ALGO

therealsuperbonbon

Pretty sure he takes most, if not all of his salary in crypto. BTC & ALGO I believe

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

kirtash93

Not biased at all. ALGO daddy talking about a project build on Algorand blockchain that won an award. I have never used Folks Finance DeFi protocol because the name repels me but I feel happy for them. Congratulations!

big_fetus_

tbh the Polygon partnerships give me vibes of all the VET and ALGO partnerships that were simply hype. be careful, there really is no accountability in this space for straight up lying.

Odlavso

Me waiting to break even on my ALGO bag that was supposed to be the future of finance

rakib0020

From the top chains, I see all of them doing decent this year as it's a recovery month, not the bull year. $MATIC likely will top always with crazy brand onboard and simplicity of use. Very excited about the $ATOM interchain security rollout. Probably the next BIG thing for the chain and blockchain technology. $ALGO is ambitious, no idea why I like it 😅 $APT & $OP shall be the eyeing coins due hype of the chains and ecosystem fund.

Odysseus_Lannister

It’s been ordained as this subs new favorite inheriting that title from ALGO. It went from NANO —> VET —> ALGO —> MATIC

Odlavso

looking at you ALGO

UPinCarolina

ALGO finally showing a little fight. You go, little guy.

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10szhfn/daily_general_discussion_february_4_2023_gmt0/).

FlyingDutchmantoMoon

Fuck Banks. 1)Deposit to your Exchange of choice 2)Buy crypto with a low fee for transfer like XRP or ALGO 3)Send that Crypto to Binance 4)Trade that Crypto to whatever you like on Binance 5)Transfer that Crypto to your wallet....

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

DingDongWhoDis

I feel the same about ALGO (dutch auction). I'll be selling my ETH soon enough regardless. I look forward to picking up another pile of BTC and ALGO and waiving adios to ETH.

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

BirdSetFree

What happened with poor ALGO and ADA?

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

StonedRex

From the alts only ALGO and ADA at the moment

JustinCompton79

ALGO for everyone! Sorry OP…

Odlavso

Yieldly hurt me bad, Staying away from almost all ASA's and just sticking with ALGO itself

the_nibler

Yeah Second this, Ive already been rug pulled twice on ecosystem alts, on ALGO not atom. I’m sticking to the flagship coins for now at least

the_nibler

ALGO and it’s ASA’s have hurt me badly over the past year and half. I experienced two rugpulls on their eco system so far

surrender_the_juice

ALGO still

kirtash93

My bets are BTC, ETH, MATIC, ADA, ALGO, DOT, LINK and ATOM.

step11234

Love me some ALGO, but it's number 35 atm, it won't be the next top 5 just yet.

JustinCompton79

ALGO for the fanboys

kirtash93

I just read about projects, whitepapers, road maps, etc. Currently I am buying BTC, ETH, ADA, ALGO, MATIC, DOT, LINK and ATOM.

NexusMinds

DOT and ALGO redemption arc.

126270

My SHIB hasn’t resulted in any greater losses than my ADA or my ALGO, and waaaay less losses than my CRO

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

Fantastic-Offer-9129

ALGO getting love lately

LWKD

Jup, swapped my bag for ALGO. Not that is has a better CEO, at least it did not get hacked.

CointestMod

#Algorand Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by mic_droo which won 1st place in the Algorand Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Disclaimer: I do hold some ALGO and think it’s a good coin. At the same time, I think it is a bit overhyped, especially in this community, and people pretend there is absolutely nothing negative about it while it of course has negative sides to it as well, like any coin. Here are a few of them: > > * ALGO somewhat has a leadership cult. Its founder, Silvio Micali – and don’t get me wrong, that guy seems to be very, very good at what he is doing – is hailed as a god in the community. While he fortunately is not as present and outspoken about everything as other leaders like Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood or especially Charles Hoskinson, the ALGO community worships him just as much and likes to say stuff like “I am sure we will succeed because we have Silvio”. Similar to other top-heavy coins this is somewhat problematic, as ALGO would probably lose a lot of support if he decides to retire or if something happens to him > > * There are [very few DApps]( https://developer.algorand.org/ecosystem-projects/?tags=dapps) on Algorand. This is a bit weird, as younger and much smaller chains have a lot more going on in this area. I also rarely hear anyone talk about any of them (except back when the biggest one, Tinyman, was hacked) > > * Algorand uses the [Algorand virtual machine (AVM)](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/avm/) to run nodes on the blockchain. This makes it much harder to develop for it, and harder for DApps from other chains to be adapted to ALGO – which might explain why there isn’t a lot going on there. > > * ALGO often underdelivers on promises. For example, in late 2020 Micali promised that TPS will soon grow from [1,000 to 46,000](https://www.algorand.com/resources/algorand-announcements/algorand-2021-performance). From what I can tell from different sources (e.g. [here](https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/what-is-algorand-cryptocurrency-blockchain)) it’s still around 1,000, almost 1 1/2 years later. > > * the tokenomics are famously bad, with a ton of coins [going to the devs and early backers](https://algorand.foundation/governance/algo-dynamics) (they used to have another problem, accelerated vesting, that has however been [mitigated]( https://algorand.foundation/news/accelerated-vesting-complete) a few months ago) ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sifdb5/coin_inquiries_algorand_conarguments_february_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Algorand) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10s57jv/daily_general_discussion_february_3_2023_gmt0/).

