5 ms·

It feels like Solana is moving fast and breaking things a little too much for a project that has to do with money. Uptime should be a competitive advantage for

It feels like Solana is moving fast and breaking things a little too much for a project that has to do with money. Uptime should be a competitive advantage for decentralized networks, but the Solana network went down 12 times in the first 6 months of this year[1]. Even Rust couldn't save them. [1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/solana-cryptocurrency-has-second-outage-in-a-month-causing-12-percent-dip-in-value/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/solana-cryptocurr...

ErikAugust 4y ago
Did it go down 12 times for technical reasons or was it intentionally pulled down? Something to wonder about.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Doesn't sound very decentralized at all...
  - nailer 4y ago
    No it just had bugs that got fixed. Decentralisation does not imply perfection.
- quanticle 4y ago
  Is there a difference? A decentralized protocol that can be DOS'd by a reasonably successful criminal gang isn't all that useful.
- imtringued 4y ago
  It goes down for an incredibly stupid decision. Transactions on Solana are free so spammers can produce millions of transactions per second and at some point validators simply crash. Solana has subsecond transaction processing so a validator being down for more than a second counts as a downtime whereas with Bitcoin a block taking two hours to mine is completely normal. Bitcoin doesn't have the concept of "downtime" only the concept of delaying the next block.
wmf 4y ago
My understanding is that the outages are not bugs but a deliberate tradeoff between throughput and liveness.
- nailer 4y ago
  No, they’re bugs, but Solana (average 4500 transactions per second) competes more with Visa (average 7500 transactions per second) and older blockchains aren’t even in the arena. The bugs get fixed, Solana’s pretty stable, you can see the exact numbers at https://status.solana.com/ https://status.solana.com/
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    Solana's definition of transaction is weird though. There's no way a P2P network is doing 4500 txs in the common blockchain terminology. The entire system is a house of cards waiting to crumble - just napkin the average tx size * 4500 txs * peers etc...
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    How are there enough transactions on Solana to get to 4500 per second? How is there possibly enough demand on a crypto network to be remotely in the same league as visa? I don't buy it.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Wash trading bots can create as much volume as you want.
    - TimJRobinson 4y ago
      A lot of Solanas throughput is consensus messages between validators. But finance in general is many orders of magnitude more TPS than visa. Think about high frequency trading of derivatives of all sorts of things, and all the tiny arbitrages that can be done over all the exchanges when fees are cents. Those can easily multiply to thousands of TPS.
    - nailer 4y ago
eddsh1994 4y ago
> Even Rust couldn't save them. Rust doesn't stop bugs, it just helps you try reason about stuff and maybe catch them earlier.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
farco12 4y ago
To be fair to the Solana team, their production chain is called Mainnet Beta. Going forward their outages should occur less frequently since they've finally introduced a fee market akin to Ethereum's dynamic gas prices. With a dynamic fee market it will be more financially prohibitive to DDOS the chain.
gd1 4y ago
[dead]

ErikAugust 4y ago

Did it go down 12 times for technical reasons or was it intentionally pulled down? Something to wonder about.

londons_explore 4y ago
Doesn't sound very decentralized at all...
- nailer 4y ago
  No it just had bugs that got fixed. Decentralisation does not imply perfection.
quanticle 4y ago
Is there a difference? A decentralized protocol that can be DOS'd by a reasonably successful criminal gang isn't all that useful.
imtringued 4y ago
It goes down for an incredibly stupid decision. Transactions on Solana are free so spammers can produce millions of transactions per second and at some point validators simply crash. Solana has subsecond transaction processing so a validator being down for more than a second counts as a downtime whereas with Bitcoin a block taking two hours to mine is completely normal. Bitcoin doesn't have the concept of "downtime" only the concept of delaying the next block.

wmf 4y ago

My understanding is that the outages are not bugs but a deliberate tradeoff between throughput and liveness.

nailer 4y ago
No, they’re bugs, but Solana (average 4500 transactions per second) competes more with Visa (average 7500 transactions per second) and older blockchains aren’t even in the arena. The bugs get fixed, Solana’s pretty stable, you can see the exact numbers at https://status.solana.com/ https://status.solana.com/
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  Solana's definition of transaction is weird though. There's no way a P2P network is doing 4500 txs in the common blockchain terminology. The entire system is a house of cards waiting to crumble - just napkin the average tx size * 4500 txs * peers etc...
- fallingknife 4y ago
  How are there enough transactions on Solana to get to 4500 per second? How is there possibly enough demand on a crypto network to be remotely in the same league as visa? I don't buy it.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Wash trading bots can create as much volume as you want.
  - TimJRobinson 4y ago
    A lot of Solanas throughput is consensus messages between validators. But finance in general is many orders of magnitude more TPS than visa. Think about high frequency trading of derivatives of all sorts of things, and all the tiny arbitrages that can be done over all the exchanges when fees are cents. Those can easily multiply to thousands of TPS.
  - nailer 4y ago

eddsh1994 4y ago

> Even Rust couldn't save them. Rust doesn't stop bugs, it just helps you try reason about stuff and maybe catch them earlier.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

farco12 4y ago

To be fair to the Solana team, their production chain is called Mainnet Beta. Going forward their outages should occur less frequently since they've finally introduced a fee market akin to Ethereum's dynamic gas prices. With a dynamic fee market it will be more financially prohibitive to DDOS the chain.

gd1 4y ago

[dead]