The most 2017 sentence ever written, and I get to write it: trading of CARTOON CATS has congested the Ethereum network. CryptoKitties — collectible, breedable, blockchain-native cats — launched last week and immediately became the largest consumer of gas on the “world computer,” at points comprising 15-20%+ of ALL network traffic, backing up transactions globally and spiking fees for everyone trying to do, you know, finance. People have paid over $100,000 for a single virtual cat. The serious take hiding in the absurdity: this is the first ORGANIC consumer dapp product-market fit, and it instantly hit the scaling wall — Ethereum does ~15 transactions per second, total, planet-wide, and one viral toy saturated it (the whole chain is one hot partition, #086, by DESIGN). Every scaling roadmap conversation (sharding, layer-2, state channels) just got its forcing function, and its mascot. Thundering herds (drink) now come in kitten form.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, has gone from #119’s $8k to past $11k in a FORTNIGHT; Coinbase keeps hitting capacity errors at each new high (retail FOMO is a load pattern you can chart against price), and the futures launch looms. The mania has reached the phase where restraint reads as ignorance at parties. Hold my position (#110) and my approximately 0.1 nostalgia-coins I keep forgetting to sell.
TIL: gas auctions — Ethereum prices computation via open bidding, so congestion is a fee SPIKE, not a queue. Load shedding by wallet. Brutal, transparent, and honestly more honest than most of our backpressure strategies.