CBC

Lap0101

Lequel ? RDI ? Ou Anglais genre CBC ?

thr0wmyl1f34wy

What you have is a base64 encrypted private key, either from multibit or any of the android wallets or some online wallets. The good news is that the vast majority use the same decryption process which is 3x MD5 AES CBC. You can download openssl and you can Google the openssl md5 decryption command for the file. If your file starts with u2fsd, that confirms it.

Slight86

CDC, not CBC. It's short for Crypto Dot Com.

benmck90

Why not CBC? (Crypto.com). They've done the best job weathering the bear IMO, and are market leaders in compliance.

EdgeLord19941

There's 3,333.3333 INX in that address, the address for that INX is 0xBBC7f7A6AADAc103769C66CBC69AB720f7F9Eae3. But that token isn't being traded anywhere and only has like 10k holders, so it seems like a scam? They aren't worth anything it looks like

xXCsd113Xx

CBC lol. Another govie cuck

Far-Department-4196

He was definitely smeared.. in Canada anyway. Did you see that article on CBC ? The title was literally something like Chainsaw wielding candidate… Did Argentina vote already?

coinfeeds-bot

tldr; 75% of all fiat volume on Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, is dominated by the Turkish Lira (TRY). This indicates a shift in global dynamics and crypto adoption. The Turkish Lira has become the most preferred currency, surpassing the Euro and Brazilian Real. The popularity of TRY has increased significantly in recent years, with adoption spiking in 2022 and reaching the top in 2023. Binance supports over 380 coins and more than ten fiat currencies, including TRY, Nigerian Naira, GBP, and Australian Dollar. Stablecoins like USDT and TUSD are among the most liquid pairs for trading on Binance. The liquidity and speed of stablecoins make them more convenient for transfers compared to fiat currencies. The survey conducted by KuCoin shows that over 50% of people in Turkey own crypto. The Turkish government has also been experimenting with a central bank digital currency (CBC), the Digital Lira. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.

Honchomike420

brooo CBC. hellyeah. i use to live in tahoe

ReddPope81

It going to take a while before it really takes effect, but I don't think it will replace cash. Ièm certain that it will pace a significant effect in place like Lebanon, Latin America, the caribbean among other places where it is very difficult to have access to money or where the dollar has lost almost all it's value. The most important thing to remember is that Bitcoin blockchain is immutable and crytocurrencies can be transfer everywhere from anywhere. Also, the banks and other financial institutions are implementing blockchain technology in the organization and governments around the world are building their own CBC for thier citizen. So yes, it will happen, but with time.

OrdainedPuma

Amanda Lang was working for CBC in Canada at the time. CBC is left leaning, and Lang is obviously the counterweight host to O'Leary, sociopath that he is. She knows he's greedy beyond compare, but even then, she was hoping for some humanity from him. Her next comment and the intensity she brought with it proves the point. "People in Africa living on $1/day aren't looking up to become Bill Gates," and Kevin is telling himself whatever pathetic lies he needs to squash what little remains of his conscious each day. If you lived in Canada and/or watched their show, her disdain for his uncompromising greed was real.

rootpl

They were listed on CBC and Kraken, but other than that not much have happened. Just accumulate and wait for the bull run.

Azera21

And i would like to add that CSPR is using a highway consensus protocol, which is essentially an improved version of CBC Casper, which is what eth only partially managed to implement in their protocol(and is working towards it in eth 3.0).

