I keep hearing this argument but I really don't buy it, sorry. I think that over time these other chains are also going to naturally decentralize, at least in the case of Solana the primary barrier of entry is hardware. I think that actually having a product that works today is more important than a platform that hasn't been scalable since inception. Maybe ETH 2.0 will release sometime and all the ongoing scalability efforts actually do work, but until then I think it's absurd to write off other chains that are vastly outperforming it.

Edit - It's really, really easy to see that a transaction on Ethereum is not even remotely worth the gas it charges today. I remember hearing ETH people trashing BTC transaction prices in 2017, but yeah I'm sorry, this is so beyond absurd I cannot support or recommend anyone use ETH as a layer 1 until it is actually a scalable chain. Not in theory, but actually works. Wasn't sharding and layering discussed in 2017? How much longer until it's actually usable? Gas price for minting a JPG the other day for me would have been $300. This isn't worth it in any world unless you are sitting on a fat stack of ETH you bought under $200. But then you should just sell it instead of actually using it. Don't you see the problem? Why do you think there's so many articles talking about how terrible Web3 is? It couldn't possibly be that people's first impression of the tech is on a financially impractical chain.

I like working in Solidity and think the EVM is great, and there's a lot of cool projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. But ETH is an unusable L1 for the vast majority of people until they solve scalability. No amount of decentralization dreams are worth it. Hell, you could even just use Ethereum classic if you wanted. It does everything ETH does because it's just ETH except they didn't have a centralized Ethereum foundation mutate the chain history because someone stole a bunch of money from them and only costs like $50 the last time I checked. If you care so much about decentralization shouldn't you like the chain that didn't have it's history changed by a centralized organization?

If you really want the most decentralized network possible, Bitcoin is it. I haven't looked into the taproot update too much yet, but maybe it'll be actually supported before ETH scales at this rate.

ETH already scales with L2 while remaining the most decentralized and secure

Yeah, let me just lock up my ETH for a week so I can move it to Arbitrum and only have to pay $25 a transaction instead of $100.

You should really do more research because that's not how it'll work.

The idea is that users will onboard straight to Layer 2 and stay on Layer 2. Layer 1 will only be used by protocols and extremely important transactions like nation-state transactions. You'll also be able to move between L2's via bridging protocols like Hop.

This isn't just Ethereum BTW. Other chains are moving to layer 2 rollups because that's just how blockchains scale. Ethereum is getting a lot of shit because it's dealing with unprecedented demand and it refuses to cut corners on important things like decentralization. Other chains will have the same fate if they grow large enough.

I'm simply stating how Arbitrum works today. And sure, once there's more adoption on L2s then there will be a reason to stay in the ecosystem, and I do get that it's inevitable that we'll have a multichain future (we have a multichain present anyways), but in this model I just don't understand why ETH has value in the thousands of dollars per token. The answer is simply amounting to "you cannot afford our chain so go use a different one". So I'll happily work with a more affordable chain with higher throughput.

I hope that the ETH vision works out because right now it's kind of a clusterfuck tbh. But until the planned vision is not theory and is fully realized, I think it's absurd to refuse to work with other L1 solutions like Solana simply because Ethereum has a large head start on decentralization. I think that if people try some Web3 apps on a chain like Solana or Avalanche, more people would be excited about the potential that Web3 can bring. Instead, we have people blindly yelling about how NFTs are bad for the environment or whatever nonsense, or that it cost someone $100 to move $50.

And regarding using ETH for nation state transactions, you can simply just use BTC for such important transactions. It's more decentralized than Ethereum and is just going to continue to decentralize.

That's not how it works. Amazing how you can be so confident while being so wrong.

Edit - my bad, seems like the week wait is from Arbitrum to ETH. Evidently missed that when I was trying to move funds from ETH to Arb. Ah well.

Really though, unless these transactions become more obfuscated crosschain this ETH ecosystem feels like an over engineered nightmare on a chain that couldn't scale. I keep hearing from ETH maximalists like you that this is the only way, while hearing it does not have to be this way from your direct competitors.

Ok let's talk about some ethereum competitors.

Take Solana for example. It takes a powerful computer with 128gb+ of RAM just to run a Solana node. You can run the ETH software on a raspberry pi.

