Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now we're getting into sharding. Right now, there is a single chain, it's one of the reasons that there is all of this congestion, because everything you're trying to do is fitting a block each single transaction into the main chain and that's it. Of course, there's going to be congestion particularly when [...] exploding and entities were exploding. Gas fees were high because people were bidding to get in. It was just insanely expensive to use Ethereum and the network was congested. With sharding, what happens is that these transactions get batched off the main chain in any number of maybe 64 shards and then come back down to the main chain as one transaction. Instead of 64 separate things happening, it happens one time and comes back down to the main chain as one transaction which decreases congestion. Yeah. Let's introduce the Scalability Trilemma. This is an interesting concept that was proposed by Vitalik, where he basically said there are three sides of the triangle. You've got decentralization which we hold dear. There is security which we also hold dear. Then there's scalability or you can think of that as bandwidth. David and I talked about how you can get 15 plus transactions a second, but it's certainly not 5000 transactions a second. It's not going to scale to a lot of transactions. The proposal for the side chains is interesting because you're basically saying we're going to punt a little bit on either security or decentralization in order to get that scalability. For little ticky-tack transactions that you don't want to pay huge fees for but also if they don't matter as much, if there's a lie in it somewhere or there's an attack on it and it's not that big a deal, it's fine for that not to happen on the main Ethereum blockchain. It's almost like not all laws or the 10 commandments. Things can be treated with different weights. For those things, maybe it's okay to have these side chains that we're going to punt a little bit on the decentralization or we're going to punt a little bit on security, but it's going to enable a lot of these ticky-tack transactions to happen in a way that actually makes the whole system work better. That said, there exists things like Solana that are Ethereum like in the fact that they are global scale computers but they make different tradeoffs in that trilemma and definitely get a lot more scalability but perhaps don't have the same level of hard core security and decentralization as Ethereum. The only thing that I would add to that is there is this concept of the execution layer and the settlement layer and right now with Ethereum those 2 things are all bundled into one. It's like having all the trades happen in real time on the New York Stock Exchange and then all of the settlement and the bank accounts and the money trading hands at the end of the day also happen in that same spot. Sharding on Ethereum or things like Solana could be where a lot of the execution happens. But because Ethereum is the most secure and more decentralized potentially than the other ones, a lot of the settlement will still happen on Ethereum even if a lot of activity happens in a bunch of different places.…

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