DDOS

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.

AmbitiousPhilosopher

It's really quite simple, test each network for yourself. Most Bitcoin UTXO are currently stalled, and have been for years. All nano accounts are currently unstalled. If we increase the demand for nano transactions beyond capacity (like Bitcoin currently has), some accounts do get temporarily stalled, but not for as long as Bitcoin suffers. Every network that experiences demand beyond capacity suffers some limitations, Bitcoin is fairly unique in that the high capacity version was DDOS attacked and killed outright very early in development history.

AmbitiousPhilosopher

It was DDOS attacked, but it did recover, unlike Bitcoin.

MachaMacMorrigan

Consider a DDOS attack on every *.gov using BTC sign/verify with spoof addresses. 'Block everything'? As Salvor Hardin said, it's a poor atom blaster that won't point both ways.

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

#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

#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 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 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.

KuciMane

firstly, that 7% drops to 1.5% and will stay at 1.5% from then on. Inflationary currency’s have a reason. There is a reason Bitcoin is at an ATH of wallets not moving Bitcoin. No one uses it, why? Because it’s a deflationary currency. As every country continues to inflate their currency, that *infinite* continuous inflated money continues to flow into assets that combat inflation inflation, hence people invest in stocks & now crypto. Also why people spend their money. Why would I hold cash in a savings account forever if a snickers bar that’s $3 today is going to cost $8 tomorrow? I’m going to buy that candy today, and put my extra money into something(stocks/crypto) that is going to increase with the price of the things around me, and also hope my job increases my wage at the same rate(they wont). Inflation puts pressure on people in a society to not hoard wealth. Keeps things going in circulation. Whether that’s by investing in *N* thing, or participating in consumerism. Solana has a 7% inflation now, that will drop to 1.5% indefinitely, which beats the average inflation rate everywhere. But still inflates, so still has some pressure of spending/investing/doing something. This makes Solana a pretty attractive theoretical currency to be adopted. This plus the other aspects of Solana: >insanely fast, insanely cheap, really good marketing, really great community, really great UI’s, and unbeatable UX, upgrades that addressed past problems(outtages, etc *[btw, not many people know this, but Bitcoin has gone down two times in it’s history, & Ethereum, although has not had outtages, has had DDOS attacks that may as well have been equivalent to what an outtage woulf cause, and that’s making the chain unusable, whether by finality issues, or costing boatloads of money for small transfers]*) make Solana a super attractive crypto to invest in. Visa adding it along with Ethereum to their pilot program, AWS adding it to it’s node runner app(that only Ethereum is also on), Google Cloud using it with it’s BigQuery; some people might say Solana has reached blue chip status *(I am some people)*

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

#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.

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 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

#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 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 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 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 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.

Aerocryptic

DDOS attack on Cc 💀

ECOEXIT

What’s “hilarious” to me is not related to /cc/ but rather how some investors can completely disregard basic tokenomics in favour for greed and faster profits. Today 88.5% of Solana’s entire supply is contained within 3000 addresses. Solana's current situation raises concerns as over 62% of its supply is tightly controlled by a small group, and the public sale was abysmal (2%) the rest was “airdropped” hard to tell who received what. This kind of tokenomics facilitates activities like wash-trading, fake order books, restricting demand, manipulating demand and supply prompting my decision to steer clear and warn others. For those of you who remember, projects like “Bitconnect” also hit #7 on cmc back in the day, with massive % gains day by day, not to compare Solana and Bitconnect, but do not forget how easily you can manipulate marketcaps with a restricted supply. While short-term gains are possible, the risks are significant. What troubles me further is the apparent shift away from valuing decentralization and sound tokenomics. Instead, demands for high transactions per second (tps), total value locked (tvl), fast finality, and throughput take precedence, despite the lack of decentralisation and vulnerabilities such as the susceptibility to a simple DDOS attack that can disrupt the network. The entire network of Solana came to a crippling halt for over 18 hours until the validators restarted the network last year. To me this raises questions about whether this direction truly represents the “future of finance”. Or whenever it’s just a more crypto compatible banking service with web 3 integrations, nfts, and smart-contracts, managed by VC funds. My cautious approach extends to other projects too like DOT, where restricted supply poses risks. I've warned people in my circle about some of these concerns, acknowledging that while some profit can be made investing into these VC funded projects short term, others I know have lost a substantial amount of money investing these long-term. Do not even get me started on all the information and allegations released in conjunction with FTX, and the currently ongoing SBF court-case. Or FTX too holds quite a % of the supply, sooner or later they will have to pay creditors. For a more in-depth look, you can find my detailed post on liquidity/wash trading below. I made this post about marketcaps not too long ago should any of you be interested. [The Marketcap Mirage](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/179gqft/the_market_cap_mirage_the_truth_about_the_hidden/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)

