Goodbye Gas Fees
every.to
every.to
The low fees on Solana make it more prone to spam. The entire chain was down for 17 hours in September and has recently been facing some major congestion issues.
There's no silver bullet here and I think we should be honest about the capabilities and tradeoffs of each approach to scaling.
To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana. The same is true in some ways for Avalanche, but I think their current EVM-compatible C-chain means most developers will spend their time porting existing Solidity-based dApps, rather than build something new or novel. Look at Fantom and its DAG-based blockchain.
Having used Arbitrum, Boba, and Optimism, I can say that they're very fast and work very well. How they handle load as we scale up remains to be seen.
I still have to spend time with the zkRollup L2s; sad to see that StarkNet gets mentioned before Loopring. Polygon's investment into the space is interesting too.
To me, lower fees are irrelevant if there are no dApps to use, and low liquidity. I'm an avid user of a very promising dApp on Arbitrum that has done very well since launching in August. However, they're looking to launch on Avalanche now due to the low liquidity and uptake on Arbitrum.
What that also tells me is that momentum matters. And right now, Ethereum has got it. You won't be bridging your NFTs from Ethereum into Solana anytime soon. But on the L2s? Yeah, probably.
Good point. What are your thoughts on Cardano, Algorand and Tezos?
Interesting points about AVAX's C-chain and Fantom as well. I have a friend who did a project on Fantom due to lower gas fees and it also being EVM compatible, but yeah, it's using Solidity.
Also, just wondering, do you agree with this quote from the article?
> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. The goal for Etheruem is not to be the chain most consumers transact on. It’s to be the settlement layer for a number of other chains sitting on top of it, which can run much faster and much cheaper, because they’re backed by Ethereum’s security and infrastructure. In other words: the consensus layer for a variety of networks.
I'd also be curious to hear once you have time to look into zkRollup L2's.
I think the scariest thing that people think of and I originally thought when I heard Ethereum will scale with "Layer 2's" is you are sending your money to a blockchain you do not have the keys to do not actually control the funds. The layer 2 scaling solutions will seamlessly interoperate with the current dapps that will be ported over looking seemless for users. You are essentially holding your capital in a contract you can call on at anytime and retrieve to the settlement layer (Ethereum layer 1).
These are the trade off imo and do not make either system better. I just prefer decentralization if I'm holding capital on a blockchain for an extended period of time.
It also would be a fair comparison to compare what is existing today. So, please don't say that Ethereum 2.0 will be far more efficient. By that time Solana would have made great strides too. So, let's compare what is existing today. Ethereum 2.0 is being touted for several years and still not ready. We can compare Ethereum 2.0, when it's ready and there, but not now.
The problem with this you can't yourself verify what is happening on the chain, you have to trust that the node operators are acting in good faith and not censoring transactions or forming cartels to manipulate history.
This is ok if you only have a small amount of money or are using it for games or something that doesn't really matter. But it'll never be able to run the global financial system or store things of large value.
If most Solana validators run on AWS, then it is as centralized as the AWS datacenters. I think they have 50+ facilities now.
There is only one metric that matters and that's users on your platform. I like Solana and am somewhat neutral on Avalanche but they just dno't have the users, or developers or ecosystem that Eth has.
If they were truly better then they'd be winning. So far the users have voted with their dollars and developers have voted with their time and claimed Eth is better.
I hold alot of SOL, but atleast ETH is decentralized. SOL is very much centralized both in terms of ownership and in terms of nodes.
I mean, they managed to get all nodes to shutdown in a coordinated manner a month ago. I was fine shutting my node down but it was strange that all node owners could get together in a discord group and make that decisions in under an hour.
Solana is ok for now if you don't care about decentralization, but it barely handles more than a few thousand TPS without falling over or having degraded performance (as has happened twice in the last week!), and it can't scale much further with it's current structure.
