GHOST

Backrus

The only thing I'm doing is showing how little average bitcoiners know about the inner workings of their preferred blockchain (like going solo mining lol). Both you and previous guys seem to go for my "lack of understanding", "dyor" and other blanket statements instead of addressing simple facts - I wonder why. Now, let's talk about pools colluding to do something bad (reorg, double finality, delay, etc, pick your poison). Once again, look at hashrate distribution and how centralized it is. Now, you have to realize that **you turning off your rig/rigs as a protest just help the attacker (!)** (because they own the bigger % of the hashrate now). Now contrast it with equally centralized eth pos model when slashing mechanism etc means that in order to attack the network you have to spend more and more money (GHOST, etc); even if you're going for supermajority, there's no guarantee that you'll succeed because of social layer defence mechanism. Not to mention that it is infinitely easier to sign a block as a solo staker (with a power cost of under $5 per month) than to mine a block as a solo miner; I'm not saying one network is better than the other, both are equally bad and centralized but still miles ahead of something like VC's database aka solana. Honestly, it's not that hard if you think about it and understand data. All I want for y'all is to stop parroting maxis and understand this space.

olduvai_man

Kaspa all the way Creator of the GHOST protocol (used in ETH) is the founder of the project, and it's a new L1 that just minted a new foundaation with IceRiver Mining and OKX Ventures to facilitate development of Smart Contracts. Will easily be the fastest, decentralized, Layer-1 proof-of-work. Also, the largest gainer in crypto since it's founding in 2022.

Curious_Corey

That is bold lol. AI and gaming I think are better narratives but memes will catch up. Idk why you didn’t do this a couple months ago but more power to ya. I’m in 3 meme coins none of which your in: COQ INU, bc.. that shits funny. HUSKY bc.. it COULD be the dog of avax. And.. IC GHOST bc I believe in the technology of ICP. I don’t really believe you put that much money into memes btw… I tried to buy PEPE a couple months ago but the fees in coinbase wallet to buy it are fucking insane.

olduvai_man

It's the fastest Layer-1 PoW in the space, created by Yonatan Sompolinksy who (with Aviv Zohar) created the GHOST protocol which is used in numerous projects in the space for consensus (such as Ethereum and Ada). Kaspa uses a version of that called GHOSTDAG (the first GHOSTDAG protocol) and a new implementation called DAGKNIGHT. What makes DAGKNIGHT so transformative is it's ability to scale the Nakamoto consensus to the latency of the speed of the internet rather than setting an upper bound value explicitly which all other projects in crypto have done. This allows Kaspa to scale, with Bitcoin's security, to 100 BPS and able to transact faster than Visa and Mastercard. Additionally, this allows Kaspa to be MEV resistant and will be the fastest, decentralized, Layer 1 that allows smart contracts (this part is still in development as they complete DAGKNIGHT implementation into Kaspa). There was no pre-mine or founding authority, and the coin was fair-launched without any investors/pre-sale/etc. All coins have been minted through mining like Bitcoin. The halving schedule is yearly rather than every four years like Bitcoin. Additionally, since launch, it has been the highest performing asset in the entire crypto space. Literally no project since it's inception has grown in price more than Kaspa. It's the hardness, security and fairness of Bitcoin with smart contracts and throughput of 100 blocks per second. Top-25 crypto project without a single major US listing.

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olduvai_man

Founder is one of the early publishers on Bitcoin and is referenced in multiple whitepapers for his GHOST Protocol including ETH and ADA. Fair launch and a scalable proof-of-work. This BTC, but with way more efficiency and eventually smart contracts. Completely decentralized and the fastest L1 POW.

FattestLion

Gary Gensler is… the GHOST RIDER

silent_tongue

Basically everything. You can - stake in the wallet and gain real yield in multiple coins, - place LP in BOW, buy/sell on FIN, -has its own stablecoin USK that you can mint by collateralising Atom, stAtom, Dot, weth and many more, - lend and borrow on GHOST, - and my favourite which is bidding for liquidation on OCRA.

