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I’m so glad people are catching on! Polygon is two separate products, masquerading as union advertised as an Ethereum layer 2 The two products are 1) a compl

I’m so glad people are catching on! Polygon is two separate products, masquerading as union advertised as an Ethereum layer 2 The two products are 1) a completely independent and separate proof of stake blockchain with validators, and a cron job that stores the network state hash on the Ethereum blockchain for shits and giggles. This is the only product anybody uses. 2) The Plasma system. Which would sometimes maybe be an Ethereum layer 2. Its fairly pointless. The first product competes with other EVMs (Ethereum virtual machines) such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Ethereum testnet. Somehow people have been swayed to believing the identical BSC is centralized while Polygon is a decentralized layer 2 solution. Oh by the way, if you are new here, people want an Ethereum layer 2 solution. Polygon isnt it. It is not a layer 2 solution it is a separate blockchain. Why is this important? Its kind of not. Congratulations on being USD billionares in India guys!

inter_netuser 5y ago
why do people want an eth l2 solution? the success of BSC seems to show otherwise?
- vmception 5y ago
  They want the security and finality of Ethereum’s consensus model. BSC is showing that the permissionless deployment model has utility to the market, whether it is centralized or not. People want to deploy contracts and create liquidity, the same ones that work on ethereum work there. It’s no different than shopify launching an app marketplace, people don’t care that’s its centralized it wasn’t even a factor.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    BSC gets its credibility from being backed by the largest crypto exchange in the world. But even then, it's far less trusted for long term storage of digital assets than Ethereum mainnet. But I do agree that BSC, and to a lesser extent HEC, show the market places a premium on permissionless-ness and composability, even in the absence of a decentralized consensus process. It's simply more convenient to use MetaMask to interact with exchange-native assets than an exchange-specific username/password. But I think all of that just solidifies Ethereum mainnet's utility as the root settlement layer.
  - yourabstraction 5y ago
    I've been saying for a while now, that decentralization is an implementation detail, which makes cryptos robust to attack from various parties. But the main thing driving adoption and innovation is permissionless usage and innovation. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world can use or create open financial systems. That's an insanely powerful concept that has never existed before. That said, survival of the fittest will dictate that the most decentralized systems are still around for the long term.
- w_TF 5y ago
  BSC was successful because it allowed users of Binance to withdraw assets from the exchange directly to their chain, and because it was the first major EVM compatible network to spring up with low fees. The problem with it is that it's too centralized, most of the projects deployed on it are trash versions of Eth dapps that get exploited constantly, and their shitty geth clone keeps breaking. Users are not loyal to chains and will go wherever money is to be made, for a while that place was BSC but for now it's Polygon due to massive liquidity incentives to lure users over on AAVE and other well established dapps becoming multi-chain. But still, all the most innovative projects are Ethereum-based and that's where all the best people in this space are building.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > it allowed users of Binance to withdraw assets from the exchange directly to their chain A factor, sure > it was the first major EVM compatible network to spring up with low fees. so we are just going to ignore Tron? but its kind of hilarious that Tron tried for years to be considered not an Eth clone "we're totally differen't, not a 100% compatible EVM" and now the market only wants Eth clones and barely anybody knows Tron is one > shitty geth clone keeps breaking yep. pretty much all the "high tps" EVMs have an issue with the node software, it is very strange. barely anybody is even bothering to work on this layer. I know some coders and arbitragers that modify the geth software themselves so that it is parsing less data and more efficiently, so they can snipe transactions for frontrunning, but they don't share it.
- puranjay 5y ago
  BSC’s only success was in enabling newer and higher tiers of scams Its not called Binance Scam Chain for nothing
  - vmception 5y ago
    Their problem is that people believe its more centralized than other DPOS blockchains (its not), and then believing that Binance is paying enough attention to reverse transactions after large scams (they aren't and people use bridges fast enough to make sure they keep the funds) The same scams happen on all the other EVMs
- cinquemb 5y ago
