It’s been making progress and Vitalik is a smart and capable leader of the project imo. High gas fees in the current system are arguably a sign of high demand.
I find it mindblowing that people willingly lock in so much money given how uncertain the whole thing is. There's no specific explanation about what happens if the 2.0 release is delayed repeatedly (like it has been in the past) or if it isn't successful and fails in some way. There's a lot of "trust Vitalik" going around which contradicts everything crypto pretends to be about.
I think hard improvements require effective coordination and someone who can pull that off. Vitalik is part of the reason I think ETH is more likely to be successful than competitors in the space (in addition to their head start).
If that changes then he'll lose his influence (imo), but from listening to him I think he's a pretty earnest guy and I've been impressed [0].
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/intellectual-honesty-c...
To tell you the truth, I can't keep up with zero knowledge cryptography that ETH uses / intends to use, and Ethereum implementations are usually buggy.
I can understand Schnorr signatures and Taproot, but even the Musig/Musig2 multi-signature aggregation schemes are too hard for me, so I won't use them for significant amount of money.
Bitcoin codebase is still readable, even though it's getting somewhat more complex over time.
There's also the fact that strong leadership trades away most of the decentralisation.
I'm sure this software project which has changed scope and has been delayed many times and is led by a 20-something-year-old with a personality cult around him will be successful. So convinced that I'll send them money which they promise they'll send back at an unspecified date.
Decentralised and trustless? Please...
It's just a (very) long position in eth. If you hold eth and the 2.0 transition fails to happen, you can practically say goodbye to your money anyways.
My point was billions of dollars of wealth are already being staked so there are a lot of people that have already bought in. This doesn't mean it is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean there are pretty strong incentives in place for it.
I suppose the other argument would be an ETH2 failure would likely devalue ETH too, so I'm not sure how much holding ETH is a hedge against failure.
From the chain perspective they never really leave the chain. They are either locked (most L2 solutions such as Bitcoin Lightning) or they are held by someone else (most centralized custodians, including exchanges). So the worst that can happen is that the locked/held coins get "stolen".
As I understand it, the idea is you put the data itself off chain but keep hashes on chain. Anyone who downloads the data can verify it by checking that the hash matches what is stored on chain.
It's not about storing off-chain, you compute off-chain and post to the network a cryptographic proof of the computation.
Rollups provide something akin to lossless compression proofs of computation. You execute the computation off-chain with high throughput and post a proof to the Ethereum network, this proof contains everything necessary to verify the correct execution of the computation. Sounds mind-blowing but we can thank smart mathematicians for figuring out the cryptography that makes it possible.
This means that we can scale off-chain while enjoying the security guarantees of the blockchain.
These techniques allow scaling the network throughput towards the 1000-4000 transactions per second range. Which together with data-availability sharding will push the throughput towards the 100K transactions per second range.
To be noted that this is not anymore a theoretical construction, these things are live running today on Ethereum. You can check the different solutions as well as detailed explanations of their trade-offs, limitations, etc... Here: https://l2beat.com
What is and isn't art and artistic value, and whether an indistinguishable copy of the mona lisa should be valued the same is an entire discussion, yes, but it isn't tied to NFT-s. By the way when I say indistinguishable I don't neccessarily mean by world class experts, but for example my guests who happen to spot my (hypothetical) fake mona lisa in my living room.
Edit: yes I have only NFTs as defined in Ethereum in mind. If there are other solutions working better/safer, I am not aware of them...
I would agree that an NFT pointing at some plain HTTP(S) URL on some random server without so much as a hash to identify the original content is pretty much worthless.
You can have the same amount of PoW on very little or very high throughput networks, the two are almost completely orthogonal.
If you drop the computation requirement and move enforcement to validators and slashing you can easily 10x-100x this without off chain layer 2 hacks. I was originally skeptical of this because it gives up the computational security guarantees of PoW in favor of game theory guarantees, but I was ultimately persuaded after reading more about it.
I think there's a place for both, digital gold like BTC with very low throughput and slow transactions for holding value and rarely moving currency, and ETH (and tokens backed by ETH's protocol) for everything else. With maybe some special situations for something like Zcash.
[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/97030/beginners-...
Yes, but that's intentional and configurable, e.g. the ten minutes of average time between blocks on the btc chain. You could very easily lower that value by modifying the difficulty adjustment formula. The same amount of pow would be done for a unit of time (say 1 hour), but with higher throughput through more frequent blocks. At that point this becomes a discussion about propagation times, network quality and node speeds, all unrelated to pow.
Or am I misunderstanding what you said?
Layer 2 is a hack given the current constraints, but it comes with its own trade offs that I think are worse.