Vitalik Buterin, create of Ethereum, believes that after implementing improvements to the platform, it will have the ability to process 3,000 transactions per second. The upgrade to the platform has been dubbed the Istanbul update, and is set to release in December.
Back in 2014, Buterin released a list of what he observed as the most difficult problems in math, computer science and economics that the cryptocurrency environment had to face. He is now re-examining this list and assessing which of the items have progressed and which have remained static. His list ranges in topics with relation to economics, mathematics and computer science. Buterin has drawn attention to the effort put forward by the industry for the implementation of privacy measures and the creation of stable coins that maintain value.
After assessing each problem that was listed five years ago and rating its progress, he stated that some of these issues are ongoing currently, however there are also new problems that he believes are significant in 2019. See the list below for a glimpse into Buterin’s thoughts..
• Ongoing work on post-quantum cryptography: both hash-based as well as based on post-quantum-secure "structured" mathematical objects, eg. elliptic curve isogenies, lattices...
• Anti-collusion infrastructure: ongoing work and refinement of https://ethresear.ch/t/minimal-anti-collusion-infrastructure/5413, including adding privacy against the operator, adding multi-party computation in a maximally practical way, etc.
• Oracles: same as #16 above, but removing the emphasis on "success metrics" and focusing on the general "get real-world data" problem
• Homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation: ongoing improvements are still required for practicality
• Decentralized governance mechanisms: DAOs are cool, but current DAOs are still very primitive; we can do better
• More sources of public goods funding: the ideal is to charge for congestible resources inside of systems that have network effects (eg. transaction fees), but doing so in decentralized systems requires public legitimacy; hence this is a social problem along with the technical one of finding possible sources