  Yeah, I think people want a better l1 from a variety of perspectives (some may be in conflict with other perspectives people think should exist), not necessarily a l2, which really only even exist because of eth limitations, which has a whole bunch of other tradeoffs people hardly mention (like cross chain settlement risk within the same[bridged] asset being introduced with the roll ups). I know only one evm compatible l1 (avalanche c-chain) that's better from a consensus perspective (not nakamoto), decentralization (#of validator nodes that actually participate relative to stake) and time to finality. wrt decentralization, lots people ignore all the choke points in the eth/polygon model (infura, nakamoto consensus, local vs cloud run nodes [people like to handwave this in the avalanche discord as well and focus purely on stake distribution…]) which must not be ignored, esp when considering PoS.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Could you say more about "local vs. cloud run nodes"? I get the sense you think local nodes are better, but I'm curious what you think the trade offs are.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      I don't necessarily think cloud run nodes are worse per se, I just think the crowding that happens when people run on a few big (aws, google, ovh, hostgator, etc) cloud providers is bad for decentralization and makes it easier for well resourced actors to easily compromise the network if they can compromise the big providers (legally à la 5eyes, and/or technically with server/node vulns) and modify the chain state of nodes with enough stake to make the modifications pass consensus (and potentially make non compromised nodes byzantine, unless they update to compromised nodes states). I think part of this tradeoff has been made because for a couple years with no real competitors to the evm (probably because from early on, most people seemed not to care for smart contracts, so the jury was very much out on it for some, compared to just forking btc) combined with peoples acceptance of pooling with PoW systems, most have become resigned and decided that the capabilities needed to run a node for a evm compatible chain will need to be delegated to the cloud providers (and even though newer consensus algos are out, people might still make this tradeoff to deal with the not quite answered state space issues being worked out/researched now).
CryptoPunk 5y ago
The staked MATIC coins for the PoS chain reside on Ethereum mainnet, so the PoS chain is dependent on Ethereum mainnet to run its consensus protocol. Source: https://kriptomat.io/polygon/ https://kriptomat.io/polygon/ >>Where do staked tokens reside? >>Staked tokens are locked in a smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Validators do not hold the actual custody of the tokens delegated to them.
- vmception 5y ago
  for no reason in particular except for shits and giggles in the best case, incompetence because their blockchain wasn't ready yet and they never could change the staking model afterwards in the worst case the distinction people care about is whether transaction finality depends on Ethereum or not. it doesn't. validators merely activate their status as a node by doing a random assortment of things, which in this case happens to include moving assets on the Ethereum network. that's it. the part about delegation is irrelevant.
murbard2 5y ago
In its relationship to Ethereum it's not fundamentally different from that of Tron. It uses the EVM, it has a bridge for Ethereum assets... The difference is that one is marketed as a replacement for Ethereum while the other is marketed as complimentary but behind this veneer they're both essentially direct competitors. It's hilarious how many people in the Ethereum community who would otherwise jump at the throat of any competitor keep falling for this trick ("hard spoon!", "sister network!").
- nootropicat 5y ago
  Is it really a trick? Crypto is overwhelmingly about narratives. Currently adoption only matters as a way to market the token. Imagine that ethereum wins, and the global economy runs mostly on rollups on eth2 shards. How much is that worth on a PE basis? Let's assume $100M in daily fees. At PE of 20 that gives a nice valuation of $730B - or about $6300 per eth. Maybe 60x - premium for being the only big yield asset that doesn't rely on law to enforce property rights (ie. eth replaces offshore banking). This means eth is already priced for success. The alternative is worse for everyone in crypto, because if the long-term future is multi-chain (ie. pushed out usecases don't go back to ethereum once it's scalable enough, and activity spreads everywhere looking for low fees) then the whole space has almost no ability to extract rent. That would mean the stable fee level is some small margin over actual running costs. Which means total crypto market cap <$10B. Bitcoin, of course, has no fundamental value at all - all it does is make btc buyers poorer because of mining, as a group. Yet it's still the largest crypto. Why? Because it's all about narratives to make people buy the token, thinking they are going to sell it higher to other people that buy for the same reason. Back to matic - what this means in practice is if the project successfully markets itself as a 'small helper' to ethereum, it's going to be valued like that. Eventually, the narrative premium is likely to disappear, and I think at that point either ethereum is valued at 1T-2T in today's dollars, or crypto as a whole collapses >100x. The latter would completely destroy PoW security and make PoS questionable. Is a chain safe if coordinating validators can make 10x by stealing pegged funds even at the cost of destroying their stake? Simple game theory says no, but in practice it may work because stealing is illegal and most validators aren't anonymous - ie. de facto law-based consensus.

