I remember reading a while back about how sharding wasn't going to be realistically achievable until proof of stake is implemented. Technically it would be possible, but the complexity of doing it on a proof of work system would be enormously higher, and likely not worth the effort for a crypto that is moving to staking anyway until after the switch. Maybe I was misinformed, but the jist was that splitting up nodes into shards in a way that distributes transactions relatively evenly and efficiently is difficult with the randomness and huge number of miners under proof of work, whereas things are a little more predictable under proof of stake.Damn, prices are dropping to the levels where I sold out. Doesn't make me feel any better though. I might have to take the miner rigs down in this keeps up.
@Feld, I have to say I am a little disappointed with how slowly they are moving on sharding. Buterin et al were trading banter earlier this year about how they had testnet-ready code that could get sharding implemented for 10k/s transactions "today", but nobody has even bothered trying it out yet. The LN project showed us how things can get out of hand quickly, so some caution is understandable, but . . . they need to do something to attract attention to the product, unless they just don't care that ETH value is dropping.
Maybe the EF and most "serious" Ethereum developers don't care about that.
Anyway, I just mean to say that I think it's Casper that's holding things back. Even though Casper itself will only increase capacity modestly, it's the last piece of the foundation needed before the true scaling projects can be expected to go live. At least as I understand it. Of course, Casper has been delayed significantly already. I hear you on that. But Ethereum is still way out in pole position with the Lion's share of developers, and I'd rather they take their time to do it right than have another DAO-like incident because that actually might threaten Ethereum's future. Though I do hope it comes pretty quickly.
Edit: I forgot to say, I do think Plasma doesn't rely on PoS, and supposedly OMG is on the verge of releasing their version of it. So the first step in scaling may actually come from that route. It just won't hit Visa+ levels of transaction capacity until sharding is also online.