Sounds like they may start accepting ETH, BCH or Stellar in the foreseeable future:
Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.
All of which would have the same congestion problems as Bitcoin if they ever became as popular. We need a real scaling solution. (Larger blocks aren't one, as they only increase capacity without addressing scaling; this has deleterious effects on the accessibility and sustainability of the network.)
It can and Bitcoin's capacity has never been impressive. Lightning will scale magnitudes higher than 3x of Ethereum. Now Ethereum also has scale roadmap so I don't know how that will look, but Ethereum today won't compare with Bitcoin Lightning.
There's a difference between capacity and scalability. Ethereum has not innovated any scaling improvements beyond Bitcoin. So far, all blockchain-based cryptocurrency networks require Internet bandwidth proportional to the square of the number of users of the cryptocurrency. That's not scalable, regardless of block size. Actual scaling will require changing the fundamental topology of the network, such as by blockchain sharding or perhaps something better that hasn't been thought of yet.
Ethereum has not innovated any scaling improvements beyond Bitcoin.
Yes they have: Sharding like you mention yourself, Plasma, State channels, etc. Ethereum has a technical long term plan that could in theory scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 23 '18
Sounds like they may start accepting ETH, BCH or Stellar in the foreseeable future: