5 ms·

I don't quite understand the point?

nwah1 4y ago
It is trying to make up for the efficiency problems of scaling a trustless network by adding extra points of trust and failure, which ends up with something that is neither efficient nor trustless.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  >adding extra points of trust and failure [I assume you meant SPOFs] Tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately true. OTOH, how are you going to remain trustless and scale to users who barely know the difference between an app, a file and a website? Granting that category of users access to crypto markets has always been the keystone of Coinbase's business model.
- toolz 4y ago
  > neither efficient nor trustless More correctly, it would be *either efficient or trustless. The existence of a layer2 does not make layer 1 unusable. It provides options with tradeoffs.
ur-whale 4y ago
>I don't quite understand the point? Same exact point as with building coinbase: making the tech accessible to non-tech users. 99% of people on the planet wouldn't have known how to buy (even much less hold) BTC before the likes of Coinbase, Bitstamp, etc... My gut feeling that for L2 ETH based-stuff, we drop to down to four nines.
- DSingularity 4y ago
  What do you mean by four 9s?
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    99.99% uptime. Ideally you want six nines (99.9999%), or for an always-on decentralized network like Ethereum, nine nines (99.9999999%) uptime. OP is implying their uptime expectation is degrading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...
    - karagenit 4y ago
      I think what they mean is: 99% of people wouldn’t know how to buy BTC without coinbase. 99.99% of people wouldn’t know how to use L2 etherium without coinbase.
      - SkyMarshal 4y ago
        Except he said "we drop to down to four nines". Drop down from where? Going from 99% to 99.99% is going up, not down.
        karagenit 4y ago
        Going down as in, the number of people is going down/getting smaller. When the percentage is referring to people who DON’T understand something, 99% to 99.99% is going down (in number of people who DO understand it). At least, that’s what I think they meant. Example: 6% of urban adults don’t use the internet regularly. When we expand that to urban AND rural adults, that drops down to 10% who don’t use it.
deweller 4y ago
Base is built on Optimism's OP Stack (1). Optimism is a Ethereum Layer 2 network. As an optimistic rollup, it can allow for much cheaper transaction fees. The tradeoff is that while it inherits security from the Ethereum Layer 1 chain, it does have a bigger attack surface since it is dependent on 2 blockchains. Coinbase will support the Base chain in their exchange, thereby giving it some utility out of the gate. 1. https://stack.optimism.io/ https://stack.optimism.io/
- dkdbejwi383 4y ago
  Is someone able to translate this into plain English for someone who's not au fait with crypto jargon?
  - diceduckmonk 4y ago
    A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors.
  - yazaddaruvala 4y ago
    Very roughly: One “transaction” on the ETH blockchain costs $X. Therefore they are batching up 10 “transactions” at a time and executing them together as a single “transaction”. This way it only costs $(X*0.1) for each “transaction”.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    A rollup means instead of putting transactions directly on Ethereum they go to a Coinbase-managed chain that later commits those transactions and their results to the Ethereum chain in a cheaper way than executing them on-chain directly. "Optimistic" means there is a period where people can prove to the chain that Coinbase lied about the transaction results and after that period it's assumed they're correct.
  - intotheabyss 4y ago
    Optimism is an Ethereum optimistic rollup, which means it batches transactions off-chain and then publishes the batches on-chain periodically. Optimistic rollups are said to be 'optimistic' because the assumption is that all the transactions follow the rules and there's a 7-14 day challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud proof and challenge the history of the chain. If fraud is determined to have occurred, then the sequencer who batched the transactions is penalized and the fraud verifier is rewarded. The benefits are two-fold: 1) The off-chain transactions are cheaper because the gas fee is split among many participants instead of one 2) Users of the rollup can exit the rollup back to Ethereum at anytime ensuring full custody of their funds, even if the rollup was malicious or if the rollup halted. Optimism has open-sourced their optimistic rollup stack which allows anyone to fork Optimism and create their own rollup. This is what Coinbase has done. So Coinbase will now have a rollup of their own where they will be responsible for the sequencer (batching transactions) and anyone can deploy EVM compatible applications, like all of the other Layer 2 rollups currently in production. So Uniswap for example may deploy to Base, which will allow Coinbase users to easily use cheap defi.

