Answering Vitalik Buterin's 7 Hard Questions For the Blockchain World Part 4: DApp Latency

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin put forward a series of open questions to the cryptocurrency community in a recent discussion with Mars Finance International WeChat group, postulating seven issues present within the blockchain ecosystem.

Erin's "Hard questions for any blockchain people" deal with some of the biggest obstacles between the current state of blockchain technology and widespread adoption, highlighting hashpower centralization, the lack of "Useful" large-scale apps, the high frequency of hacks, scalability and latency, issues with consensus methods, and the inefficiency of on-chain governance.

DApps operate with back-end code running on a decentralized network.

The benefits of DApps are obvious - imagine Uber without the need for a third party managing operations and taking a cut of profits or fees or social media platforms without centralized hosts mining user data.

The use cases of dApps are limitless - should property deeds be tokenized, it's possible to envision a world where listing, selling, or buying a home is managed by a simple smartphone dApps.

While dApps have great potential, development is still at a nascent stage.

There are currently about 1,700 DApps with most offering only novelty applications such as games, or gambling.

Compared to the 2.3 million iOS apps in existence, the dApps ecosystem is rudimentary.

There are a number of obstacles that prevent widespread dApps adoption, such as a lack of dApps developers, difficulty in monetization, and minimal network effects, but the core issue that dApps adoption faces today is scalability - specifically, blockchain latency.

The answer to Buterin's question is that dApps - at the current stage of blockchain development - can't work.