MIT Technology Review Reading Notes

1. Worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are on track to rise nearly 3% in 2018.

2. China is in a slow pace to build nuclear reactor for electricity. If China’s nuclear ambitions wind down, it maybe by the nail in the coffin for the technology’s viability elsewhere. (Nail in the coffin: an event that causes the failure of something that already started to fail)

3. Three key terms of Ethereum 2.0:

   • Sharding: work by partitioning the blockchain’s data. Instead of storing and computing every smart contract, subsets of nodes would handle smaller pieces of the whole.
   • Plasma: let user transact with each other without always needing to go through the main blockchain. They can make agreement on a private, secure communications channel and use it to do things like exchange cryptocurrency or play a game. When they are done, they can add all the updates to the main blockchain in just a single transaction.
   • Casper: A more efficient consensus algorithm. (data: Ethereum can only handle about 15 transactions per second; Visa’s payment network handles an average of 2,000 card transactions per second and has teh capacity for ten of thousands.)