Original author: _gabrielShapir 0 (@lex_node）
Original compilation: Joyce, BlockBeats
Editors note: According to data, Solanas token SOL has increased by nearly 60% in the past month. Regardless of the LSD protocol stimulated by airdrop information on Solana, or the NFT market where the floor price has quietly doubled, Solana has emerged from this round of calf market. A good development trend. As a result, Solana’s title of “Ethereum Killer” was brought up for discussion again. Community bloggers_gabrielShapir 0 Published a long tweet discussing the differences between Ethereum and Solana, and how they affect the two important propositions of decentralization and autonomy. BlockBeats is compiled as follows:
Ive been meaning to write this article for a while, and Ive been thinking about these questions since diving into Solana (and its source of centralization at the DApp level) a year ago.
Generally speaking, it seems to me that Solana is trying to achieve better scalability and composability by shifting costs to the DApp team and infrastructure providers instead of the users... This is also the SOL value flywheel origin of.
If a blockchain’s main goal is to achieve low fees, then the value of its tokens cannot come from transaction fees alone. Contrast this with Ethereum, where value growth comes from users needing to pay (and partially burn) ETH on each transaction, making it expensive for users but not expensive for those who hold ETH. favorable.
On the other hand, in order to ensure the security of the blockchain, some form of value proposition is required. How does Solana solve this problem?
- Collect state rent from decentralized application (DApps) teams.
- Charge validators a voting fee, which is what validators must pay to participate in voting for blocks.
These two features, which do not exist in Ethereum, create additional value drivers for the Solana Token (SOL), which somewhat offsets the impact of the lack of transaction fee demand on the SOL price, while also mitigating some of the Security and public resource issues (such as state bloat).
However, the problem is that both may limit decentralization (because of the increased fixed cost of becoming a validator), and in addition, actually limit the immutability of the DApp due to the presence of state rents and the difficulty of coordinating payments at the community level. .
The first question is given by@ceterispar 1 busAs he pointed out in his Delphi Research article on Solana, “This fixed cost, coupled with variable revenue based on the token staking mechanism, inherently has a natural centralizing force because the larger validators basically start from Smaller validators receive voting fees. The example below is a high-level illustration of this dynamic. After about 10 days of voting, the largest validator has increased its holdings by 0.6% relative to its initial holdings, while the smaller validators Validators lost 0.6% purely from voting.”
Second question, we have seen at least one Solana DApp team abandon their DApp during the bear market.
Token economics aside, there’s an oft-noted issue with Solana’s performance validator hardware requirements… However, despite ETH maxis slamming this, it’s not “centralized” Problem - Solana validators are decentralized (Satoshi Takamoto coefficient).
“One of the most common criticisms of Solana is the expensive hardware required to run a full node. Due to the higher cost of running a full node, the number of nodes will be limited to a small number of network participants. Goals of Solana Slot times are 400 milliseconds, and a globally distributed set of validators is slow relative to a centralized validator, so how does Solana perform and how does it achieve such performance?”
Theres also the question of how smart contracts work on Solana and the centralization/trust issues that come with it...Solana contracts work on a literal on-chain inheritance structure, for example, all NFTs are multiplied by Metaplex A sub-contract of the main NFT contract controlled by signature.
“My first concern is the number of key programs that are still controlled by multi-sig. For example, every NFT is based on Metaplex’s standard, and before they will have their programs in the next two years or so (year z) Before becoming immutable, every NFT on Solana could be changed to, say, a banana, or a coconut, or even a banana-shaped coconut... you know what I mean. Even with this Immutable planning, Metaplex has now introduced a tax, and centralization/monopoly concerns remain.”
This inevitably raises obvious trust issues, however, there may also be some benefits to this model. It turns creating new smart contract standards into an entrepreneurial activity and simultaneously reduces the due diligence burden on users, as they no longer need to check the deployment of individual token contracts.
On the other hand, this model and the cNFT model also show how costs can sometimes be hidden. If there are too many rent seekers, user costs may increase, and Solana structurally provides some opportunities that Ethereum does not have. MetaPlex may forever tax NFT transactions.
At the same time, cNFTs are very attractive to users and offer them lower costs, thus lowering overall fees. However, these reduced fees will be passed on to the DApp team to cover RPC (remote procedure call) fees to maintain data. This means that, similar to the state rent problem, Solana’s DApps may fail to pass"Bahamas test"。
In all of this, it would be a huge mistake to say that Solana is less decentralized than Ethereum... Its not a matter of decentralization... but rather, its It is a question of autonomy, that is, a question of censorship resistance.
To understand the difference, you can read thisAutonomy and Decentralization。
While Ethereum achieves immutability, autonomy, and censorship resistance, at least in theory, and charges users a high premium accordingly, Solana is cheap and passes the cost of security onto validators and DApp providers.
So, in general, Solana DApps will have a harder time minimizing trust from their teams (impacting autonomy), and in theory, the economies of scale for Solana validation should be at least greater than for Ethereum validators (decentralization).
Furthermore, we care about decentralization because it limits autonomy. So the real issue with things like performance requirements is that Solanas verification may be limited to complex data centers that are susceptible to subpoenas/seizures, which could lead to censorship.
So, if you believe that the USP of blockchain is censorship resistance/autonomy, then ETH is still a better choice than SOL as it better suits the unique purpose of blockchain.
But what if Ethereum isn’t very good at resisting censorship either? What if Ethereum isn’t actually very autonomous?
Ultimately, ultimately, the backbone of autonomy in a PoS system is the communitys willingness to conduct UASF (user-activated soft forks), and social sanctions on validators who engage in censorship. Unfortunately, Ethereum’s firmness in this regard has been less than remarkable as of late when it comes to OFAC (the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control).
Related Reading:The case for social cuts》
The business reality of social sanctions in PoS is that you are not just sanctioning the validators, but if those validators are (as they most likely are) institutions, many of their innocent customers who use the staking service will also be affected.
Will a handful of Ethereum developers really socially cut Coinbase customers millions of dollars in ETH because Coinbase is complying with the law by censoring OFACs smart contracts? I doubt it, and it seems Vitalik is also skeptical (now he advocates privacy pools).
