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Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

I would like to point out that the alternative method of focusing on maximizing execution bandwidth and speed at the base layer is being done on Solana, with great success.

Layer 2s if they’re needed are as easily added on top as it is for Ethereum. But Solana is so fast and cheap already right now that it hasn’t been necessary.

I’m of the philosophy that since you only get to build one base layer, you should really spend the time to do it well and have it designed to be as efficient and performant as possible.

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Solana is certainly fast and cheap, but to the detriment of reliability and security. Not sure that this is the correct tradeoff.

Ethereum and Solana are exactly the same in reliability and security. But Solana is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper at the same time.

This wasn’t easily achieved by the way. It’s a heroic feat of engineering that shouldn’t be discounted.

what are you smoking? Solana has had various outages in its lifetime and required to repeat transactions a lot. thats NOT the same experience as on Eth and far inferior in reliability.

They're just trying to "pump their bags", as they say.

By increasing the requirements to run a node by multiple factors, yeah.

Solana recommends 10Gbit/s network speed for running a node.

Ethereum nodes can easily run on almost any home connection.

Technology grows exponentially. Ethereum validators are fixed to an arbitrary performance threshold that ensures the network will stay stagnant.

Solana is perfect for most retail use. I’ve used Solana Pay to buy things online with USDC and the experience is incredible. Can’t see any reason why most things that don’t require utmost security (shopping, games, etc.) won’t use Solana.

But if I was managing big money, I wouldn’t want it on Solana. Ethereum is far more decentralized and secure.

I can see a near future where Bitcoin is “digital gold”, Ethereum is the settlement layer for institutions, and Solana is the blockchain for retail users.

Why not have Solana be the settlement layer? I understand the Bitcoin thesis given its network effects and OG nature sure.

I don’t understand why people view Ethereum as more secure than Solana. They’re exactly the same in terms of security. And Solana is actually more decentralized than Ethereum is!

Solana's validating nodes are extremely resource hungry, to the point the Solana Foundation has to subsidize people running them. Transactions also fail 60% of the time.

> Transactions also fail 60% of the time.

Any more details about this would be interesting for me.

I’ve written off Solana after looking at it seriously several times now, yet it continues to have the appearance of thriving. Fwiw my biggest issues in the past has been a combination of large data and resource requirement and vulnerability of archive/full history nodes to Google services shutoff and centralization with censorship possibilities.

I haven't looked closely into Solana because it's clear to me it's not a decentralized network. Its transaction history is over 100 TB now, with gigabytes being added per day (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/solana/s/ipF70lwxe0).

The result is that everyone relies on the Solana Foundation to store the full archive, and pretty soon even non-expired history will only be possible for large companies to store.

is full history needed?

for validators it may be last 300 blocks. for bridges 30k blocks. for rollups 300k.

assuming it is possible to start validator from any block(trusting random subset of validators to bootstrap) and account state is way smaller its ok.

also, as i see 100tb costs 3k usd. so some archieval nodes can be just payed some to handle that.

100 TBs makes it extremely difficult to fully validate the history, because you need to download that much data over the internet, from some archival nodes.

And that number is going to grow exponentially, to the point where the network is destined to have a centralized, and thus fragile, structure.

I agree that most nodes do not need the full history, but even everyday operational costs are enormous: dozens of gigabytes a day just to keep up?

solana can make some ceremony for warp bootstrap. instead of validating since genesis, ask several on chain random nodes for start from specific block. and fisherman to find if any node differs from archieval.

so economics of storage i do not know, but that leads back to artificially cheap transactions. as soon as tx will be real price, they will pay storage.

Yes it's possible to use these kinds of schemes to get artificially cheap transactions. I don't see such schemes being employed on Solana right now and I anticipate that we're going to see much more of that on Ethereum Rollups in the near future.

people tell that solana lowers validating fees up to inability to stand against normal traffic which ddos it.

also two thirds of transactions are validators voting for blocks.

also afaik solana finalization time is not sub second, but 10 seconds. intrestingly why misleading info about sub second still persist...

also solana cannot really execute as part of single transaction all needed. so from 1/3 of useful transactions, half is just account lookup table creation.

so it feels somebody tries hard to tell the story about high throughput and low latency, while both are not there.

Finalization of a transaction on Solana averages <400ms. Feel free to look at the dashboard yourself if you need proof: https://solanabeach.io/

block production is not finalization. reorgs possible.

one cannot bridge or act in reality for 32 * 400 ms

https://solana.stackexchange.com/questions/7945/single-slot-...

That’s disingenuous. Reorgs are also possible on Ethereum.

To date no transaction has been rolled back on Solana once two thirds of the validator set have voted on it.

Transaction failure is misleading. Here's a good thread explaining the details: https://twitter.com/0xMert_/status/1771700602629730795

tl;dr Users often submit transactions that attempt to arbitrage price discrepancies on-chain. But someone else fills the arb before them and so their transaction while successfully received will result in nothing happening. The transaction didn't fail though. Solana, your "decentralized server", successfully received the request.

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