Fueri, what is the risk to a blockchain getting bogged down with tons of buggy smart contracts being uploaded by noobs like me? What is the risk of a blockchain being hacked, like a smart contract that self replicates itself i.e.
Scaling is a problem with any blockchain, as can be seen with Bitcoin's scaling problem
There are, however, differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum in the way changes are implemented.
Bitcoin utilized a change protocol whereby any given change has to be adopted by a certain percentage of miners (I think its 75%) before it takes place. Problem here is that as mining has become more concentrated across a fewer number of large scale mining operations, those people have too much say and in some cases hold so much of the percentage that they have a virtual veto over such changes. This has caused bitcoin to bog down in terms of doing something about its issue, as consensus is a great concept but in practice it's difficult.
Ethereum is different in that it has no such limitations. If the core group decides to do it, they do it. When Ethereum implemented a hard fork they let folks vote, and then went right ahead and did what they wanted to do despite overriding that vote.
And the Ethereum dev team has a plan for scaling. See here:
Ethereum's Creator Proves Blockchain Scaling Vision is No Joke - CoinDesk
In terms of hacking, the basis of the technology is it's security protocol. I'm not going to say it's unhackable, because who knows what tech comes out tomorrow that might make it possible, but it's pretty close. The only means I'm aware of is called a 51% attacks which is a situation that could occur if one mining group controlled more than 50% of the hashrate. this is purely hypothetical and most, if not all, major BTC mining pools have stated they will not deploy enough hashrate to mine >50% for this reason.
It is:
"51% attack refers to an attack on a
blockchain – usually
bitcoin's, for which such an attack is still hypothetical – by a group of
miners controlling more than 50% of the network's mining hashrate, or computing power. The attackers would be able to prevent new transactions from gaining confirmations, allowing them to halt payments between some or all users. They would also be able to reverse transactions that were completed while they were in control of the network, meaning they could
double-spend coins."
Read more:
51% Attack | Investopedia 51% Attack
to brute force a crack it would take an ubelievable amount of time and computing power to yield a single key, much less crack the entire network, which I'm not sure is even possible.
For those calculations on time and power see here
Time and energy required to brute-force a AES-256 encryption key. • r/theydidthemath
the security is quantum leaps beyond what we're using right now and is one element that has people so excited about this from corporations to the Defense Dept. people are jacked up in some cases solely based on the security element.
