhere where banking privacy is high, and securities regulation is low. so probably a random Caribbean island.
>>that seems like a liberterian cop-out, and it doesn't take into account that it takes time and energy to do due diligence, most people are naive and can't do due diligence, and there's a huge incentive for ICO founders to lie, which creates an asymmetry of information.
People learn surprisingly quickly. A consumer base has a sort of collective wisdom that evolves as it gains experiences. Years ago, people would trust fly by night Bitcoin wallets that store the bitcoin client-side, and numerous scams and hacks cost people hundreds of thousands of bitcoin as a result.
Now everyone stays away, even new users, because only highly secure and reputable wallets that store cryptocurrency client side, or credible exchanges with cold-storage, are recommended on all major information portals, and everyone (including any likely first contact point for a new cryptocurrency user) strongly warns users to avoid storing their cryptocurrency on untrusted websites.
The main difference is that 20 years ago, eCommerce was actually good for pretty common use cases. 20 years ago today I'd already had 9 successful orders from Amazon totaling 38 books. I was hardly an early adopter; at that point Amazon had been going more than 2 years.
In contrast, I'd be willing to bet that the bulk of ICOs to date will in 10 years time be seen as failures.
Token sales using an immutable ledger that guarantees open access to third parties to trade digital assets, and a payment system that is open, censorship resistant and global, have advantages over the prior art. These two features combined reduce financial friction and provide a stable platform for the development of financial technology (e.g. decentralized exchanges like EtherDelta and OasisDEX, and token wallets like MyEtherWallet and Jibrel).
I don't get it. A company _is_ a fiction, too. And that fictional nature is very close to the surface in a startup. Especially when you add in vesting schedules, dilution, getting squeezed out, etc.
(For more established companies, their equity's value works more like bitcoin: they might still go bankrupt and be worthless in eg thirty years, but they are unlikely to totally crash in the next few months.)
Except that companies have real (and for bigcorp, relatively stable) value, and that you are entitled to a fraction of it's dividend payouts (if it pays out dividends)
I fail to see the value of "legit ico" vs. stocks..
The only real difference is the lack of oversight and "common rules" - both of which I value when I invest my own money...
Stock (or bonds for that matter) have a long and stable legal history and are mostly standardized and well understood. (Not that investing in them is easy, I primarily buy ETFs).
ICOs are more wild-west anything goes, which just opens up so many cans of worms IMHO.. And if/when it gets too big or to wild-west all financial bodies declares the securities and they are then under the exact same rules...
but not "company" like Apple or Google, more like "company" like an anonymous entity that have 0 revenue and can run away at any time with no recourse for you.
Anyone who has worked with ETH will tell you that it isn’t really designed as a currency.
A large chunk of the transactions are exchanged who must transfer deposits to other addresses.
This is a hack that everyone does because Ethereum doesn’t allow you to send from multiple addresses reliably.
Also tracking deposits from contracts is a nightmare. The nodes don’t work well at scale. Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
As someone who has worked with ETH, I tend to disagree. If there are issues with Ethereum, they mostly stem from it being ahead of other blockchains in terms of features. With that I mean that other blockchains don't have these issues because they don't offer the features in the first place.
Is it then a good idea to have these features at all if they introduce new risks? I believe so, they enable many interesting projects that are hard to develop on other blockchains. The growth of Ethereum is an attestation to this. As a consequence, many skilled developers are now creating solutions to the (relatively minor) remaining issues.
For bigger issues, like privacy and scalability, no-one has a good answer yet. The Ethereum community is working on promising solutions (Casper, Plasma, zkSNARKs, eWasm).
Ethereum doesn't use UTXO like Bitcoin, so there is no inherent need to spend from multiple accounts. If you still want to do so, it's easy to write some smart contracts that allow you to do this. I don't see the use-case though.
Optional, retrofitted checksums that aren't widely used? Also, I like how "rejects too short" is a column, implying that at some point there was Etherium software that didn't and that would just silently send youe coins into the void if you accidentally missed off a character when copy-pasting addresses.
If you aren't meant to type in ethereum addresses, why does all the ethereum software provide a textbox to let you type it in? Are they doing this to let you shoot yourself in the foot? Are they plain malicious or just extremely dumb?
While you may not know anyone who manually types in an address, there are plenty of stories about people who do (and make a typo) on reddit & other discussion boards.