inter_netuser 5y ago

why do people want an eth l2 solution? the success of BSC seems to show otherwise?

vmception 5y ago
They want the security and finality of Ethereum’s consensus model. BSC is showing that the permissionless deployment model has utility to the market, whether it is centralized or not. People want to deploy contracts and create liquidity, the same ones that work on ethereum work there. It’s no different than shopify launching an app marketplace, people don’t care that’s its centralized it wasn’t even a factor.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  BSC gets its credibility from being backed by the largest crypto exchange in the world. But even then, it's far less trusted for long term storage of digital assets than Ethereum mainnet. But I do agree that BSC, and to a lesser extent HEC, show the market places a premium on permissionless-ness and composability, even in the absence of a decentralized consensus process. It's simply more convenient to use MetaMask to interact with exchange-native assets than an exchange-specific username/password. But I think all of that just solidifies Ethereum mainnet's utility as the root settlement layer.
- yourabstraction 5y ago
  I've been saying for a while now, that decentralization is an implementation detail, which makes cryptos robust to attack from various parties. But the main thing driving adoption and innovation is permissionless usage and innovation. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world can use or create open financial systems. That's an insanely powerful concept that has never existed before. That said, survival of the fittest will dictate that the most decentralized systems are still around for the long term.
w_TF 5y ago
BSC was successful because it allowed users of Binance to withdraw assets from the exchange directly to their chain, and because it was the first major EVM compatible network to spring up with low fees. The problem with it is that it's too centralized, most of the projects deployed on it are trash versions of Eth dapps that get exploited constantly, and their shitty geth clone keeps breaking. Users are not loyal to chains and will go wherever money is to be made, for a while that place was BSC but for now it's Polygon due to massive liquidity incentives to lure users over on AAVE and other well established dapps becoming multi-chain. But still, all the most innovative projects are Ethereum-based and that's where all the best people in this space are building.
- vmception 5y ago
  > it allowed users of Binance to withdraw assets from the exchange directly to their chain A factor, sure > it was the first major EVM compatible network to spring up with low fees. so we are just going to ignore Tron? but its kind of hilarious that Tron tried for years to be considered not an Eth clone "we're totally differen't, not a 100% compatible EVM" and now the market only wants Eth clones and barely anybody knows Tron is one > shitty geth clone keeps breaking yep. pretty much all the "high tps" EVMs have an issue with the node software, it is very strange. barely anybody is even bothering to work on this layer. I know some coders and arbitragers that modify the geth software themselves so that it is parsing less data and more efficiently, so they can snipe transactions for frontrunning, but they don't share it.
puranjay 5y ago
BSC’s only success was in enabling newer and higher tiers of scams Its not called Binance Scam Chain for nothing
- vmception 5y ago
  Their problem is that people believe its more centralized than other DPOS blockchains (its not), and then believing that Binance is paying enough attention to reverse transactions after large scams (they aren't and people use bridges fast enough to make sure they keep the funds) The same scams happen on all the other EVMs
cinquemb 5y ago
Yeah, I think people want a better l1 from a variety of perspectives (some may be in conflict with other perspectives people think should exist), not necessarily a l2, which really only even exist because of eth limitations, which has a whole bunch of other tradeoffs people hardly mention (like cross chain settlement risk within the same[bridged] asset being introduced with the roll ups). I know only one evm compatible l1 (avalanche c-chain) that's better from a consensus perspective (not nakamoto), decentralization (#of validator nodes that actually participate relative to stake) and time to finality. wrt decentralization, lots people ignore all the choke points in the eth/polygon model (infura, nakamoto consensus, local vs cloud run nodes [people like to handwave this in the avalanche discord as well and focus purely on stake distribution…]) which must not be ignored, esp when considering PoS.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Could you say more about "local vs. cloud run nodes"? I get the sense you think local nodes are better, but I'm curious what you think the trade offs are.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    I don't necessarily think cloud run nodes are worse per se, I just think the crowding that happens when people run on a few big (aws, google, ovh, hostgator, etc) cloud providers is bad for decentralization and makes it easier for well resourced actors to easily compromise the network if they can compromise the big providers (legally à la 5eyes, and/or technically with server/node vulns) and modify the chain state of nodes with enough stake to make the modifications pass consensus (and potentially make non compromised nodes byzantine, unless they update to compromised nodes states). I think part of this tradeoff has been made because for a couple years with no real competitors to the evm (probably because from early on, most people seemed not to care for smart contracts, so the jury was very much out on it for some, compared to just forking btc) combined with peoples acceptance of pooling with PoW systems, most have become resigned and decided that the capabilities needed to run a node for a evm compatible chain will need to be delegated to the cloud providers (and even though newer consensus algos are out, people might still make this tradeoff to deal with the not quite answered state space issues being worked out/researched now).