ShanktarDonetsk

You go, ALGO

UPinCarolina

Might just have to do that with ALGO. A cent here or there on a swing will return better than governance anyways.

Grunblau

Hmmm… maybe 100 AVAX or ATOM, or 10K ALGO?

Lillica_Golden_SHIB

These are champions, ALGO also deserves a mention for speed and fees

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

IAmSomewhatDamaged

I just put $100 each into BTC, ETH, MATIC, ALGO, and ADA…. So be prepared for a massive dump either tonight or tomorrow

CointestMod

#Cosmos Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Shippior which won 1st place in the Cosmos Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > [Cosmos](https://cosmos.network/) ([ATOM](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cosmos-hub)) is a dPoS blockchain. Often it is named in the list of 3rd generation blockchains like ADA, DOT, ALGO, etc. As one can already see it has a lot of competition. As of yet it has to endure at least ADA, DOT and AVAX being above in market cap. Even Cronos (CRO) which is based on the Cosmos SDK has a higher market cap than ATOM itself. This proves that so far ATOM hasnt been really popular with the people and it is resembled by the lack of marketing for the chain. > > To be able to get a better comparison between ATOM and it's competitors first it should be explained better what the vision and role of Cosmos is. Cosmos Hub acts as a security relayer for the Cosmos cryptoverse. There are no smart contracts on the Cosmos chain itself and there is limited governance available. It's main reason is to secure the IBC (inter blockchain connection) network which allows all chains within the Cosmos network to easily communicate with each other. > > Currently there is a debate happening, backed up by a governance proposal, to allow the use of smart contract (implement CosmWasm which is the smart contract enabler on Cosmos network). However this has been met with fierce arguments between pro and con groups, the con group being led by [Jae Kwon](https://twitter.com/jaekwon) one of the main developers of Cosmos who treathens to make his own chain. All in all this discussion might be beneficial going forward but it does deliver a lot of FUD to the community (there is a lot of FUD currently in the Cosmos network, but that is a whole different story). > > Due to the current position of Cosmos Hub, only ensuring security, the discussion has come up in the community what the use is of the ATOM coin. It provides no incentive but a low APR for staking, the lock-up period of 21 days is significantly longer than for many of its competitors, and there are a lot of coins in the Cosmos network available that are more usefull for using in DeFi. As of now ATOM is valuable because a lot of aidrops are based on the amount of ATOM a person has staked, but who knows what happens with the price of ATOM once the airdrops dry up. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sifdml/coin_inquiries_cosmos_conarguments_february_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cosmos) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Cosmos Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by Shippior which won 1st place in the Cosmos Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > [Cosmos](https://cosmos.network/) ([ATOM](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cosmos-hub)) is a dPoS blockchain. Often it is named in the list of 3rd generation blockchains like ADA, DOT, ALGO, etc. As one can already see it has a lot of competition. To be able to get a better view of ATOM it is to not describe what it is in itself but how it compares to its competitors. > > ATOM compares best to DOT with regards of above list. Just as with DOT the sole purpose of ATOM is to provide security for the network around it. Contrary to DOT, that leases parachains to other networks as a payment for using the security of DOT, the IBC (Inter Blockchain Connection) is free to use for every network that whishes to do so. This has led to a higher capacity of shitcoins on Cosmos compared to Polkadot but it has also ensured that the development of many chains has been faster than it has been on Polkadot. > > Compared to ADA the Cosmos network has a lot more flexibility. The eUXTO model of ADA still provides many limitations in DeFi, which ATOM does not have. It has multiple DEXes ([Osmosis](https://osmosis.zone/), [Crescent](https://app.crescent.network/swap) and [Sifchain](https://www.sifchain.finance/) are just a couple of examples) and currently there are multiple parties working on bringing EVM to the Cosmos, with [Evmos](https://twitter.com/evmosorg) being the most anticipated product which has launched last week. > > The biggest advantage of investing in Cosmos at this very moment is airdrops. The set way to introduce new networks to the network is to airdrop coins of a new network to holders of several networks. This way it is ensured that you are able to participate in a new network, free of cost, or just sell off the airdrop in a network you are not interested in for a small profit (free money = free money). For newcomers: Airdrops are only available when one stakes a minimum amount (normally 5 ATOM) in a non-custodial wallet. E.g. the ATOM should be taken of a central exchange like Binance and be staked through a wallet like [Keplr](https://www.keplr.app/) which fortunately is really easy to use. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sifdk5/coin_inquiries_cosmos_proarguments_february_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cosmos) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

