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Comment by injeolmi_love | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of blockchains is to fulfill users needs, not to allow developers to enjoy creating what they view as perfect and clean solutions. Vitalik pushed hard for L2 scaling over L1 which lead to the set of biggest user headaches on ethereum; ecosystem fragmentation. Individuals and small projects can’t develop experimental dapps on L1 because the gas fees are too high, but if they use an L2 then they only access a small portion of the userbase. Contrast this with development on BSC where there’s enough L1 scaling to make experimentation not excessive expensive, but L2 solutions are still available for large projects that need it and have the developer resources to make cross chain dapps painless for users.

It’s kind of funny because btc had the same issue, where scaling the base protocol was rejected. That decision allowed ethereum to emerge as a competitor. Now eth has followed that same path with predictable results.

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Ecosystem fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. It leads to rapid development through competition. Different L2s are competing against each other to provide the best service and that has lead to a cambrian explosion of solutions. It's also a very effective way to explore the solution space, I'm sure many will disappear, others will get eaten, and at some point there will be consolidation. But all this seems like a good approach early on when tackling complex problems for which the ideal trade-offs are not entirely obvious. Explore as much of the solution space as possible and trim later on.

A perhaps more pernicious problem is liquidity fragmentation. Moving assets between L2s is a tedious friction that leads to fragmentation of liquidity. In that respect, zero-knowledge rollups present a big advantage as you can share liquidity between them as long as they share some zk-circuits that allow to prove statements to both chains. All this is being very actively worked on. And the technology behind it is short of fascinating. The typical HN audience would have a huge hard-on for it, if they didn't have such a strong preconception against crypto-anything.

If anyone is curious to learn more about L2s a good starting point is here: https://l2beat.com/

And if you want to see Ethereum scaling progress you can check it here: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

The next major upgrade to the protocol, slated for late this year or early 2024 (date is not finalized yet), will focus on scalability by making L2 activity veeery cheap.

The tech is no doubt, impressive. If we liken it to a Cambrian explosion however, there is no guarantee it'll settle to a local optimum, just as the smallest genetic differences would prove it difficult for different genealogical branches to produce viable offspring.

But as you said, it might be the quickest way to explore the solution space. We may just see a lot of unviable branches in the mean time.

Ethereum emerged as a competitor as it introduces programmable smart contracts over Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger of amounts or limited storage, while Ethereum executes programs.

Also, BSC is just one of the numerous Ethereum forks, most nodes seem to be controlled by related parties and linked with high-speed networking, making it (much) more centralized hence a considerably easier problem to solve.

There are a variety of ways to write smart contracts on BTC; it’s simply factually false that smart contracts are a primary differentiator between btc and eth. BTC has supported scripting from the beginning while lightning and taproot allow more complex contracts.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-bitcoin-smart-cont...

This comes years after Ethereum...

Who decided what the purpose of blockchains was? Is this some sort of teleological argument, or a moral one, or just a desire?

When I'm getting paid by users I care what they want, and when I'm a user I care, but otherwise I'll write the code I feel like writing, and I suppose that's how the ETH devs work too.

Blockchains were literally created as a way to prevent double-spending in cryptographically-backed currencies and claiming anything else is silly.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Double spending doesn't sound like a user problem to me. As a user id be happy to be able to double spend!

Would you be happy if your vendor also double-spent, and you ended up with nothing?

Users decide what the purpose of a blockchain is, simply because the blockchains that gain the most market share are chosen by users. Users follow developers that provide quality services, and developers pick the chain that meets their application needs closest.

Of course it’s great when people experiment on their own hobbies, I’m guilty of that pleasure myself all too often! Just please don’t use it as an excuse to attack people doing something different from you, as we see the btc and eth communities doing sadly too often.

BSC isn't distributed. It's just someone's server, now with more steps.

Can you explain this in more detail? That’s not my admittedly limited understanding of the consensus mechanism BSC uses.

Not enough validators. To become a validator you have to have millions US worth of BNB. The richest validators get priority. A handful of these richest validators are actually known to be the same entity, reducing the number even further. The chain can, and has, been "paused" by requesting the 2 dozen or so validators to coordinate (to be fair, Ethereum has also coordinated with miners due to hacks, but that resulted in disagreements and a new chain, Eth Classic).

It has all the technology to be decentralized, but ultimately it's not -- or in the least, it's not decentralized enough to survive against nation-state attacks/censorship (though you could probably say the same about Ethereum, Tornado Cash, and USA sanctions).

BSC is literally a fork of Ethereum. They have not solved the scaling trilemma. It regularly reorgs and experiences all kinds of instability.

Huh interesting. I do think L2 scaling is a disaster, I wasn’t aware Vitalik did it.

If it’s interesting to you, his public advocacy on his blog for L2 goes back to 2017[1] where he dismisses block size scaling as a centralizing risk. Of course now that we have ofac geth, liquid and cex staking; Parlia Consensus and other consensus methods where the number of validators is capped (usually at a few hundred) but voting is done through delegation are in actual fact more decentralized than ethereum. To be fair though no one knew this is how things would turn out on 2017; back then the idea that just a few hundred actors could control a blockchain was scary. Now it’s a success compared to chains where just 3-5 actors could attack a chain.

[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/31/sharding_faq.html

Thank you for sharing this.

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