Azera21

Hi, For point 1 and 2, its up to you to find the few hidden gems within the vast crypto scene.Ill give u a few, CSPR,AZERO,NXRA,MNW,EWT and QNT. QNT alrdy has a bullrun but i believe it will reach ath again due to its scarcity. As for the rest i mention, they are gaining real world adoption. Im only gonna CSPR atm cause im the most bullish in it. They have a highway protocol, which is an improved version of CBC casper, which in turn is something that ETH IS TRYING TO ACHIEVE FOR A LONG TIME. They are part of the hyperledger foundation which contains some of the biggest companies(Eg, IBM,accenture). They are also working with IPwe(which in turn is working with toshiba, one of the biggest company in japan) to bring tokenise patents into blockchain(est Market is abt 10trillion). They are gonna be used in China to build a smart city(we know how china is like against crypto). Furthermore, they are future proof since they are able to dump any new features into their protocol as they see fit. As for the rest, they are all unique in their own way and will be providing other values too. MNW for eg is acting as a middleware for supply chain businesses. For point 3, while i agree on the part of the ukraine war, im expecting recession to hit before the bullrun. When looking at the past 100 years of history, the longest period from yield inversion to a recession is 18months. Atm we are alrdy 13/14mths in alrdy. Given the timeline, we should hit a recession in dec or january. Furthermore, i believe the current FED has no balls to push the economy into a depression. Hence i believe it will be a mild recession.

Significant-Yam8849

Can I put up my screenshot of fake CBC page ? Or is that a problem for Reddit ? ( I never know their rules)

Significant-Yam8849

Thanks … yea I called my phone provider, cos just around the same time I had all these strange calls from places I’ve never been or know anyone ( my phone number is now in “ their” possession… but that’s about it .. and your right my email has probably been passed around a thousand times already … but no address credit cards etc … it all came crashing down ( for them ) when he called me … I could hear people yelling/ talking in the background … I picked up .. and he said is this … I said I don’t answer my phone like that … if you don’t know who your calling then your full of 💩… then I said are u at a call centre … wtf? He denied got angry … and said weirdly im not asking for your information ( as if was offering to give it to him lolz … but I fear for older folks … millions have been taken in this particular scam alone I notified the CBC ( Canadian broadcasting corporation) they replied with a fairly terse we do not shill for other companies, products etc .. I sent them screenshots etc .. of the fake page … I think they should make a public statement alerting people…

Significant-Yam8849

Yeah so I fell .. only to fill out page as it was on a CBC. Pop up news page ( thought it was the actual CBC … not ) I wouldn’t done it Twitter … but I thought the CBC omg 😱 now my phone email out there in the dark web

Significant-Yam8849

In what you think is a CBC article??? I guess I’m just one dumb mofo … that’s how I feel 🤦‍♀️

Significant-Yam8849

The whole CBC STORY WAS A FAKE … PHISHING… man they are gettin good

Significant-Yam8849

The CBC story was a really good fake !!! Ouch this is gettin bad … seriously?? I have to check every single pop up etc

Significant-Yam8849

On CBC !!!

Significant-Yam8849

DONT DO IT ! I just did … but the link to the scam was on a legit CBC story about crypto Twitter … the journalist credentials were listed below as per usual nothing to flag … but the link is bullshit .. it looks like amateur hour and it is … the WHOLE THING IS A SCAM … but now these bastards have my name my email and phone number which is WAAAY TOO MUCH INFO … I’m trying to shut shit down and get a good firewall … but yeah don’t

tambaybtc

CBC is working on allowing deposits.

coinfeeds-bot

tldr; Two Canadian teenagers have been apprehended and charged in connection with the theft of $4.2 million in cryptocurrency, according to a report by CBC on July 4. Teens stole $4.2M in BTC, ETH The accused teenagers allegedly stole a substantial amount in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) by posing as Coinbase support and gaining unauthorized […] The post Canadian teens allegedly stole over $4M in crypto by impersonating Coinbase support appeared first on CryptoSlate. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.*

raznt

I've seen multiple sponsored posts with this scam on Reddit recently. A couple linked to the fake CBC News page and another one linked to a fake WSJ page with the same story. I tried reporting them to Reddit Ads support page, but they seem to just keep popping up.

