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Solana is the busiest blockchain by active wallets and now has a higher Nakamoto coefficient (decentralisation score, currently about 31) than most of the Eth L

by nailer 4y ago

Solana is the busiest blockchain by active wallets and now has a higher Nakamoto coefficient (decentralisation score, currently about 31) than most of the Eth L2s. > because the stake amount remained stable while validator count increased, it improved to 27 in Q2 and 31 in Q3. The improvement continues to put Solana above the industry average compared to other L1 networks. https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q3-2022 https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q3-2022 Way more at: https://youtu.be/5NDs3Il2J3Q?t=303 https://youtu.be/5NDs3Il2J3Q?t=303 Re: Visa, Sol's hit peaks above Visa's global average of 7,500 TPS recently too. Not boosting Sol, but if you're going to build, you should seriously consider it.

senttoschool 4y ago
It sacrifices decentralization and it has poor reliability.
- nailer 4y ago
  The post you’re replying to discusses and measures centralisation. I’m happy to discuss reliability but it doesn’t appear we’re having a conversation.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    I have no horse in this game but the Wikipedia page [1] doesn’t line up with the story you’re painting: > On 30 April and 1 May, 2022, Solana experienced major outages due to being taken offline by bots.[18] On 1 June, 2022 Solana reportedly[19] suffered another outage due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. On 1 October, 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a single misconfigured node. In a properly decentralized system, how does 1 misconfigured node take down the entire system? That looks like a single point of failure to me, something decentralized systems aren’t supposed to have. Can you elaborate how your distinguishing reliability and centralization in the context of single node failures? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)
    - nailer 4y ago
      Sure - it’s a bug, it’s been fixed. The issue occurred on 30 Sep and there’s a discussion here: https://solana.com/news/09-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report https://solana.com/news/09-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-... And the fix: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/28172 https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/28172 That’s how software works. Things break. They particularly break at scale. Nobody’s done this before. If Eth was as busy it would break too.
      - kayamon 4y ago
        They have done it before -- Bitcoin existed first, and has kept clearing transactions every ten minutes since, and will continue to do so once Solana is long dead.
        nailer 4y ago
        Bitcoin and Eth have nowhere near the usage of Solana.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        and Solana has way less usage than the average postgres DB running webapp xyz
        nailer 4y ago
        Nope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879077
        snapcaster 4y ago
        I don't see how your link disputes my claim
        nailer 4y ago
spir 4y ago
There's a lot to like about Solana, but one thing to dislike is the ongoing claim by the Solana community that Solana is actually fairly decentralized. In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements. If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.
- nailer 4y ago
  These are good things to be concerned about. There's a second client and a second validator in the works, there's some stats on datacenter decentralisation in the youtube link above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NDs3Il2J3Q&t=303s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NDs3Il2J3Q&t=303s - 230 datacenters, 9% in a single data center. But yes lots of work to be done - I don't want to pretend there isn't - but also don't want to pretend that a network with far less activity has has already done it.
- monodeldiablo 4y ago
  I may be wrong today, but I took a peek awhile back and Solana's top N validators -- enough to exert outright control over the network -- were operated by companies from within the same 2-3 VC portfolios, which struck me as a shockingly poor standard of "decentralization" for a network which apparently prides itself on that metric. From a certain angle, it could almost look as if said VCs were trying to add legitimacy to their portfolio investments by colluding to make Solana seem busier and safer than it really is...

by nailer 4y ago

senttoschool 4y ago

It sacrifices decentralization and it has poor reliability.

nailer 4y ago
The post you’re replying to discusses and measures centralisation. I’m happy to discuss reliability but it doesn’t appear we’re having a conversation.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  I have no horse in this game but the Wikipedia page [1] doesn’t line up with the story you’re painting: > On 30 April and 1 May, 2022, Solana experienced major outages due to being taken offline by bots.[18] On 1 June, 2022 Solana reportedly[19] suffered another outage due to a bug in how the blockchain processes offline transactions. On 1 October, 2022, the Solana network went down for 6 hours due to a single misconfigured node. In a properly decentralized system, how does 1 misconfigured node take down the entire system? That looks like a single point of failure to me, something decentralized systems aren’t supposed to have. Can you elaborate how your distinguishing reliability and centralization in the context of single node failures? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solana_(blockchain_platform)
  - nailer 4y ago
    Sure - it’s a bug, it’s been fixed. The issue occurred on 30 Sep and there’s a discussion here: https://solana.com/news/09-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report https://solana.com/news/09-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-... And the fix: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/28172 https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/28172 That’s how software works. Things break. They particularly break at scale. Nobody’s done this before. If Eth was as busy it would break too.
    - kayamon 4y ago
      They have done it before -- Bitcoin existed first, and has kept clearing transactions every ten minutes since, and will continue to do so once Solana is long dead.
      - nailer 4y ago
        Bitcoin and Eth have nowhere near the usage of Solana.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        and Solana has way less usage than the average postgres DB running webapp xyz
        nailer 4y ago
        Nope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879077
        snapcaster 4y ago
        I don't see how your link disputes my claim
        nailer 4y ago

spir 4y ago

There's a lot to like about Solana, but one thing to dislike is the ongoing claim by the Solana community that Solana is actually fairly decentralized. In reality, Solana is a highly centralized blockchain. Solana has zero protocol specs (the code is the spec), one production client, one main development organization (Solana Labs), limited exposure to the academic research community, and the entire network only runs in data centers due to extreme hardware & bandwidth requirements. If we wanted to boil down decentralization into a narrow metric (we shouldn't want this, but if we did), that metric might be "how many guns to how many heads to force an invalid state transition?" And Solana scores very poorly on this metric.

nailer 4y ago
These are good things to be concerned about. There's a second client and a second validator in the works, there's some stats on datacenter decentralisation in the youtube link above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NDs3Il2J3Q&t=303s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NDs3Il2J3Q&t=303s - 230 datacenters, 9% in a single data center. But yes lots of work to be done - I don't want to pretend there isn't - but also don't want to pretend that a network with far less activity has has already done it.
monodeldiablo 4y ago
I may be wrong today, but I took a peek awhile back and Solana's top N validators -- enough to exert outright control over the network -- were operated by companies from within the same 2-3 VC portfolios, which struck me as a shockingly poor standard of "decentralization" for a network which apparently prides itself on that metric. From a certain angle, it could almost look as if said VCs were trying to add legitimacy to their portfolio investments by colluding to make Solana seem busier and safer than it really is...