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Personally as a user of both ecosystems I strongly prefer the speed of transactions and minimal fees on Solana, despite it being more centralized. I like EVM fr

Personally as a user of both ecosystems I strongly prefer the speed of transactions and minimal fees on Solana, despite it being more centralized. I like EVM from a dev standpoint, but for most applications I want to use a financially practical and scalable L1 personally. There are some very solid products on Solana as well. I think that both are gonna be around for a long time regardless.

PretzelPirate 5y ago
The problem is that Solana is much easier to attack. Imagine running a business on Solana and all an attacker has to do is bribe 700 (or fewer) operators to give your competitors a advantage. Those attackers can’t even be punished by slashing their stake. Solana is attractive to everyday users because it’s cheap to use, but it’s security isn’t suitable for high-valued assets (even self-verifying the chain is expensive). They sacrificed security and censorship resistance for short-term low fees, but will suffer from the same scalability issues every other L1 will/has hit and will rely on rollups. Rollups with a highly-centralized base layer aren’t suitable. Even the ZKSync team has tweeted that using ZKSync on top of Solana is more secure than using Solana itself because the zero-knowledge proof will be validated by Ethereum.
- shiohime 5y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, do you know of any good resources for learning more about the scalability solutions of Solana vs Ethereum? I've only been in the space for about 6 months as an engineer and almost every document I've read in regards to Solana scaling are sure that they will not encounter the same scalability issues that ETH has had. However, they are direct competitors so I wonder how biased these claims are sometimes, from both perspectives.
  - PretzelPirate 5y ago
    Here is a great article to read on why layer1 blockchain scalability isn’t sustainable long-term (for any layer 1): https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-only-sustainable-solution-for-high-scalability-c9aabd6fbb48?source=user_profile---------2------------------------------- https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-o... When reading about competing blockchains, it’s important to figure out if someone you’re reading values money or decentralization (and therefore individual’s digital autonomy once we enter the Metaverse). Polynya (Liberosist on Reddit) is in the same camp as me - we want the most permissionless, secure, and censorship resistant solution. As an Ethereum Dev recently put it they want to build in the MSIT secure, decentralized blockchain and as long as Ethereum is the only one providing that, they’ll keep building on Ethereum. It’s hard to understand which protocols are the most decentralized and secure because blockchains have gone from being built for decentralization, to being marketing machines. No one really writes about things like the importance of state receipts for blockchain validation, how many chains remove those due to the storage overhead, and how users lose a lot of self-reliance when that happens. I think they largely don’t write about it because most users nowadays just want to get rich and don’t care about decentralization, but I hope that changes and people realize that we need a neutral layer to store digital assets that we actually own as the Metaverse becomes a real part of our lives over the next 10-20 years.
    - shiohime 5y ago
      Thanks for sharing that article and for the insight, I appreciate it! I'm trying to learn the pros and cons of a lot of chains and agree that a lot of articles come across as marketing focused, so it's been hard for me to learn about each chain other than being a user and working with each chain creating simple dapps or other projects.
      - jules-jules 5y ago
        Do check out r/ethfinance, it's the most rational sub related to all things Ethereum. Brand new, blockchain-based reddit/twitter hybrid gm.xyz looks interesting as well.
      - PretzelPirate 5y ago
        I’d suggest looking at the block explorer for any chain to first understand how many validators they have (there are some hot new chains with fewer than 200 validators which may be run by far fewer than 200 people). I’d also take a look at what’s actually being processed - some blockchains have their validators submit regular transactions to vote for the next block, and they can account for 90+% of the TPS the chain claims to have. I’d then look at how their consensus model behaves - if it’s Delegated Proof of Stake, how are they handling voter apathy where users have very little incentive to change who they delegate to even if the validator they delegate to is misbehaving? What happens to misbehaving validator? Is there some mechanism in the protocol that punishes a validator for doing the wrong thing (aka slashing)? I’d then dig into how they are any different from the thousands of existing blockchains. Did they centralize by having a few powerful machines run the chain, did they fork the Ethereum Geth code and simply increase the max gas per block to reduce fees and get a higher TPS? Making short-term decisions like that look great in the short term, but will fail over the long run due to state bloat and centralizing forces (large storage, compute, and/or networking requirements). I’d also recommend reading articles on https://vitalik.ca/ https://vitalik.ca/ and https://ethresear.ch/ https://ethresear.ch/. Before you say “won’t those be bias towards Ethereum?” The answer is, sort of… Vitalik writes a lot about technical challenges in the blockchain space and how Ethereum is planning to handle them, but he seems to remain somewhat levelheaded and focuses on how the solutions help retain censorship resistance and security. EthResearch is actually used by people in the Ethereum and non-Ethereum blockchain space since many chains need to solve the same problems and are building on the work of Ethereum researchers. They are pretty open for non-Ethereum discussions there. I would almost certainly say to avoid the cryptocurrency subreddit (that’s where people go to con others into buying their coins and farm Moons) as well as Twitter - with the exception of epolynya. I recommend reading epolynya‘s tweets because they engage with people who are championing non-Ethereum chains and start technical discussions with them which tend to be very educational. That can get you exposed to how developers on other chains view solutions to technical and economic problems. It’s a ton of work to keep up to date on the inner workings of all these chains. Reading about the blockchain trilemma and understanding it is a good way to start get a lense to view these blockchain projects through so you can at least tell when a claim smells funny.