theonepercent65536

I have three criteria right now: 1. Has a maximum supply (non inflationary) 2. At least 70% of max supply is circulating (won’t dilute much in bull run) 3. Price is at least 1/4 of ATH (has at least 4x potential back to ATH) As a perk I prefer coins I can stake to earn more from any supply not yet circulating. Based on this I own: ALGO, ADA, LRC, COMP, 0X, CRO And before i insight the fury of the maxis, I also own BTC and ETH which I just HODL. The others I try to trade, but generally am just going to wait til we get back to ATH.

Odlavso

honestly it's seems pretty dead, has I think 16k active wallets daily which is about half of what Algorand has and most people consider ALGO pretty empty

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Cosmos Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Shippior which won 1st place in the Cosmos Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > [Cosmos](https://cosmos.network/) ([ATOM](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/cosmos-hub)) is a dPoS blockchain. Often it is named in the list of 3rd generation blockchains like ADA, DOT, ALGO, etc. As one can already see it has a lot of competition. As of yet it has to endure at least ADA, DOT and AVAX being above in market cap. Even Cronos (CRO) which is based on the Cosmos SDK has a higher market cap than ATOM itself. This proves that so far ATOM hasnt been really popular with the people and it is resembled by the lack of marketing for the chain. > > To be able to get a better comparison between ATOM and it's competitors first it should be explained better what the vision and role of Cosmos is. Cosmos Hub acts as a security relayer for the Cosmos cryptoverse. There are no smart contracts on the Cosmos chain itself and there is limited governance available. It's main reason is to secure the IBC (inter blockchain connection) network which allows all chains within the Cosmos network to easily communicate with each other. > > Currently there is a debate happening, backed up by a governance proposal, to allow the use of smart contract (implement CosmWasm which is the smart contract enabler on Cosmos network). However this has been met with fierce arguments between pro and con groups, the con group being led by [Jae Kwon](https://twitter.com/jaekwon) one of the main developers of Cosmos who treathens to make his own chain. All in all this discussion might be beneficial going forward but it does deliver a lot of FUD to the community (there is a lot of FUD currently in the Cosmos network, but that is a whole different story). > > Due to the current position of Cosmos Hub, only ensuring security, the discussion has come up in the community what the use is of the ATOM coin. It provides no incentive but a low APR for staking, the lock-up period of 21 days is significantly longer than for many of its competitors, and there are a lot of coins in the Cosmos network available that are more usefull for using in DeFi. As of now ATOM is valuable because a lot of aidrops are based on the amount of ATOM a person has staked, but who knows what happens with the price of ATOM once the airdrops dry up. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/sifdml/coin_inquiries_cosmos_conarguments_february_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cosmos) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > Ethereum has drastically changed in the past year now that it has rebranded itself as **Consensus/Settlement layer** for other Layer 2 Execution/Rollup networks. It is no longer trying to be a monolithic blockchain by itself. Because of this shift in design, many of its former CONs are no longer major issues. And many of the CONs that still exist often have a beneficial sides. > > I discuss the CONs of Ethereum and their impact on its users here: > > ## CONs > > **Gas Fees** (major): > > The biggest complaint for Ethereum is its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason much of DeFi is extremely expensive. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Basically: use a coin on a different network to avoid fees. > > Typical transaction fees for Ethereum were [between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $50+ several times in 2021. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees mid-year in 2021 saw $100-$200 gas fees. Transferring ERC-20 tokens (often $20-50) is also more gas expensive because it can't be done through native transfers like on the Cardano network. It's impractical to use swaps like Uniswap for small transactions due to these fees. > > In particular, One/Many-to-many batch transactions are extremely gas-expensive using Ethereum's account-based model compared to Bitcoin's and Cardano's UXTO-based model. [This batch transaction on Ethereum](https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0fe2542079644e107cbf13690eb9c2c65963ccb79089ff96bfaf8dced2331c92) cost over $5000 while [a similar eUXTO transaction on Cardano](https://adapools.org/transactions/e586c6340ee9e60a6c64f447feffe5f89bdabc7741666ecaa681081957938f56) only cost $0.50 in fees. > > On the other hand, these fees provide Ethereum long-term economic sustainability and resilience against DDoS and spam attacks. > > **Competition from other Smart Contract networks** (moderate): > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain due to first-mover advantage. But there are now many efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. Ethereum is now facing much competition. