DDOS

Weekly_Public_7134

So it’s a transaction theft/DDOS attack

SeemedGood

You must be a newb. Blockstream and the consistent censorship of discussion on bitcointalk.org and r/bitcoin that started in late 2014. The DDOS attacks on Bitcoin XT nodes in mid to late 2015. The *many* lies told by u/nullc (Greg Maxwell) in this sub in 2015-2016, some of which I caught him in and exposed but he has since deleted. If you’d like to know more about the history (and it would be wise for you to investigate), Roger Ver does a pretty good job summing it up in “Highjacking Bitcoin.” Here’s one interview with him: https://youtu.be/m6p3GLkuQoc?si=jq7Zi8RWWXvVkZt

AnoAnoSaPwet

So everything broke on Solana but it wasn't Solana's fault 🤣. Cope much. Sounds like an unstable network when everything crashes simultaneously. No DEX worked, wallets broke. Maybe it ran so well that it was intentional to DDOS attack it with transactions that only "certain" transactions went through? I had to BRUTE FORCE transactions through it was so bad. Never had to do that ever, on anything. 

CorneliusFudgem

Example of Snapshot substitution to restore block headers (and with MEV’d tx’s you can rearrange order and finality in the halted/resumed block as you’d like). That would be the DDOS attack in 2023 where superminority took the chain down via coordination in discord. And another list for you: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?collection=solana-instability I’ll let you do your own homework from here on out buddy. It’ll do you some good to learn how to use the internet 😉

CeramicDrip

and i said “…Although they are getting less frequent” Yet none of this proves how Solana is decentralized cause it’s not. It almost is, but it isnt. Also Bitcoin has only had 2 outages and they were over a decade ago. ETH just straight up hasn’t had an outage. The closest things to one was those DDOS attacks in the early years of ETH, but those just slowed the network down.

SeaworthinessSad7300

they have zero now. I used their post to make a DDOS attack on their seedportal

MinimalGravitas

> Has the Eth network ever been down? There were DDOS attacks around the time of Devcon 2016, the network didn't go down but there were a couple of times over that week or two when it was severely slowed and frustrating to try to use. > Don't think this update changes much tbh Yea, in terms of quantifiable difference this increase in available blockspace isn't significant. It's more just about the community demonstrating its ability to change this parameter without needing upgrades to come from the client teams or the foundation or whatever.

dickingaround

Nah, let them sell. If you have uncertainty 15 years of seeing BTC just keep clearing blocks and growing despite ups/down in fiat trade and hacks and DDOS attacks, and new scare-tactics from governments, etc. this might be a good time to sit it out, get some FOMO, do more research, and figure out what you really believe. You gotta really believe deep down to ride this train.

Amazonreviewscool67

Cardano's network has *never* had downtime. The DDOS attack you're referring to had little disruptions on the network. It was widely considered a failed attempt to take the network down. The attacker also lost money. The fees for the attackers transactions also went up over time which caused them to stop. Just wait until you find out how badly a DDOS attack has affected other Blockchains in the past.

TansySalad

Aha I see thank you. So opening a port is more like opening a window into a specific room in your house (the room being Bitcoin core software) not opening the front door to the whole system :) So long as the software is secure (and keeps the door locked to the rest of the house), then a malicious actor can’t do anything to the rest of the system; and the software should only allow them to do what it wants them too. So vulnerability-wise I need to ensure that no other piece of software can use port 8333. I’m 100% sure this isn’t the case, but best practice would be to limit outbound and inbound connections on 8333 for everything else in the system except Bitcoin core. Are there any other security concerns with the setup I’ve outlined (static IP & port forwarding)? I assume someone could DDOS but that would seem petty . . .

MinimalGravitas

> I'm not having a tit for tat I'm asking you what you think the risk is, because it seems like your being intentionally vague to avoid addressing the fact that this 'security risk' would have almost no impact on anything... finality of an epoch would be delayed by 6.4 minutes. No one's transactions would be censored, no one's wallets would be compromised, nothing of consequence to anyone except the validator who was DDOS'ed, who would have a small penalty for missing her proposal. You seem to be trying to portray this as Ethereum being broken... but I don't see how you can interpret it that way unless you completely avoid the details of the issue.

Sad-Commission-999

Most chains have never been hacked. Cardano has gone down for brief periods of time a few times, no big deal except for the community gaslighting about it. However a couple months ago someone DDOS'ed them. It didn't break the chain, but it did cause transactions to take up to 20 minutes for hours, all for only a few hundred dollars in cost for the DDOS'er. That's pretty terrible, you wonder what someone really motivated could do, and would be a big reason not to have significant amounts of money in Cardano DeFi projects. Mainly though the throughput of the network is terrible. The amount of smart contract transactions it can handle is laughably low, under 10 per second. When smart contracts launched it could only do 1 or 2! Someone launching a mini memecoin can bring chain load to 90%, which is a big deal when you can't pay to get to the front of the line like most chains. Cardano is probably the slowest chain in terms of development, and while their community claims it's because they are doing things properly and that takes time, in reality they are run by a cult leader who doesn't have experience shipping successful software projects. It's very likely that their claims about doing things properly aren't true, and how vulnerable they were to the DDOS supports that. They haven't yet had to deal with motivated and well funded people trying to disrupt the chain.

