Vitalik Buterin Proposes New EIP to Tackle Ethereum’s Sky-High Gas Fees
cryptonews.com
cryptonews.com
> Notably, EIP-4488 is a "short-term" remedy for Ethereum's sky-high gas fees.
No, it would not be a remedy at all. The high gas fees wouldn't be reduced a lot by a reduction of the calldata gas cost.
> Arguably, the main update that is expected to solve Ethereum’s scalability issue is the shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.
Another bad take. Changing the consensus engine does nothing for gas fees. Sharding is expected to do that but that is not planned to be introduced in 2022.
What EIP-4488 would do is reduce the cost of Layer 2 (L2) solutions like rollups. Those need to commit their state hashes to the L1 blockchain. But those are currently somewhat expensive as well because of the high calldata gas cost.
EIP-4488 might help with gas fees indirectly if it encourages the usage of L2 solutions which will then have less gas costs to commit to L1.
Are they changing how calldata is processed? or are they changing an ordering mechanism? or are they privileging calldata to have lower gas cost via a simple conditional statement? something else?
The nice thing about rollups is that although they trade-off some centralization for scale, you can always escape hatch to layer 1 by posting a fraud proof of validity proof and your funds are secured by L1.
Eventually rollups will begin to decentralize themselves, as is the plan for some of the most promising rollups such as StarkNet and zkSync. Right now the sequencers and provers are operated by the founders of these organizations, but they will split these off into a federated network over the next year.
And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.
I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.
So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.
These fees used to be paid to miners. Now the currency paid as transaction fees are simply destroyed.
Starting August 5th for the first time, coins that were created were literally destroyed.
You can see the profound impact this has had on the total ETH supply in the chart below. You'll see the growth curve largely flattened out.
How did they pull that off w/o a hard fork?
Or was this a planned feature from the get go?
It was first proposed by Vitalik in 2018 but lay dormant for a while before being picked up by community members and being prepared for inclusion. IIRC it took about 2 years to get it into production.
Besides the technical changes it's interesting as the most vocal proponents weren't developers and as such its inclusion was truly driven by the community.
Solana is open source. What is stopping a community, perhaps even a DAO, from forking all the hard work those VCs so generously open sourced?
(side note - I fuckin love open source for this reason)
If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.
If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.
Successful businesses first leverage novel services to niche markets with less competition before expansion.
To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.
So we replace a (in-theory democratically accountable) central bank with a cabal of banks?
How is this better? This is like replacing the Federal reserve with the agreements of LIBOR traders.
I've always been of the opinion that their sharding effort would fail, but I want to stay well informed. Sharding POS is very hard because the "trilemma" is correct for POS (kadena.io / explorer.chainweb.com being the example that the trilemma is solvable if you stick to POW).
Layer 2/zk-rollups will only help successful dapp devs lower their gas costs (see: DyDx). It doesn't relieve the pressure on layer 1 as other apps/patterns move in until a new equilibrium is reached.
If Ethereum was not working on lowering fees, users would quickly migrate to another chain.
Complexity is the enemy of security. These systems just grow more complex and fragile as they progress.
There is a lot of immediate commerce right now which is awkward to disrupt, but just patch and move on.
useful to mention because I notice people often aren't aware of how the system they respect works and succumbs worse to the same criticisms
And I thought I was responding to a no-coiner, but it seems you are conflating everything not-bitcoin together
Blocks stopped briefly and it was inconvenient because there is a bit of commerce since the adoption curve is way faster, we can just say “thank you bitcoin for paving the way” and move on. That circumstance is just not different enough.
And yes, they have been turning the knobs year after year, but turning knobs is a lot different than adding more and more code.
To me, they all seem be more or less the same, a bit like different Linux flavors. (If one would disappear, nobody would miss it, or?).
Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. And history has shown that coins with near zero value very soon have no users and die.
That tells you that it isn't the features that give a cryptocurrency its value. The value is in the pool of users who believe it has value. The features of a cryptocurrency are in many ways irrelevant.
I'd like to believe that. But then I see projects like Bitcoin Gold that just replaced the PoW and enriched the authors with 100,000 coins and somehow it's valued at nearly $1B...
Makes you wonder what the value is, then.
Interop between blockchains seems doable (I guess Coinbase, more or less, does this). At that point what makes one cryptocurrency worth more than another?