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees on Ethereum when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? > > Fortunately, the amount of competition is limited because Ethereum is positioning itself as a Settlement layer whereas these other networks are monolithic networks. All monolithic networks will eventually run into scaling issues due to long-term storage and bandwidth limits. It will really depend on how successful Ethereum's Layer 2 rollup solutions will be. > > **Future uncertainty about Layer 2 solutions** (major): > > Ethereum's long-term success is dependent on the success of its Layer 2 solutions. > > These Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early. Even after a year, L2 has a very fragmented adoption. The majority of centralized exchanges currently do not support Layer 2 rollup networks. A few have started to support Polygon, which is more of a Layer 2 side-chain that saves state every 256 blocks than a Layer 2 rollup. Very few CEXs allow for direct fiat on/off-ramping on L2 networks, which puts those networks out of reach of most users. > > Many of these Layer 2 networks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Loopring, ZKSync, etc), are not interoperable with each other. You can store your tokens on any specific L2 network, but they're stuck there. If you want to move your tokens back to Layer 1 or to another L2 network, you have to pay very expensive smart contract gas fees ($50-300). Eventually, there will be bridges between these networks, but we could be years away from widespread adoption. > > Fragmented liquidity is another huge issue. Each of these L2 networks has its own liquidity pool for each token it supports. You can store your token on the the L2 network, but you won't be able to trade or swap much if there are no liquidity pools for that token. Eventually, there will be Dynamic Automated Market Makers (dAMMs) that can share liquidity between networks, but they are complex and introduce their own weaknesses. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. They are very centralized in how they operate, so there's always the risk that their network operators could cheat their customers. By now, the community seems to agree that ZK rollups are the future rollup solution to decentralized L2 networks. There is only 1 notable instance of Plasma (Ethereum to Polygon network conversion), and no one uses it anymore since the Ethereum-Polygon bridge is easier to use. The biggest competitor to ZK rollups are Optimistic rollups, and those take too long to settle back to Layer 1 (1 week) and are still too expensive to use (20-50% of the cost of L1 Ethereum gas fees for transfers). > > **ZK Rollups** require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive, potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly. To reduce the cost, they are done completely-centralized by specialized servers. Thus the cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.10 to $.30](https://l2fees.info/). But even at $0.10 per transfer and $0.50 per swap, these are still at least 10x more expensive than costs on Algorand and Solana. Users will have to decide whether the extra cost and hassle of using an L2 platform is worth the extra security of settling on the more-decentralized and secure Ethereum L1 network. > > **Ethereum Proof-of-Stake merge is arriving later than competitors** (moderate): > > The ETH PoS Beacon chain has been released, it's a completely separate blockchain from ETH and won't merge with the main blockchain [until later this year](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving its competitors plenty of time to provide FUD. We still don't know how successful the merge will be. Currently, stakes are locked, preventing investors from selling. We don't know what will happen to the price once staking unlocks. > > **MEV and Dark Forest attacks** (minor): > > [MEV](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/rs4wp2/the_dark_forest_of_cryptocurrency/) is actually a pretty big issue for networks with high gas arbitrage and mempools like Ethereum, but most casual users will never notice hostile arbitrage. When you broadcast your transaction to the network, there are armies of bots and automated miners that analyze your transaction to see if they can perform arbitrage strategies on your transaction such as front-running, sandwiching, excluding transactions, stealing/replaying transactions, and other pure-profit plays. "Dark Forest" attacks have reveled that bots are constantly monitoring the network, and they can front-run you unless you have your own private army of miners. > > **Final Word** > > Overall, I still think the PROs outweigh the CONs for Ethereum in the long-run due to its first-mover advantage and the long-term sustainability of the Ethereum network. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/ru2luf/top_10_ethereum_conarguments_january_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10ralbq/daily_general_discussion_february_2_2023_gmt0/).

NexusMinds

ALGO quietly pumping 14% without much fan fare.

StonedRex

I actually have a small bag of ALGO and I'm not selling it anytime soon