Why Solana was decimated by Bankman-Fried’s downfall
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
Personal anecdote: I was supposed to get in a call with a few people on the Solana team -- received a calendar invite with a name@ftx.com address, which was then amended to a name@solana.com address. Make of that what you may.
https://twitter.com/nileshtrivedi/status/1459438723305725952
In the heady days of web3 of <checks watch> six months ago, we were being told that it’s actually better if you don’t know who is behind a project because that’s the true spirit of decentralization. Just another crypto gaslighting exercise.
Remember when people were very upset that the creators of the Boring Ape NFTs were revealed from public records?
It turned out many of the people working for the DAO were anonymous and nobody in the DAO knew or cared who they were in real life. They did good work, got paid crypto, everyone was happy.
When I asked “what about sanctions” he gave me the blankest look I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, in the same position I wouldn't care about those either and would give you the same blank look.
Economic sanctions are a political act, and I can think of many ethical positions (class, ethnic, religious solidarity, rejection of extremism, rejection of central economic controls, immediate humanitarian need for items that are sanctioned, etc..) that may lead someone to disregard them entirely.
A practical concern here would be security (not knowing who is involved == not knowing if they have alternative goals). I suppose they may have been trying to implement zero-trust development practices (can that even exist?) but that sounds like a great way to put a big fat brake on any work being done.
(Disclaimer: Never owned any crypto, nor have I ever violated any sanctions)
I can see why someone would choose to "disregard" (violate/evade) sanctions if they disagree, and I can see why someone would want to make what is effectively a sanctions-proof company. I just think if you're building a system ideally suited for, say, sanctions-busting or money-laundering or whatever, that you should consider the risk of colliding with the world of laws.
Note that it's not illegal to provide humanitarian aid or help in other ways. It's not even illegal AFAIK to transact, as long as you make sure you are not involving anything or anyone sanctioned. (But I'm not a lawyer)
It’s criminal to evade them as a citizen of the sanctioning country. That might be a lot of countries, it might also be only the world police USA.
The UN security council for example is considered to have a mandate to decree international sanctions against a nation. Here is the UN’s sanctions info https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/information
That being said, I don't even think it is better. When you make active decisions to, say, help Russian goverment, you are not exactly coming off better then someone clueless doing the same.
I want widespread crypto, because I want to have the autonomy to initiate transfers myself, transparency of my accounts, easier back office, less payment middlemen, etc.
Yet I would like a state managed crypto (e-euro?) so that a fraudulous transfer, stolen wallet, etc can be canceled.
- We're in 2022 and I still can't have an API with my bank to analyze my purchases, I have to parse PDF monthly reports.
- I still can't automate my savings without a third party robo advisor than requires me giving my account credentials.
- I can't easily make FX swaps without a third party broker with 2 days wire transfers in/out.
- I can't swap without a brokerage margin account.
etc.
Centralized crypto? yes please, it's still better than the current state of affairs.
Not everyone lives in Europe or the US with fancy worldwide smart banking. Here in HK, banks are from the 90s. Crypto centralized would level the banking experience to the current century.
Why should exotic synthetic financial products only be the realm of Wall Street?
Please link to it so we can judge for ourself.
Still waiting for that one to come along though.
I'd argue that the status quo is that if you have enough money you can do whatever you want. It's sometimes inconvenient. Sometimes you have to have a clever accountant on staff. But you can get it done.
Anonymous money is more of the same, except you can fire that accountant. So tornado cash was an optimization of the current status quo.
I'm talking about a threat to that status quo. The kind of coordination technology that would let us turn our backs on money so that everybody on wallstreet had to go find real ways to contribute because the people who make the things they want just laugh at their silly dollars.
bourbaki and satoshi are
Eth is down 70%. Sol being down 90% given the above isn’t surprising.
They funded several sol projects that are now underwater without their money even DeFi ones with how FTX was controlling serum.
Serum itself was the backbone of numerous sol projects and when it got exposed for being heavily manipulated by FTX, it was obvious sol was gonna get fucked.