Literally they could have just copied BTC and implemented base58check from the get go, it would take any competent programmer an hour or two tops. But it was too much work for the _MASTER PROGRAMMERS_ behind ethereum.
Not too much work to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, though. Ofc something so simple is an EIP.
>>Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
Contracts can be changed if they're made upgradeable. The execution environment is Turing Complete, so it's up to the developer to make contracts secure, upgradeable, etc.
Ethereum has a different blockchain design and ledger security properties than Bitcoin, an archival node is not required for a similar level of security (and is quite extraneous).
From Vitalik, on the link you shared:
> That chart is highly misleading. 300 GB is the size of a full archive node, which stores the history, present state and all historical states. The state itself is only ~1-2 GB and the history is ~10 GB. A pruned node would still store the full state and history, and so would be able to recompute any historical state if you really needed it, but it would only consume around 20 GB. If you only care about present state, you can go much lower.
>Ethereum has a different blockchain design and ledger security properties than Bitcoin, an archival node is not required for a similar level of security (and is quite extraneous).
doesn't bitcoin also have a feature similar to this? except bitcoin's pruned node takes ~3GB rather than etherum's 20GB.
> doesn't bitcoin also have a feature similar to this? except bitcoin's pruned node takes ~3GB rather than etherum's 20GB.
No, not in the same way. A pruned Bitcoin node loses validation/state that you can't reconstruct, it does not have the same security properties. See the links in my comment.
Yes, it is in the same way. In both cases you keep enough state to verify future transactions but not enough to rebuild up to the current state if it were to get corrupted. I don't see anything in your links that says otherwise.
The difference is that it's possible for new Etherium nodes to sync up using just the current state without having to trust the node they got it from or process the history, whereas new Bitcoin nodes have to either process the entire transaction history themselves or trust someone to give them a valid state copy. Also, pruned Bitcoin nodes are more analogous to Etherium nodes which only store the current state without any history (~1GB according to that link). I think the pruned nodes vbuterin talks about are roughly equivalent to unpruned Bitcoin nodes.
Nope, Ethereum fast sync has to trust that peers don't give it an invalid state (it checks that all it's peers have the same state, but that is much weaker protection). https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/1889
A 25 GB pruned Ethereum node is the same as a Bitcoin full node. A pruned Ethereum node is one that has pruned all intermediate states (the state refers to all account balances at a given block), which Bitcoin full nodes don't store (Bitcoin full nodes only keep a copy of the latest block's state, Ethereum full nodes keep a copy of every block's state).
So a pruned Ethereum node and a Bitcoin full node both have the entire transaction history and the current state.
For those who don't follow the markets, ETH just cleared its all-time-high of $420 about twenty minutes ago. This is a big deal because such numbers weren't seen since June.
This is really misleading. ETH may handle more than the top crypto m by market cap, but Steemit and Bitshares dwarf all of these combined by number of transactions.
Title: Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined
Digital currency does not require decentralization, not sure why you and others keep bringing this up. They aren't claiming to be the biggest decentralized, they're claiming to be the biggest digital currency period.
You may be correct from a strictly technical point of view but then "digital currency" becomes a meaningless term. After all, one could argue that USD is a "digital currency" as well, given that cash transactions are a minuscule part of all transactions.
Also, I can easily devise a "digital currency" which handles billions of tx/s...between address A and address B.
One could argue you can stretch any term to mean something and then it becomes meaningless. That doesn't make the argument valid.
In your case, you're wrong because Digital Currency means "Only Digital", where the form of exchange is of information not something physical. FIAT currencies are pretty much all excluded by definition.
Digital currency is the criteria THEY specified. When making vague hand wavey claims to your superiority, you should expect people to point out how silly it is to make vague hand wavey claims and how that usually means the claim is BS.
If they wanted to compare to decentralized blockchain based p2p currency then they should have said that. They didn't, so any digital currency that beats them in transactions proves them wrong.
Its really not that hard to make truthful statements. "We're the highest transaction decentralized digital currency on the market". One additional word to clarify and no one here is arguing this point.
You consider Ethereum to be decentralized? I don't see its governance structure being any different than neoliberal central banking. Hence Ethereum Classic.
Looking like ethereum is very mature technology these days, it's the companies and smart contracts that are built on ethereum that are a risk now, much like Bitcoin how we have centralization from having exchanges or wallets like coin base everyone uses.
Is there any way to know which transactions are for goods and services and which are for speculation? That is a necessary number to interpret this headline.
2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by just one system - https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c - A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide ownership.