Sad-Commission-999

Ethereum launched officially in mid 2015, but the team go together in late 2013, which is when I counted it from, the comparison is fair. Cardano just takes a long time, the jury is still out on whether they've done it properly. They've had some downtime, though less than most chains. Someone spent a few hundred dollars to DDOS them and users had degraded performance for hours. The max smart contract TPS is currently shocking, and Dex's have to use things like bacthers to make up for it, which have rugged users multiple times. People barely talk shit about Cardano, no one gives a shit about it. It's that Cardano people live in their own world where it's actually going fantastic, then they pop out of that world into one where people actually use blockchains and are treated with some distain, and they find that shocking. Charles is a cult leader, who's convinced millions of people to buy his coin. He's convinced them "It's the future! "We're gonna bring finance to the world!" "Everything is going great!" "You're investing in the future of finance and the internet!". Whilst in reality almost none of the millions of retail holders actually use the chain (36k addresses a day interact, and many of them will be bots), and it's performance is absolutely atrocious given the time and money spent on it. The only reason I know so much about Charles is I find Trumps dishonest demagoguary so repulsive and yet compelling, and Charles is the same in crypto form.

EastCoastASICRepair

This is a scam you can’t DDOS miners. They will just choose a different node.

EastCoastASICRepair

This is a scam you can’t DDOS miners. They will just choose a different node.

CourtesyFlush211

- Satoshi comes back and sells. He’s got what 5% of supply? The loss of confidence by the creator would cause chaos - some govt reveals they created btc - we go to a gold standard instead which is much better than infinite money printing, and easier to understand. Gold’s real world utility is just too easy for the world to understand - US govt imposes 20% tax. Some Bitcoiners move out of country but btc price takes a hit - unforeseen software bug - a hard fork happens to address quantum computing. A software bug slips thru the cracks and one hacker gets an outsized portion of supply - the U.S. manages to keep fiat in order to maintain war dominance. Bitcoin interest slows down. U.S. goes to war and fiat is the easiest way to finance. Some Bitcoiners say fuck it, just print money and win this war. - BRICS gains traction with a gold standard. - North Korea teams up with others to DDOS the network - miners somehow 51% attack the network - we have to hard fork, the. ETF holders sell, price crashes hard. The etf issuers do not give etf holders a copy of the forked bitcoin - someone creates bitcoin 2 and it gains traction - binance gets hacked Some confluence of factors happens over decades. The world descends into anarchy ironically because of an epic Bitcoin meltdown.

jcpham

Believe it or not I solo mined a mined a 50BTC block with GPU’s once and only once. Back then you had to run your own stratum proxy and just about everyone who was serious was running the bithopper package to either manage failover pools or jump from a proportional payout pool on long blocks. There’s no more proportional payout pools, blame people like me for gaming that as long as possible. Anyways, pool number 4 or 5 for me was my local bitcoind:8332 and once during a DDOS every pool went unreachable for a time; I failed over to solo mining and snagged a 50btc block during epoch 1. It only happened once and the money is gone. Back then 8 or 12 GPUs of mid level Radeons was crushing a few Gigahashes

mikelimebingbong

I had my bank account hacked and someone was able to make a wire transfer, my phone was hit with a DDOS attack with constant phone calls and emails as well making my phone unusable….. nothing electronic is safe TBH

ske66

Why are there so many network outages on Solana? Poor architecture? Network DDOS?

ElGuano

>So every \~10 minutes, a bunch of transactions are added to a block, then that block needs to be verified by miners (nodes) before queuing up inside the blockchain.  Miners submit blocks, the verification happens by full nodes, the vast majority of which are NOT miners. >Now one can setup a fraudulent bitcoin transaction and try to place it on the block and it will automatically get rejected from queuing in the block. I assume you mean "No one?" Because you cannot "add a transaction to a mined block" because the hash won't verify. This is what the nodes do. >The fact that the majority of the bitcoin's hash rate is controlled by few entities is a huge risk and can lead to 51% attack. IIRC, pools in the past have reached 51%, and this fear has existed and has been vetted. In reality, nodes still verify that any submitted blocks must be valid. But as to your hypo, if the top 5 miners were suddenly DDOS'd out of existence, the difficulty would be so HIGH that the remaining miners would have a hard time for the next \~2 weeks generating valid blocks every 10 minutes. Anyone jumping in new to "control mining" would have to contribute enough compute to maintain the current hash rate. And if the rate did drop due to less mining, then more miners from other chains would point their gear to bitcoin because the economics of the lower hash rate would favor BTC over whatever they're mining. In short, it would still be exorbitantly expensive to mine and create double spends, and if they were spending the money to do that, maybe they should just mine bitcoin validly instead?