The entire solana ecosystem is just nuked now and it isn't hard to see this in on-chain activity and project/dao comm's.
edit: as a dev solana had some nice implementation details and was a step forward over some other chains in some ways. IMO it's totally DOA now, but I hope the dev community (whoever is real and not an alameda-funded "anon" dev etc) continues on in some capacity on a fork or other chain.
However, that ominous stack of cursed Solana will significantly dampen market sentiment even before it's sold, and that's what probably caused the magnitude of the last selloff.
Down 90% is being down 70% then going down 70% from there.
Curiously, a16z is the lead investor in Solana and Coinbase, while Sequoia...
What worries me more about this is that companies like Coinbase listed Solana at all. I think that Coinbase does understand decentralization and knew Solana was centralized, so listing a centralized coin shows that they're not committed to decentralization.
The problem is there are no crypto assets of value, and so Coinbase looks perpetually behind the ball, because their trading volumes are nothing, their costs are high, and they move incredibly slowly. They've spent their entire time as a company looking stupid because they don't show crazy trading volumes or magical new markets that are going to drive incredible revenue. Instead, they got valued as an also-ran in the market, people thinking "Oh well they're no FTX but they're worth something".
The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars. So now people look at Coinbase and realise it's not a business. We thought they were doing a poor job of capturing a brilliant market. Actually they've done a great job building a company to a serve a market that simply never existed and was all pretend.
Why is it that crypto bros think this sort of metaphor-that-doesn't-explain-anything is persuasive? Or do you actually think that a company being "cool" is important in this context?
Crypto is a space where you want to move slowly. "Move fast and break things" doesn't work here because "break things" causes full-scale collapse.
Coinbase is the largest exchange in a Western country and as such is a market leader--definitely not an also-ran. You may be looking for "crazy trading volumes or magical new markets", but anyone who actually knows how to invest knows the risks of those things and is skeptical.
> The problem they face today, is is turns out all the guys they looked unsuccessful next to turned out to be bare faced liars.
Huh? Why would competitors turning out to be liars be a problem for Coinbase?
Also, I'll point out: even if you didn't know FTX were scammers, you had to know that their products were extremely high risk, while Coinbase's products were... still high-risk but at least a coherent choice. Of the crypto scams of this past year I've been taken in by exactly 0 of them because even when they weren't obvious scams, there have always been obvious issues.
Maybe designing for scaling on the native chain is the way to go, but that's not "the idea behind Solana". There are like 30 chains trying that, many which predate Solana. Tron was trying to do that before Solana was even an idea. It's not clear to me what "the idea behind Solana" is, beyond a bunch of buzzwords which aren't even unique. I see very little in their goals that differentiates Solana from chains like Avalanche or Near, but both of those are better designed technically and more decentralized.
And there absolutely is something technically centralized about Solana. Multiple times before it was even listed on Coinbase, it was stopped and restarted by the developers. That should not be possible on a decentralized system. Period.
I implore you to recognize that you do not know what you are talking about, and stop confidently spreading misinformation. If you were taken in by Solana, recognize that investing in Solana was an obvious, avoidable mistake. If it wasn't obvious to you, it's because you're severely undereducated with regards to cryptocurrencies to be investing in them. I don't mean that to be rude--it's just that I don't want to be unclear. The people who invested in Solana weren't making educated decisions, they were gambling.
No, that's dishonest. It wasn't stopped and restarted by "developers". It was stopped and restarted by validators running Solana nodes after a massive surge in transactions locked it up for a few hours. The validators decided to run a forked version patched by developers because it was in their economic best interest to have a functioning chain.
Anyone can invest in the hardware and crypto to become a validator. This is no different than what happened when ETH and ETH classic forked, or when any other crypto hard forks during an emergency.
The validators are a small group, but that will change with scale, just like any other crypto.
If you can point to a single technical reason why Solana is centralized over other PoS cryptos, I'll happily stand corrected.
From the perspective of an individual investor in cryptocurrencies, decentralization is the entire benefit of cryptocurrencies.
Hacker News isn't a place where this will be popular to say this, but some regulations are good--they exist to protect from scams and obvious economic flaws.
Some regulations are misguided too. Decentralized currencies by their unregulatable nature avoid all regulations: good regulations and bad regulations. If you have reason to avoid the bad regulations, then cryptocurrencies are a good investment for you.
