It is a good project though...A very elegant account model, Rust in action, engineering practices that make sense for becoming the fastest chain in the market...And then, SBF showed up and shit hit the fan.
> Indeed, a proof-of-stake protocol enjoys many of the benefits, in terms of efficiency, of permissioned protocols; moreover, while it is less centralized than a traditional permissioned protocol, it is not nearly as decentralized as a truly permissionless protocol, such as Bitcoin.
I hear this take often, but I have no idea why it would lead to less decentralization in practice. PoS means that someone needs to transfer you some of the native token before you can participate in consensus, but there's no practical way for a cabal of validators to stop someone from doing that if there's even one person with Eth willing to sell to you. That doesn't really seem different in practice from having to find someone willing to sell you a mining rig.
You could argue that PoW has natural attrition of validators because ASICS improve over time which gives more opportunity to enter the market, but that is secondary to the high validator requirements.
Solana validator hardware requirements are incredibly high compared to anything else I'm familiar with.
In additional to the Solana validator from my original comment I've also run Ethereum and Cardano validators (or rough equivalents). They use a fraction of the compute required by a Solana validator while providing similar rewards and network function.
Again, in terms of PoS chain validators the hardware requirements of Solana are significantly higher than any other PoS chain I'm aware of - it's not even close.
High validator requirements are a barrier to entry, but Solana has a Nakamoto coefficient (decentralization score) of about 30 (actually more, but this is a couple of months ago) which is more than most - probably all - fast chains.
https://youtu.be/5NDs3Il2J3Q?list=RDCMUC9AdQPUe4BdVJ8M9X7wxH...
Because it takes money to have enough ETH to be a validator and therefore, you centralize. It takes 20ETH to be a validator, and at the height of ETH valuation, that roughly translated to about $100k. Not everyone has that kind of money to stake. Plus, it is well know that majority of ETH or any crypto for that matter is held by a small group of people, which further pushes centralized operations.
[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/solana-cryptocurr...
But finance in general is many orders of magnitude more TPS than visa. Think about high frequency trading of derivatives of all sorts of things, and all the tiny arbitrages that can be done over all the exchanges when fees are cents. Those can easily multiply to thousands of TPS.
Solana has subsecond transaction processing so a validator being down for more than a second counts as a downtime whereas with Bitcoin a block taking two hours to mine is completely normal. Bitcoin doesn't have the concept of "downtime" only the concept of delaying the next block.
Rust doesn't stop bugs, it just helps you try reason about stuff and maybe catch them earlier.
Going forward their outages should occur less frequently since they've finally introduced a fee market akin to Ethereum's dynamic gas prices. With a dynamic fee market it will be more financially prohibitive to DDOS the chain.
There are, however, plenty of real projects backed by real money with real employees, open books, and have proven resilient over these handful of years. If the economy gets pumped full of fakeass USD causing stonks and crypto to triple up, I'm not going to be one to say "Yeah that value is so real". My fave stonk Square (SQ) (I refuse to call it block), has net me several boatloads of money since day 1, and now it's dropped to only a couple boatloads. Does that mean it's now bullshit? No. It means the economy has a mind of its own and let's not pretend it makes much sense. It's more powered by emotion and guessing than actual worth.
Citation needed, especially considering what’s been going on with BNB
Well for one “40x their output” is meaningless. Ideally stocks are valued at their expected net present value of future dividends; implicitly assuming it’s baked in for growth stocks.
Second, I don’t care at all what you think is overvalued. The question was “why was this thing valued without crypto fundamentals?” And the answer is because the market cares very little for those things.
K that's the topic of this conversation.
Bitcoin is used as a tool against French colonial CFA Franc in Africa. A a lifeline to access the outside financial world for citizens of countries under sanction.
https://iharare.com/african-countries-are-no-strangers-to-th...
That's a new one. Sure there are some crypto enthusiasts/ scammers (those are not necessarily the same people) trying to push some convoluted argument related to the CFA but this is super niche at best. And furthermore, if anyone would actually use crypto in the CFA area, it would be as a mean to circumvent the exchange control and acquire Euros/Dollars. That's not exactly fighting "colonial money", is it ?
A pyramid scheme only implies that the number of investors must keep growing.
The point an L2s is they are secured by Ethereum, not be their own consensus. They have an escape hatch so if they ever go down / disappear / attempt to steal all the money - then anyone can force a withdraw to Ethereum and be safe. If Solana goes down there's nothing you can do.
- 90% of crypto is still speculators who only care about cashing out before the collapse, if Solana lives only a few years that is fine by them.
I would expect breaches in many Solana projects just as I would in other blockchain projects but after looking at this more in both here [0] and here [1] it is more Ethereum projects that have shown to have these hacks for years (due to it being there longer than other projects).
I have not seen the overall blockchain(s) of Ethereum or Solana getting outright hacked at the core. But Polygon comes to mind as a highly centralized chain which got its whole chain breached [2] requiring the developers with access to the chain to force a silent update on validators.
That doesn't look 'decentralized' or 'secure' to me on the core level of a blockchain in the case of Polygon which another VC and FTX funded chain.
[0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com
[2] https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-t...
The slide #6 talks about the different things called account. You can easily translate it if you don't speak Spanish.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/ug70ft/are_there_a...
That's where my experimentation with the chain stopped.
Doesn't really strike me as a problem though, it just means the client has responsibility of opening a port. Considering the complication of adding 1000s of hole punching strategies in the protocol, it's a fine trade-off.
and
2) even in the case where UPnP fails and there is no inbound connectivity, bitcoind works and syncs fine with only outbound connections
Solana won't even sync behind nat.