Financial_Design_801

nostr is the first technology that leverages btc PoW cost of production as an internet-native means of protecting a network from DDOS attacks and consequentially enables a free market for information Try a nostr client via the Damus or Primal app

aansteller

You have not read what this paper is about. This paper talks about the concept of proof-of-work as a counter measure for DDOS attacks. This white paper is not about a digital currency at all.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

Silver_Moon_1994

DDOS attack on eth? Lmao

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Con-Arguments Below is a TRON con-argument written by CreepToeCurrentSea. > TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, and its own cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX). Justin Sun founded it in March 2014, and it has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore founded the same year. It began as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token before migrating to its own blockchain in 2018. > > # CONS > > **Whitepaper Plagiarism** > > In January 2018, Tron's developers were accused of plagiarism after many sections of the Tron whitepaper appeared nearly identical to IPFS and Filecoin technical documentation. IPFS is an acronym for InterPlanetary File System. Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, which develops IFPS tools and services, revealed on Twitter in early January 2018 that Tron's whitepaper authors did not properly cite references and that the document was "mostly copied" from other projects. Even the equations and formulas mentioned in the first version of Tron's whitepaper were identical to those found in IPFS documentation. Sun claimed to have a "very detailed" reference to the most recent Chinese version of the Tron whitepaper. He also claimed that the Tron paper was translated into other languages by volunteers who may have overlooked important details. Just as Vitalik had also sarcastically said in twitter regarding the teams copy-pasting abilities, this just goes to show how un-genuine their team appears even making the most basic of mistakes. > > **Question of Vulnerability** > > A barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to HackerOne. "Using a single machine, an attacker could send DDOS attack to all or 51 percent of the Super Representative (SR) node and render Tron network unusable or unavailable," the claim goes. While TRON is somewhat better in marketing compared to other cryptocurrencies, it falls short on one of the most important pillars for an effective one, that of which is security. To hinder a blockchain with just one computer is the polar opposite of what you want a cryptocurrency to be. > > **Un-Stablecoin** > > TRON's native stablecoin "USDD" de-pegged to the US dollar earlier this year, falling to as low as 91 cents. Its design is uncannily similar to Terra's stablecoin, UST, which lost its price peg and imploded a month ago, wiping out $40 billion in market value. If it continues to follow UST's path considering how similar they are in function and structure, one could assume they also have a ticking algorithmic time bomb in the making. > > **Final Thoughts** > > It seems that TRON has a knack for idolizing (to the point of almost copying their work) other projects both in and out of the crypto-sphere. What I do hope is that they also know what not absorb. Else, they have nothing but a mushed up bowl of their favorite things and just decided it would stick together with glue and duct tape. > > Sources: > > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron\_(cryptocurrency)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(cryptocurrency)) > > [https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/](https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/) > > [https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal](https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal) > > [https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/) > > [https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/](https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Con-Arguments Below is a TRON con-argument written by CreepToeCurrentSea. > TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, and its own cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX). Justin Sun founded it in March 2014, and it has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore founded the same year. It began as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token before migrating to its own blockchain in 2018. > > # CONS > > **Whitepaper Plagiarism** > > In January 2018, Tron's developers were accused of plagiarism after many sections of the Tron whitepaper appeared nearly identical to IPFS and Filecoin technical documentation. IPFS is an acronym for InterPlanetary File System. Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, which develops IFPS tools and services, revealed on Twitter in early January 2018 that Tron's whitepaper authors did not properly cite references and that the document was "mostly copied" from other projects. Even the equations and formulas mentioned in the first version of Tron's whitepaper were identical to those found in IPFS documentation. Sun claimed to have a "very detailed" reference to the most recent Chinese version of the Tron whitepaper. He also claimed that the Tron paper was translated into other languages by volunteers who may have overlooked important details. Just as Vitalik had also sarcastically said in twitter regarding the teams copy-pasting abilities, this just goes to show how un-genuine their team appears even making the most basic of mistakes. > > **Question of Vulnerability** > > A barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to HackerOne. "Using a single machine, an attacker could send DDOS attack to all or 51 percent of the Super Representative (SR) node and render Tron network unusable or unavailable," the claim goes. While TRON is somewhat better in marketing compared to other cryptocurrencies, it falls short on one of the most important pillars for an effective one, that of which is security. To hinder a blockchain with just one computer is the polar opposite of what you want a cryptocurrency to be. > > **Un-Stablecoin** > > TRON's native stablecoin "USDD" de-pegged to the US dollar earlier this year, falling to as low as 91 cents. Its design is uncannily similar to Terra's stablecoin, UST, which lost its price peg and imploded a month ago, wiping out $40 billion in market value. If it continues to follow UST's path considering how similar they are in function and structure, one could assume they also have a ticking algorithmic time bomb in the making. > > **Final Thoughts** > > It seems that TRON has a knack for idolizing (to the point of almost copying their work) other projects both in and out of the crypto-sphere. What I do hope is that they also know what not absorb. Else, they have nothing but a mushed up bowl of their favorite things and just decided it would stick together with glue and duct tape. > > Sources: > > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron\_(cryptocurrency)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(cryptocurrency)) > > [https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/](https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/) > > [https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal](https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal) > > [https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/) > > [https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/](https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Con-Arguments Below is a TRON con-argument written by CreepToeCurrentSea. > TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, and its own cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX). Justin Sun founded it in March 2014, and it has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore founded the same year. It began as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token before migrating to its own blockchain in 2018. > > # CONS > > **Whitepaper Plagiarism** > > In January 2018, Tron's developers were accused of plagiarism after many sections of the Tron whitepaper appeared nearly identical to IPFS and Filecoin technical documentation. IPFS is an acronym for InterPlanetary File System. Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, which develops IFPS tools and services, revealed on Twitter in early January 2018 that Tron's whitepaper authors did not properly cite references and that the document was "mostly copied" from other projects. Even the equations and formulas mentioned in the first version of Tron's whitepaper were identical to those found in IPFS documentation. Sun claimed to have a "very detailed" reference to the most recent Chinese version of the Tron whitepaper. He also claimed that the Tron paper was translated into other languages by volunteers who may have overlooked important details. Just as Vitalik had also sarcastically said in twitter regarding the teams copy-pasting abilities, this just goes to show how un-genuine their team appears even making the most basic of mistakes. > > **Question of Vulnerability** > > A barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to HackerOne. "Using a single machine, an attacker could send DDOS attack to all or 51 percent of the Super Representative (SR) node and render Tron network unusable or unavailable," the claim goes. While TRON is somewhat better in marketing compared to other cryptocurrencies, it falls short on one of the most important pillars for an effective one, that of which is security. To hinder a blockchain with just one computer is the polar opposite of what you want a cryptocurrency to be. > > **Un-Stablecoin** > > TRON's native stablecoin "USDD" de-pegged to the US dollar earlier this year, falling to as low as 91 cents. Its design is uncannily similar to Terra's stablecoin, UST, which lost its price peg and imploded a month ago, wiping out $40 billion in market value. If it continues to follow UST's path considering how similar they are in function and structure, one could assume they also have a ticking algorithmic time bomb in the making. > > **Final Thoughts** > > It seems that TRON has a knack for idolizing (to the point of almost copying their work) other projects both in and out of the crypto-sphere. What I do hope is that they also know what not absorb. Else, they have nothing but a mushed up bowl of their favorite things and just decided it would stick together with glue and duct tape. > > Sources: > > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron\_(cryptocurrency)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(cryptocurrency)) > > [https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/](https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/) > > [https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal](https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal) > > [https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/) > > [https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/](https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