PretzelPirate 5y ago

The problem is that Solana is much easier to attack. Imagine running a business on Solana and all an attacker has to do is bribe 700 (or fewer) operators to give your competitors a advantage. Those attackers can’t even be punished by slashing their stake. Solana is attractive to everyday users because it’s cheap to use, but it’s security isn’t suitable for high-valued assets (even self-verifying the chain is expensive). They sacrificed security and censorship resistance for short-term low fees, but will suffer from the same scalability issues every other L1 will/has hit and will rely on rollups. Rollups with a highly-centralized base layer aren’t suitable. Even the ZKSync team has tweeted that using ZKSync on top of Solana is more secure than using Solana itself because the zero-knowledge proof will be validated by Ethereum.

shiohime 5y ago
If you don't mind me asking, do you know of any good resources for learning more about the scalability solutions of Solana vs Ethereum? I've only been in the space for about 6 months as an engineer and almost every document I've read in regards to Solana scaling are sure that they will not encounter the same scalability issues that ETH has had. However, they are direct competitors so I wonder how biased these claims are sometimes, from both perspectives.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  Here is a great article to read on why layer1 blockchain scalability isn’t sustainable long-term (for any layer 1): https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-only-sustainable-solution-for-high-scalability-c9aabd6fbb48?source=user_profile---------2------------------------------- https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-o... When reading about competing blockchains, it’s important to figure out if someone you’re reading values money or decentralization (and therefore individual’s digital autonomy once we enter the Metaverse). Polynya (Liberosist on Reddit) is in the same camp as me - we want the most permissionless, secure, and censorship resistant solution. As an Ethereum Dev recently put it they want to build in the MSIT secure, decentralized blockchain and as long as Ethereum is the only one providing that, they’ll keep building on Ethereum. It’s hard to understand which protocols are the most decentralized and secure because blockchains have gone from being built for decentralization, to being marketing machines. No one really writes about things like the importance of state receipts for blockchain validation, how many chains remove those due to the storage overhead, and how users lose a lot of self-reliance when that happens. I think they largely don’t write about it because most users nowadays just want to get rich and don’t care about decentralization, but I hope that changes and people realize that we need a neutral layer to store digital assets that we actually own as the Metaverse becomes a real part of our lives over the next 10-20 years.
  - shiohime 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing that article and for the insight, I appreciate it! I'm trying to learn the pros and cons of a lot of chains and agree that a lot of articles come across as marketing focused, so it's been hard for me to learn about each chain other than being a user and working with each chain creating simple dapps or other projects.
    - jules-jules 5y ago
      Do check out r/ethfinance, it's the most rational sub related to all things Ethereum. Brand new, blockchain-based reddit/twitter hybrid gm.xyz looks interesting as well.
    - PretzelPirate 5y ago
      I’d suggest looking at the block explorer for any chain to first understand how many validators they have (there are some hot new chains with fewer than 200 validators which may be run by far fewer than 200 people). I’d also take a look at what’s actually being processed - some blockchains have their validators submit regular transactions to vote for the next block, and they can account for 90+% of the TPS the chain claims to have. I’d then look at how their consensus model behaves - if it’s Delegated Proof of Stake, how are they handling voter apathy where users have very little incentive to change who they delegate to even if the validator they delegate to is misbehaving? What happens to misbehaving validator? Is there some mechanism in the protocol that punishes a validator for doing the wrong thing (aka slashing)? I’d then dig into how they are any different from the thousands of existing blockchains. Did they centralize by having a few powerful machines run the chain, did they fork the Ethereum Geth code and simply increase the max gas per block to reduce fees and get a higher TPS? Making short-term decisions like that look great in the short term, but will fail over the long run due to state bloat and centralizing forces (large storage, compute, and/or networking requirements). I’d also recommend reading articles on https://vitalik.ca/ https://vitalik.ca/ and https://ethresear.ch/ https://ethresear.ch/. Before you say “won’t those be bias towards Ethereum?” The answer is, sort of… Vitalik writes a lot about technical challenges in the blockchain space and how Ethereum is planning to handle them, but he seems to remain somewhat levelheaded and focuses on how the solutions help retain censorship resistance and security. EthResearch is actually used by people in the Ethereum and non-Ethereum blockchain space since many chains need to solve the same problems and are building on the work of Ethereum researchers. They are pretty open for non-Ethereum discussions there. I would almost certainly say to avoid the cryptocurrency subreddit (that’s where people go to con others into buying their coins and farm Moons) as well as Twitter - with the exception of epolynya. I recommend reading epolynya‘s tweets because they engage with people who are championing non-Ethereum chains and start technical discussions with them which tend to be very educational. That can get you exposed to how developers on other chains view solutions to technical and economic problems. It’s a ton of work to keep up to date on the inner workings of all these chains. Reading about the blockchain trilemma and understanding it is a good way to start get a lense to view these blockchain projects through so you can at least tell when a claim smells funny.