Making a high-throughput L1 to reduce gas cost is a bit like making a road wider to reduce traffic
In reality, the wider road makes more people think โoh I can take my car to work now instead of commuting!โ => traffic re-clogs => it takes exactly as long to get to work as before
In reality, the wider road makes more people think โoh I can take my car to work now instead of commuting!โ => traffic re-clogs => it takes exactly as long to get to work as before
In reality, a wider road does not reduce the time it takes to get to work. It only allows more people to endure the same level of traffic at the same time.
What you need in order to solve the traffic problem is more roads, coming in from different directions to the city.
What you need in order to solve the traffic problem is more roads, coming in from different directions to the city.
Intuition: if everyone had their own road into the city, there would be no traffic.
So, if everyone is going to suffer the same gas cost on the centralized L1 as on the decentralized L1, what problem did you actually solve by making the L1 high-throughput?
Solana is pitched as an Ethereum alternative that is cheap because of its higher L1 throughput, and further; because the L1 has such high throughput, youโll be able to run all dapps on the same composable layer! No need to bridge to rollups/sidechains! Everything interacts on L1.
It really sounds like an attractive tradeoff. A bit more centralization, but no more gas issues and a fully composable chain for all dapps! Imagine the greatness this DeFi ecosystem can achieve in comparison to the fragmented Ethereum version!
But, this is a mirage. The base-layer will clog just like the wider road. Like @KyleSamani says, Solana will eventually also have to build on rollups. This is inevitable as arbs, liquidations and other fee-insensitive transactions begin to crowd out everyday users.
So, if you inherently *must* break composability at the base-layer, whatโs the advantage of sacrificing decentralization at the base-layer for high-throughput?
It seems like the only thing youโre actually achieving is creating a base-layer in which the native asset (SOL) will be unable to compete as a decentralized SoV/MoE. Thatโs a huge sacrifice. Those 2 things are the largest value drivers for cryptocurrency by orders of magnitude.
And when you consider that in the long term you made this sacrifice to gain almost nothing, it really makes you wonder why anyone thought this was a good route to embark upon in the first place.
$SOL has been one of my most profitable investment in the last year though so thanks for that.
Letโs play more games like this I guess
Letโs play more games like this I guess
People will say @0xfour is my alt account
Loading suggestions...