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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I see with cryptocurrency is the transaction rate problem. It’s not like attempts haven’t already been made to solve it (Bitcoin Lightning), and Dr. Green fully admits that it’s not certain that any currently proposed changes can solve it either. How long is the world supposed to wait for reasonable transaction rates on this technology? If this is truly like the early internet, they should have vastly improved over the past ten years, and should definitely improve over the next five. But as far as I know they’ve been basically static throughout the technology’s life so far.

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> The biggest problem I see with cryptocurrency is the transaction rate problem. (...) How long is the world supposed to wait for reasonable transaction rates on this technology?

The technology to do so already exists / is currently being developed via:

- Optimistic rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism)

- 0-knowledge rollups (zkSync 2.0 (in public testing), Loopring, Immutable X)

- sidechains (Polygon PoS, Fantom)

https://ethtps.info/ https://l2fees.info/

At worst, you'll only need to wait for a year or two to get sub-$0.10 transaction fees on the ETH rollups, as user adoption picks up. For me, I've been an active user of Polygon PoS & my transaction fees are often below $0.01, with the most being $0.05.

There're also scalability improvements that're currently in the works, such as EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding, partially named after one of the core contributors to the ETH protocol). It should be noted that this is placed in the backburner, as the move to PoS is more important.

https://www.eip4844.com/

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4844

> At worst, you'll only need to wait for a year or two to get sub-$0.10 transaction fees on the ETH rollups, as user adoption picks up.

I do hope this works, genuinely. I feel I’ve been burned already on this stuff so I’ll believe it when I see it. Would you say my misgivings would be proven correct if TPS is not well over a thousand in a few years?

> If this is truly like the early internet, they should have vastly improved over the past ten years

They have. There are other cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin. Even the worst proof-of-stake chains have multiple orders of magnitude better throughput and latency than Bitcoin does. Hell, there are plenty of other proof-of-work chains with better throughput and latency than Bitcoin. And that's all entirely ignoring sidechains and other such shenanigans pushing transaction rates and speeds even further.

L1 transaction rate has improved from 7 TPS to over 1,000 TPS. If you didn't notice that's on you.

The article says Ethereum’s tx rate is 20-30 per second, and Bitcoin’s is 7. That’s what I’m going off.

Did you read the article? No?

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, will avoid this type of comment next time.

I did. He lays out several possible solutions but notes that none are proven. That’s what I’m criticizing: I’ve seen these claims made before, and they were never proven.

The author reasonably concluded that these solutions are early and effectively “beta software” but I think it would be wrong to say they are completely unproven. L2s are currently securing billions of dollars and the amount of block space they take up is on increasing rapidly.[1][2]

The unproven part is whether users will be satisfied enough with the security and censorship considerations of something like a ZK Rollup for it to scale to facilitate a significant part of the world’s economic activity. This is reasonable to question as we are only about 1 year into a range of this tech being heavily applied on mainnet.

https://l2beat.com/

https://dune.com/funnyking/L2-Gas-Consumption

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