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Hi all — I wrote these notes with my colleagues at PSL while trying to wrap our heads around the madness that is Web3/Crypto. I’m an engineer by background and

Hi all — I wrote these notes with my colleagues at PSL while trying to wrap our heads around the madness that is Web3/Crypto. I’m an engineer by background and sort of a skeptic by nature; I think of this piece as a collection of loosely connected, hopefully pragmatic opinions from a builder’s perspective.

tmaly 5y ago
Great notes! I am curious, what language / tech stack would be most promising in this space?
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  AFAIK only EVM(Ethereum VM) is popular and others are emulating it. You have Soldity there which is meh from my CS view. On frontend you use whatever you like and just bind via library to wallets.
- davepeck 5y ago
  It's a good question. I don't know if this is helpful, but: I dipped my toes in with Solidity and Ethereum on day one, and used Hardhat to help set up a local blockchain, dev environment, and test suite. I quickly found myself scratching my head about many of Solidity's language features (particularly some of its modifier keywords) and spent a bunch of time looking at opcodes at https://www.ethervm.io/ https://www.ethervm.io/ and the really solid technical documentation on https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/. Solana was next; it's a whole different ballgame. Luckily, I have some Rust under my belt, so my focus was primarily on writing programs and deploying them.
- 1ark 5y ago
  EVM seems to be the hottest, because of early entrance with its own langauges. But WebAssembly in Cosmos, and Solana favors Rust as a programming language but afaik you can use any LLVM compatible. After that it is just a matter of connecting a client to a node, usually done in the browser.
clpm4j 5y ago
Thanks to you and your colleagues for writing this - the best writeup I've come across so far. This puts all of a16z's crypto marketing babble to shame.
- davepeck 5y ago
  Thanks; I’m really glad to hear that!
riffic 5y ago
I started a subreddit a few days ago to try to channel some of the web3 criticism/skepticism and to take the hype down a peg or two. If you're so inclined this is exactly the kind of content that would be worthwhile there. www.reddit.com/r/Web3skepticism
acjohnson55 5y ago
This is truly fantastic work. This is going to be my new recommendation for anyone who wants to seriously grapple with the space. I'm a crypto skeptic, but I think you make a strong point that crypto doesn't have to win the future on technical terms, it may be the place where new products emerge simply because it inspires people.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Just wanted to thank you! Well done.
jules-jules 5y ago
thanks for the well-written primer. Just one observation. You write: >Over time, Ethereum has proven to be sub-optimal for the incredible demand DeFi services have seen. The network has diseconomies of scale and, given its low throughput capability, gas fees (the cost of executing a transaction on the Ethereum network) have recently been over $150. This makes executing simple low-value transactions, such as swaps on Uniswap, prohibitively expensive! Since the emergence of DeFi, there are several other L1 chains (like Solana and Avalanche) that have become a popular place for DeFi developers to build with transaction fees. Ethereum itself is also in the midst of the infamous “ETH2” transition, which aims to solve this problem on the Ethereum network itself. This is not correct in the sense that a) 'ETH2.0' is now deprecated term, and b) does not solve the gas fee issue by itself. Ethereum has pivoted to a modular rollup centric roadmap that solves the high costs of transactions already now (cf StarkWare and MatterLabs zkSync) while still keeping the secuirty and decentralisation of the main Ethereum settlement layer. This is in contrast to other L1s such as Solana which have sacrificed decentralisation for higher speed and throughput. Check out this wonderful resource by @epolynya for the most comprehensive summary of this new roadmap https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...
- davepeck 5y ago
  Thanks. This is good detail. I may go back and revise this corner of the post.

tmaly 5y ago

Great notes! I am curious, what language / tech stack would be most promising in this space?

machiaweliczny 5y ago
AFAIK only EVM(Ethereum VM) is popular and others are emulating it. You have Soldity there which is meh from my CS view. On frontend you use whatever you like and just bind via library to wallets.
davepeck 5y ago
It's a good question. I don't know if this is helpful, but: I dipped my toes in with Solidity and Ethereum on day one, and used Hardhat to help set up a local blockchain, dev environment, and test suite. I quickly found myself scratching my head about many of Solidity's language features (particularly some of its modifier keywords) and spent a bunch of time looking at opcodes at https://www.ethervm.io/ https://www.ethervm.io/ and the really solid technical documentation on https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/. Solana was next; it's a whole different ballgame. Luckily, I have some Rust under my belt, so my focus was primarily on writing programs and deploying them.
1ark 5y ago
EVM seems to be the hottest, because of early entrance with its own langauges. But WebAssembly in Cosmos, and Solana favors Rust as a programming language but afaik you can use any LLVM compatible. After that it is just a matter of connecting a client to a node, usually done in the browser.

clpm4j 5y ago

Thanks to you and your colleagues for writing this - the best writeup I've come across so far. This puts all of a16z's crypto marketing babble to shame.

davepeck 5y ago
Thanks; I’m really glad to hear that!

riffic 5y ago

I started a subreddit a few days ago to try to channel some of the web3 criticism/skepticism and to take the hype down a peg or two. If you're so inclined this is exactly the kind of content that would be worthwhile there. www.reddit.com/r/Web3skepticism

acjohnson55 5y ago

This is truly fantastic work. This is going to be my new recommendation for anyone who wants to seriously grapple with the space. I'm a crypto skeptic, but I think you make a strong point that crypto doesn't have to win the future on technical terms, it may be the place where new products emerge simply because it inspires people.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Just wanted to thank you! Well done.

jules-jules 5y ago

thanks for the well-written primer. Just one observation. You write: >Over time, Ethereum has proven to be sub-optimal for the incredible demand DeFi services have seen. The network has diseconomies of scale and, given its low throughput capability, gas fees (the cost of executing a transaction on the Ethereum network) have recently been over $150. This makes executing simple low-value transactions, such as swaps on Uniswap, prohibitively expensive! Since the emergence of DeFi, there are several other L1 chains (like Solana and Avalanche) that have become a popular place for DeFi developers to build with transaction fees. Ethereum itself is also in the midst of the infamous “ETH2” transition, which aims to solve this problem on the Ethereum network itself. This is not correct in the sense that a) 'ETH2.0' is now deprecated term, and b) does not solve the gas fee issue by itself. Ethereum has pivoted to a modular rollup centric roadmap that solves the high costs of transactions already now (cf StarkWare and MatterLabs zkSync) while still keeping the secuirty and decentralisation of the main Ethereum settlement layer. This is in contrast to other L1s such as Solana which have sacrificed decentralisation for higher speed and throughput. Check out this wonderful resource by @epolynya for the most comprehensive summary of this new roadmap https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...

davepeck 5y ago
Thanks. This is good detail. I may go back and revise this corner of the post.