High hardware requirements means fewer people can afford to join the network. This makes Solana more centralized. They also do some sketchy things. For example, in proof-of-stake algorithms the nodes vote on the next block. Solana counts votes as transactions which inflate their transactions-per-second numbers.

The Solana network has also been taken down by a software bug. This is much less likely to happen with Ethereum since there are multiple, independent development teams writing Ethereum client software. A bug in one client will only take down part of the network but not the whole thing.

Let's take another popular competitor Algorand. With Algorand they have two types of nodes relay and participant. The relay nodes take care of consensus. However, you have to send in an application to the Algorand foundation just to be allowed to run a node. There is not a lot of info on relay nodes but apparently the harware requirements are non-trivial.

Cardano I don't know as much about. However, there has been some debate over whether it's PoS algorithm is too similar to DPoS with similar vulnerabilities. Also, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, is a known psycho and liar. This isn't just my opinion, just google him.

Polkadot has parachains which is kinda like sharding. However people are also developing Layer 2 rollups for polkadot. This helps prove my point that layer 2 isn't just an ethereum thing.

I don't really have issues with Bitcoin on a technical level, although I think they are too slow to change and adapt. Bitcoin also has multi-dollar transaction fees just like Ethereum which helps prove my point. They are also looking into layer 2 with the lightning network which, again, helps prove my point.

Overall, I really don't see any compelling alternative to what Ethereum is doing. Other chains are starting to look into similar Layer 2 solutions. Other chains are cutting corners to boost their transaction-per-second numbers. And other chains are run by questionable folks.

Thanks for writing up these viewpoints of different chains. I haven't had the chance to check out Cardano, Algorand, or Polkadot, but in regards to the downsides of Solana vs Ethereum, I'll state why I personally am choosing to create applications on Solana compared to something on the Ethereum ecosystem (despite me really liking the tooling that some projects like The Graph provide) -

I'm an applications developer - to me the most important things are lessened complexity, performance, and usability. You can certainly use chains like Polygon, which I might do in the future. However, from my viewpoint, the more complex the ecosystem becomes, the less likely it is to achieve widescale adoption unless there is a lot of masking of the underlying complexities. I've been interested in crypto for years, and been in the space as an engineer for about 6 months, and cannot keep up with how complex the Ethereum ecosystem has grown and how these chains scale. If I cannot keep up, there is no way I can expect for people who've never even touched crypto to be able to wrap their heads around it. I do know that there are efforts to mask crosschain EVM interactions, and personally haven't tried them out too much yet beyond standalone bridges like Synapse. If these projects work out and a year or two from now the ecosystem's complexities are masked, that is fantastic.

For me, I will happily take the tradeoff of making it more difficult / costly to become a validator (in the case of Solana), with the huge performance improvements it provides compared to EVM. While the cost of hardware does mean it is more centralized to entities that can afford to run a Solana validator, to me it is not a concern. It's still decentralized, albeit not as much as Ethereum. I was skeptical of Solana at first until I used it as an end user and am quite happy with the experience, there's a gigantic difference between a 1-5 second transaction time vs 30s - 1 minute (or higher, if you submit a transaction while there's a sudden dip in gas price). I've had transactions stuck on ethereum for an hour and a half because the gas price metamask suggested was too low, there was a 5 minute window I submitted my transaction where the average gas price was super low. Same with Polygon, I've had a transaction stuck in a processing queue for half an hour.

These interactions to me have driven me to look into non-EVM solutions because it truly leaves a bad taste to have to wait helplessly on ETH to process these transactions. Hence, Solana's throughput and promises that they will not need to rely on L2 solutions to achieve scalability (whether that is true is to be tested by time I suppose) are incredibly attractive. It being down for a day was bad, yes, but the mainnet has only been live since last year and is still in beta, and has only happened once to my knowledge. I will still take that downtime given the incredible performance the chain provides. And if it is true that Solana will not require L2 solutions to scale in the same way ETH has, then it's even more attractive to me as an app dev. I think it's likely to be a lot easier to convince the average person to use a platform like this, compared to a complex ecosystem which is multichain only to allow for scalability.

I definitely understand that to a lot of people, decentralization in ETH is the number one driver. However, I do want to emphasize there are certainly reasons to use a chain like Solana, despite having a lessened degree of decentralization.