EthFinance

What the heck is Banana Gun and why is it the third largest consumer of gas on mainnet

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Is there anything really happening on mainnet anymore besides bridges, large sum trades or rollups?

Doesn’t look like it according to largest gas guzzlers

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

What's your feelings about this, where most of the activity is happening on centralized (and by roadmap projections, at best, federated) L2s?

Cypherpunk me doesn’t like it and was never enthused by the L2 roadmap. But the galaxy brains have told me that L2s are the optimal way to scale Ethereum, and I’m too technically mid to argue otherwise.

My coping mechanism is that the L2 centralization is supposed to be transitory and they should eventually reach stage 2+, with the understanding that it will take a while at best. I’m also hopeful about based rollups and shared sequencing.

So, not great, not terrible, but also beats the monolithic L1 competition IMHO (not counting Q — I’m talking SOL etc).

A couple more things before I log off for the day.

First, I’m weirdly grateful that you asked me this question. Nobody has ever asked me that before, because I’m not a reference on blockchains, just a power normie. It feels… liberating to finally give a honest layperson’s opinion about how I feel about it. So, thank you for that.

Second, you are one of the few people I genuinely admire in this space, for both your technical chops in cryptography and development, but also your integrity as a cypherpunk with a vision for privacy and permissionlessness.

I cannot claim to understand the finer nuances of Q (and probably not even the coarser ones), but I’m proud to be running a pre-2.0 node. Makes me feel like the early Ethereum or even Bitcoin days, when I was running a node just to be part of something fresh and exciting, even when I had literally no one to share this excitement with.

I can understand that perspective (and esp wrt sol, given their superminority control for validators being so small). And no offense taken on general L1 alts: We took a lot of design ideas from a bunch of different networks, either inverted them (e.g. chia's use of VDFs) or made them actually work at all (EF's research on sharding/DA and use of RPM), Q stands on the shoulders of giants, and I consider it a positive sum game, not zero sum. So I feel your cyberpunk frustration side. I hope that the "centralization being transitory" holds true, but I do remain convinced it'll resemble federation by the end for most of them.