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> Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc).

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.

> NFTs are the use case a lot of Crypto was looking for

I have a hard time taking this sentiment seriously.. NFTs seem like vaporware. Their demonstration of ownership is unenforceable on chain nor off chain.

I'm sure we can discuss this at length... but regardless of how you view NFTs as a representation of ownership, my main point is that enough people use the NFT ecosystem on these chains to the point that it gives these chains importance.

> I think is enough to sustain appetite towards developing these chains in a direction for the better

They don't have the culture needed.

NFT art is a scam,

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.

> As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day

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

> my read was that the network was simply overloaded to the point where validators were crashing, not that some critical centralized component went down

They're the same thing

Solana has chosen to use the same underlying infra for consensus as for transactions. Validator votes are simply transactions in a block. This means there is no natural QoS to prioritize consensus traffic from regular traffic. This lead to massive issues when Solana underwent its first real-world load test.

Thanks! This is a subtle but helpful distinction (and also clarifies why ETH2 is designed the way it is).

> Yes, it hasn't taken any shortcuts or sacrifices to the blockchain trilemma

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.

> Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared

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.

> They have the best balance of decentralization, scalability, and security.

Using a Turing complete scripting language means it does not have a good scalability balance.

Perhaps you could explain this hot take?

Probably something related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

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.

If a smart contract is small enough in scope then eventually you can be reasonably sure it’ll behave the way it’s supposed to.

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.

Once you start combining "small" contracts (e.g. they call into each other), you have a large program one way or the other. The combinatorial explosion pretty much guarantees there will be some input combinations that lead to unexpected consequences, even if you claim to know everything there is to know about each particular component. If there's a way to get around this, I'd be very, very interested in reading about it.

Predicate transformer semantics[1] are an approach that would work with sufficient discipline. Given that the cost of a bug is potentially losing everything, maybe smart contracts will finally be impetus developers need to learn enough of the predicate calculus to compose programs that behave as specified.

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...

Thanks for the reference. I'm currently studying type theory and the Curry-Howard correspondence, and this seems to be an interesting bridge between that and traditional imperative programming.

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

It sounds like you might appreciate Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics[1] which is a rigorous formal treatment of the subject. Dijkstra's earlier work, A Discipline of Programming[2] lacks mathematical rigor, but is still quite pragmatic and is arguably a much gentler introduction to the subject. It also focuses more on real-world use cases.

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_...

Why not just use a centralized system if a human judge is the arbiter for disputes with respect to the operation of the system?

Nobody has yet convinced me that the effort spent on blockchain smart contract whatever would not have been better spent un-pretentiously re-writing traditional banking infrastructure with lessons learned in the last 40 or so years.

Good luck with that. Myself and others have lost hope that the current system can ever change. You're never going to convince the people in power to rewrite the current system.

Why is this a hot take?

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.

Because execution is guaranteed to stop, it is technically not turing complete.

Turing completeness assumes infinite resources and just concerns itself with the ability of a system of rules to simulate a Turing Machine.

Execution of any computer program is guaranteed to stop

What's the Halting problem?

while(True) print("That doesn't seem quite right...");

What is the heat death of the universe?

> since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made.

could you be more specific about Cardano issues?

One straight forward one is their scaling. They would bash ethereum's developers saying how stupid they are and cardano spent years on research papers without any practical experience to come up with off-chain payment channels. Just recently (a week ago?) They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better and that they'd start working on those. But with their speed of development, grifting founder, and more interest in marketing than building, I don't expect them to finish any time soon or be relevant.

Cardano does have significant benefits though. For example native tokens rather than wrapping things in smart contracts saves a lot of space, computation, and expense.

What happens, when the structure of a typical token contract changes?

I don't know when this would happen - it'd be a big deal, like a fork I think. The point is on Ethereum we might create an ERC-20 token for NewCoin that wraps it and then all of our interactions with NewCoin is via smart contracts. On Cardano these would be native to the chain in the same way as Ether is on Ethereum (or Ada on Cardano). If you need a layer of logic over the token you'd need to introduce a smart contract but for things like transferring, getting supply, etc, it's the same as doing that for Ether on Ethereum - they're essentially primitive functions on the chain.

