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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a badly researched article.

> Notably, EIP-4488 is a "short-term" remedy for Ethereum's sky-high gas fees.

No, it would not be a remedy at all. The high gas fees wouldn't be reduced a lot by a reduction of the calldata gas cost.

> Arguably, the main update that is expected to solve Ethereum’s scalability issue is the shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.

Another bad take. Changing the consensus engine does nothing for gas fees. Sharding is expected to do that but that is not planned to be introduced in 2022.

What EIP-4488 would do is reduce the cost of Layer 2 (L2) solutions like rollups. Those need to commit their state hashes to the L1 blockchain. But those are currently somewhat expensive as well because of the high calldata gas cost.

EIP-4488 might help with gas fees indirectly if it encourages the usage of L2 solutions which will then have less gas costs to commit to L1.

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It would reduce the cost of rollup transactions by as much as 80%. And rollups are already 90-99% cheaper than L1, so I'd argue it provides a huge incentive to users and applications to migrate to L2, and helps relieve quite a bit of burden until sharding is released.

Are rollups generally expected to be 'native' to etherium, or orthogonal - but packaged in a way that becomes well-integrated with L1? Or said another way, it seems like there are L2 rollup 'providers' - are these 3rd party providers inherent in an L2 solution, or are they features that will be subsumed later by the parent protocol?

Those 3rd party L2 providers are inherent to Ethereum's scaling roadmap. No need to ossify them or integrate them tightly with the protocol layer, they can remain modular and in free market competition on the smart contract layer.

According to current roadmap, they will remain independent of core. This is partly because it allows for experimentation and competition and partly because different rollups may have unique features and tradeoffs. For example, one could imagine a privacy focused rollup or even a corporate rollup (maybe VISA could operate its own rollup) which might have additional requirements to participate. The tech is also very new at this stage, in particular with regards to zero knowledge rollups that operate on zkProofs. We don't really know what the limits of zk technology are, and it's best to allow for multiple competitors to experiment and try different approaches out.

The nice thing about rollups is that although they trade-off some centralization for scale, you can always escape hatch to layer 1 by posting a fraud proof of validity proof and your funds are secured by L1.

Eventually rollups will begin to decentralize themselves, as is the plan for some of the most promising rollups such as StarkNet and zkSync. Right now the sequencers and provers are operated by the founders of these organizations, but they will split these off into a federated network over the next year.

Yep Ethereum is all-in on Layer 2 Rollups. They are the official solution to gas-fees and scaling (transactions per second).

Can you elaborate on how this is implemented? I find the actual EIP language to be obtuse.

Are they changing how calldata is processed? or are they changing an ordering mechanism? or are they privileging calldata to have lower gas cost via a simple conditional statement? something else?

It's simply privileging calldata with lower gas (changing a constant) plus adding a cap on the maximum amount of calldata that can be in a given block to prevent crazy state bloat. It's effectively baking in L2s as something the protocol wants to encourage by giving them a "tax break". Note that the gas market is still in effect, so this is "tuning call data against the other costly aspects of ETH tx processing" rather than some "magic price reduction".

Yes, thats it!

Yup, they did a horrible job and it spreads more misconceptions.

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