Ur_mothers_keeper

Ok, let's take that then for a second. She's talking about how to get people to blow their savings. What kind of a healthy society wants people to blow their savings? And how do you incentivize that? Shiny things? Make saving not worthwhile? Think about what it means to make saving money less attractive than blowing it. When these people talk about problems like "less than such and such percentage of people couldn't afford an unexpected emergency expense" and living paycheck to paycheck, theyre talking about a potential existential threat to the social fabric. Then, in pretty words, they come and dress it up as a good thing, "stimulate the economy". Theyre setting incentives to cause these problems, problems that have lead to the hollowing out of western society and culture. How do you feel about consumerism and cheap plastic crap being churned out by the fuckton? *Do you not see the connection between these policies and the state of our societies today?* Now, imagine these people aren't swayed. The government puts commercials on CBC about how fun it is to drink mojitos on Toronto or spend the summer in a sleepy village in Labrador, but alas, nobody is biting. You think the government, the people that make the laws, are just going to stop there? Throw their hands up and say "we tried"? Or do you think they'll come up with more, shall we say, motivating ways of getting these people to part with their money?

zesushv

Simple, they don't want a currency that the government can you in surveillance of the people. Better, they want a currency that is controlled by the CBC. If they must venture into the digital currency domain, they must utilise a [DEX](https://np.reddit.com/r/zetablockchain/comments/1376kop/defi_amm_platform_towerdefi_now_supports_twstzeta/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)/DeFi for its financial use. Otherwise, don't do it. There are enough woes already with fiat.

Beyonderr

Did the CBC author watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver perhaps? Rather slow reporting, lol.

GodfatherOfficial

CBC: CoinBaseCoin

Oskarikali

I could be be wrong but I was reading that this guy had one business that failed then wrote a book. Is he even a personal finance expert? CBC did an expose piece on this guy's scam he was running in Canada.

FeDuke

You can't trust the CBC. Trudeau wants everyone to lower their consumption so he doesn't have to. He's huge on the climate agenda, and his approach is dead wrong.

flavoredbeef

CBC radio in Vancouver Canada had a piece on Bitcoin and the bank run. Called us all “crypto bros” Interesting enough they talked about btc being a hedge against traditional fiat currency

tied_laces

They are way ahead of you. The biggest economy or second biggest is Nigeria and they are very frequent traditional crypto users (BTC, LTC). They must be because the naira is worthless and the CBC tried to for people to use the e-naira and it failed miserably (as all CBDCs do) Catch up!

AutisticGayBear69

Afaik Coinbase uses Plaid for bank account transfers which means Plaid is mining your bank data whether you know it or not. Coinbase also signed a contract with Homeland Security to mine blockchain data but did not divulge the details of what HS was mining. I'm guessing CBC will be the Meta/FB of the crypto world the way they are playing with and selling customer data.

aminok

Thinking that peaceful people shouldn't be brutalized, like John McAfee was, is not "extreme". [Antivirus mogul John McAfee dies by suicide in a Spain jail while awaiting extradition on tax evasion charges](https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-dead-suicide-spain-jail-tax-evasion-2021-6) There's nothing natural about income taxation. It's just been normalized in our society with idioms like "Death and Taxes". There was a time when the British parliament was so ashamed of having instituted an income tax that after its repeal, they tried to burn all copies of the legislation and its repeal, so that no one would ever know it happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income\_tax#Modern\_era \>Pitt's income tax was levied from 1799 to 1802, when it was abolished by Henry Addington during the Peace of Amiens. Addington had taken over as prime minister in 1801, after Pitt's resignation over Catholic Emancipation. The income tax was reintroduced by Addington in 1803 when hostilities with France recommenced, but it was again abolished in 1816, one year after the Battle of Waterloo. Opponents of the tax, who thought it should only be used to finance wars, wanted all records of the tax destroyed along with its repeal. Records were publicly burned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but copies were retained in the basement of the tax court.\[9\] Now we live in a mass-surveillance society, where you can be imprisoned if you don't keep records of all your private financial interactions, and produce them if the government requests to see them. From the original income tax of 10% on the highest income category during a war in 1799, we're now in a situation where large sections of the population in many countries are required to hand over half their income to the government during peacetime. And most people accept it without thinking, because that's the way it's been their whole life. Anti-libertarianism, and all of the brutality that goes along with it, is extreme: [Long-term care residents beg to go outside after year-long COVID-19 confinement - CBC](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-confinement-1.5969825) That's the way of the Communist Party of China. Western democracies should not emulate it. The only humane way to organize society is along libertarian principles. Anti-libertarianism is anti-humane.

