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I wish that people writing articles talking about how horrible web3 is tried something other than Ethereum lol. I'm fairly certain that if people's first web3 e

I wish that people writing articles talking about how horrible web3 is tried something other than Ethereum lol. I'm fairly certain that if people's first web3 experience is something that actually works and doesn't cost hundreds of dollars for minor transactions they won't be as put off. I get downvoted everytime here I bring it up but seriously if people tried something like Solana today compared to Ethereum I'm fairly certain they'd have a much better experience. Yeah, it's currently more centralized, but that really is minor compared to actually being able to use the ecosystem and explore what kinds of applications and products are possible on web3 without the unacceptably high costs and low tx throughputs that Ethereum as an L1 offers. It's no wonder that people are upset with web3 when their first experience is on ETH. A fundamentally simple approach of using private keys (wallets) as identification for auth purposes is huge, and we're still really early imo as we explore the possibilities with Web3.

kinakomochidayo 5y ago
It's not really minor to worry about funds being inaccessible for who knows how long when Solana is down. I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. Same with StarkNet. The quick and cheap transactions of Solana with Ethereum's decentralization is what I'm looking for, and that'll only be possible with zk rollups.
- shiohime 5y ago
  Polygon's a pretty good chain, but I have had issues with it before with essentially a traffic jam where my tx got locked up in a queue and took 30 minutes to process. But it's nice to be able to use the chain and it is quite cheap. Arbitrum is pretty expensive per tx still though right? I haven't used the chain too much because the native bridge takes about a week to get funds over IIRC. And Solana's only been down for a day like once I believe.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - diveanon 5y ago
    Polygon has become my go to chain over the last 6 months. Even during yesterday’s crash I was able to execute trades at reasonable gas prices (<$1). I’ve developed a couple of dapps that run on polygon, and while the docs could use some love the overall experience was pretty frictionless. Crypto.com now supports deposit/withdraw directly to polygon making it possible to skip ETH altogether. For bridging I recommend Relay if you are setting up on a new chain for the first time, then xpollinate for later transfers of just stables. Fees are super low to go from L2 to L2 these days. Rabby is a really nice web wallet the replaces metamask and supports all the L2 chains by default, built by the guys at debank.
    - shiohime 5y ago
      Yeah polygon does seem like a nice chain to develop for, I'm assuming the same frontend packages like ethers.js / web3 work seamlessly since it's EVM? The thing I like about working in the Ethereum ecosystem is it is more mature as a whole despite the scalability issues, and there are some very cool projects out there. If you are looking for other bridges too I recommend checking out Synapse, they let you bridge between a good number of EVM chains and I haven't had any issues with them at all.
- rvz 5y ago
  > I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. I don't think the local supermarket would be pleased to hear that if they were going to adopt Ethereum for shoppers to pay for their groceries, they would need to approve + switch to layers like Polygon, Arbitrum just to reduce the already high fees on ETH. Even if they did, it's still very expensive and not very fast either. Perhaps some will tell them to use contraptions like zkSync, StarkNet etc, which are experimental and not ready to be used by 'everyone'. Therefore is not a mature solution to use right now. Looking at which cryptocurrency is suitable today for lots of users to make fast, cheap and efficient payments for their groceries in the supermarket, it is clearly not Ethereum. There are better alternatives out there that are more useable and best suited for this; even Solana qualifies for this. After all, everyone needs to eat.
