Fwiw, it's possible to sync to Ethereum in a few hours now. The features to enable that were added in 2021, before the merge.
If you want to sync an archive node instead, which contains all historical transactions verified from the beginning, that takes about a day and a half, but current work will bring that down to a few hours as well.
It used to take nearly 2 months, and the state was smaller then, so this is an interesting technical achievement because it's just the same data represented more efficiently.
When you consider how much work a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 could do in 2 months, is it still an interesting technical achievement, or is it an embarrassment?
The syncing bottlenecks were mostly storage performance bound, not CPU bound, so the Raspberry Pi thing is not as relevant as it may look to someone who doesn't know the difference.
The Etherium blockchain is roughly 1122.97 GB. Cool, how long would it take me to write all that data with an RPI4? Let's pick the ~20th fastest SSD listed, just so we ensure we don't have a ringer in the data: https://pibenchmarks.com/benchmark/53760/
Awesome, let's do some division. Let's pick the DD speed: 1122.97GB/174 MB/s = 1.79273627 hours. Hm, that can't be it.
The RPI4 could write the entire Eth blockchain in under 2 hours. Hmm. Well, maybe there's lots of data being added in a torrent at the end? That could be a real problem?
https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...
Looks like it's adding about 3GB a day. A rip roaring rate of 34.7222222 kBps.
Ok with the data in hand, this looks like a pathetic system and it doesn't look like a technical achievement. It looks like an embarrassment to me. Could you check my numbers?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-07/when-i...
"Some of them did securities offerings, but by the time the SEC noticed they were too entrenched and decentralized and it would have been a pain for the SEC to go after them. Ethereum, most notably, very very clearly did an ICO in 2014, raising about $18.3 million by selling ETH tokens. If they did that today, or in late 2017, the SEC would have some serious questions. But by the time the SEC got around to cracking down on ICOs in 2017, Ethereum was big and decentralized and the SEC would have had a hard time, practically and legally, challenging its 2014 ICO. And so everyone sort of grudgingly concedes that ETH is not a security."
Perhaps not the best solution, that can be argued, they can be used for nefarious purposes too, but there's definitely good engineering work in crypto field.
Where? I've seen a lot of bad engineering, especially in 'smart' contracts.
I thought all of those, including bitcoin, are just baits used by those conmen.
You need to have a pretty big brain tumor to believe there is any tech involved.