PenaltyFickle5699

you might wanna check out $GHOST - it's like $ZOMBIE, but even spookier

gravitywind1012

Nope… according to the GHOST Hypothesis AI will leap frog past wanting to kill us and just ignore us instead.

MasterDebater100

I see the same bidders on practically all of the auctions. Looks like maybe 5 accounts make up about 90% of the bids. GHOST TOWN.

Maleficent_Plankton

Yeah, it's a very tough topic, and I doubt even 5% of this sub could understand it. And among that 5%, 90% wouldn't have the patience to read up on it. You first have to understand Ethereum's Gasper consensus protocol. This is good ELI-15 video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gfNUVmX3Es The [Single-Slot Finality article](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality) already simplifies Casper and BLS to an ELI-college level. I'll attempt to summarize the important parts, but you'll lose out on understanding unless you study the full article. Ethereum PoS's **Gasper** consensus is broken into 2 parts: GHOST-LMD and Casper FFG * **GHOST** provides the 12s blocks everyone's familiar with that have probabilistic finality (similar to PoW chains). Since the merge, 99.9% of uncle blocks and forked blocks have disappeared. But once a week or so, we still see a [forked block](https://etherscan.io/blocks_forked). * **Casper** is a separate finality gadget protocol that provides an additional deterministic finality for consensus. Ethereum has a stupidly-high number of validators ([460K+ and growing](https://beaconscan.com/stat/validator)) compared to most smart contract chains that only have 100s-1000s of validators. Instead of using small committees to validate transactions, Ethereum targets higher security and gets every validator to validate every transaction using an efficient signature-aggregation method, BLS. The important parts are that each validator's signature only uses 1 bit in the final aggregated signature, and it takes many blocks to aggregate that many signatures. * At 32 ETH being the minimum requirement for becoming a validator, Ethereum currently supports a maximum of 3.8M validators. Due to the gigantic number of validators, it takes a long time to finish signature aggregation. The current design for Casper requires 1 Epoch for signature aggregation and 2-3 Epochs (64-96 blocks) before finality. Currently, there are almost 2^19 validators (500K), growing towards 2^20. For BLS, they are split into 32 slots of 64 committees with 256 validators each: 2^19 = 2^5 * 2^6 * 2^8. There are several potential ways to optimize BLS so that it fits into 1 slot: * **Increase # of committees** - Requires higher network load * **Increase # of validators per committee** - Requires higher network load * **Use multi-layered aggregation** - Increases complexity and latency (hard to do in a 12s slot) * **Decrease # of validators** by increasing the minimum staking value - Decreases decentralization. Some have suggested 1024 ETH minimum to reduce the maximum # of validators to 120K (2^17). This is what nearly ALL other PoS networks do. Or they could cap validator size through another method, but it's hard to choose a fair method to decide who gets to stay. * **Use Super-committees**: Randomly pick a subset of validators for the committee instead of using the full set of validators - Decreases fault-tolerance. This is what many other PoS networks do. It also increase complexity in security design. They can do it, but it requires sacrificing one part of the trilemma.

coinfeeds-bot

tldr; $GHOST has been listed on ExchangeAssets, a Ukrainian based hybrid system offering PoS Pools, bux, interest and more. Currently, there are four different trading pairs for $GHOST! BTC, LTC, USDT, and S11, the exchange’s native token. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.*

LogicalTonight5158

TA is really good tool to analyze past behavior and habits. Of course, like everything else never relay on data solely but give you kind of roadmap what to expect on past behavior. Crypto is fairly new and behavior really changing daily on hype, fear and fed news. [GHOST](https://www.reddit.com/r/GhostTraderBSC/)

Maleficent_Plankton

Technically PoS is not a consensus mechanism and can be probabilistic or deterministic. Both Cardano and th3 Ethereum's GHOST protocol part of Gasper consensus are technically probabilistic since you can have skipped blocks and reorgs. In reality, skipped blocks on PoS Ethereum are uncommon (1%), and it hasn't had a reorg [in 4 day](https://etherscan.io/blocks_forked). Maybe we need a new term like "semi-detereministic".