One_Boot_5662

I think that's a fair question. The biggest is probably PoS. Ethereum spent an insane amount of time working on it, it was 6 years late in implementation and it's not nearly as advanced as Cardano's Ouroboros which is used by several other crypto projects now. Ethereum PoS has problems like public leader election per epoch, which could make DDOS a real threat, also the reliance on a smart contract to custody staking funds is very dangerous, considering the early stage of smart contracts on Ethereum and the constant security failures that arise. The need for LSDs to allow users to stake and use their ETH is also significantly sub-optimal to Cardano where funds are native in the users wallet and always liquid. The uptake of staking on Ethereum is also poor, probably because of the slashing that Cardano does not need, it's hard to say Ethereum is really secure. The rise of Lido that is practically at the threshold of breaking Ethereum security guarantees is also a major concern. Cardano also created native tokens which solves the need for high risk smart contracts to do tokens, which makes the user experience on Cardano much safer, and the blockchain execution environment much more efficient. Cardano also did this on the UTxO model, which while it has some trade-offs is much more robust and decentralised than the account model. Ethereum was a paradigm shift when it was created, but better technology has surpassed it in many areas.

kaleidostar11

If only It tanks DDOS as well as it tanks selloffs.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

One_Boot_5662

Bitcoin; launch a number of stake pools, let's say a dozen should be good enough. Operate them honestly for a few years, offer different types of incentives to join the pools, cheap rates, fast payouts etc. Grow the hashrate of a couple of them in particular, you don't need your own mining hardware just provide a good service. Now start getting larger miners into long term contracts, offering better terms. When your couple of pools are holding over 51% of hashrate, start attempting 51% attacks. If miners move, they are likely to join one of your other 10 pools, so you can sustain any attack for quite a while by causing confusion with some media posts. When all is said and done, if some pools lost market share just rebrand them and start over. If you really want to do some long term attacks, infiltrate existing pools and shut them down while your other attack is in play, this will make them look complicit. Ethereum; setup a large network of relays like Infura, log a large proportion of validators IP addresses. As block leaders election is public, simply DDOS each leader in turn, validators start getting slashed, chaos ensues.

northcasewhite

You might as well speak about the DDOS attacks on Bitcoin Classic too.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

defiCosmos

How do combat spam txt aka DDOS attack?

