16 ms·

Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

59 points by muzikman1 5y ago

spyder 5y ago
What's the relation between L1 sharding and L2 off-chain solutions? If sharding will be implemented will the L2 solutions still be necessary? Is L2 just something to help in the meantime until the harder to implement sharding is working or both will be used on top of eachother to help scalabilty?
- Tenoke 5y ago
  No, sharding will increase the throughput but not enough. Ethereum are all-in on L2s long-term for scaling.
ejb999 5y ago
nothing makes an article seem more legit than having moronic gif's play on a continuous loop while you try to read it. </sarc>
- muzikman1 5y ago
  Why? You cannot read it?
wruza 5y ago
tldr: because blockchain is too slow for practical uses and one has to resort to off-chain blockchains on blockchain with separate consensus, that go into blockchain. If you’re still confused why would you care about it, so am I.
- sterlind 5y ago
  a defense of it, from someone who's not in the cryptocurrency scene: blockchains are useful because they offer decentralized centralization. Ethereum has no policies, no embargoes, it's a neutral platform. this is because everyone can agree that what's on Ethereum is canon, and everyone can access Ethereum (except for how pricey gas is.) this is the opposite of federations where servers host their own state, with their own terms and conditions or API keys. everyone can agree on putting things in one place. I think that bit is genuinely useful. so the major problem is that gas is expensive (and PoW is immoral, but I'll leave that for another time.) gas is cheap on altcoins, but nobody (rightly!) trusts bespoke altcoins because they're too small to be secure. this L2 stuff is the solution, because rolling up to Ethereum keeps the not-an-altcoin L2 chains honest, along with verifying that their aggregation or challenge protocols or whatever are secure. whether you find a scalable blockchain useful or not is a different matter, but I think L2 protocols will get it there.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    Can you clarify what "not in the cryptocurrency scene" means? You seem to be a proponent.
    - sterlind 5y ago
      I haven't invested in cryptocurrency besides a small amount of Bitcoin more than half a decade ago (which I subsequently got locked out of.) I've never worked for any company doing anything blockchain-related. I was enthusiastic early on (2011) but became jaded by seeing how environmentally awful Proof of Work is, and how PoS has stalled. I find trustless/decentralized protocols intellectually interesting. I didn't count myself as a proponent because I don't have skin in the game.
      - ShamelessC 5y ago
        Fair enough - thanks!
  - c-cube 5y ago
    That's just too funny: "ethereum has no policies". It had a superb bail out of the initial DAO in 2016, which was deemed too big too fail, and lead to a fork of the chain. So let's not pretend blockchains are neutral immutable ledgers, they exist purely for speculation.
mk3 5y ago
Short answer you should not.
miked85 5y ago
The article doesn't live up to the title. I'm still not sure why I should care.
spapas82 5y ago
As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes web3 viable only for very expensive stuff, making it more or less non usable and defeating its whole purpose. The solution to that is stuff like polygon which is an ethereum compatible network ( meaning that smart contracts that run on ethereum can be also deployed to polygon without changes) and has minimum fees. The same thing that has $30 fees on ethereum will have line $0.01 in polygon. So polygon can be easily used for all kind of stuff without the need to pay the heavy gas premium. This is possible because polygon uses a different concencus model (proof of stake) than ethereum (proof of work).
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Why isn't etherium deprecated then and everyone moves to polygon? What's the catch?
  - stavros 5y ago
    Ethereum is slated to use proof of stake soon too (no idea how soon, AFAIK it was supposed to be last December).
    - Jasper_ 5y ago
      It was delayed. Again. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345 The URL slug saying "may-2022" while the title says June 2022 really exudes confidence, too.
      - stavros 5y ago
        Oh yay :(
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
dcposch 5y ago
Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state machine whose state transitions are verifiable on a blockchain. Blockchains, in turn, are about creating a uncensorable state machine that reaches global consensus. So L1 achieves security, and L2 adds speed. So why not just make L1 fast to begin with? The strong guarantees of L1 rely on a lot of validators (on the order of ~10k+, worldwide, often on home internet connections) verifying each state transition. This puts a fairly low practical ceiling on how fast L1 can go. L2 uses centralized sequencers to run transactions much faster, but uses a mechanism that runs on L1 to ensure the sequencer can't cheat. The main mechanisms are 1. optimistic rollups and 2. ZK rollups. The latter, in particular, are fascinating. If you care about distributed systems even a little bit, it pays to suppress your skepticism and learn about how they work. Good starting point: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html Alternatively if you believe this is all just a ponzi scheme involving ape jpegs, bookmark this comment and come back in 3 years.
- homarp 5y ago
  you should do a https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/
- lottin 5y ago
  The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the explicit goal of preventing such re-allocations. Therefore my question is how can this technology be the "future of finance" when it's designed from the ground up to be incompatible with finance?
  - 5y ago
stitched2gethr 5y ago
This is why the Solana model is succeeding.
- tata71 5y ago
  Temporarily, until people realize they are a sidechain, and Loopring does what they do without inherent added security risks.
  - _ink_ 5y ago
    Why is Solana a side chain?
    - tata71 5y ago
      Not sure how to answer the question. This is like asking "why are Google services centralized?".
- danlugo92 5y ago
  Wasn't Solana down for 72 hours as of this morning?
- doopy1 5y ago
  Succeeding at being barely usable.
inter_netuser 5y ago
You shouldn't care what the marketing website wants you to think. Don't give them your precious attention and lifespam. You will never get it back.