Logical_Lemming

> [Insert GHOST image: Ethereum - GHOST 01.png] Your GHOST image ghosted.

FixingandDrinking

Sure ICP is the most underrated blockchain in the world. it is litterally the only blockchain that is completely decentralized and it is just starting. ETH stores all info on AWS like most blockchains. ICP is on independent nodes located around the world has its own oracles and it costs about 5 dollars to have 1gb of smart contract data on ICP. it is almost 1 million dollars for the same on ETH. Defi is very new to ICP and GHOST is offering 41% staking atm and the TVL for the LP swap pool for ICP/GHOST has hit 6billion in just a few weeks.

Maleficent_Plankton

It's a blockchain with a token that's well above #3000 in marketcap that only started 2 months ago. No point investigating this until it's a lot more proven. It uses the a variation of the GHOST protocol that PoW Ethereum uses, but this one is doesn't get rid of the uncle branches while also keeping Nakamoto Consensus, which is based on the longest chain. So without doing further research, it sounds completely contradictory to me.

ExSqueezeIt

Ye np bro love talking to people who like to digest information since I am like that myself x))) >That's what I do as well, the hard part for me is figuring out which time candle to use. I look at 1m and 5m mostly and when I see we've been going up in steps in those time candles - so I suppose that's essentially looking higher time frame candles too. True. The thing is higher time frames are just reflection of smaller time frames, you should view smaller time frames for signals of reversal but you should follow big time frame candles to determine up or down trends based on those changes in smaller time frame candles. Its like setting a bet against your own prediction, I used to watch the market for years without ever making a purchase just viewing and observing. Also the phasing is important, if the coin has 2-3 week chart green candles you can bet your ass the red candle is coming, I have never seen a coin I think with more then 4 weekly monthly green candles. Timing is also important, thats how i am able to predict some of these down turns, if the weekly candle looks like it will end up in green you must watch the minute candles during the week/month closing because usually the chart will invert somewhere along the top, making the candle that will start the next time frame go down and start the red downtrend phase. Around new years was dead obvious this was the case, all coins almost finished in green candle i think october or november so I was sure it will start dipping into red candles next month since the green ones were far too overstretched for the current month. >If you are winning in this game over a long period of time, I want to listen to what you have to say! Agreed. Same thinking here, but then it also depends what you consider winning. I had 44 ETH at some point in 2017, some would say holding onto it would be winning. And true, I would made MAD money if I had holded till 4k. But thats a big IF. And its a big IF if I would sell it there or wait for the 5k or 10k mark if I had hold mentality. I dont really care tho, I cash out periodically and every cash out is a win for me since its free money, I used a lot of it to improve my current life and get a new roof and bunch of equipement to do what I wanna do in real life so yea, if I just holded I would have no way to afford that UNTIL i cash out. Plus I dont like the idea of being a millionaire anyway, seems like a hassle to have so much and have to worry about it, plus everyone will want to get some and I dont wanna feed the regular financial system because if you make millions you will probably end up buying a house and a car and all that "crypto millionaire when lambo? " shit. Cashing out and buying into regular financial structure is just feeding the capitalist beast, and I wanna starve it as much as I can because thats the only way we get a new system since this one is fundamentaly broken and we need to break it by not participating in it as much as possible. >My first order at 45.15 hit for LTC. I'm only trading LTC right now as I think it's a diamond in the rough, for the next bull run. Yes LTC is like that stable horse you can always bet on. The problem is his gain aint insane - because no one uses it to hoard but to actually transact. Same like XMR. Its unbreakable because people will always use it. I will buy it for transaction no matter what price it is because its everything a currency is supposed to be. It will have its time to shine for sure. Also yea I heard about its privacy update :D i support that shit and when I saw it was being delisted because of it I was jumping from joy :D fuck the system!!! The only thing is it is still pseudo anynomous to my understanding, or is it full privacy? Can you watch the adress you were sent funds from on the blockchain ledger still? The coins I listed go little above just serving as privacy chain, as they have a lot of other cool projects built on them. DERO is a fully functional privacy chain with smart contract making it like ETH XMR which enables building of privacy apps for all type of usages. Still waiting for some to be made but their fundamentals are insane and you can also send encrypted messages with your transactions which are also lightning speed even faster then LTC. OXEN is also a promising chain with their messanger Sessions and their Lokinet internet traffic "spoofer". [https://lokinet.org/](https://lokinet.org/) Download this and put exit.loki as your exit node and all your internet traffic will be rerouted through onion network thus making you invisible while online. Im all in on privacy so any chain update for privacy is good but I like these projects as they offer some nice products that work regardless of the currency. Also GHOST was initiated by John Mcaffe, and they will try to make a privacy GHOST DAI like stable coin so that will be interesting if it emerges since no stable coin I know offers that privacy transaction layer :S Especially with rise of the censorship and centralization, its important to have these privacy features. Also forgot to add NYM project on that list of coins, really big one as well in future I think. All in all a lot of nice things out there just gotta dig deep, gonna purchase more of these coins after they fall some more cuz I think they will, got some in the bag but nothing much atm still in some small profit but will see how it develops :) good luck bro!