A centralized cryptocurrency is the worst of both worlds. It's (temporarily) unregulated, but it's not unregulatable. That means that investors don't get the benefits of avoiding the bad regulations, because in the long run, centralized cryptocurrencies can be brought into the regulation fold. But it also means that investors don't get the benefit of good regulations, because a scammer can exit long before their crypto gets regulated.
That's a pretty high-level, general view, but this plays out in a lot of specific ways, including what has happened with FTX.
> I think that Coinbase does understand decentralization and knew Solana was centralized, so listing a centralized coin shows that they're not committed to decentralization.
Why exactly would a centralized crypto exchange care about decentralization?
It has always been a buzzword to get crypto maxis to HODL at high prices and traders, crypto exchanges and VCs to dump on retail.
If one of the less active chains handled Solana’s volume they’d occasionally have had issues too.
Also Solana has been pretty damn reliable of late despite doing more volume than ever before: https://status.solana.com/uptime
Say, being human, and a software author, you didn't anticipate a node with a single ID producing two valid blocks (someone's blue/green setup went active/active).
Yes, one could say that you should have anticipated a single node producing two valid blocks and programmed defensively. I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs. This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever.
You can read cause and effects of the outages, including the one above, here: https://status.solana.com/history
Not yet, but that's definitely an open problem that needs good solutions, and bugs aren't an excuse for allowing centralization.
The "solution" to bugs being used by Ethereum is simply: move very slowly and try very hard to not create bugs in the first place. But others, i.e. Polkadot, are trying to come up with ways of reaching consensus around reverting or patching bugs.
> I would argue that many people would not have, and even if they did, they would not anticipate other potential bugs.
Well, tough shit. This isn't a space with room for errors, certainly not ones this big.
> This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever.
It does mean it's centralized.
If you are skeptical that it's even possible to avoid bugs, well yeah, me too. That's why crypto is a high-risk space: bugs aren't really acceptable, but so far we really haven't found a way to completely avoid them.
It is. Comparable systems can and do have errors. You can attach a bunch of nines as an SLA there and Solana would do pretty well in the last months. Especially because it’s only competition in the scalable blockchain space is itself.
> > This does not mean the design is centralised: it's just that it's a peer-to-peer design with bugs. Like all software, ever.
> It does mean it's centralized.
ok.
Uptime isn't the issue, security is. If a centralized group of developers can push out a patch and validators will pull it without the time to properly validate it, thus restarting the entire chain, that's a major security problem.
> Especially because it’s only competition in the scalable blockchain space is itself.
Oh give me a break. There are literally hundreds of cryptos in the scalable blockchain space, and Solana isn't close to being the fastest, most scalable, or most stable. You've drunk too much Kool-aid.
We all know there is absolutely no such thing as "true decentralization" in crypto.
Then I expect this to be repeated for Polygon, Algorand and Flow then. Out of all of those, Polygon is the most centralized chain pumped by VCs out of all them.
I won't be surprised to see another hack and silent emergency upgrade via a centralized multi-sig of devs to fix this VC funded chain [0].
[0] https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-t...
> Indeed, a proof-of-stake protocol enjoys many of the benefits, in terms of efficiency, of permissioned protocols; moreover, while it is less centralized than a traditional permissioned protocol, it is not nearly as decentralized as a truly permissionless protocol, such as Bitcoin.
I hear this take often, but I have no idea why it would lead to less decentralization in practice. PoS means that someone needs to transfer you some of the native token before you can participate in consensus, but there's no practical way for a cabal of validators to stop someone from doing that if there's even one person with Eth willing to sell to you. That doesn't really seem different in practice from having to find someone willing to sell you a mining rig.
You could argue that PoW has natural attrition of validators because ASICS improve over time which gives more opportunity to enter the market, but that is secondary to the high validator requirements.
Solana validator hardware requirements are incredibly high compared to anything else I'm familiar with.
In additional to the Solana validator from my original comment I've also run Ethereum and Cardano validators (or rough equivalents). They use a fraction of the compute required by a Solana validator while providing similar rewards and network function.
Again, in terms of PoS chain validators the hardware requirements of Solana are significantly higher than any other PoS chain I'm aware of - it's not even close.