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

Financial_Design_801

“Just because it has “coin” in the name doesn’t mean it should be regulated as a financial instrument, any more than Amazon “cloud” should be regulated by Weather service” If you call PoW for what it really is ( a nonlethal weapon system being used for cyber security and self defense against DDOS etc), you inherit 2nd amendment protections and then all of these orgs have a much, much harder time. Classify PoW as an arm used for self defense and cybersecurity and you inherit 2A protection. I have been consistently saying 1A won't be enough for the last 2.5 years -Jason Lowery author of Softwar https://twitter.com/1chrismcg/status/1784390291417342228?s=46&t=ihVglVXC0BQSbw6j57EoaA https://twitter.com/jasonplowery/status/1784396711860797684?s=46&t=ihVglVXC0BQSbw6j57EoaA

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

Themistokles42

it is not acceptable, since stores will by definition always be in the slowest bucket since they transact the most value. A network that goes down every time some teenager decides to DDOS it for fun is not a payment network. Also PoW will always be preferable over PoS, especially a representative kind of PoS, but that's a different discussion. The only thing that sets Nano apart from other PoS networks is no fees and it is fundamentally broken for that reason.

GoodSamoSamo

that wouldn't DDOS the network, i already explained it above. but ok. glhf.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

GoodSamoSamo

This is incorrect. By design, DDOS needs to cover the physical links of 1/3+ stake weighted nodes for the network to stop confirming blocks. Targeting a single leader would only delay that leader. Your claim is wrong. Also, don't really care about Cardano. It's very clear that the market is starting to see ADA going nowhere anytime soon. ADA has been around for 8 YEARS and has nothing to show for it. 1 TPS, relatively weak TVL, virtually no DeFi activity, no NFT presence, terrible DEX volume, virtually no stablecoins (not even USDT or USDC), no institutional interest (Grayscale just removed them from their institutional product list and Coinshare Fund Flows show virtually no interest in ADA ETP products), no serious investors or influencers in crypto support it or care about it, etc. It's (incorrectly) taking an "academic" approach instead of the standard technology approach of "ship and iterate." The list goes on and on. Cardano is a garbage chain that is run by a sociopath and has a VC arm that is in charge of making ecosystem investments to attract builders - which it has failed at horribly.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

stanley_fatmax

Honestly, a lot of it is probably manipulation. When major world events occur, people (markets) are on edge. Like dominoes falling, the markets are "primed" to move during unprecedented times. When that happens, bad actors can swoop in, and any anomalous trades they make are amplified more than they'd be on a normal day by people watching closely for market movement. It's like DDOS amplification attacks. In uneasy markets, and for very little investment, you can get a huge movement. Whereas in normal markets, it takes a huge investment to get any movement.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

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#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

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#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

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#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

Revolutionary-Ebb-26

Great write up, but I quibble with the second sentence. Haven't seen evidence that Satoshi was attempting to solve that problem. The "Chancellor on the Brink" headline's inclusion in the Genesis Block is the only thing that may allude to such a thing but we have no explanation from Satoshi about it. That could have easily just been a timestamp for reference. We may never know. What Satoshi did talk about in terms of the problem he was attempting to solve were just technical things .. like the double spend problem, the Byzantine Generals problem. There was a long history of attempts at making a digital cashlike system since such a thing could protect against spam and DDOS. That said it turned out that a decentralized, permissionless and secure solution to digital cash certainly does address the fiat problem when that solution provides a finite bound like Bitcoin did.

Flex-93

Those servers are DDOS protected - the requests will not even reach the servers.....

BarrySix

I do this weekly... AWS has tools to block DDOS attacks, it has a good CDN. There is nothing stopping you putting akamai in front instead if you are extremely high scale. The instances scale horizontally to far more capacity than any site needs. The parts that brake are site bottlenecks, not AWS capacity limits.

hdrive1335

Networks have limits. You can throw as much compute, storage and routing at a problem all you want but at the end of the day user traffic on the scale of a DDOS is NOT going to be resolved simply.

PrestigiousAd9825

TBH it would be more convenient if a bad actor who stands to profit from CB losing market share waited to launch a DDOS attack on them right when BTC starts big time mooning near ATH

BMB281

Yeah, likely an issue with extremely high traffic volume, maybe a DDOS attack. Seriously seriously doubt Coinbase is attempting anything shady. Bitcoins not even at an ATH, why would they Robinhood themselves for pennies

Drunkn_Cricket

Same with their stocks. most likely its a DDOS from some elites who still want to sell off at the ATH before the pesants drive it down

cecil_X

Apparently Binance and Coinbase are going through some problems, that stopped the rally. The FED and the ECB are very likely attacking them with DDOS attacks. This escalated quickly, we're in total war against the system.

manageablemanatee

To be honest, I think people who hold that view haven't looked into Nano's transaction prioritization system. It actually has spam attacks quite regularly which are handled without issue. The ones that degrade the network do so by attacking another weakness simultaneously. The last major attack was essentially DDOS'ing the nodes to force them to desync with each other, dampening their ability to cope with the transaction backlog. The one the network is still dealing with is still being investigated but to my limited understanding it seems it focused on desyncing the nodes by spamming different sets of blocks to different nodes, taking advantage of the limited size of the backlog each node can hold. (I'm happy to be corrected on that by someone with better understanding) These attacks are not *just* spam, but spam tends to be a necessary component of them. Spam on its own doesn't really cause problems for Nano anymore.