It is trying to make up for the efficiency problems of scaling a trustless network by adding extra points of trust and failure, which ends up with something that is neither efficient nor trustless.

ur-whale 4y ago
>adding extra points of trust and failure [I assume you meant SPOFs] Tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately true. OTOH, how are you going to remain trustless and scale to users who barely know the difference between an app, a file and a website? Granting that category of users access to crypto markets has always been the keystone of Coinbase's business model.
toolz 4y ago
> neither efficient nor trustless More correctly, it would be *either efficient or trustless. The existence of a layer2 does not make layer 1 unusable. It provides options with tradeoffs.

ur-whale 4y ago

>I don't quite understand the point? Same exact point as with building coinbase: making the tech accessible to non-tech users. 99% of people on the planet wouldn't have known how to buy (even much less hold) BTC before the likes of Coinbase, Bitstamp, etc... My gut feeling that for L2 ETH based-stuff, we drop to down to four nines.

DSingularity 4y ago
What do you mean by four 9s?
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  99.99% uptime. Ideally you want six nines (99.9999%), or for an always-on decentralized network like Ethereum, nine nines (99.9999999%) uptime. OP is implying their uptime expectation is degrading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...
  - karagenit 4y ago
    I think what they mean is: 99% of people wouldn’t know how to buy BTC without coinbase. 99.99% of people wouldn’t know how to use L2 etherium without coinbase.
    - SkyMarshal 4y ago
      Except he said "we drop to down to four nines". Drop down from where? Going from 99% to 99.99% is going up, not down.
      - karagenit 4y ago
        Going down as in, the number of people is going down/getting smaller. When the percentage is referring to people who DON’T understand something, 99% to 99.99% is going down (in number of people who DO understand it). At least, that’s what I think they meant. Example: 6% of urban adults don’t use the internet regularly. When we expand that to urban AND rural adults, that drops down to 10% who don’t use it.

deweller 4y ago

Base is built on Optimism's OP Stack (1). Optimism is a Ethereum Layer 2 network. As an optimistic rollup, it can allow for much cheaper transaction fees. The tradeoff is that while it inherits security from the Ethereum Layer 1 chain, it does have a bigger attack surface since it is dependent on 2 blockchains. Coinbase will support the Base chain in their exchange, thereby giving it some utility out of the gate. 1. https://stack.optimism.io/ https://stack.optimism.io/

dkdbejwi383 4y ago
Is someone able to translate this into plain English for someone who's not au fait with crypto jargon?
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors.
- yazaddaruvala 4y ago
  Very roughly: One “transaction” on the ETH blockchain costs $X. Therefore they are batching up 10 “transactions” at a time and executing them together as a single “transaction”. This way it only costs $(X*0.1) for each “transaction”.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  A rollup means instead of putting transactions directly on Ethereum they go to a Coinbase-managed chain that later commits those transactions and their results to the Ethereum chain in a cheaper way than executing them on-chain directly. "Optimistic" means there is a period where people can prove to the chain that Coinbase lied about the transaction results and after that period it's assumed they're correct.
- intotheabyss 4y ago
  Optimism is an Ethereum optimistic rollup, which means it batches transactions off-chain and then publishes the batches on-chain periodically. Optimistic rollups are said to be 'optimistic' because the assumption is that all the transactions follow the rules and there's a 7-14 day challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud proof and challenge the history of the chain. If fraud is determined to have occurred, then the sequencer who batched the transactions is penalized and the fraud verifier is rewarded. The benefits are two-fold: 1) The off-chain transactions are cheaper because the gas fee is split among many participants instead of one 2) Users of the rollup can exit the rollup back to Ethereum at anytime ensuring full custody of their funds, even if the rollup was malicious or if the rollup halted. Optimism has open-sourced their optimistic rollup stack which allows anyone to fork Optimism and create their own rollup. This is what Coinbase has done. So Coinbase will now have a rollup of their own where they will be responsible for the sequencer (batching transactions) and anyone can deploy EVM compatible applications, like all of the other Layer 2 rollups currently in production. So Uniswap for example may deploy to Base, which will allow Coinbase users to easily use cheap defi.