Cardano can have xyz benefit — are they too late to get traction?

It looks to me like first mover advantage, and community support, are carrying Ethereum off into the sunset.

Maybe! I do trust in Cardanos robustness so there could be a move towards them if something goes wrong in an Ethereum fork, or if the fees don’t come down. However I think Ethereum may be the JavaScript of blockchain - imperfect, but the winner nonetheless.

Yes, Cardano audits are really late

What do you mean by "Cardano audits are really late"?

when did they say that rollups are better and that they'd switch to them?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJcVEJ1a6eg&t=4660s

Wrong, try again. It's a lie.

They didn't. The scaling path is well known : Optimizations, Input Endorsers, Hydra.

The project is kindof finished isn't it? The founders managed to scam their way into a top 5 coin for a while, got rich AF, and never had to actually deliver any sort of product. Their ineptitude got laid pretty bare when their "smart contracts" were finally released, and only able to process something like one transaction per day or something absurd like that.

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.

> only able to process something like one transaction per day or something absurd like that.

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...

Maybe it changed? I know when the smart contracts were finally released, there was a bunch of discussion about only being able to do one transaction per day, or per block, or per wallet per day, or per wallet per block per day or something ridiculously small like that.

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.)

What you're talking about is the concurrency "issue". It was a bad designed app.To code Smart Contract on Cardano you have to learn the "Cardano way" of building Smart Contracts. It's like multi-core systems : you have to learn how to take advantages of the several cores.

> They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better

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.

> There are some experiments on Rollups because it can have use cases

waits for 2nd and 3rd weeks of December

No time to waste, I'm learning Plutus. :-)

Arbitrum has good rollups. Ee are working on a descentralizad cloud storage using blockchain. It works quite good

Haskell as the contract language is one, they've made the developer barrier to entry comically high.

They’re working on Marlowe and Blockly to reduce that barrier though. I spoke to Charles a while back and got the sense he’d have used a different language if he’d done it again.

Solidity is a minefield language... Plutus is way better

It's not a minefield

Neither of you are adding any information — could you? Actually very interested.

On Ethereum, Solidity has access to the global state of the blockchain and it's very hard do create secure program with it. Cardano's language Plutus has only access to UTXOs ( bitcoin way to manage account) and store a local state in it. It's really functional programming applied to the blockchain space. The language is functional ( Haskell subset ) and the ledger too. One advantage of this design is that fees are deterministic. For a given transaction input you will have exactly the same fees.

Great information to know. Thank you for the summary.

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.

https://polynya.medium.com/

Scroll to their first article (it's not that far) and work backwards.

This is a great blog on cryptocurrency. Thank you!

UBQ is entirely decentralized, stable, no premine, and ETH/EVM compatible. Tiny coin but extremely solid with very capable devs.

They should become a rollup

> They have the best balance of decentralization, scalability, and security.

Eth is highly centralized

This entire article is about the problems with Eth's scalability and how everyone else is better

Ethereum is slightly less decentralized than Bitcoin when it comes to node count, but that’s about it. Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only chains with high number of nodes.

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.

Node count is not a good measurement of decentralization.

> Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only chains with high number of nodes.

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].

[1] https://ethernodes.org/countries

[2] https://adapools.org

Ethernodes.org crawler isn’t capturing all the nodes, but supposedly it’s either getting updated or a new one is coming out that should see all of them.

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://www.nodewatch.io/

I don't believe there are that many nodes. Those may not be full validating/archival nodes.

Contrary to the misinformation spread by a certain community, “full nodes” in Ethereum are fully validating.

https://mobile.twitter.com/TuurDemeester/status/146437138499...

Would it be a good idea to build a node (or fork) that lets only nonwhales (as of 20xx) vote?