High validator requirements are a barrier to entry, but Solana has a Nakamoto coefficient (decentralization score) of about 30 (actually more, but this is a couple of months ago) which is more than most - probably all - fast chains.
https://youtu.be/5NDs3Il2J3Q?list=RDCMUC9AdQPUe4BdVJ8M9X7wxH...
Because it takes money to have enough ETH to be a validator and therefore, you centralize. It takes 20ETH to be a validator, and at the height of ETH valuation, that roughly translated to about $100k. Not everyone has that kind of money to stake. Plus, it is well know that majority of ETH or any crypto for that matter is held by a small group of people, which further pushes centralized operations.
[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/solana-cryptocurr...
Rust doesn't stop bugs, it just helps you try reason about stuff and maybe catch them earlier.
Going forward their outages should occur less frequently since they've finally introduced a fee market akin to Ethereum's dynamic gas prices. With a dynamic fee market it will be more financially prohibitive to DDOS the chain.
Solana has subsecond transaction processing so a validator being down for more than a second counts as a downtime whereas with Bitcoin a block taking two hours to mine is completely normal. Bitcoin doesn't have the concept of "downtime" only the concept of delaying the next block.
But finance in general is many orders of magnitude more TPS than visa. Think about high frequency trading of derivatives of all sorts of things, and all the tiny arbitrages that can be done over all the exchanges when fees are cents. Those can easily multiply to thousands of TPS.
- 90% of crypto is still speculators who only care about cashing out before the collapse, if Solana lives only a few years that is fine by them.
There are, however, plenty of real projects backed by real money with real employees, open books, and have proven resilient over these handful of years. If the economy gets pumped full of fakeass USD causing stonks and crypto to triple up, I'm not going to be one to say "Yeah that value is so real". My fave stonk Square (SQ) (I refuse to call it block), has net me several boatloads of money since day 1, and now it's dropped to only a couple boatloads. Does that mean it's now bullshit? No. It means the economy has a mind of its own and let's not pretend it makes much sense. It's more powered by emotion and guessing than actual worth.
Citation needed, especially considering what’s been going on with BNB
Well for one “40x their output” is meaningless. Ideally stocks are valued at their expected net present value of future dividends; implicitly assuming it’s baked in for growth stocks.
Second, I don’t care at all what you think is overvalued. The question was “why was this thing valued without crypto fundamentals?” And the answer is because the market cares very little for those things.
K that's the topic of this conversation.
Bitcoin is used as a tool against French colonial CFA Franc in Africa. A a lifeline to access the outside financial world for citizens of countries under sanction.
https://iharare.com/african-countries-are-no-strangers-to-th...
That's a new one. Sure there are some crypto enthusiasts/ scammers (those are not necessarily the same people) trying to push some convoluted argument related to the CFA but this is super niche at best. And furthermore, if anyone would actually use crypto in the CFA area, it would be as a mean to circumvent the exchange control and acquire Euros/Dollars. That's not exactly fighting "colonial money", is it ?
The point an L2s is they are secured by Ethereum, not be their own consensus. They have an escape hatch so if they ever go down / disappear / attempt to steal all the money - then anyone can force a withdraw to Ethereum and be safe. If Solana goes down there's nothing you can do.
A pyramid scheme only implies that the number of investors must keep growing.
I would expect breaches in many Solana projects just as I would in other blockchain projects but after looking at this more in both here [0] and here [1] it is more Ethereum projects that have shown to have these hacks for years (due to it being there longer than other projects).
I have not seen the overall blockchain(s) of Ethereum or Solana getting outright hacked at the core. But Polygon comes to mind as a highly centralized chain which got its whole chain breached [2] requiring the developers with access to the chain to force a silent update on validators.
That doesn't look 'decentralized' or 'secure' to me on the core level of a blockchain in the case of Polygon which another VC and FTX funded chain.
[0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com
[2] https://polygon.technology/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-t...
The slide #6 talks about the different things called account. You can easily translate it if you don't speak Spanish.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/grincoin/comments/ug70ft/are_there_a...
That's where my experimentation with the chain stopped.