  - shiohime 5y ago
    This summarizes my viewpoint on ETH quite well. I think it's a really technologically sick platform that has a lot of potential, and I do believe in the future when these scalability solutions are in place and have mass adoption, then the ecosystem really can be excellent. However, today, it's not there, and I cannot recommend using base ETH for anything other than if you are a large corporation or generally wealthy and want to capitalize on the large amount of liquidity in the ecosystem compared to others. ETH, as a base layer, is financially impractical. The native L2 solution in Arbitrum is also too expensive, I believe it's like a quarter of the cost? That is still absolutely unacceptable. Also I don't have any faith in advertised timelines or scalability solutions until they are in place, I saw slides and discussions around sharding, layering, and off-chain computation solutions like Truebit back in 2017. Fast forward to today and the system is still unusably inefficient, so yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. I'm fairly certain that the majority of holders in ETH are treating it purely as a stock that only goes up, never moves their ETH off of the exchange (or even better it's not able to move off as it's a closed system like Robinhood), and actually are not using the ecosystem. If they were, then the average person would quickly realize how absurd it is to burn through their ETH for simple transactions. I truly hope that the scalability solutions in development now pan out, because it will never succeed long term imo if they cannot solve this. If the scalability solution ETH proposes is simply use different chains, I'll do that, and they won't be in your ecosystem.
leifg 5y ago
Genuine question: what has private key authentication to do with blockchain? I've been using this for my ssh connections for almost 15 years now. And the second question: what happens if you use your private key? Every website that uses password has a mechanism to reset your password. Take that feature away you'll lock out millions of users.
- shiohime 5y ago
  Yeah PKI has been around of course for a long time and is a core facet to how the web functions today. The private key authentication I'm referring to is because wallet extensions allow for users to connect their wallet to applications, as a method of authentication. You don't even have to have funds in your wallet to perform this authentication, you just need a wallet. If you lose your private key, you're probably out of luck, but there may be some wallets / platforms that have strategies to mitigate risk, but idk to be honest. So yes, for sensitive applications it is a risk vector, however for users that are already familiar with crypto, it's not really a new risk. If you ever lose your private key or it's compromised you can lose whatever money is in that wallet. The thing that I like about the infra personally as a solo dev is that using this for authentication for small scale applications on whatever chain I chose is really easy to set up and is a great user experience, and I'm not worried about this as an app developer as my target audience already should be vaguely familiar with how this works.
  - pornel 5y ago
    A crypto wallet is just a random number. Literally. Everyone using wallets for identity equals everyone just picking a random number to represent themselves (and then classic cryptography allows you to prove to others that you know this number without revealing it). The hard part of this is not cryptography — that is already solved quite well. It's the human side. People forget pass phrases. Or disclose them to whoever calls them and says they're from Microsoft Pass Phrase Verification Authority. People break computers they haven't backed up. People click "Yes" on security prompts, and open random mail attachments. With private keys involved, these situations are irreversibly catastrophic.
  - 5y ago

