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I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some kind of temporary plac

I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they aren't charged fees individually? EDIT: NVM, I RTFMed https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/ https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/. I wonder what the trade-offs of layer 2 protocols are. Less secure?

mypastself 3y ago
A lot more centralized, in my view.
- hanniabu 3y ago
  If you're going to leave a controversial comment like that then you should back it up
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    It’s backed by decentralized voting consensus
    - hanniabu 3y ago
      Correct, which is why they should explain their claim of how and what is more centralized
    - everfree 3y ago
      What do you mean?
      - bigyikes 3y ago
        Upvotes and downvotes on Hacker News. It’s a joke with some truth.
        everfree 3y ago
        Oh. That's an uninteresting way to "back up" a statement imo. Crowd wisdom is often wrong. "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
        bee_rider 3y ago
        Just a note, the person you’ve responded to is different from the person who made the “joke,” (if that is the right interpretation. I don’t really get the joke, fwiw). It doesn’t really make sense anyway; if the joke is that the comment is “backed” by the fact that HN users are upvoting it—comment scores aren’t visible to people other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it wasn’t smote into the hidden state.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        I agree. Voting systems are just generically dumb for any sort of truth consensus.
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        It's confusing because we went from "decentralized" meaning "an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized" meaning "a hierarchy seen from the other direction".
        hanniabu 3y ago
        Can you expand on that? What do you mean by from the other direction?
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        Banking is a centralized model. Participantation in banking can be said to be, from the perspective of the participant, decentralized. The participant's perspective on the hierarchy is inverted, but the model itself is unchanged. Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an actually inverted hierarchy.
    - dartos 3y ago
      It’s decentralized in the same way lobbying a politician is decentralized. Unless I’m remembering incorrectly, you need a ton of eth to partake in eth PoS voting.
      - everfree 3y ago
        Distributed validator tech (DVT) has made it so you can participate in PoS voting with much less ETH than was required before, if you choose.
        dartos 3y ago
        So like a PAC?
mxwsn 3y ago
Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only required to be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival nodes are free to store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N trust mechanism to verify an archived blob. Blobs contrast with permanent data storage in calldata, which is very expensive (due to its permanence). Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  [flagged]
dboreham 3y ago
Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?". The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
- hanniabu 3y ago
  > The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for settlement > The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?". It's about data availability > there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1 They're called escape hatches, you can view the state of each L2 on L2Beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
  - dboreham 3y ago
    > Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for settlement Can you post an example of a code that implements either of these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path) I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as Optimism, that code was "to be developed".
    - everfree 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that implements fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of the few L2s to currently have fraud proofs. Sequencer side: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50214d8ac05a1c76da7a50d5407a/validator/server_arb/machine.go#L255 https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50214... Contract side: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/90037b996509312ef1addb3f9352457b8a99d6a6/src/osp/OneStepProver0.sol https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/90037b9... It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-say.
benreesman 3y ago
As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics. Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques. So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff. If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted). But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia. To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet). Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?
chrisco255 3y ago
Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of them do host billions in assets, but they each have different tech stacks backing them up that are at varying levels of maturity and decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of breaking down the L2 ecosystem: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
ForHackernews 3y ago
Layer 2: It turns out "blockchain technology" works a lot better if you do all the important stuff off-chain. I predict that by 2030 the cryptocurrency nerds will have discovered SQL and transaction audits.
pyaamb 3y ago
a good explainer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU

mypastself 3y ago

A lot more centralized, in my view.

hanniabu 3y ago
If you're going to leave a controversial comment like that then you should back it up
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  It’s backed by decentralized voting consensus
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    Correct, which is why they should explain their claim of how and what is more centralized
  - everfree 3y ago
    What do you mean?
    - bigyikes 3y ago
      Upvotes and downvotes on Hacker News. It’s a joke with some truth.
      - everfree 3y ago
        Oh. That's an uninteresting way to "back up" a statement imo. Crowd wisdom is often wrong. "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
        bee_rider 3y ago
        Just a note, the person you’ve responded to is different from the person who made the “joke,” (if that is the right interpretation. I don’t really get the joke, fwiw). It doesn’t really make sense anyway; if the joke is that the comment is “backed” by the fact that HN users are upvoting it—comment scores aren’t visible to people other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it wasn’t smote into the hidden state.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        I agree. Voting systems are just generically dumb for any sort of truth consensus.
      - thomastjeffery 3y ago
        It's confusing because we went from "decentralized" meaning "an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized" meaning "a hierarchy seen from the other direction".
        hanniabu 3y ago
        Can you expand on that? What do you mean by from the other direction?
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        Banking is a centralized model. Participantation in banking can be said to be, from the perspective of the participant, decentralized. The participant's perspective on the hierarchy is inverted, but the model itself is unchanged. Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an actually inverted hierarchy.
  - dartos 3y ago
    It’s decentralized in the same way lobbying a politician is decentralized. Unless I’m remembering incorrectly, you need a ton of eth to partake in eth PoS voting.
    - everfree 3y ago
      Distributed validator tech (DVT) has made it so you can participate in PoS voting with much less ETH than was required before, if you choose.
      - dartos 3y ago
        So like a PAC?

mxwsn 3y ago

Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only required to be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival nodes are free to store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N trust mechanism to verify an archived blob. Blobs contrast with permanent data storage in calldata, which is very expensive (due to its permanence). Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
[flagged]

dboreham 3y ago

Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?". The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..

hanniabu 3y ago
> The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for settlement > The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?". It's about data availability > there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1 They're called escape hatches, you can view the state of each L2 on L2Beat: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
- dboreham 3y ago
  > Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for settlement Can you post an example of a code that implements either of these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path) I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as Optimism, that code was "to be developed".
  - everfree 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that implements fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of the few L2s to currently have fraud proofs. Sequencer side: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50214d8ac05a1c76da7a50d5407a/validator/server_arb/machine.go#L255 https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300d50214... Contract side: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/90037b996509312ef1addb3f9352457b8a99d6a6/src/osp/OneStepProver0.sol https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/90037b9... It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-say.

benreesman 3y ago

As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics. Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques. So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff. If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted). But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia. To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet). Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?

chrisco255 3y ago

Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of them do host billions in assets, but they each have different tech stacks backing them up that are at varying levels of maturity and decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of breaking down the L2 ecosystem: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.

ForHackernews 3y ago

Layer 2: It turns out "blockchain technology" works a lot better if you do all the important stuff off-chain. I predict that by 2030 the cryptocurrency nerds will have discovered SQL and transaction audits.

pyaamb 3y ago

a good explainer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU