For instance, with LN you have to be online to secure your funds, otherwise you might lose them.
L2 only inherits the security of L1 when it settles, which by definition is not that often (that's the whole point!).
The "whole point" of L2 is to reduce the amount of resources used to settle its transactions on L1. Some L2s, like Lightning Network, achieve this by settling infrequently. But other L2s, like roll-ups, achieve it by batching transactions in clever ways so that less L1 resources are used on a per-transaction basis.
It could write to L1 immediately, but your writes can still not be trusted or right.
https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/01/almost-everything-you-need-...
Look into Optimism and Arbitrum for current technology, or zkSync, Starknet, Polygon zkEVM for next gen L2's coming soon. There's a big list of all the current L2's and their tradeoffs at https://l2beat.com
I don't understand what we've gained here.
Besides that, your breakdown has other problems:
- None of these three criteria you presented are binary attributes. How decentralized and secure are BTC vs ETH? How performant is ETH vs BTC?
- One could easily argue that PoS is more decentralized than BTC ever will. The capital and resources to start a viable node on Ethereum is a lot lower than it is to get a sustaninable/profitable BTC miner.
ETH is centralized — power lies with the large coin holders.
That is not true. This shows a terrible misunderstanding of how PoS works.
Stakers are only rewarded in proportion to their stake. "Power" in PoS comes from being a validator node, which requires the minimum stake of 32 ETH. Having more ETH on a node does not give them any power. Yeah, whales could try to create many nodes, but they would need 66% of the nodes to even consider the possibility of blocking a transaction or making a double spend.
Because that would be news to me and if so I would be misunderstanding things.
But my bet is that you are dismissing the threat of whales splitting their holdings to maximize their influence. Don’t know why though.
Yes, that's exactly what I am saying. Not because of "crypto-magic", but because that is not how PoS works. Stakers have no control over the protocol. Their stake only gives them the benefit of validating and producing blocks and collecting rewards for it.
> But my bet is that you are dismissing the threat of whales splitting their holdings to maximize their influence. Don’t know why though.
You mean "joining their holdings", in order to achieve 2/3 of the staked capital?
If so, the threat is possible but incredibly stupid. There is more than 10M Ether locked in the staking contract. This means that they would have to control two-thirds of the tokens (that they do not have, which means that they will have to go to the market and shoot the price up). And even if they did get to collectively have that much, they would be willing to risk losing it all on an attack that (a) could be easily detected (b) would have to entail a single profitable operation that is more profitable than the current stake they are holding and (c) would lead to people losing faith in the ecosystem and consequently plunging the value of the token they have at stake and, worst of all, (d) if needed be, could still be remedied with an irregular state change like the DAO hack was.
IOW, even though such an attack is theoretically possible, in practice "malicious whales" could do nothing but bring a major inconvenience to the thousands of the developers, and they would have to spend ~$7B for it.
It costs currently over $10B to pull off this attack, and the rest of the network can do a fork and burn all your tokens as soon as they notice. So game theory wise it makes no sense.
Not forever.
> They can’t block certain protocol updates by continuing to use old/custom clients?
They could try, but if that was clearly against the interests of the rest of the community, the minority could counteract by adopting a client that forked the chain to a state where the majority holders are slashed.
> because the stake amount remained stable while validator count increased, it improved to 27 in Q2 and 31 in Q3. The improvement continues to put Solana above the industry average compared to other L1 networks.
https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q3-2022
Way more at:
https://youtu.be/5NDs3Il2J3Q?t=303
Re: Visa, Sol's hit peaks above Visa's global average of 7,500 TPS recently too.
Not boosting Sol, but if you're going to build, you should seriously consider it.
I’m happy to discuss reliability but it doesn’t appear we’re having a conversation.
> On 30 April and 1 May, 2022, Solana experienced major outages due to being taken offline by bots.[18] On 1 June, 2022 Solana reportedly[19] suffered another outage due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. On 1 October, 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a single misconfigured node.
In a properly decentralized system, how does 1 misconfigured node take down the entire system? That looks like a single point of failure to me, something decentralized systems aren’t supposed to have. Can you elaborate how your distinguishing reliability and centralization in the context of single node failures?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)
https://solana.com/news/09-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-...
That’s how software works. Things break. They particularly break at scale. Nobody’s done this before. If Eth was as busy it would break too.
A network falling over because of high usage or (in this case) one validator had a misconfigured node is extremely bad.
In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements.
If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.
From a certain angle, it could almost look as if said VCs were trying to add legitimacy to their portfolio investments by colluding to make Solana seem busier and safer than it really is...
> BTC = security, decentralization
The brilliant thing is that you can stack. In other words, why would I want every transaction to be on the blockchain? I could just as easily use one of the more than 50 2nd-layer "Lightning" wallets and seldom touch the layer 1 blockchain.
So with very little risk you get:
BTC = security, performance, decentralization.
I think some of the recent events around FTX and similar are exactly why you would want on-chain records, fees or not. Actors in this space are (imo) not fully trustworthy.
How does the second layer handle this?
Layer 2 = security, performance
Layer 1 = security, decentralization
Just because you added a horse to a cart doesn't make the cart neigh nor the horse to have wheels.
It doesn't have that much of a performance advantage over PoW, but that's what rollups and danksharding are for. Combined, they should support 100K tx/sec, while inheriting base-layer security properties.
BTC = security, decentralization
ETH PoW = security, decentralization
ETH PoS = security, performance
It also applies to real world tech. For example, Visa is performance and security.
This means if Bitcoin or ETH ever wants to process as many transactions as Visa, it'll slowly morph into a centralized Oracle database.