kinakomochidayo 5y ago

It's not really minor to worry about funds being inaccessible for who knows how long when Solana is down. I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. Same with StarkNet. The quick and cheap transactions of Solana with Ethereum's decentralization is what I'm looking for, and that'll only be possible with zk rollups.

shiohime 5y ago
Polygon's a pretty good chain, but I have had issues with it before with essentially a traffic jam where my tx got locked up in a queue and took 30 minutes to process. But it's nice to be able to use the chain and it is quite cheap. Arbitrum is pretty expensive per tx still though right? I haven't used the chain too much because the native bridge takes about a week to get funds over IIRC. And Solana's only been down for a day like once I believe.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- diveanon 5y ago
  Polygon has become my go to chain over the last 6 months. Even during yesterday’s crash I was able to execute trades at reasonable gas prices (<$1). I’ve developed a couple of dapps that run on polygon, and while the docs could use some love the overall experience was pretty frictionless. Crypto.com now supports deposit/withdraw directly to polygon making it possible to skip ETH altogether. For bridging I recommend Relay if you are setting up on a new chain for the first time, then xpollinate for later transfers of just stables. Fees are super low to go from L2 to L2 these days. Rabby is a really nice web wallet the replaces metamask and supports all the L2 chains by default, built by the guys at debank.
  - shiohime 5y ago
    Yeah polygon does seem like a nice chain to develop for, I'm assuming the same frontend packages like ethers.js / web3 work seamlessly since it's EVM? The thing I like about working in the Ethereum ecosystem is it is more mature as a whole despite the scalability issues, and there are some very cool projects out there. If you are looking for other bridges too I recommend checking out Synapse, they let you bridge between a good number of EVM chains and I haven't had any issues with them at all.
rvz 5y ago
> I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. I don't think the local supermarket would be pleased to hear that if they were going to adopt Ethereum for shoppers to pay for their groceries, they would need to approve + switch to layers like Polygon, Arbitrum just to reduce the already high fees on ETH. Even if they did, it's still very expensive and not very fast either. Perhaps some will tell them to use contraptions like zkSync, StarkNet etc, which are experimental and not ready to be used by 'everyone'. Therefore is not a mature solution to use right now. Looking at which cryptocurrency is suitable today for lots of users to make fast, cheap and efficient payments for their groceries in the supermarket, it is clearly not Ethereum. There are better alternatives out there that are more useable and best suited for this; even Solana qualifies for this. After all, everyone needs to eat.
- shiohime 5y ago
  This summarizes my viewpoint on ETH quite well. I think it's a really technologically sick platform that has a lot of potential, and I do believe in the future when these scalability solutions are in place and have mass adoption, then the ecosystem really can be excellent. However, today, it's not there, and I cannot recommend using base ETH for anything other than if you are a large corporation or generally wealthy and want to capitalize on the large amount of liquidity in the ecosystem compared to others. ETH, as a base layer, is financially impractical. The native L2 solution in Arbitrum is also too expensive, I believe it's like a quarter of the cost? That is still absolutely unacceptable. Also I don't have any faith in advertised timelines or scalability solutions until they are in place, I saw slides and discussions around sharding, layering, and off-chain computation solutions like Truebit back in 2017. Fast forward to today and the system is still unusably inefficient, so yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. I'm fairly certain that the majority of holders in ETH are treating it purely as a stock that only goes up, never moves their ETH off of the exchange (or even better it's not able to move off as it's a closed system like Robinhood), and actually are not using the ecosystem. If they were, then the average person would quickly realize how absurd it is to burn through their ETH for simple transactions. I truly hope that the scalability solutions in development now pan out, because it will never succeed long term imo if they cannot solve this. If the scalability solution ETH proposes is simply use different chains, I'll do that, and they won't be in your ecosystem.

leifg 5y ago

Genuine question: what has private key authentication to do with blockchain? I've been using this for my ssh connections for almost 15 years now. And the second question: what happens if you use your private key? Every website that uses password has a mechanism to reset your password. Take that feature away you'll lock out millions of users.

shiohime 5y ago
Yeah PKI has been around of course for a long time and is a core facet to how the web functions today. The private key authentication I'm referring to is because wallet extensions allow for users to connect their wallet to applications, as a method of authentication. You don't even have to have funds in your wallet to perform this authentication, you just need a wallet. If you lose your private key, you're probably out of luck, but there may be some wallets / platforms that have strategies to mitigate risk, but idk to be honest. So yes, for sensitive applications it is a risk vector, however for users that are already familiar with crypto, it's not really a new risk. If you ever lose your private key or it's compromised you can lose whatever money is in that wallet. The thing that I like about the infra personally as a solo dev is that using this for authentication for small scale applications on whatever chain I chose is really easy to set up and is a great user experience, and I'm not worried about this as an app developer as my target audience already should be vaguely familiar with how this works.
- pornel 5y ago
  A crypto wallet is just a random number. Literally. Everyone using wallets for identity equals everyone just picking a random number to represent themselves (and then classic cryptography allows you to prove to others that you know this number without revealing it). The hard part of this is not cryptography — that is already solved quite well. It's the human side. People forget pass phrases. Or disclose them to whoever calls them and says they're from Microsoft Pass Phrase Verification Authority. People break computers they haven't backed up. People click "Yes" on security prompts, and open random mail attachments. With private keys involved, these situations are irreversibly catastrophic.
- 5y ago