WeaselJCD

That's him paiving the way for crypto regulation and introducing the CBC when the US Dollar is fully defated

NoRelationship8664

Let’s the shitshow continue ! credit rating agencies (S&P, Fintch) are independent (even though they have strong ties with TradFi. That’s why subprime crisis appeared) Now you telling me that CBC and PoR are totally held by who they should audit 😂😂. Now I understand CeFi’s meaning 😂.

E-renter

That's because the WEF is far left-wing, and SBF and SBF were enormous contributors to the democrats. And by the way had he instead been an enormous contributor to the Republicans I can guarantee you CNN and CBC those hypocritical jokes of networks would be all over it trying to cite that as proof of the corruption on the right. As usual left-wing hypocrisy and unfortunately most of the population votes for these jokers. You lefties aren't going to figure it out until you're all eating insects and owning nothing. P.s. Your rulers Biden and Trudeau will not own nothing, they will actually own everything, but you're not even going to find that in the fine print.

e987654

So now we know the CEO of CDC was lying when he said they were transferred "accidently" . There's something SUS here. Both GateIO and CBC are sharing funds. Same with Huobi and Binance. If true, then it's pathetic. Shut them all down.

HannesVM

Binance is not going down. Everyone is shooting at eachother. Trust me, SEC has been watching Binance very closely. If anything would be wrong, they would have already been taken down years ago. FTX was a baby exchange compared to others like CBC and Binance (not Binance.US). FTX was made for the elite, Binance is made for the small fish (and big too).

SmallReflection2552

Right now just Bitcoin. CBC has had it marked as pending for almost 24 hours now

lookingaroundblind

Yeah, fully screw this guy. He spouted for YEARS on CBC Newsworld against anything crypto related. Refused to look into it, but regularly talked like he knew more than Antonopoulos. He functions on personal greed alone.

o_LUCIFER_o

tldr; Aiden Pleterski, who calls himself "Crypto King," had $2 million of assets seized, CBC Toronto reports. Pleterski was reportedly given $35 million by 140 investors. Now, he's being sued by former investors in a bankruptcy proceeding and two civil lawsuits

01technowichi

That *really* depends on what definition of "money" you are using. Physical currency? Sure, it's not in the bank. But the ledger that represents your ability to transact is almost certainly stored in a computer(s) located somewhere on their premises. Not your local bank's premises, but probably their headquarters (with backups all over the place - possibly even in data centers). Fractional reserve just means that the numbers represented on the ledger owned by the bank must be backed by some percentage by an asset (for the bank) stored in the Federal Reserve (or CBC, or ECB, or your favorite central bank) - that asset typically being yet another number on a ledger. If you don't count numbers on a ledger as money, then fine. But it's certainly a currency, which is what most people mean when they say "money."

supermadandbad

You can go to a search engine "Pierre opt out of inflation" and articles from sites like CBC quote him from early March 2022 from a press conference. “After creating $400 billion in cash out of thin air since 2020, Canada’s inflation rate has hit a 30-year high, and housing inflation is hitting all-time records,” Poilievre said. “Choice and competition can give Canadians better money and financial products. Not only that, but it can also let Canadians opt out of inflation, with the ability to opt in to cryptocurrencies.” As my comment above stated. I'm all for decentralization and crypto. But this guy is pandering, and not fully explaining crypto because he's a career politician doofus. He doesn't fully understand or explain anything and is misinforming others to look good.

thepantsalethia

CBC. Lol. My Lord you are brainwashed. Snap out of it.

dubiousdexter

This was false, just like everything else the Canadian Federal Government (reported by CBC) said to get GoFundMe to cancel their fundraising. This [Toronto Sun article](https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-more-falsehoods-about-the-convoy-are-now-being-retracted) talks about it.