A rollup centric system can scale to 14 million TPS by 2030 once a few core pieces of tech are released (see https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...) on similar hardware to what Ethereum is running today (raspberry Pi's of 2030)
Avalanche does seem promising. I like their concept of multiple chains: Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain) [1].
[1] https://docs.avax.network/learn/platform-overview/README/
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil...
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype...
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-meta...
And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable:
300% more is usually considered a good upgrade for most things (Apple is touting a whopping 20% speed increase on their latest iPad, for example). It's just that six years is a long time in this space and they've learned how to make things a lot faster since.
Over time this will all be abstracted away and typical users won't have to worry how it's all working underneath (unless they really want to).
Given that being the case, the general decentralization argument would be pointless. For the many users who need to be able to pay for their groceries quickly, you might as well use Solana then, since everyone needs to eat.
The whole point of Uniswap is to move away from these centralized exchanges. Perhaps using that has gotten more complicated to use or the swaps have also gotten too expensive even if it is on an L2; making that useless as well?
It's also quite easy to integrate with webapps.
Someone else can do that and then sell you the L2 token directly.
We're still very much in the early days of this though, having to move between chains manually. There are bridges that allow executing contracts on other networks, and eventually apps will abstract the different layers away from users using technology like this.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/981090555697405952
Count me among those not in the know!
I...really don't get it.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency. Then we realized that it's too slow and too energy-hungry for that. So we retcon'ed it into, it's a store of value!
Etherium was supposed to be a place for smart contracts. Then we realized it's too slow and gas-hungry for that. So...we retcon'ed it, too?
With optimistic rollups, there's a withdrawal delay so people have an opportunity to submit proof of fraud.
I'm old enough to remember it was always called "currency".
It seems it would be like if I compared the price of gasoline ($3.80/gallon here) to the price of water ($0.00018/gallon if I use a lot, 25% less if I use an ordinary amount) and said this shows that gasoline is way overpriced because they are both liquids.
What is the point of going back to centralized crypto exchanges once again, just to move, swap your cryptocurrencies and then bringing up the argument of decentralization? Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap were supposed to make it possible to get rid of the reliance on centralized exchanges. But even using that or similar decentralized exchanges, the gas fees are still high.
This post is enough to put off any cryptocurrency-skeptic who would be wondering if they can ever use Ethereum to pay for their groceries at the local supermarket.
I guess after reading the mentioned beta contraptions, multiple steps, still expensive gas fees and the coins and layers you need to know just to 'use it' gives the TL;DR of:
Nope, It is not ready and I cannot use it. So I will wait.before: ETH fees needs to be cheap (remember the bitcoin fees and eth wanted fees to belower?), now: ETH fees was meant to be high!
before: we need to get away from centralized exchanges for decentralization now: we need centralized exchanges
crazy.
that's ... not exactly an endorsement.
Is there is source where Vitalik states this? Is this was the case then why bother creating Eth2?
Also here's a more recent tweet from him in July 2020 that says the high gas fees are risking making Ethereum even LESS secure[2].
Also here's his response to someone mentioning his initial quote about 5 cents per transaction and accusing Vitalik that he has since become more accepting of higher transaction fees:
"Wait what? Why do you think half the ecosystem is working nonstop on rollups and eth2?"[3]
I think it's safe to assume that Vitalik does not share the opinion of the linked article that Ethereum is intended to have high fees or that it helps security by having those high fees.
[1]: https://youtu.be/unMnAVAGIp0
[2]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/128559311567235891...
[3]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/129789601746812928...
ETH2 is where Ethereum goes from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and as a result uses 99% less electricity.
The second phase of ETH2 is sharding where instead of Ethereum being one big chain it has one execution chain and 64 additional data shards. This makes it scale incredibly well when it's a settlement layer for rollups (up to 14 million TPS with 1024 shards - See https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...)
The researchers have floated the possibility of incorporating zkrollup tech into L1 eventually, but with the tech advancing so quickly it's hard to say whether it will ultimately make sense.