There are thousands of applications that live on Ethereum, that have smart contracts controlling their treasuries, that have access to interoperable liquidity, that have established history and user base, etc.
Solana has made many sacrifices to decentralization and basically requires a super computer to operate a validator. As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day which is unacceptable.
Cardano is just a hot mess. They spent years in research to "fo things right from the get go" and since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made.
Polkadot is pretty much following ethereum's rollup design but their downside is it's pretty much a vc chain like the others.
Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc). They come in with a huge marketing budget to mislead the likes knowledgeable mainstream, but the builders see through all that nonsense and as Palmer says, "developers, developers, developers".
could you be more specific about Cardano issues?
It looks to me like first mover advantage, and community support, are carrying Ethereum off into the sunset.
As far as I can tell, even the cringey youtube livestreams have ended at this point. I genuinely don't think that anybody involved with that absolute disaster of a project care. They'll just release more declarations that things are coming eventually, obfuscate everything with more confusing sounding names for things, make more vague promises about "Africa", and deliver nothing while enriching themselves.
why are you blatantly lying?
[1]: To split the logic across different branches and enforce more parallelism, it is essential to build DApps and other solutions using multiple UTXOs. This provides benefits in terms of scaling, just like developing Bitcoin services prerequisites splitting one wallet into sub wallets. DApps built on Cardano are not limited to one transaction per block. In fact, the block budget (that is the maximum number of transactions it can hold) allows the execution of hundreds of simple transactions and several complex scripts. However, the eUTXO model allows spending a transaction output only once. Given that users can face contention issues trying to access the same UTXO, it is important to use many different UTXOs. Note that this is important unless such a design would benefit from a strict ordering of clients. Sets of UTXOs can be used to implement design patterns that include semaphores. In addition, different users can interact with one smart contract without any concurrency failure.
[1] https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/10/concurrency-and-all...
It doesn't matter if it's one transaction per day, or one transaction per block per wallet per day or whatever they eventually got it to. That is way, way too slow.
(I could be wrong about this. I pulled the ripcord on cardano when I started seeing the extremely bizarre youtube livestreams about vaccines, and the bizzare, 5 hour word salad interview with lex friedman.)
Again, it's a lie : Can you provide a link to an official statement made by IOHK about this ? No, of course : Input endorsers is the official path for scaling, it's not a surprise : they are part of the first 2016 Ouroboros paper. There are some experiments on Rollups because it can have use cases, but there are no official statement about using Rollups.
waits for 2nd and 3rd weeks of December
Using a Turing complete scripting language means it does not have a good scalability balance.
The amount of brainpower needed today to _prove_ that a smart contract does exactly what is intended doesn't scale to a whole financial system. The existing financial system gets away with having "oracles" called judges (in a court). I think we can graft this onto Ethereum by accompanying each smart contract with some natural language that can be interpreted as its "intent", and in the event any bug in the code violates this intent we can bring in a human judge who can decide whether to fork or not.
On the other side, I think any sufficiently strong theorem-proving strategy will resemble simply limiting yourself to a non-Turing-complete subset of the language.
With enough of these contracts you start to build a financial operating system that can be relied upon.
However I do think the human component is underrated in the crypto space. I imagine the future will consist of humans being injected into the financial operating system itself instead of bypassing it like you describe.
That's just half of the problem though. The other half is knowing that your specification doesn't admit any unpleasant behaviors. I expect some combination of KISS and model checking is appropriate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_transformer_semantic...
As for the second part, do you know off the top of your head if [not checking whether the proved behavior admits abuse] was the issue that resulted in "millions of dollars" worth of coins being stolen in the various debacles we hear about? I have an inkling that almost every time, it's actually this.
The only one I ever looked into was the 2016 DAO[1] hack and I didn't get the impression that it was because they didn't check their code for spec violations, rather they just designed a system that allowed someone to do something bad. I have no idea how we can prevent this, even with all the power of theorem provers.
Like most of his work, the general theme is "how can we avoid making a mess of things unnecessarily?" Avoiding needless complexity is clearly the programmer's greatest challenge.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3144463-predicate-calcul...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2276288.A_Discipline_of_...
It means that a single transaction can be very computationally expensive, compared to a Bitcoin transaction that is very simple, meaning that it's exponentially harder to scale Ethereum than to scale Bitcoin.