CryptoPunk 5y ago

The staked MATIC coins for the PoS chain reside on Ethereum mainnet, so the PoS chain is dependent on Ethereum mainnet to run its consensus protocol. Source: https://kriptomat.io/polygon/ https://kriptomat.io/polygon/ >>Where do staked tokens reside? >>Staked tokens are locked in a smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Validators do not hold the actual custody of the tokens delegated to them.

vmception 5y ago
for no reason in particular except for shits and giggles in the best case, incompetence because their blockchain wasn't ready yet and they never could change the staking model afterwards in the worst case the distinction people care about is whether transaction finality depends on Ethereum or not. it doesn't. validators merely activate their status as a node by doing a random assortment of things, which in this case happens to include moving assets on the Ethereum network. that's it. the part about delegation is irrelevant.

murbard2 5y ago

In its relationship to Ethereum it's not fundamentally different from that of Tron. It uses the EVM, it has a bridge for Ethereum assets... The difference is that one is marketed as a replacement for Ethereum while the other is marketed as complimentary but behind this veneer they're both essentially direct competitors. It's hilarious how many people in the Ethereum community who would otherwise jump at the throat of any competitor keep falling for this trick ("hard spoon!", "sister network!").

nootropicat 5y ago
Is it really a trick? Crypto is overwhelmingly about narratives. Currently adoption only matters as a way to market the token. Imagine that ethereum wins, and the global economy runs mostly on rollups on eth2 shards. How much is that worth on a PE basis? Let's assume $100M in daily fees. At PE of 20 that gives a nice valuation of $730B - or about $6300 per eth. Maybe 60x - premium for being the only big yield asset that doesn't rely on law to enforce property rights (ie. eth replaces offshore banking). This means eth is already priced for success. The alternative is worse for everyone in crypto, because if the long-term future is multi-chain (ie. pushed out usecases don't go back to ethereum once it's scalable enough, and activity spreads everywhere looking for low fees) then the whole space has almost no ability to extract rent. That would mean the stable fee level is some small margin over actual running costs. Which means total crypto market cap <$10B. Bitcoin, of course, has no fundamental value at all - all it does is make btc buyers poorer because of mining, as a group. Yet it's still the largest crypto. Why? Because it's all about narratives to make people buy the token, thinking they are going to sell it higher to other people that buy for the same reason. Back to matic - what this means in practice is if the project successfully markets itself as a 'small helper' to ethereum, it's going to be valued like that. Eventually, the narrative premium is likely to disappear, and I think at that point either ethereum is valued at 1T-2T in today's dollars, or crypto as a whole collapses >100x. The latter would completely destroy PoW security and make PoS questionable. Is a chain safe if coordinating validators can make 10x by stealing pegged funds even at the cost of destroying their stake? Simple game theory says no, but in practice it may work because stealing is illegal and most validators aren't anonymous - ie. de facto law-based consensus.