What a load of nonsense, over 10 years in and still no use case. Noone has ever needed a blockchain.
An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
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Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Hermez Network (zk-rollup L2) will launch a little later this year: https://hermez.io/
How does this compare to something like arbitrum which I think is also L2 rollups but could be wrong.
Arbitrum seems to be based on optimistic rollups. See the Optimistic rollups vs ZK rollups section in Vitalik's write-up.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#13Why not use a sidechain instead? They can compress transactions at least as effective, and have more simple security properties.
The main drawback with sidechains are that they are hard to run decentralized in any credible sense. Basically just as hard as the blockchain in the first layer sense. They seem to be identical in this regard.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#14I continue to be in awe of people like Vitalik and all of the other protocol developers who can understand all the different pieces (math, social incentives, engineering) to make blockchain technologies work. Great writeup, I really appreciated the tradeoffs tables in particular.
If you're interested in other uses of zk-SNARK, Celo (an Ethereum fork) is making it possible to run an "ultralight" node on your phone -- not mainnet yet I don't think but some details here https://docs.celo.org/celo-codebase/protocol/plumo and whitepaper here https://docs.zkproof.org/pages/standards/accepted-workshop3/...
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#15Why not use a sidechain instead? They can compress transactions at least as effective, and have more simple security properties. The main drawback with sidechains are that they are hard to run decentralized in any credible sense. Basically just as hard as the blockchain in the first layer sense. They seem to be identical in this regard.
To me this is a side chain approach, but it depends on your definition of side chain.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#16Great write-up, concise and very clear. I just started learning dapp development and was able to easily grasp the different forms of L2-scaling. I am especially excited about recursive ZK-Rollup smart contracts even though they are complex and computationally expensive. They seem to be more trustworthy than Optimistic Rollups and I can see them becoming the standard eventually. It is great to follow this dapp tech at…
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
Not sure about pseudo-science, but I have found blockchain writings to be on the abstract side. Try this interpretation:
The Ethereum blockchain hosts serious money. However it has poor cost and performance characteristics for many potential use cases. One approach to work around those is to move money temporarily from Ethereum to another blockchain (let's call that the secondary chain) that's cheaper/faster; shuffle it around there as much as you want; cash in the money back on Ethereum when you're done shuffling it. "Rollups" are a way to pull off that trick (there are other ways). Rollup means (to me at least) that you arrange to publish a kind of checkpoint of the secondary chain state at some point in time, to Ethereum. This checkpoint operation is relatively cheap to do because it's just a "put" of some small number of bytes. Where this comes in handy is when someone asks to withdraw their money from the secondary chain to Ethereum. If they were able to just say "give me my money", there would be the potential to steal funds. There has to be a way to know that a) they owned that money on the secondary chain and b) they didn't spend it already. This is achieved by making the withdrawal request of the form "give me my money because ... this rollup says I legit have that money". Absent the rollup, or some equivalent scheme the Ethereum contract deciding whether or not to give them their money would need to look at the entire history of the relevant transactions from the secondary chain. That's hard-to-impossible. Then, having invented the rollup concept there are two subspecies of ways to tell if the withdrawal request is valid or fake : 1) by holding off on giving the money for a while during which anyone who is interested can call foul on the validity (and get a reward for doing so) or 2) by means of ZK-proofs, which are a real thing but may be impractical to use for various reasons so it's always a good idea to ask for running code whenever anyone invokes them.
This paper has some useful background for the problem space: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.06441.pdf
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
Not sure about pseudo-science, but I have found blockchain writings to be on the abstract side. Try this interpretation: The Ethereum blockchain hosts serious money. However it has poor cost and performance characteristics for many potential use cases. One approach to work around those is to move money temporarily from Ethereum to another blockchain (let's call that the secondary chain) that's cheaper/faster; shuffle…
One difference between rollups and sidechains is that with rollups the essential data is stored on the main chain, in compressed form.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#18Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just read through the whole thing and have no idea what it says. It sounds smart but it’s pseudo-science to me.
> it’s pseudo-science to me Maybe do some background reading? For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07221
Thanks for dropping that link. The info is very accessible.
Re: An Incomplete Guide to Ethereum Rollups
#20Why not use a sidechain instead? They can compress transactions at least as effective, and have more simple security properties. The main drawback with sidechains are that they are hard to run decentralized in any credible sense. Basically just as hard as the blockchain in the first layer sense. They seem to be identical in this regard.
To me this is a side chain approach, but it depends on your definition of side chain.
That is my understanding as well. At least the "optimistic" version as described seems like a standard sidechain.
The important part, who gets to publish this chain and if and how that can operate in a trustless manner, is not described here. That makes the ZK proof seem misplaced. If it is operated by a trusted third party, why bother?