# kaal:claim:3782198-039

**Claim.** Ethereum is Turing complete in theory but cannot practically match even a cheap smartphone, because everything stored on the blockchain must be stored redundantly on thousands of nodes forever, so decentralized smart contract computation is necessarily primitive compared with centralized Web 2.0 services.

**Type.** failure  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- applies to on chain computation and storage on general purpose blockchains

**Source quote.**

> However, Ethereum is not practically capable of mimicking the power of even the cheapest smartphone. The storage limit is currently extremely small, because anything stored in the blockchain needs to be stored redundantly on thousands of nodes for all time in the future.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, *Contemporary Decentralization* (2021), New tools: the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts, page 37

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Contemporary Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782198

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `e7e1378e3eed06cace6534e7792a7307d607d18bc6beb4ac45896476280728e4` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20and%20Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20Contemporary%20Decentralization.pdf

**Failure mode.** on-chain-capacity-ceiling  (family: scalability-and-throughput-limit)

**Topics.** smart-contracts

**Keywords.** ethereum, smart-contracts, storage-limits, scalability, redundancy

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.