Ruiiter

You must watch a lot of CBC. Pierre definitely isn't perfect but at least he doesn't paint himself and mock other races. You'd need to be one hateful person to support someone like that

Mash_Effect

Irresponsible eh? Says the guys who think deficits and debt is good policy. This is the true grifter and our national CBC addicts cannot see it. Trudeau can go suck Klaus Schwab cock while we try to fix this country.

RewtDooDoo

I always speak for myself. My words are backed by my research which is data, or fact driven by things people have said and done on record as well as numbers. You're literally repeating what some news anchor told you, who's news channel is being heavily subsidized by the government. Go look up how much the CBC is funded by the government, and their relative fanbase. There's Youtubers with bigger audiences.

wartywarth0g

Huh interesting. This is the first bit of positive media I’ve seen about him. Everywhere else it says he’s racist/like trump, every single headline mentions he’s a populist and ultra conservative. Anyway I looked up his wiki and did a tiny bit of research and he supported dismantling the Canadian broadcasting corporation/CBC so he sure didn’t make any friends in the media. I haven’t been able to find anything damning, not even Trudeau-esque black face on halloween.

KuciMane

I pay rent w/ CBC and get 4% XLM everytime; I love it

yeetfu-kyou

Literally have no idea how any of this works but I think my id is 0x22E291c3c6Dd09F7DaaA043CC95D3b02D1CBC898 Do I need matic or something to transfer my reddit nft on metamask?

Substantial_Prune_64

I heard on CBC radio the other day they were saying that over in El Salvador it's not as straight forward as the rest of the world is assuming this experiment to be. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Bitcoin. But they were saying that no one really knows where the BTC purchases are being make, how much is spent, and how much they have have. There's no transparency, other than tweets saying they bought the dip. Some top officials in the country are even speculating if any BTC was ever bought. Is it stretching too far to say that corruption exits in a place like El Salvador, especially in politics? Isn't corruption and deceit the pain in the ass that almost always ends up ruining good intentions, especially political intentions? At the very least, as a sign of intelligence, play devils advocate for a moment and entertain other possibilities without believing them.

E-renter

You mean would I leave Canada, where the supreme rulers Trudeau + Singh freeze bank accounts and credit cards of you and your spouse without criminal charges for donating to peaceful protests, his state-funded (from my tax dollars) media CBC lies constantly for his benefit, his finance minister Freeland riles against cryptocurrencies, property taxes are so high that you are renting your own property from the government whose goal (in line with WEF which Trudeau is a proud member of https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/justin-trudeau ) is for you to "own nothing and be happy" and they will accomplish this with taxation, where working is punished with excessive taxes, and not working is rewarded often with more money than they used to earn (various worker's comp programs very widely abused throughout the nation)? In a word: Fuck yes.

E-renter

You mean would I leave Canada, where the supreme rulers Trudeau + Singh freeze bank accounts without criminal charges for donating to peaceful protests, his state-funded (from my tax dollars) media CBC lies constantly for his benefit, his finance minister Freeland riles against cryptocurrencies, property taxes are so high that you are renting your own property from the government whose goal (in line with WEF which Trudeau is a proud member of https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/justin-trudeau ) is for you to "own nothing and be happy" and they will accomplish this with taxation, where working is punished with excessive taxes, and not working is rewarded often with more money than they used to earn (various worker's comp programs very widely abused throughout the nation)? In a word: Fuck yes.

Pma2kdota

this isn't what privatizing health care means, this is stealing public funds to subsidize private owned facilities. Privatized health care means the hospital or facility does not take government subsidies, and is not required to take patients for free (as in paid for by taxpayers). I literally said Doug Ford is a moron, and your opinion on the Ottawa trucker protest is shaped by consuming the same fake CBC news that told you taking a shot would mean you could take off your mask and travel freely and never spread or catch the Wuhan sniffles.

waun

How delicate must your ego be to call someone online a tiny guy? Lol. Sources are CBC, CTV (you know, that bastion of liberal propaganda), BBC, and his own words. Because *his own words* are owned by his opposition?

