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Comment by michaelmarkell | Hacker News Reader

As a dev, you build on mainnet because that’s where the liquidity is. Your project will get less trade volume on any other chain (even compared to an EVM compatible chain like polygon, where transaction times are faster and gas fees are lower.)

The story may be different on Solana but it’s not really my area of expertise. My guess is many ethereum devs haven’t moved to solana because of its lesser decentralization.

Anecdotally I know a lot of ethereum devs are excited about building on layer 2s like zksync / arbitrum but there’s a learning curve and relatively little liquidity there too

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Who cares about the liquidity if most users in the world can't even afford it? And it's unsuitable for a large array of applications?

L2s are like a last-ditch effort. If they are the main scaling mechanism, the chain is done.

L2s are the PayPals etc that make "the internet" (cryptocurrency) useful for "the normies" (later adopters).

zkEVM and Starknet liquidity sharing between dozens of L2s is what will end up changing the game.

Letting people provide liquidity to each other, all individually transacting with a decentralized app, such as buying a Disney Princess NFT, or notorizing a deed to a property, or trading a gun on a first person shooter on GameStop's network.

Exactly. This is admitting that Ethereum is not designed to scale at all for anything on-chain such that it needs half-baked "Layer 2" contraption like Polygon, zkEVM, zkSync, Optimism, etc to be remotely useful for people who are not millionaires wasting >$100k in fees to send $100.

Even so. If the service is not on a layer 2, then you have go through the bridging process of moving your ETH to and from layers which is more complicated than directly using a layer 1 blockchain.

These 'solutions' are telling everyone that Ethereum is never going to fix these issues and the duck-taped layer 2 contraptions are now making it even harder for 'normies' to just 'use it'.

It is designed to be secure at scale. Not much else is doing that over a long period, yet.

Which popular alternatives to ETH are /technically/ insecure according to you?

> L2s are the PayPals etc that make "the internet" (cryptocurrency) useful for "the normies" (later adopters).

That's a lie people tell themselves to justify Ethereum's platform.

The reality is that I can build scalable L1 dapps on Algorand that "normal" users can use at extremely low cost.

The cost of having nobody else on the network your app is using is arguably pretty high.

That's a good argument if you're a short-sighted business looking for short term profits.

As a dev however, that sounds foolish to me.

Also, chains like Algorand or Cosmos don't have "nobody else on the network".

To the multiplier that is ETH numbers in comparison? Effectively nobody.

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