Yegpetphoto

It's a.... *gulp* G-G-G-GHOST CHAIN!?? ZOIKS!!!

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/umsqe8/monthly_optimists_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ufshqo/monthly_skeptics_discussion_may_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

MrUglyfeet

Don t buy $GHOST it a shitcoin ASA and its gonna never moon https://tinychart.org/asset/714773890

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

hateballrollin

TL;DR We're shilling for $GHOST

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Cardano Pro-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Cardano Pro-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Copied from u\/maleficent_plankton’s submission from last round** > > **Cardano Pros:** > > **General**: > > * Uses a Proof of Stake consensus (Ouroboros), so it uses less energy than PoW coins. > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.40 - 0.50 USD as of [Sept 2021](https://solberginvest.com/blog/cardano-fees/). They are cheaper than BTC transaction fees of \~5 USD and much cheaper than basic Ethereum transaction fees of 15 USD, which fluctuate so much daily. > * The general design of Ouroborus is a multiple-round BFT protocol. It's quite similar to Ethereum 2.0's Casper-FFG, but without the GHOST protocol. This type of BFT protocols is well-documented, studied, and thoroughly tested in the wild. > * ADA's current transaction speed is about 7 TPS due to lack of need, which can easily [scale to 257 TPS](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/a-deep-dive-into-cardano) without any major updates. Top scaling is [1000 TPS](https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-solution-36b05ddc91cf) without Hydra Layer 2 scaling with major updates. > * With Hydra, it can scale to millions of TPS (though it would need sharding to take care of storage bloat). eUTXO can also scale smart contracts through Hydra. > > **Staking**: > > * Its Yoroi hot wallet is easy to use and has DPoS staking built-in. Staking is [non-custodial](https://staking.staked.us/cardano-staking), so stakers don't have to worry about handing over their coins to a centralized platform like with ETH 2.0. Governance is also directly given to stakers instead of pools, leading to higher decentralization. > * US Chair of the Securities Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, said [on 2021-09-21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/09/21/transcript-path-forward-cryptocurrency-with-gary-gensler/) that he may go after staking platforms. This could limit centralized ETH 2.0 staking but not decentralized DPoS systems like Cardano's staking. > * There is no punishing slashing on staking. Instead, bad nodes receive reduced rewards. Also, staking reward decreases when the pool size increases, so there is an incentive to join smaller pools, leading to more decentralization despite the DPoS model. > > **Smart Contracts**: > > * The Smart Contract in Alonzo (Plutus) [is deterministic](https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/06/no-surprises-transaction-validation-on-cardano/), so its fees are known ahead of time unlike in Ethereum. > * Plutus smart contract can also be simulated ahead of time, giving better estimates than Solidity. You'll know whether it'll succeed or fail before making the transaction. It is also easier to check for security flaws. > * Cardano supports [native tokens](https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/) without the need for smart contracts. This avoids gas fees and other complexities when dealing with tokens/assets as when using ERC20 contracts. > > **Popularity and Media Attention**: > > * There is still more to come in [Cardano development roadmap](https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/), which is mainly important because continues to build excitement over the blockchain and keep it under media attention. > * Cardano is currently #3 in terms of market cap, which gives it a lot of attention. > * Cardano has one of the most active marketing teams that's great at building a cult of followers. The Cardano Virtual Summit 2021 was a high-budget showcase. For better or worse, this keeps it under the media spotlight. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz46rz/rcc_cointest_top_10_cardano_proarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds.

