Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow in the blockchain space. Even his (5+ year) old writing is quite interesting, if nothing else to see how Ethereum's research thinking has evolved over time.
A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]."
The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a couple hundred shards, each with 1000 users seems like a limit. But I wonder: 10 years from now, if the blockchain (maybe pipe?) dreams succeed, then why do we expect 1000 * 500 = 5M nodes? This seems like it's quite small.
Especially if running a node on a phone ever becomes reasonable, or at least participating in the data availability process is possible here, then why would we not go further?
The second reason for non-super-quadratic sharding is data permanence. But here, couldn't we design different shards with different appetites for data permanence. Sure, NFTs currently are forever, but I can think of many applications where users do not give a damn about data permanence, and even some applications where users would prefer if data was just forgotten about.
In which case, what's stopping us from saying "these shards, we save. The other ones, who cares about." We would want users to opt into such guarantees, of course, but it seems reasonably possible.
Of course, let's get a good sharded blockchain before we optimize for more.
I'm excited to see how sharding research continues to involve and drives the cost per TX (economic and environmental) down. Consider me a cheerleader rooting for you all!
Regarding your first reason, I think having more users can increase the security of the data, even if you're conservative about the minimum number of users you need.
For the second, if you don't care about data permanence, it's relatively easy to put the data on a second layer. Just host the data there and put merkle roots on the blockchain for consensus. If you want to verify state transitions on chain you can do that too, e.g. with zksnarks.
It is always preferred to require less resources. There must be a healthy balance. If Ethereum accomplishes what a lot of us hope, allowing home-hobbyists to run nodes and at least break-even in staking or profit a small amount will be crucial. Relying on goodwill from a small amount of technically-adept-yet-centralized operators is how we get to the Tor situation where everyone knows the government runs most of the exit nodes.
Genuine question: can crypto economics provide incentives for a more decentralised Tor?
I'm talking about being paid crypto for hosting a tor node, and charged crypto for using a tor node. Using privacy technologies like ring signatures of course.
Technologies like payment channels would allow for automatic pay-as-you-go schemes where your Tor client would pay sub-cent amounts for every MB used or whatever.
But privacy is indeed a big challenge since we're talking about Tor.
There is already a PoS chain. After the ice age in June/July, there will be another PoW chain as well. It will be up to individuals and exchanges to decide which one they want to do transactions on. And they might even choose "both", as in the case of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
That's running only a fraction of the network, though. The concerns are whether or not it can scale (or at least those have always been my concerns), and I'm of the opinion it won't work.
It's not running any of the network. It's running on its own, and it's well beyond the point required for security. It reads the PoW chain, and reaches its own consensus on block hashes.
What remains is to alter the clients of the PoW chain, so that it reads the PoS chain. Then instead of choosing the blocks with the most accumulated work, it chooses the blocks chosen by the PoS chain.
That's not a big change for the PoW clients, it doesn't add load to the PoS network at all, and it's all that's needed to eliminate mining.
>Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow
Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing".
Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a full node and validating the blockchain state, and how blockchains can't scale, and how keeping blockchain bloat limited to allow easy verification is important? I'm convinced Vitalik has been replaced by some Bizzarro version of himself because of how astonishing this 180 is.
It took creating an entirely new separate altcoin, complete with massive premine for himself, and the greater part of a decade, to finally realize Bitcoiners were right all along.
Vitalik was a big blocks supporter for a long time. I saw this post as a 180 as well.
"Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s failure to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against."[1]
It's literally the only comments on Ethereum there have been from knowledgeable people. Show me a source from an expert that thinks Ethereum would scale
All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.
The only people who claim Ethereum can't scale are those who claim Lightning Network can scale, and have aggressively silenced any one who says otherwise within the Bitcoin space for the last six years, while declaring themselves to be the only experts on the issue.
Who cares who claims what? It's more important to hear the reasons behind the claims. Vitalik makes excellent points about tolerances and safety margins needed in decentralized networks like this. People who call for increasing the key parameters almost never acknowledge the fact that things aren't as simple as what some fast machines can process in ideal conditions.
A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]."
The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a couple hundred shards, each with 1000 users seems like a limit. But I wonder: 10 years from now, if the blockchain (maybe pipe?) dreams succeed, then why do we expect 1000 * 500 = 5M nodes? This seems like it's quite small.
Especially if running a node on a phone ever becomes reasonable, or at least participating in the data availability process is possible here, then why would we not go further?
The second reason for non-super-quadratic sharding is data permanence. But here, couldn't we design different shards with different appetites for data permanence. Sure, NFTs currently are forever, but I can think of many applications where users do not give a damn about data permanence, and even some applications where users would prefer if data was just forgotten about.
In which case, what's stopping us from saying "these shards, we save. The other ones, who cares about." We would want users to opt into such guarantees, of course, but it seems reasonably possible.
Of course, let's get a good sharded blockchain before we optimize for more.
I'm excited to see how sharding research continues to involve and drives the cost per TX (economic and environmental) down. Consider me a cheerleader rooting for you all!