Doesn't really strike me as a problem though, it just means the client has responsibility of opening a port. Considering the complication of adding 1000s of hole punching strategies in the protocol, it's a fine trade-off.
and
2) even in the case where UPnP fails and there is no inbound connectivity, bitcoind works and syncs fine with only outbound connections
Solana won't even sync behind nat.
Some of these coins will recover in the next bull market, but the question is always which ones. This cycle has happened multiple times at this point.
Crypto is dead, the sky is falling. Its all happened before. The only thing that might be different this time is we could be starting a very long global bear market started by high interest rates in the U.S. to curb runaway inflation.
SPY is closing a big fat red yearly candle, and I wouldn't call real state safe since you could be easily overpaying above inflation.
what are you using to benchmark crypto against?
You basically have to gamble on a coin that have never been seen in a Bull market. Otherwise Bitcoin is always the better bet.
[1]: https://bitcoinwisdom.io/markets/bitfinex/ethbtc, zoom out to 1w
Yes, there were few weeks when ethbtc was higher, but that was over 4 years ago.
There were 6 months of free money during the second half of 2020 with three digit APR. Most active people in defi multiplied their eth holdings several times (4-6x). There was no risk because tokens to dump were received for free.
>Slow and steady wins the race.
No, it doesn't. Yield wins the race. This cycle had a once in a lifetime free money period. There's not making up for missing that. Current yields are single digit but still good.
Blocks will still be produced, and when someone DDOS’ the ability to produce blocks all the validators will route around it and keep producing blocks
Who cares if the price of Sol is $.20 cents (~$73 million market cap on 367 million Sol) by the time institutional funds, Sam and bankruptcy trustees finish selling, thats not really a factor in technology like this
If you wanna dump all your files and application onto this data store, cheap Sol will let you do it very cheaply and validators will happily store it.
If this isn't the most red flag of red flags about BNB then nothing will be.
He could have said “the most active blockchain” but chose not to. Interesting.
https://docs.solana.com/developing/on-chain-programs/overvie...
The devil is in the implementation details, but if we're talking about eBPF vs. EVM... one of them was designed for deadlock-free execution of untrusted code in-kernel, and the other is EVM.
Though, for smart contracts, I think we're best off with a graph reduction execution model, where the contract is presented its initial state and an array of the output contract states, and the contract graph evaluates to True i.f.f. the outputs are an acceptable end-state given the initial state. The client code would propose the new state, along with a compact representation of the path taken through the graph. (The path represented as the index of each branch taken at every OR node in a pre-order traversal of the graph.) The client-side execution to find a True path through the graph might not be efficient, but the on-graph verification is fast, and the format lends itself to a declarative contract description.
The tradeoff is, of course, that scripts become much harder to implement, as you can't depend on global state.
[1]: https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/the-extended-utxo...
At one extreme, apps like UniSwap are mostly blockchain side and server side code and a little client side.
At the other extreme, it is possible to use boilerplate code to write a minimal blockchain part and then have most of your business logic on your own server and then the UI on the client side.
[0] http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethere...
That was the value prop of Solana. I'm not sure they're delivering (the real problem) but, stated that way, as an attempt at a solution, it makes perfect sense.
I got off easy.
"Everyone buy Leather Chaps, we're going to control the supply and all be rich! Spend all your money on Leather Chaps, you're sure to make it back when they go even higher! Make sure you don't sell until it's 1000x higher than when you bought, diamond hands until then!"
"Want to get in early on the next drop? Simply go all around the world telling people to join our private channel where it will be announced, if you get enough people to join we'll let you into the even privater channel where we announce it even earlier!"
Meanwhile last week some dude bought a billion Leather Chaps at 2gp each and is now laughing all the way to the Grand Exchange.
Nothing new is new. Nothing old is old.
Unfortunately immunity doesn't get passed down intergenerationally, or at least not enough that a few members of the herd won't be receptive to the infection the next time around. Every time "this time is different" with a sizeable group.
Everything else is garbage I agree
To quote hn_zorba [0], who replied to a similar comment you made:
> There's no mention of CFA Francs in that article? Also the bitcoin experiment that this article briefly talks about has since become a failure - though that's probably more on the incompetence of the rollout than bitcoin.