[jkilpatr]

The ETH2 'beacon chain' is a meta-chain that's supposed to checkpoint a bunch of 'sub chains' for scalability. But they have launched it with many big questions unanswered.

What does a 'sub chain' actually look like to interact with? How do you coordinate with many of them? All these questions have answers in theory, but not answers in solid production ready interoperable code.

Furthermore some of these problems like 'how do you store a bunch of sub-chains' are questions not even properly answered in ETH1 nodes for the much simpler one chain case.

By launching the beacon chain early the organizations developing ETH2 can validate and make money while all these questions are figured out. This is where the money goes instead of the improvement of ETH1 since that's a tragedy of the commons as this point.

ETH2 is only worth money if these questions are figured out and ETH1 is somehow brought under the beacon chain's governance. Exactly how this is to happen... well I haven't even seen anything credible on this. Greenfield addition of chains under the ETH2 beacon chain is generously described as 'incomplete' moving ETH1 under ETH2 is much more challenging and I have not seen a plan with any level of detail.

Given that everyone is making bridges to ETH1 now and typical development timelines. I would give a medium to high chance that ETH2 will miss it's window by a couple of years and activity will move to other faster chains that are available now and capable of siphoning off traffic from Ethereum using bridges until they reach their own critical mass.

If I had to put money on it I would place 'proof of stake Ethereum' (defined as ETH1 under the POS beacon chain) more than 2 years out.

I could see the sub-chains (greenfield) working by EOY, although I wouldn't grant it a high probability.

Also if I had to put money on it I will bet on a halt of the Ethereum 1 chain for a time greater than 24 hours within that period, due to lack of maintenance on ETH1 nodes and increased stress from DeFi activity.

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ETH2 is kinda like 5G, yes there is a very real 5G network protocol, but in terms of pubic messaging, everything is 5G and communicating anything about how it works or when it will be available is filled with pitfalls and nuances that are difficult for the highly technical, much less the general public, to understand.

[derefr]

IMHO the most important endpoint for ETH2 isn’t ETH1 under the beacon-chain, or greenfield projects under the beacon chain, but rather major projects that have already been in development for years, and already had a testnet targeting some alternative sub-chain substrate (e.g. Polkadot, Near), re-evaluating their alternatives at mainnet launch time, and choosing to use ETH2 as their mainnet substrate chain instead.

That could create a lot of momentum/adoption for ETH2, very quickly. And it wouldn’t take much: all these substrate projects are intentionally architected so that you can just develop for them as if you were developing for an ETH1 side-chain, and defer all the operational questions to network launch time. They’ve intentionally commoditized themselves!

So, as long as ETH2 is the best choice for a substrate when these projects go to mainnet, it’s what they’ll pick. And, for many reasons (that all mostly come down to “lifetime cost of bridging to either ETH1 and/or chain-foo-where-DEX-foo-lives”), ETH2 may be the best choice.

(Imagine if you developed your project against some Postgres-ish-DB-aaS cloud provider like Greenplum Cloud, but only used regular Postgres features; and then, when you went to production, you looked around and decided that Amazon RDS was good enough—and on top of that, required no re-engineering, since you weren’t doing anything fancy.)

[jkilpatr]

> and choosing to use ETH2 as their mainnet substrate chain instead.

But why exactly? Until ETH1 is in the ETH2 chain ecosystem ETH2 is just another blockchain platform, providing no network effects.

ETH2's big selling point was higher throughput but bridges are already starting to commoditize access to more throughput from ETH1. ETH2 could provide smoother access than the bridge interfaces provided by other chains. (I'm speaking of bridges both to and from ETH1 and within the bridge blockchain's ecosystem like IBC)

It's not that I don't think ETH2 could win this. There's a clear path to victory.

- ETH1 integrated ASAP, going all in on expanding ETH1 capacity and bringing it under ETH2

- Provide a subchain interface that's better than IBC or any other cross-chain interface on the market

- Fullnode tooling that really works well (partial syncing for block availability, seamlessly syncs multiple chains etc)

Once you have these you can keep ETH1 users via network effect and provide access to more capacity more easily than other potential platforms.

But I don't see a clear plan from ETH2 to do either of those things. Cross chain communication is a theory-only problem devoid of the extremely polished tooling it will need to win and ETH1 under the beacon chain doesn't even seem to have a plan.

[derefr]

The difference is that ETH1 will bridge to ETH2 in the future, and therefore by choosing ETH2 as your substrate, you’re predicting that transaction costs for sibling-transactions crossing from your chain to ETH1 will become cheaper when that happens.

A similar promise cannot be made for any other substrate network, as ETH1 isn’t going to bridge to any other substrate network.

Since it’s not like sub-chain mainnets can pack up and move house after they’re launched, when launching one, you have to make choices based on how things will be, rather than how things are. It’s sort of like choosing a city to build a corporate headquarters in, based on what the civic infrastructure is likely to look like in 20 years.

[jkilpatr]

There are bridges to and from Ethereum right now. I use them every day because I need a fast sidechain for my application.

Choosing ETH2 is predicated on the assumption that ETH1 will be bridged more cheaply and easily than existing bridges can provide and that the opportunity cost of waiting is worth it.

I had to make that decision personally, decided I can't wait for ETH2, so we're using a bridge that's available today and building an ecosystem elsewhere.

Several other product leads that I know are making the same decisions, they can't just put their lives on hold and trust that ETH2 will solve problems for which there's no public timeline or even a public solution.

[reversecss]

What are your thoughts on eip 1559 and it's impact on mining profitability? That is supposedly coming this summer and my understanding is that it fixes in place gas fees, and burns off some fees that would otherwise go to miners. I'm not sure how large of an impact that will make on mining profitability, but I was under the assumption that some miners were going to pump and dump their cards right before they anticipate gpu profitability going down, so they can make some scalper money. I was thinking that miners would be redistributing their supply in the next 3 months or so.

[sedatk]

Avalanche seems to have sorted it out. It's been working on a PoS network without any significant issues so far.