CointestMod

#TRON Con-Arguments Below is a TRON con-argument written by CreepToeCurrentSea. > TRON is a decentralized, open-source blockchain-based operating system with smart contract functionality, a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, and its own cryptocurrency, Tronix (TRX). Justin Sun founded it in March 2014, and it has been overseen and supervised by the TRON Foundation, a non-profit organization in Singapore founded the same year. It began as an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token before migrating to its own blockchain in 2018. > > # CONS > > **Whitepaper Plagiarism** > > In January 2018, Tron's developers were accused of plagiarism after many sections of the Tron whitepaper appeared nearly identical to IPFS and Filecoin technical documentation. IPFS is an acronym for InterPlanetary File System. Juan Benet, CEO of Protocol Labs, which develops IFPS tools and services, revealed on Twitter in early January 2018 that Tron's whitepaper authors did not properly cite references and that the document was "mostly copied" from other projects. Even the equations and formulas mentioned in the first version of Tron's whitepaper were identical to those found in IPFS documentation. Sun claimed to have a "very detailed" reference to the most recent Chinese version of the Tron whitepaper. He also claimed that the Tron paper was translated into other languages by volunteers who may have overlooked important details. Just as Vitalik had also sarcastically said in twitter regarding the teams copy-pasting abilities, this just goes to show how un-genuine their team appears even making the most basic of mistakes. > > **Question of Vulnerability** > > A barrage of requests sent by a single PC could be used to squeeze the power of the blockchain's CPU, overload the memory, and perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to HackerOne. "Using a single machine, an attacker could send DDOS attack to all or 51 percent of the Super Representative (SR) node and render Tron network unusable or unavailable," the claim goes. While TRON is somewhat better in marketing compared to other cryptocurrencies, it falls short on one of the most important pillars for an effective one, that of which is security. To hinder a blockchain with just one computer is the polar opposite of what you want a cryptocurrency to be. > > **Un-Stablecoin** > > TRON's native stablecoin "USDD" de-pegged to the US dollar earlier this year, falling to as low as 91 cents. Its design is uncannily similar to Terra's stablecoin, UST, which lost its price peg and imploded a month ago, wiping out $40 billion in market value. If it continues to follow UST's path considering how similar they are in function and structure, one could assume they also have a ticking algorithmic time bomb in the making. > > **Final Thoughts** > > It seems that TRON has a knack for idolizing (to the point of almost copying their work) other projects both in and out of the crypto-sphere. What I do hope is that they also know what not absorb. Else, they have nothing but a mushed up bowl of their favorite things and just decided it would stick together with glue and duct tape. > > Sources: > > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron\_(cryptocurrency)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(cryptocurrency)) > > [https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/](https://cryptoslate.com/justin-suns-controversies-plagiarism-teslas-warren-buffett-kidney-stones-and-a-deleted-apology/) > > [https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal](https://www.inverse.com/article/40050-tron-trx-cryptocurrency-plagiarism-scandal) > > [https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/](https://www.zdnet.com/article/tron-critical-security-flaw-could-break-the-entire-blockchain/) > > [https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/](https://fortune.com/2022/06/13/algorithmic-stablecoin-usdd-loses-peg-justin-sun-tron-decentralized-usd/) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#TRON Pro-Arguments Below is a TRON pro-argument written by ExchangeEnough7821. > The cryptocurrency Tron was was created in March 2014 by Justin Sun, and is a blockchain-based operating system. In 2017, it was bought by the TRON foundation, a Singapore based non-profit organisation . > > # Transaction Fees > > The first key benefit of Tron is the extremely low transaction fees, which are often a fraction of a penny. In addition, if you have enough Tron staked or ‘frozen’, then many transactions will have no fee, depending on the amount you are sending. The Tron system has a unique way of calculating this fee, and bandwidth points are necessary for normal transactions. Users are automatically allocated 5000 of these bandwidth points for free daily, and more of these are allocated for those who stake tron (which is how transaction fees are lowered for those who stake Tron). There are 3 steps involved when gathering the bandwidth points necessary to complete a transaction, and the system will only move onto the next step if that one does not gather enough points for the transaction fee. Firsty, they will use any bandwidth points earned from staked (or ‘frozen’) Tron, then it will use free daily bandwidth points and finally Tron owned by the sender. The amount of bandwidth points needed is calculated by multiplying the number of bytes involved by 10 Sun. The reason for these fees is to prevents user carrying out DDOS attacks on the network without paying anything. > > # Partnerships > > Another positive about Tron is their partners, as Tron has partnerships with a range of high profile companies, like Samsung. This suggests that these large scale companies have faith in this coin, its infrastructure and its future, which is also a good sign for potential buyers. For example, the crypto is partnered with Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are working with Sony in the field of blockchain based gaming to facilitate Crypto in-game payments. This leads to a larger audience for Tron, and potential for widespread use in Sony Games. > > # Transaction Speed > > \- Although there is a theoretical transaction speed of 2000 transactions per second, this claim has been disputed by researchers and users. Particularly, Huawei Li, Zhihuai Li and Na Tian published a report named “Resource Bottleneck Analysis of the Blockchain Based On Tron’s TPS”\[1\]. If this figure is accurate however, this would definitely be a positive aspect of Tron. > \- \[1\] - “\[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103\](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32591-6\_103) (Paid article) ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_tron) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

