The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
Bold of Vitalik to mention CryptoKitties for two reasons. Not only did CryptoKitties overload he Ethereum chain in 2017, breaking usability for everyone, the founders of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, were forced to make their own blockchain, Flow, to actually serve customers the experience that’s become the first “mainstream” blockchain app, NBA Topshot.<p>That was bold, and his claim that Ethereum nodes need to be runnable on old laptops on residential internet is confused. Ethereum, worth many billions of dollars, most of which is controlled by whales and nerds with beefy gaming rigs, is deliberately sacrificing desperately needed scalability for a superficial narrative of “decentralization”.<p>I would almost get it if the post included a picture of some skinny African children; is “decentralization” just a euphemism for “diversity and inclusion” now?<p>Sometime soon, the DeFi “yield farming” free-money well is gonna run dry, and when it does, the Ethereum ecosystem will wake up in the freezing cold of a “dark forest” of their own creation.<p>But what about sharding? Sharding, like roll-ups, sidechains, and layer 2s including any of the forms of “Plasma”, are fundamentally less valuable than a high-scalability main chain. Reason being that transactions on the main chain are arbitrarily composable, while cross-shard communication with reasonable latency is an open problem.<p>And composability is important. Composability is an intrinsic aspect of DeFi, and the part that will remain even when the yields are brought down to parity with traditional finance.