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Comment by trutannus | Hacker News Reader

Well put. In addition, Ethereum is also not the most ideal blockchain in the world. Given more time, I'm sure better options will become available. There's no reason to pile onto a flawed system like that just because it's the only option now. Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.

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I did a Buildspace project building on the Solana blockchain a couple of weeks ago. It solves a bunch of problems with Ethereum - it processes thousands of transactions a second and has tiny fees. Had to learn some Rust to write it though, and it’s definitely very early still. But I think it or something like it is going to become a really good option eventually because so many apps can’t really work with Ethereum’s transaction speed and fees.

But is Solana even decentralized enough? What's the point if it's not really that decentralized?

I'm not sure, I'm not super familiar with the theory of it to be honest. I'd like to learn more though! Do you mean in terms of being proof of stake instead of proof of work, or do you mean something specific to Solana itself?

Idk so much, but basically i've heard that Solana validation isn't easily available like ETH (run on any GPU). It needs like 16 core cpu with 256gb RAM and fast SSD.

Then there's only 1000 validators right now, and 130 of them are losing money.

So it seems like their validation is very oligarchal. Which kinda defeats the purpose right?

Venmo or Visa can have superfast and supercheap transactions... but who cares.

Yep looks like you’re right, those are some pretty beefy requirements. I suppose that if they’re paid in Sol then they could become profitable/more profitable over time and then more might come in, but that’s definitely a really high floor.

Yeah idk, I don't know much about it. But it seems like centralization and gas fees are inversely related. The only way to scale is to use the L2's and L3's which are basically just smaller blockchains that clear on the L1 less often.

So for smaller transactions where you don't care about global immutability that much, you just let it get done on an L3 and then your gas fee is much much lower. Creates kind of a tree structure.

Again i don't know sh!t, but basically having a globally immutable decentralized blockchain that works for tons of transactions seems impossbile

L2 companies have liability for the transactions that passed over their infrastructure. I think they will evolve by having their own L1 chains.

So that's L3 then, right.

Will there be enough upside to Solana though when Ethereum 2 rolls out?

No idea! If Ethereum can get those kinds of transaction times and fees that'll be awesome and a big step forward for everyone though. If all I get from learning Solana is an excuse to learn Rust then that's a win in my book!

Absolutely correct. They are only doing this because all their investments are in Ethereum (Because they missed Bitcoin).

So they have to keep hyping up the 'web3' narrative with Ethereum having to power it despite it still being expensive and useless for basic use-cases as more apps built on it begin to implement very complex features.

The best part is they know Ethereum can't scale, hence the intensity of the hype squad pushing and pumping it. There are better alternative blockchain ecosystems (not 'tokens') which solve Ethereum's shortcomings and aim to supersede it.

One of the most important thing people overlook is network effects. By being around longer those chains have built those networks, so even if you have something better, it'll have a huge uphill battle for adoption.

For same reasons that many startups tried to compete with craigslist for years and failed because they didn't account for network effects.

>Realistically, we should be still developing out better chains rather than building everything onto Ethereum.

This is exactly what's happening. One of the biggest trends of the last 1-2 years in crypto has been alternative approaches to smartchains. You can find many of them in the top 50 projects list.

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