EbonyHelicoidalRhino

It cost less to send a transaction (and have it fail) than what it cost for a node to process it. That's because there isn't a fee market. It's an intrinsic feature of the chain. It's cheap and fast thanks to that feature. By nature this opens up the network to clogging, DDOS, and performance issues, which is where the root cause of all the shutdowns happened. They have tried to put various band-aids over that fact to limit as much as possible the occurences of this becoming a problem, but it will always be there. We'll never have guarantee that more shutdowns won't happen, because this fundamental problem will always be there. The consequences of a single shutdown can be catastrophic in a live market that's supposed to track things like oracles, etc. It's enough to deter me from using it.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Far-Scholar9028. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CockroachSeparate827

Don't evaluate strength where a system is strong. Evaluate it where it's weak. What do we call hacking bitcoin? 1. DDOS transactions 2. Prevent one wallet from transactions 3. Steal one wallet 4. Steal many wallets 1 and 2 are pretty easily done. Use the might of one or two countries to coerce the top 2 or 3 mining groups to only mine empty blocks.  3. Easily done, but not by cryptography. Rubber hose cryptography is the way. 4. Been done, just make an enticing 3rd party service to steal authentication.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Far-Scholar9028. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

_Niwubo

Tell me why people would not just use Dark Web, if they were really so controversial that people wanted to shut the site down. Like how many sites have actually experienced this apart from DDOS attacks with that ultimately shuts down the site if no load balancers are in place.

t9b

True. Just be careful though - wallets in the ecosystem don’t run their own nodes, meaning they rely on polkadotjs end points. This is a house of cards because polkadotjs systematically removes endpoints if they cannot be reached for example because the wallets are using too much bandwidth. This is wide open to a DDOS on all the endpoints meaning wallets will just stop working. Pretty bad design.