Infamous_Bus1578

What facts? The ones CBC fed you? I personally could give a fuck what the majority of Canadians want. This is a matter of fundamental civil liberties.

Say_no_to_doritos

Lmao get fucked guy. Canadian news, particularly CBC, is constructively critical of the Canadian government. You probably don't want to be getting your news from sources funded by Russia.

frstdrgn

I have recently asked myself the same question. TL;DR unless you know everything there is to know about cyber security and cryptography and are willing to go through the trouble to continually verify (and if necessary update) that security, what you don’t know could hurt you. And there’s a LOT even the experts don’t know. So without further ado, here’s the short / simple reason to avoid this: peace of mind. There’s a 0% chance that a fully airgapped seed will be hacked, and the security of your wallet is exactly equal to the entropy of your seed (and the likelihood that your physical key can only be found by you). The risk of digitizing your key is unknown, and that is scary. Yes, it should be a very low risk, but ultimately unknown, especially if you’re considering very long term storage. Yes, it seems like the risk of cracking multiple layers of encryption and obfuscation should be significantly less than a physical backup being stolen, but bear with me until the end and I will show why that is not the case. Long version: As solid as encryption and cryptography are, new vulnerabilities and (ESPECIALLY) faulty implementations are discovered all the time. Even a decade is an eternity in cyber security, so the more levels of encryption and security you add, the more attack surface and security deterioration you risk. Specific details: Here are a few ways this could play out badly for you. Again, these are unlikely, but the goal is to reduce risk to the absolute minimum to maximize peace of mind. 1) Dropbox gets hacked (again!). This could be a nation-state level attack that could result in your drive being wiped. Motivation could be full attack on destroying bitcoin / eliminating cloud-stored keys. Or someone could just hate Dropbox. Yes, you still have your physical backup, but now you’re reduced to a single point of failure, and it seems like you’re trying to avoid that. (See the end for my recommendation of avoiding this single point of failure w/o digital backup). 2) Your encryption methods are faulty / don’t stand the test of time. There’s a huge rule of thumb in the cyber security community: don’t hand-roll your own cryptography. I’m serious - this is so common and so easy to get wrong. Even widely-used encryption libraries and methods have nuanced chinks in the armor that result in things like secret key discovery via off-curve attacks, decryption via reused or biased nonces, and the list goes on and on. It’s absolutely mindblowing how insecure so much of the internet is. It’s never as simple as “It’s AES-256 bits, so it’s good!” - nope, wrong. It wouldn’t be surprising in the least for (another) AES cipher algorithm to get popped. ECB and CBC were thought to be secure at one point in time, and now they’re joke-level ciphers. And just about every other AES cipher has a wrong way to use it. 3) The security you’ve implemented is bypassed anytime you want to check your backup. This is a complicated set up, which means you’re going to want to check your access to this backup periodically. That means downloading from Dropbox, decrypting, and viewing the seed with your eyes. If an attacker was able to gain access to your computer and view your screen, you’ve just done all of the decrypting work for them, and it’s game over. Your wallet security is dependent on whether or not you can 110% guarantee that the device you’re accessing the backup on is secure. Social engineering remains the most successful method of exploitation. An attacker could put you in a situation where you need to check your backup on a device they control, and you might not be aware of any of that. Or, it could be as simple as compromising/hijacking an app you’ve downloaded on your computer and using it to steal files. There was a vulnerability discovered recently on macOS where a malicious third party app could access your documents folder. So, all that to say, your set up needs to include a guarantee that the device you’re using is 100% secure, and not to be scary, but that’s not practical for most. 4) this is compounding a few of these to contrive an attack scenario (this is somewhat complex, but definitely not impossible). Due to poorly implemented browser cryptography (which has happened in the past, and could happen in the future), I’m able to deploy a MITM attack when you download your backup from Dropbox. Now I have a double encrypted file, but I’ve installed a keylogger on your device. That means I have the file and your passwords for decryption. Done. 5) unknown attacks. There will absolutely continue to be more and more methods of attack, not only on the ever-increasing attack surface of browsers and web applications that frequently sacrifice security for user-friendliness, but even on modern cryptography. There’s simply no telling how devastating these could be, and we’ve seen some devastating stuff over the last couple of decades. Again, these are not likely scenarios. But they’re not impossible, and significantly more likely than guessing your seed, and that’s the point. If you keep it airgapped, you have a lot less to keep track of, you never have to worry about what you don’t know, and you have peace of mind. You might be content with that level of digital risk, and if that’s the case then I don’t think anyone here could convince a digital backup is less than ideal. I think the meat of the question is this: Is your security method more likely to get hacked than your physical backup is to be stolen? The short answer is IDK and you don’t either, which is kinda the point, but… I would say you could ensure the likelihood of your physical backup being stolen is as close to zero as possible by using collaborative custody multisig. This is extra, but I wanted to include this to address your desire for a backup instead of just poking holes in your digital copy idea. If you want a true backup: use 2 of 3 collaborative custody multisig with a company like Unchained. They have some really great educational content on that model, so I won’t go into a ton of detail here (unless you’d like me to!) but in short, there is no single point of failure, and it’s the best of all worlds. It’s simple and almost impossible to steal or lose. If you go with multisig and keep your seed phrases 100%, I think the likelihood of losing your funds due to physical backups being stolen is far less than the likelihood of a single wallet digital backup being hacked.