If you want cheap transactions, for actual cash-like usage rather than a "settlement layer", you need big blocks. It is not rocket science.
for example the uniswap contracts can be deployed on arbitrum. users can then swap coins on the arbitrum blockchain rather than ethereum and therefore save gas costs
For a miner, currently the latter is negligible. Increasing block size implies more storage space needed, which would push amateur miners out, making Bitcoin less decentralized than now[0]. Over time, the storage costs will become massive. This is why block sizes have stayed relatively low.
One reason I'm bearish on Bitcoin is that it's absurd that a one-time fee allows you to essentially have a permanent public billboard. For example, people have posted links to illegal content on the blockchain that is essentially unremovable[1].
> When the owner of a resume decides to create a blockchain resume, Rezi makes an encrypted record of: issuer, recipient, resume, date of creation. These pieces of data are encrypted right onto the blockchain. This means that every blockchain resume is incredibly secure.
Secure from what?
But for now, it does two things - ensures the resume has not been altered since created (think recruiter's incentives to do so) and serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful.
We're just launching, so let's see how it evolves over time
How often do recruiters actually modify your PDF resume after you submit it? Why would they do that when the company can just verify its contents on LinkedIn? Do you actually have any kind of data on this?
And if you're actually worried about rogue recruiters modifying your resume after you make it, why would you not sign your PDF?
>serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful.
Because it's on the blockchain it's not bullshit?
This is quite honestly one of the dumber product pitches I have heard in a while. It sounds like you just pulled a word out of the hat to figure out what to blockchainify next.
The feature comes from asking our users what they'd like to see improved on our existing software.
The topics of trust/authenticity have been left unexplored in relation to the resume. We'll gladly be the first.
And as to a promise that the resume is truthful - thats just your assurance, what does block chain have to do with that either?
Asking with genuine interest as we are in the HR space so often discussing these sort of things.
Whomever is responsible for hiring can instantly and independently verify the authenticity of the resume without the friction of communicating with the applicant.
> And as to a promise that the resume is truthful - thats just your assurance, what does block chain have to do with that either?
We've seen lying on the resume as a huge problem that we haven't been able to tackle. Perhaps making a record of this assurance will discourage job seekers from lying.
How does whoever is responsible for hiring know to look for it on the blockchain? I have a blockchain verified resume, the recruiter exports it to PDF and modifies it, and erases any words about the blockchain from that copy. If the hiring manager is going to go looking somewhere else to check if it's on the blockchain, they can already just look at my website or my LinkedIn.
Isn’t that sort of implied when someone gives you a resume?
Have you noticed a lot of job applicants saying things like “that pdf I gave you? Total bullshit, I made it all up. But this? This is real, because blockchain!”?
Also, do you even store the resume on the blockchain, or do you just store a url? If the latter, what happens when the original owner of the dns name sells it to someone else who replaces your “blockchain verified” resume with goatse?
Unfortunately lying on a resume remains a huge problem that has been left untouched. We've lead innovation in the space of resume software for the past couple of years now, so adding this download option is a step towards the solution.
The whole post reads extremely formulaic.
Repeat what what was just said -> "Unfortunately lying on a resume remains a huge problem that has been left untouched."
Made up claim of leadership in a non existent field -> "We've lead innovation in the space of resume software for the past couple of years now"
Future promise to keep attention, or claim of something new that is identical to old -> "so adding this download option is a step towards the solution"
= no
It would also allow the hiring manager to instantly and independently verify that the resume has not been altered by anyone accept you.
It does not verify claims of your experiences - that is a messier endeavor.
I don't know whether an employer can help me meet my own career goals, but an AI does? And somehow the blockchain factors into this? This is one of the more patronizing startups I've ever seen.
Blockchain verified resume is one of four download types along with PDF, DOCX, Drive. Not a huge component of the software by any stretch of the imagination.
The software is quite nice, no patronizing here.
Sadly I cannot tell if this entire subthread is actually a joke or not, but if it is, it's a pretty good one.