Making Decisions on Ethereum

Think about the last decision you made. What factors did you consider? Your surroundings? Past experiences? Something you learned in school? Logic? Emotion?

Except for impulsive decisions, you most likely acted on some powerful combination of environmental, historical, and real time data. For the more consequential decisions in our lives (where to go to college, who to date, who to do business with), it’s wise to take into account as many meaningful inputs as possible. These inputs multiply as we grow older — we can marry information from our immediate surroundings with lessons we learned 15 years ago. Whether or not we attend to all these lifelong vectors and data points, we take comfort in the fact that they’re there.

Working with the blockchain should feel the same way. Just as we’re able to draw on an increasingly rich store of lessons and experiences, decision-making on the blockchain should improve as the network develops. Since its inception, the Ethereum blockchain has expanded in size (over 100,000 new users join the network daily), complexity (more than 700 tokens were launched in 2017 and more than 960 decentralized application are either live or in development), and memory (over 1 million transactions are processed per day).

Decisions we make on the network, especially as more meaningful applications launch, ought to incorporate the totality of the network’s experience to date — the whole picture, past and present. As the chain grows, however, one must ask: how accessible is this network information? And how effectively can we digest it? Can we quickly translate it into actionable insights? And how seamlessly can we look back in time and draw conclusions from past activity? Right now, the answer to these questions is “no,” or “not very.” Alethio is out to change all that.

Alethio and ETHStats: Lighting Up the Blockchain