divinesleeper

It's being solved by Kaspa I meant, nano is centralized PoS garbage that went down by DDOS last bullrun, no I don't care about whatever complex bandaids were put on. And nano doesn't even achieve Kaspas TPS even tho it's centralized.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Far-Scholar9028. > **Solana Cons** > > **Centralization** > > An estimated 1,700 validator nodes support Solana. If a single entity or collection of entities comes to possess a sizable portion of the SOL token supply, the Solana network may become unduly concentrated. The network's decentralization may suffer because Solana requires more specialized equipment to join and is unable to draw a sizable user base. There is a high concentration of stakes among validators, with 22 validators controlling 33% of total staked SOL. Accordingly, if 22 validators conspired, the network might theoretically come to an end. > > **Network Outages** > > * September 14,2021: 15 Hours of outage as bots capitalized on an IDO on raydium > > * January 2022: The whole month faced partial outages of 6-12 per day due to high demand of NFT minting and defi usage. > > * April 30, 2022: 7 Hour outage due to a DDOS attack by bots > > **Solana, the token** > > The token distribution on Solana reveals that the top 0.04% of addresses, or around 3,000 addresses outright, hold 88.5% of the current outstanding SOL. Along with early investors and the founding team, these wallets also contain staking pools and exchanges. 11.7 million SOL are included in the biggest wallet. Less than 1% of the outstanding SOL is held by the bottom 98.6% of wallets on Solana. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by a deleted user. > #CONs > > This is the Cons section of [my analysis on Solana](https://np.reddit.com/r/MPlankton/comments/vk42tn/solana_research_june_2022/) > > There are many flaws with Solana's network and design. Retail investors should be cautious of investing in Solana until the upcoming **QUIC** and **Localized Fee Prioritizations** fix the ongoing outage and stability issues with the network. > > ##Way too many outages > > One of the biggest problems with Solana is that it has had way too many outages ever since its Mainnet launch. It's had at least [4 major outages, 3 partial outages](https://status.solana.com/uptime), and numerous congestions caused by DDoS attacks (some unintentional) in the 9 months between Sept 2021 and Jun 2022. That's way more than most of its competitors. These numerous outages have ruined its reputation in the crypto community. > > The network is very vulnerable to DoS attacks, which have brought down the network many times. In Sept 2021, a [DoS attack flooded the entire network](https://solana.com/news/9-14-network-outage-initial-overview) to the point it could not recover for almost a full day. In Jan 21-22, 2022, [bots brought down the network](https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/solana-founder-anatoly-yakovenko-crypto-crash-blockchain-instability/) with excessive duplicate transactions. A similar DDoS attack happened on Apr 30, when a [NFT minting bots took down the network](https://solana.com/news/04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation) with 4M TPS of spam. > > During DDoS attacks, validators continue forwarding transactions to the leader. Since there is no mempool, the leader has to keep up with the traffic. If the leader can't keep up, the transaction drops and the user has to resubmit it. When congested and attacked by DDOS, the number of forks increases greatly, and leaders end up picking branches quickly and inaccurately, often extending empty blocks. This ends up reducing throughput of valid transactions and creating wasted forks. For example, during the Jan 21-22 attacks, the true throughput fell to 140 TPS. It's really easy for DDoS attacks to create a disruptive positive feedback loop that shuts down the whole network. > > ##Blockchain Design > > **Slower Finality** > > Due to the design of Proof of History consensus, Solana has probabilistic finality with a moderate chance of wasted forks. It takes [32 blocks before any transaction is final](https://docs.solana.com/proposals/block-confirmation). At 2.5s per block, this means 80 seconds. Users will see their transactions posted in 2.5s. If there's no congestions, they can probably wait 10s and assume it's probabilistically final. But if there's congestion, lots of skipped blocks, and people DDoS'ing the network, it's not deterministically final until they wait 80 seconds. This is much slower than many of their competitors, which have 2-10s deterministic finality. > > **Exaggerated/Useless TPS metrics** > > Solana's reported 50K TPS in ideal conditions is completely exaggerated. > > First, that number is based on a 400 ms slot time, but the current slot time is around 600-800 ms, which reduces the ideal TPS 25-50%. > > Solana also exaggerates their throughput by including non-useful transactions in their metrics. This includes vote transactions, which account for 70-90% of transactions. > > The count of valid TPS (excluding vote transactions and erroneous transactions) is much lower. About 80-85% of transactions are either vote transactions that are used for consensus or erroneous transactions. The true [non-vote TPS limit is much lower at around **400-600 TPS**](https://dashboard.chaincrunch.cc/public/dashboard/cc7a0d94-7f70-46f4-aae4-2f8810430931#theme=night) when the network isn't congested. As of June 2022, on average only 15% of total counted transactions are working transactions. > > In addition, validators routinely skip blocks, encounter bad forks, or post empty blocks. Even when there's no congestion, validator's unweighed skip rate is [10-25% of blocks](https://solanabeach.io/validators). > > ##Opaque Ledger and Block Explorer > > Solana has several explorers, and all of them are very opaque. The official explorer doesn't allow you to browse blocks and transactions, and it's practical useless. Solana Beach is probalby the best explorer, but it too shows almost no data except for the address and transaction fee. It is very confusing trying to decipher these transactions. There's almost no information on the identity of validators. Both of the main explorers are very slow and often stall when querying details. > > Another part of Solana's obscurity is the 30% of the total supply of SOL that is non-circulating but staked. It's supposedly owned by the Solana Foundation. This has been discussed several times by developers on Discord, but no one seems to understand why it's there and how they're using it. It also doesn't help that Solana's main explorer and Solana Beach explorer won't load details about its non-circulating supply. > > **Unable to Audit Smart Contracts** > > Probably the worst issue on Solana (even worse than the outages) is that you can't audit smart contracts. When you use a smart contract on Solana, you are blindly trusting that it does what it says it'll do. There's not a single Solana Explorer that currently shows smart contract code. > > Developers can publish their source code on another website, but they can also redeploy their on-chain contract at the same address. So users don't have a reliable method of trusting source code published off-chain. > > ##Poor Tokenomics > > **Transaction fees are 99% subsidized by Staking Rewards, which feed back into SOL as supply inflation** > > Like many networks, the low transaction fees are not enough to pay for the cost of running the network. > > Solana is expected to make [$12M in transaction fees in this year going by the current 30-day average]( https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/solana). Staking rewards is expected to [pay out around $1.4B in SOL in 2022](https://messari.io/asset/solana/profile/supply-schedule). That means 99.1% of validator rewards are being paid by staking rewards instead of the artificially-low transaction fees. And staking rewards inflate the supply of the SOL token. > > Total supply inflation for staking started out [at 8% and gradually declines by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5%](https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule). Note that this is an underestimate because these calculations are based on total supply, not circulating supply, which is 30% smaller. Messari currently lists [circulating supply inflation as 7.4%](https://messari.io/screener/supply-and-marketcap-EB1755C2). > > Solana is fully-vested as of Jan 2022, though there is a 30% gap between the recorded circulating and total supply because most of the [Foundation's staked SOL](https://explorer.solana.com/supply?filter=nonCirculating) is not included in circulating supply. (Their Explorer website barely has any supply details or charts, and doesn't even loading half of the time, so it's hard to investigate.) > > ##Other Points > > **Requires insecure bridges to other networks** > > Solana is a bit isolated from other blockchains. It requires insecure bridges to connect to other networks, which is also an issue for many other networks. Bridges often get exploited, like the [Feb 2022 $320M Solana Wormhole hack](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/320-million-stolen-from-wormhole-bridge-linking-solana-and-ethereum.html). Solana needs a safer cross-chain protocol if it wants to communicate safely with other networks. > > **High validator requirements** > > The minimum requirements for validators are 12-cores and 128GB of memory. 300 Mbit internet server is preferred. These are enterprise-server requirements, and they're expensive to maintain. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Solana) to find submissions for other topics.