Starting Point
Cryptokitties, a new kitten trading game based on the Ethereum network, is clogging the Ethereum network.
Consequences
The number of transactions on the Ethereum network exploded in the last days.
If you want to make a transaction now, you have to pay the miners a bigger gas price, because otherwise your transaction will take days until some miner mines it.
What we can do
All we can and need to do is wait. This process is selfregulating:
The miners get now nearly 3x as much for each transaction they make. That means the can earn much more money, because the electricity price still is the same as before the Cryptokitties hype.
This means they will expand their capacities and hook up more mining gear onto the Ethereum network, or they will switch some of the other coin mining gear to mine Ethereum. Furthermore that means more mining power competes globally for the expensive transactions and the network can do more transactions per time.
The consequence will then be that the network will be less clogged and the GAS price will go down again.
And the network will work normally again.
Slowing factors
The price of Bitcoin sure is a fact that will slow down this process, because the miners can choose between Ethereum and Bitcoin, which is the higher the price, the more profitable to mine. This will prevent some of the miners from putting additional mining power into the Ethereum network, as they seek more profit in mining Bitcoin.
An outlook into the future of Ethereum
This whole network clogging is mostly a problem proof of work algorithms have. But there is already a fork announced for Ethereum. Ethereum will probably switch to proof of stake one day. But I think this is a discussion for another post.
Now I'd like to hear what YOU think. Write it in the comments.
Greetings
@freethoughts