I used to believe this, but despite the inferiority of these chains I no longer think this is the case. I think NFTs are the use case a lot of Crypto was looking for, and there are now a significant number of people making their living via NFTs on chains like Solana & Tezos. The volume from their activity alone (not to mention defi) I think is enough to sustain appetite towards developing these chains in a direction for the better. Wether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but certainly plenty of folks would miss these chains if they went belly up.
I have a hard time taking this sentiment seriously.. NFTs seem like vaporware. Their demonstration of ownership is unenforceable on chain nor off chain.
They don't have the culture needed.
NFT as a governance token solution HEAVILY needs decentralisation and trust onchain to fullfill its usecase.
Solana, Bnb etc are tbh a joke, most validator nodes are under one team’s control, why call it a cryptocurrency when your “blockchain” is essentially under control of one team.
I get your point, a ton of money is being made with nft art , etc on those chains, but its mostly snakeoil salesman stuff.
Eth atleast has real potential to be something more then that. Idc if it takes 10 years, might as well wait and do it the right way.
Eth is highly centralized
This entire article is about the problems with Eth's scalability and how everyone else is better
Ethereum has 10 different, independent teams working on their own clients, far more than Bitcoin, so we could say that the development is way more decentralized.
Am I looking at the correct source here? [1] It says 2997. This is lower than the total number of Cardano staking (validating) pools, which is currently 3135 [2].
Seems like it’s about 6000 according to geth dev:
https://mobile.twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/14605772098...
There’s also about 4600 eth2 nodes:
https://mobile.twitter.com/TuurDemeester/status/146437138499...
While the post-mortem [1] is lacking (mostly in terms of follow-up), my read was that the network was simply overloaded to the point where validators were crashing, not that some critical centralized component went down. I'd imagine there's similar DoS attacks one could execute against the older chains (but probably much harder to find given their maturity).
I suppose if you wanted to make an argument against decentralization on Solana it would be that it seems low-probability near-term that there would ever be an alternative validator implementation due to the complexity of Solana and VC-funded nature of the main one (it could always be forked though, I suppose).
[1] https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview
They're the same thing
Eth has sacrificed on scalability. Whether you find that the balance is subjective.
Cardano's issue to this point is that their eUTXO model and their smart contract tooling is a bit too esoteric for the current crypto community. What you get in return is deterministic and verifiable smart contracts. Whether that will matter in practice time will tell
Eth didn't come up with the rollup design.
I agree with your Steve Balmer take, but the rest of your assessment is something else.
Are there any good information sources where we could get up to speed on the problems you mentioned above and similar issues?
The usual news sources are not very informative.
Scroll to their first article (it's not that far) and work backwards.
I think you are vastly underestimating some of these alternative chains and the amount of development effort that some of these ecosystems have been building this year. As more people use blockchain technology people are just not going to be able to afford Ethereum unless they solve their gas and scalability issues sooner than later. I can't even recommend using ETH to any of my friends or coworkers because of how financially impractical it currently is. Solana being out for a day is pretty trivial compared to being able to actually use the chain now instead of the theoretical future where ETH's zkRollups, and their various L2 solutions are in place.
I'm pretty sure the only people that can actually use ETH are people that got in years ago, or have institutional money. That is not a chain I can sell to people despite me really enjoying the tech and thinking it is a cool product.
Seriously. Imagine trying to convince someone that isn't in crypto already to use Ethereum when transactions cost upwards of $100. It's absolute insanity, and not worth the cost currently. I really hope ongoing development efforts work out sooner than later.
If you do capture a significant number of real users than yes there’s not much difference.
People will mention the fees or efficiency but the fact is a lot of the underdogs have not had to face any actual load so it’s easy to brag about low fees.
I can't imagine that a clear winner would emerge any time soon or maybe ever.
The question in my mind is: will Ethereum's network effect buy it enough time to scale and get to an optimal "ETH 2.0" state where fees are negligible and throughput is high? Or will it be supplanted before then? My money is on the former, but it's certainly a question worth pondering!
3. Ethereum is far more secure in an adversarial environment. 51% attacking Ethereum would require more capital than performing a similar attack on other chains.
Ethereum's execution will continue to be serialized while the data layer is parallelized.
This allows the chain data to grow without excessive hardware requirements.
One day the HN crowd is pushing what a joke proof of stake is -- really? Who guessed so.
The next day the newest newest crypto poop gets served on golden platters.