brypto

As someone who was pretty anti-Solana from an architecture standpoint, I find myself on the pro-Solana side when it comes to GTM

Super weird to find myself here, and sometimes I can't effectively articulate why I have conviction that Solana is here to stay (in addition to believing & investing in the EVM world)

I never vibed with the "Forget full nodes, lean into the Nakamoto coefficient" approach to decentralization

But given Ethereum is only able to keep up with Solana fee markets with centralized rollups, it reduces the bar collectively to what is "good enough"

I have lowered my standards significantly

The failure modes are very different.

Very real experience: I wanted to move Ethereum Classic ETH a few years back and all of the public endpoints were dead. It took 1 hour to get a node up and running, and my very own RPC. No API keys, no permission.

What happens when all public endpoints of an L2 are gone and I need to exit my tokens? What about Solana? Is it the same as Ethereum mainnet?

While centralization is on a continuum, rollups and Solana are not centralized in the same ways (and certainly won't continue to be).

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

So there's a concept I've been thinking about how to express, maybe you can help. Something along the lines of "credible momentum" or something?

The difference between a rollup and Solana to me is that rollups have a credible roadmap and momentum/work towards achieving desirable properties (worst case security bound to L1, which can be reasonably operated at home in a pinch). Solana on the other hand is *philosophically* uninterested in optimizing for some of those properties, and Toly actively argues that they're stupid etc.

Let's assume for a moment that both are functionally equivalent *today* (they're not, but let's pretend), even so I'd argue the one who has a clear path and credible momentum towards some destination does have something like a moral high ground if we morally care about the properties we're working towards.

One has no interest in going there (though can change later), other is actively working towards it and making progress. There's a difference.

100%

That extends to even more basic non-black swan pain points like how hard it is to index data or run a simple block explorer

My point was more that it is hard to watch rollups act holier than thou when they also made (significant) compromises

Whereas Solana stated very clearly what it was and went after users. I respect that, even if I dislike the architecture for exactly the reason you outlined. Verifiability is a cornerstone of permissionless access IMO