[artfulhippo]

Gas fees have been too high since Cryptokitties in 2017. Actually, even before Ethereum launched, anyone with a calculator could have predicted the scaling issues. After all, bitcoin was never built for millions of consumers to transact onchain.

And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.

I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.

So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.

In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.

[cslarson]

This eip goes against everything you are claiming. It is pro-user and pro-scaling. The current eth mainnet was always essentially a proof of concept. Everyone knows the goal has been to find a scaling solution. L2s and rollups are that solution. Sustainable scaling was never guaranteed and yet now, due to some incredible brains, we have the technical roadmap worked out and coming to fruition. This eip lowers costs for L2/roll-up users it is completely pro-user and not to just make existing eth holders richer.

[Zamicol]

I'm unaware of a successful Internet company that didn't start by serving a niche market.

Successful businesses first leverage novel services to niche markets with less competition before expansion.

[artfulhippo]

I get what you mean, but I do see a difference between scaling strategies. Imagine if Facebook adopted multi-layer scaling, like Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing. Students and alumni of elite universities would have access to Facebook Layer 1, but non-elites would be stuck on Layer 2. Does that sound awesome to you?

To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.

[philipwhiuk]

> From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly.

So we replace a (in-theory democratically accountable) central bank with a cabal of banks?

How is this better? This is like replacing the Federal reserve with the agreements of LIBOR traders.

[300bps]

...and since EIP-1559 that went live on August 5th, over $4.6 billion worth of ETH fees have been burned into non-existence.

https://watchtheburn.com/

These fees used to be paid to miners. Now the currency paid as transaction fees are simply destroyed.

[skellera]

Probably more nuanced than “destroyed.” The entire value of the coin didn’t exist like 6 years ago and is now $500B. The burned coins are just going to be factored into the price in some way.

[300bps]

I don't agree. Every year, a max of 18 million ETH is created through mining every year with no hard cap on # of ETH.

Starting August 5th for the first time, coins that were created were literally destroyed.

You can see the profound impact this has had on the total ETH supply in the chart below. You'll see the growth curve largely flattened out.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_supply

[marcoslozada]

Hope we have 2.0 soon…

[ur-whale]

> since EIP-1559 that went live on August 5th

How did they pull that off w/o a hard fork?

Or was this a planned feature from the get go?

[bhaak]

Of course it needed a hard fork: https://ethereum.org/en/history/#london

It was first proposed by Vitalik in 2018 but lay dormant for a while before being picked up by community members and being prepared for inclusion. IIRC it took about 2 years to get it into production.

Besides the technical changes it's interesting as the most vocal proponents weren't developers and as such its inclusion was truly driven by the community.

[marcoslozada]

True that…

[reginold]

What are your favorite cryptocurrency communities / projects?

[shill_cunt]

algorand. Silivio Micali. enough said.

[marcoslozada]

We are working with many of them on Baas256.com … Solana, Poligon, BSC… and many more.

[monkeydust]

Gridcoin and PowerLedger

[game_the0ry]

> As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.

Solana is open source. What is stopping a community, perhaps even a DAO, from forking all the hard work those VCs so generously open sourced?

(side note - I fuckin love open source for this reason)

[chillacy]

Afaik solana full nodes require basically datacenter level networking (unless you have like gigabit fiber at home) while more people could run an Eth full node at home on cable internet. That's one aspect of a sacrifice in decentralization in the Eth vs Solana debate.

[artfulhippo]

Good question. I don't have the answer, but maybe it has to do with the market game theory? I mean, there's easier ways to make money. Like, copypasta smart contracts from Ethereum to EVM-compatible chains. But, to fork Solana or another distributed state machine that's currently in beta and quite unstable (and has an unintuitive programming model) is to take on immense complexity, and therefore liability.

If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.

If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.

[marcoslozada]

Totally disruptive this market. I am a blockchain professor at the university and I think it is like that!