59 points by muzikman1 5y ago

What's the relation between L1 sharding and L2 off-chain solutions? If sharding will be implemented will the L2 solutions still be necessary? Is L2 just something to help in the meantime until the harder to implement sharding is working or both will be used on top of eachother to help scalabilty?

Tenoke 5y ago
No, sharding will increase the throughput but not enough. Ethereum are all-in on L2s long-term for scaling.

ejb999 5y ago

nothing makes an article seem more legit than having moronic gif's play on a continuous loop while you try to read it. </sarc>

muzikman1 5y ago
Why? You cannot read it?

wruza 5y ago

tldr: because blockchain is too slow for practical uses and one has to resort to off-chain blockchains on blockchain with separate consensus, that go into blockchain. If you’re still confused why would you care about it, so am I.

sterlind 5y ago
a defense of it, from someone who's not in the cryptocurrency scene: blockchains are useful because they offer decentralized centralization. Ethereum has no policies, no embargoes, it's a neutral platform. this is because everyone can agree that what's on Ethereum is canon, and everyone can access Ethereum (except for how pricey gas is.) this is the opposite of federations where servers host their own state, with their own terms and conditions or API keys. everyone can agree on putting things in one place. I think that bit is genuinely useful. so the major problem is that gas is expensive (and PoW is immoral, but I'll leave that for another time.) gas is cheap on altcoins, but nobody (rightly!) trusts bespoke altcoins because they're too small to be secure. this L2 stuff is the solution, because rolling up to Ethereum keeps the not-an-altcoin L2 chains honest, along with verifying that their aggregation or challenge protocols or whatever are secure. whether you find a scalable blockchain useful or not is a different matter, but I think L2 protocols will get it there.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  Can you clarify what "not in the cryptocurrency scene" means? You seem to be a proponent.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    I haven't invested in cryptocurrency besides a small amount of Bitcoin more than half a decade ago (which I subsequently got locked out of.) I've never worked for any company doing anything blockchain-related. I was enthusiastic early on (2011) but became jaded by seeing how environmentally awful Proof of Work is, and how PoS has stalled. I find trustless/decentralized protocols intellectually interesting. I didn't count myself as a proponent because I don't have skin in the game.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      Fair enough - thanks!
- c-cube 5y ago
  That's just too funny: "ethereum has no policies". It had a superb bail out of the initial DAO in 2016, which was deemed too big too fail, and lead to a fork of the chain. So let's not pretend blockchains are neutral immutable ledgers, they exist purely for speculation.

mk3 5y ago

Short answer you should not.

miked85 5y ago

The article doesn't live up to the title. I'm still not sure why I should care.

spapas82 5y ago

As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes web3 viable only for very expensive stuff, making it more or less non usable and defeating its whole purpose. The solution to that is stuff like polygon which is an ethereum compatible network ( meaning that smart contracts that run on ethereum can be also deployed to polygon without changes) and has minimum fees. The same thing that has $30 fees on ethereum will have line $0.01 in polygon. So polygon can be easily used for all kind of stuff without the need to pay the heavy gas premium. This is possible because polygon uses a different concencus model (proof of stake) than ethereum (proof of work).

bruce343434 5y ago
Why isn't etherium deprecated then and everyone moves to polygon? What's the catch?
- stavros 5y ago
  Ethereum is slated to use proof of stake soon too (no idea how soon, AFAIK it was supposed to be last December).
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    It was delayed. Again. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4345 The URL slug saying "may-2022" while the title says June 2022 really exudes confidence, too.
    - stavros 5y ago
      Oh yay :(
- The_rationalist 5y ago

dcposch 5y ago

Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state machine whose state transitions are verifiable on a blockchain. Blockchains, in turn, are about creating a uncensorable state machine that reaches global consensus. So L1 achieves security, and L2 adds speed. So why not just make L1 fast to begin with? The strong guarantees of L1 rely on a lot of validators (on the order of ~10k+, worldwide, often on home internet connections) verifying each state transition. This puts a fairly low practical ceiling on how fast L1 can go. L2 uses centralized sequencers to run transactions much faster, but uses a mechanism that runs on L1 to ensure the sequencer can't cheat. The main mechanisms are 1. optimistic rollups and 2. ZK rollups. The latter, in particular, are fascinating. If you care about distributed systems even a little bit, it pays to suppress your skepticism and learn about how they work. Good starting point: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html Alternatively if you believe this is all just a ponzi scheme involving ape jpegs, bookmark this comment and come back in 3 years.

homarp 5y ago
you should do a https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/
lottin 5y ago
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the explicit goal of preventing such re-allocations. Therefore my question is how can this technology be the "future of finance" when it's designed from the ground up to be incompatible with finance?
- 5y ago

stitched2gethr 5y ago

This is why the Solana model is succeeding.

tata71 5y ago
Temporarily, until people realize they are a sidechain, and Loopring does what they do without inherent added security risks.
- _ink_ 5y ago
  Why is Solana a side chain?
  - tata71 5y ago
    Not sure how to answer the question. This is like asking "why are Google services centralized?".
danlugo92 5y ago
Wasn't Solana down for 72 hours as of this morning?
doopy1 5y ago
Succeeding at being barely usable.

inter_netuser 5y ago

You shouldn't care what the marketing website wants you to think. Don't give them your precious attention and lifespam. You will never get it back.