Conversation

SBF
@SBF_FTX
Replying to
@SBF_FTX
9) But there are a lot of advantages to ETH2 over Solana. It will come with a larger built-in ecosystem, more active developers, more validators, more value securing the protocol, etc. The biggest thing that Vitalik pointed to, though, was the cost of running a node.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
10) This was probably the crux of it for him. You can run an ETH2 node on a laptop; Solana requires a decently high performance desktop. There are a lot of reasons this matters; one is that it's easier to debug something that's slower. But the largest is decentralization.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
11) On ETH2, it's plausible that there could be 10m validators and 1m block producers; 100m+ laptops are made each year. And more crucially, *most users of ETH2 could run a node for very little cost*. That means that a random person using an ETH2 DEX could validate its shard.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
12) This doesn't mean it can validate the whole blockchain--it likely couldn't--but it could validate the shard of the application it was using. This means that each user could practically verify themselves that the transactions they were doing were legit.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
13) This provides a huge added layer of security: even if consensus broke down and the block producers tried to do something nefarious, each user could notice and call bullshit. Even if they didn't have 51% stakeweight, if 80% of users disagree with a block, they can hard fork.
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SBF
@SBF_FTX
14) How about Solana? Well, the cost of running a node is dedicating a ~$500 machine to it. Which isn't that much, for a large player in crypto! But it is for a random user. And so in practice only people fairly interested in the ecosystem are likely to run nodes.
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toly 🇺🇸
@aeyakovenko
Replying to
@lightcoin
and
@SBF_Alameda
> How quickly does that $500 cost grow? 50k TPS seems like it'd fill up hard drives and explode IBD times pretty fast on a $500 machine. History that is older than the epoch is useless for consensus, so validators don't need to store it.
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toly 🇺🇸
@aeyakovenko
Replying to
@lightcoin
and
@SBF_Alameda
They don't! We could add parallel validation between checkpoints, but I don't really see the point. Booting up a new node means going through the weak subjectivity side channel checks to validate the network anyways.
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