kmdr

to guarantee fairness, you should publish a hash of a message containing the number. e.g. (fictional example) sha256 for verification: 5861AE5AD4EFC5AF054E33CBC3B1346C675CAE9AFCFC3D93B13C913BEAB040D6 after the giveaway you publish the message for everyone to verify in my case: I am kmdr and I am thinking of number 123456

mark_able_jones_

Bitcoin is more centralized that the CBC. The only purpose of crypto is to facilitate various forms of fraud. We live in a world filled with fraud, which is why crypto has done well. The more corrupt our society becomes, the more crypto thrives.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

coinfeeds-bot

tldr; Cyprus' Deputy Minister for Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, Kyriacos Kokkinos, has said that Cyprus welcomes the use of digital and crypto assets, but needs to respect the regulations currently in place and the absence of any regulations. He also acknowledged disagreements between the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) and the government. He defended the government saying that CBC is subject to the ECB. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.*

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

PeterSchiffindisguse

Canadian redditors are mostly bots and woke city dwellers that eat, sleep, and breath whatever CP24 and CBC tells them, so the real question is, why are you surprised? They have zero foresight or skepticism of the current narrative, and just parrot each other.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

E-renter

It's called legacy state media propaganda. Liars beholden only to the government, not the truth, and in the case of CBC wholly funded by the taxpayers with no choice in the matter, unless you voted Trudeau or Jagmeet then you got what you wanted.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

TechnicallyComputers

Liberals hate him because he will defund the CBC which is their mouthpiece, and he will remove their influence from the public school system and restore freedom for conservatives to teach their children their own values without threatening to take their kids away.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

padizzledonk

>It turns out that they were right the first time. Bitcoin doesn't work well as currency No fixed supply asset does, be it Crypto or Silver or Gold or whatever....Every nation in the world moved away from the Gold Standard.....Like a 100 years ago....No one asks why that was- Oh...they have TONS of wacky conspiracy theories, but the actual reason why is because currencies based on a fixed supply asset are unstable and unmanageable domestically and vulnerable to outside manipulation...Bicoin is all those things and worse in a lot of ways because it's pseudoanonymous It will never supplant fiat currency imo At best it will exist alongside fiat, CBC and decentralized stablecoins as a speculation

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

Buy_More_Bitcoin

Good point, let's rob CBC

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are 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 small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. 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. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > 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 in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > 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. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup 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). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) 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/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).