Etherium and the Client Conundrum

Sometime in early February, having caught a pretty severe case of CryptoKitty fever (if you're infected as well, head over to my profile and see if anything catches your interest), I decided it was time for me to start learning more about Bitcoin's red-headed stepchild, Ethereum. As a software developer by trade the idea of combining the security and censorship-resistant permanence of Blockchain with a Turing-complete scripting language sounds like something that would be right up my alley. After spending a couple days reading up on Web3.js and Ethereum's JSON-RPC api, I decided that there had to be a better way to see your cat's hidden/recessive traits then plugging then into a google spreadsheet one cat at a time, so I began working on a secondary web interface that would allow me to search by recessive genes and automatically suggest ideal matches.

Since Etherscan and most of the other free API's will rate-limit your requests to just a handful a minute, I decided the first thing for me to do would be to install geth on a machine in my local network. I was a little surprised I waited this long - as a long-time Bitcoin node operator, I'm a huge believer in the value of being able to authoritatively verify your transactions without having to rely on a third party that I know next to nothing (or in most cases, absolutely nothing) about. Sure, back when I only had $100 worth of ETH Etherscan and MEW made sense. But now that I was buying ETH more often then BTC, plus was holding onto a couple digital cats that I am sure will be worth more than a Picasso in the not-so-distant future, trusting a centralized authority just wasn't going to cut it anymore.

Now that we're a few days away from May, I cannot believe that I'm still a little over 4 days behind the most recent block. In all fairness, I've started over a number of times - I wasted at least a month and a half trying to get geth to synch up before switching over to Parity, and there was a couple days where my computer shut down while I was out of town and unable to start the sync back up, but that doesn't change the fact that I still can't call eth_getLogs to find out which kitties were sold by who for how much - or for that matter whether or not the ETH I transfered into my wallet actually made it.

What's more is the fact that I'm nowhere near the only person with this experience - I've done quite a bit of research on how to get a sync to complete over the past few months, and according to the comments on github and other popular websites, there's more people out there who are still trying to catch up to the chain then there are who have it. But what blows me away most is the fact that the most accepted answer for this issue seems to be suggestions to hop onto etherscan and check to see what they say about any given transaction. Mind you, it's not just average users making this suggestion - I've even seen core Ethereum developers telling folk to stop getting bent out of shape and check with {name your centralized authority here}. What I really don't get is ho type of project,w a currency whose primary value proposition is to stop fooling around and "just go check on Etherscan". If this was any other project, I'm all about delegating whatever I can to the cloud. But when a currency's primary value proposition comes from the fact that anyone can setup a node and start verifying transactions on their own, without the need for a centralized authority, why are so many people on the ETH bandwagon so laissezfaire about the fact that we're only a handful of years into the experiment and it's already become next to impossible for your average user to validate anything on their own, is it really worth the 66.5 billion dollars people have sunk into it at this point?

Anyways, I'm done with my rant, but I'm interested to hear from some hard-core ETH fans what they feel about this. And yes, I know there are ways to speed up the sync process by only downloading a subset of the chain - but that again doesn't do me any good if my goal is to be able to go back to the beginning of cryptokitties and look through logs to determine who sold what for how much. Please tell me what you think in the comments section!

until next time,
Sean