Wake up, babe. New spicy post dropped: https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/crypto-unchained

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

/quilibrium

Thanks Cassie really enjoyed it. Two questions:
i) why do you dismiss solana, and other "not-quite-a-blockchain" protocols? 
ii) the article doesn't seem to cover what the cracks are with larger block size. how's you summarize?
ii) selfishly curious what your view of Mina is in this landscape.

Oh interesting! Well I'm looking forward to that next post!

Just an added perspective: the way we sometimes articulate Mina is "it is like any other blockchain (it uses a variation of ouroboros after all); but it allows nodes to connect with full node security without having to download and verify since genesis"

Mina is unique (and has some really cool ideas!), and it gets closer to what I will be talking about in the next post. Very similarly to how I characterize Solana and others, it’s different enough that I wouldn’t call it a pure blockchain (and again, I consider that a _good_ thing).

What are those other forces in your opinion? In our experience it's mostly the cost of state proofs (in mina's case zkps) + general optimizations around networking

i) I’m not dismissing them, rather I’m pointing out that they aren’t quite a blockchain as it is, which is a reason they are not seeing the same scalability problems.

ii) larger block sizes are one of the ways more data can fit, but those with max caps never reach them, because other forces are slowing things do