Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#1

Post by muzikman1 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
thecryptojournal.substack.com

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#2

Post by ejb999 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

nothing makes an article seem more legit than having moronic gif's play on a continuous loop while you try to read it.

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#3

Post by wruza » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:25 AM UTC

tldr: because blockchain is too slow for practical uses and one has to resort to off-chain blockchains on blockchain with separate consensus, that go into blockchain.

If you’re still confused why would you care about it, so am I.

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#4

Post by mk3 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

Short answer you should not.

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#5

Post by miked85 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

The article doesn't live up to the title. I'm still not sure why I should care.

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#6

Post by spapas82 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes web3 viable only for very expensive stuff, making it more or less non usable and defeating its whole purpose.

The solution to that is stuff like polygon which is an ethereum compatible network ( meaning that smart contracts that run on ethereum can be also deployed to polygon without changes) and has minimum fees. The same thing that has $30 fees on ethereum will have line $0.01 in polygon. So polygon can be easily used for all kind of stuff without the need to pay the heavy gas premium.

This is possible because polygon uses a different concencus model (proof of stake) than ethereum (proof of work).

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#7

Post by dcposch » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see.

L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1.

To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state machine whose state transitions are verifiable on a blockchain. Blockchains, in turn, are about creating a uncensorable state machine that reaches global consensus.

So L1 achieves security, and L2 adds speed.

So why not just make L1 fast to begin with?

The strong guarantees of L1 rely on a lot of validators (on the order of ~10k+, worldwide, often on home internet connections) verifying each state transition. This puts a fairly low practical ceiling on how fast L1 can go.

L2 uses centralized sequencers to run transactions much faster, but uses a mechanism that runs on L1 to ensure the sequencer can't cheat.

The main mechanisms are 1. optimistic rollups and 2. ZK rollups. The latter, in particular, are fascinating. If you care about distributed systems even a little bit, it pays to suppress your skepticism and learn about how they work.

Good starting point: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

Alternatively if you believe this is all just a ponzi scheme involving ape jpegs, bookmark this comment and come back in 3 years.

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#8

Post by homarp » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 11:13 AM UTC

dcposch wrote: post #7

Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…

you should do a https://longbets.org/

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#9

Post by lottin » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 11:18 AM UTC

dcposch wrote: post #7

Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…

The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the explicit goal of preventing such re-allocations. Therefore my question is how can this technology be the "future of finance" when it's designed from the ground up to be incompatible with finance?

Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?

#10

Post by ricochet11 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

dcposch wrote: post #7

Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…

agree, ZKProofs are really interesting and i'm sure they will come to be used across lots of areas of the web and not just blockchain, though their use and development is most active in the blockchain space for how useful they are for privacy+scalability.

Proving knowledge without revealing information allows us to prove computations (validating them is a lot quicker than repeating the computation) and "use things" without sacrificing privacy. You can combine the two and have private transactions which are then rolled up in a computation, and then post the proof of the computation to mainnet. You get both cheap and private transactions and infra on top of the base chain.

But this goes beyond blockchain: we can hand code to other people to run and then have proof they haven't altered what we agreed upon running, so we can trust the results of someone else running something. That is useful in all sorts of research for replicability in science/engineering.

WIRED Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c

https://developers.aztec.network/

https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/

https://github.com/matter-labs/awesome-zero-knowledge-proofs