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 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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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.

jawni

[And they implemented local fee markets, QUIC, and QOS since then to mitigate that.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/2bt0j8lu/production/6ac701e3f04f3fed90c17fdea7f350db90dfa407-3200x1800.png?w=714&fit=max&auto=format&dpr=3) Also "4 million requests is a lot" but "billions" is more... and the network didn't go down, only the front-end of the wallet taking the requests went down as that much demand was analogous to a DDOS. During the Mad Lads mint, all of these things happened: * crushed by ddos (and extortion) * coingecko api down * twitter spaces broken * cloudflare ui broken * rpc node 1 data center rugged * rpc node 2 unable to handle capacity * bots trying to rug the public phase But the network itself was never phased, and like I mentioned Helium's token migration was taking place at the same time. But I guess that's not enough of a test for you.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 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 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.

thinkingperson

If the internet somehow gets turned off, there will be cascading effect on almost every aspect of life as many public and private institutions and services sit on the internet as its backbone infrastructure to varying degrees. But to begin with, can the internet get turned off? Not exactly. The very design of the internet is a widely distributed and redundant inter network infrastructure system that started life to keep communications going even after multiple nuclear warhead strikes in US. It is possible to cripple certain services if a widespread DDOS attack is executed on major continental fibre ISP gateways. This could cause the internet to become fragmented into geolocale segments that are temporarily isolated from each other. With CDNs, users may not notice the attacks until a while later when CDNs data replication start timing out. Depending on how companies design their backend infrastructure, different services may continue to function while others grind to a hault. Bitcoin blockchain will become segmented like how different countries like Russia and China were blocked previously. In this case, blockchain traffic is not so much blocked but btc transactions will only get validated by miners/nodes within the respective geolocation. Effectively, they may either not get confirmed or may end up forking the chain. The prob will hit everyone when the internet is back up and the chains try to sync up.

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 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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 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.

elidevious

Binance has chosen to be on the side of Israel: https://www.binance.com/en/feed/post/1301750 Amidst the ongoing Israel v. Palestine physical war, there’s also a violent yet more subtle cyber-war at play, with heavy DDOS attacks on both sides. It was not a good choice for Binance to help Israel and to advertise it, jeez. Sources linked to the cyber-war on the side of Palestine tell me to be careful, as Binance is now a target that their hackers will try to hit. Just a heads-up — move your funds if you don’t wanna risk being stuck in the limbo for a few days.

Revolutionary_Case13

Thank you ! Then perhaps, as people concerned with bitcoin, this should be discussed more in this sub and brought attention to. Can’t really imagine the future of money is where your money can get DDOS’d.

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.

lofigamer2

You can do a DDOS, like with Ordinals. It won't screw it up permanently, if you don't count the pollution in the blockchain, but from the user's perspective it can be rendered unusable temporarily. Which is a failure if you want to use it as a payment system for every day txs.

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.

jhansen858

I have read through this 3 times but still can't fully understand how you can prevent double spending. >Prime doesn't provide any protection from double-spending; it will be provided by the client-side-validated part of the system. >Proofs: ephemeral public data produced and published by miners alongside headers. The proofs are not required to be stored by the network and are parsed into individual proofs kept by the users of the protocol in their client-side-validated data storages (named stashes). Lets say I spend the money with you. It seems like your saying that you would have the proof that i spent the money with you. but lets say that i want to execute a double spend. So i spend the money with you, and then i start DDOS'ing you and revert my "status" to what it was before i spent with you and then re-spend the money somewhere else. Since the data containing the fact i spent the money with you only exists between us, no one else would have the ability to know i did that? Maybe i just don't understand it at all but it seems like your system is that I have to get a witness to agree i spent the money and that knowledge only goes to you on a client side basis. So if i spend the money with you, get my thing and you die in a plane crash the next day, does it mean i can just restore my backup of my wallet before you died and i get my money back? its just not clearly described in the link.

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 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 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.

kryptoNoob69420

Is it possible to spam that email id or just DDOS the scam website?

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 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

#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

#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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 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 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 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.

AvatarOfMomus

If they put a hard cap on how much Eth can be staked you're gonna start seeing participants getting DDOS'd to force them to fail their obligations and get kicked out.

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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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.

bitusher

The game theory of Bitcoin insures that its profitable to secure Bitcoin and dangerous and costly to attack it. The most important innovation of Blockchains and why Blocks exist as a data structure is Proof of work with the right incentives found in Bitcoin. There was a huge flaw in the way the internet and email was designed where its extremely inexpensive for spammers or hackers sending out phishing emails to mass mail people and for infected computers(zombie bots) to attack networks and websites in DDOS (Distributed denial of service attacks). Bitcoin solves this great flaw with incentive aligned proof of work. Thus an attacker can certainly create a small mining farm but the game theory makes it very difficult to doublespend or attack bitcoin with this far of "bots". Lets discuss an example here with a problem of spam. A very small spammer with a mere 10 servers @ 120 usd a month(1200 usd a month) can send out almost 100 million emails a day. Now lets compare that to email built upon bitcoin lightning where the sender needs to pay 1/10th of a penny per email to send out emails secured by the Bitcoin network. Small businesses sending out newsletters typically have client lists of 500-10k people for a monthly newsletter (costs 50 cents to 10 usd a month), internal emails within the same domain and LAN can all be free and bypass this for larger companies, and individuals send far less emails so this is insignificant but with spammers it is devastating. 100 million emails x 30 days = 3 Billion x 0.001 = 3,000,000 usd a month instead of 1,200 usd a month. This would essentially eliminate most spam to those who used this.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 Maleficent_Plankton. > #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.

only_merit

Bitcoin Core code is written in a way that it allows the remote node to cause consumption of an amount of a resource that is roughly on par with the amount of resources that the remote node needs to consume. This is especially true in case of bandwidth attacks like this one. For each 1MB of data that the node sends, the remote node receives 1MB of data. Such symmetry means that the cost for the attacker is roughly the same as cost for the target. This is considered secure enough. It is true that it is possible to strong arm a single node in the network with this technique, but DDOS attacks on online nodes do not even need Bitcoin protocol, they operate on the same principle on other protocols as well. So this is not some extra danger for a node. Of course, if the attacker is super wealthy entity, it can strong arm more than just one node. But such attack is costly, highly visible, and it's very much possible to defend against it on various levels of Internet infrastructure. Even in an unlikely scenario that this would be used to temporarily disable many publicly accessibly nodes, there are many more operated privately with manual connections established between the node owners, so this would not have any significant impact on the Bitcoin network. Perhaps minor disruption for some clients but that would be rather temporary as the node owners would react quickly to ban the offending networks.

CointestMod

#Solana Con-Arguments Below is a Solana con-argument written by Maleficent_Plankton. > #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 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 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

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