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).

CointestAdmin

#Ethereum Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by roberthonker which won 2nd place in the Ethereum Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > **Taken from u\/maleficent_plankton's submission from last round** > > **Gas Fees**: > > The biggest issues for Ethereum are its network gas fees. Every transaction needs gas to pay for storage and processing power, and gas prices vary based on demand. Gas price is very volatile and often changes 2-5x in magnitude within the same day. ERC20 transfers are used for a large percentage of cryptocurrencies, and it's the reason small ERC20 transactions on DeFi platforms under $1000 are impractical. If I wanted to send ERC20 tokens between exchanges, it's often cheaper to trade for XRP, ALGO, or some other microtransaction coin, transfer it using their other coin's native network, and then trade back into the original token. Pretty ridiculous. > > [Typical transaction fees were between $2-10 over the past year](https://etherscan.io/chart/avg-txfee-usd), but they have shot up to $70 on several occasions. It's very common for popular exchanges to set withdrawal fees to a flat $20-50 for ERC20 transfers due to expensive and unpredictable Ethereum network fees. > > And that's just for basic transactions. Anyone who has tried to use more complex smart contracts like moving MATIC from Polygon mainnet back to ETH L1 mainnet during a time of high gas fees in early 2021 probably saw $100-$200 gas fees. Staking MATIC also costs expensive ERC20 gas fees. (So much for MATIC's claim to reduce ETH gas fees.) > > **Inflation**: > > Ethereum has no supply limit and is still inflationary. It did have [three deflationary days](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/net-eth-emission-after-eip-1559) in September 2021 after EIP-1557, but it's still net inflationary of ~5K ETH daily. As other competitors join the smart contract space, it's likely we'll see fewer deflationary days in the future. > > **Smart Contract Competition**: > > Ethereum has enjoyed its lead as the smart contract blockchain because it had so few competitors historically. Now we have tons of efficient smart contract competitors like Algorand, Solana, and Cardano. While Ethereum has an enormous lead in smart contract project adoption, it is likely to gradually lose market share to its competitors, which are ahead of it in terms of efficiency and technology. Who wants to pay $20 gas fees when you can get similar transactions for under $0.01 with Algo and Solana or $0.30 transactions with Cardano? This will mainly depend on whether the PoS consensus Ethereum 2.0 can arrive fast enough, and whether it can deliver its claims. For now, we are stuck with PoW Ethereum with almost no adoption for Layer 2. > > **Layer 2 issues**: > > Layer 2 solutions are still extremely early and almost have no adoption. Considering how long it takes exchanges to roll out Layer 2 networks, it'll probably be 6-12 months before I can use any Ethereum Layer 2 solutions on Coinbase. (Polygon network still isn't available on any of the biggest US exchanges after half a year of becoming popular and claiming hundreds of partnerships). The majority of platforms do not currently support Layer 2 rollup networks. Very few fiat onramping/offramping exchanges allow for Optimistic or zk-Rollups. ZK Rollups are very limited in use until they have coordination between exchanges that both support them. > > **L2 - Plasma** has been around since 2017, and I couldn't find anyone still using this state-channel solution. It's [more or less abandoned](https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/the-life-and-death-of-plasma-b72c6a59c5ad) in favor of rollups. I guess some Polygon bridges still use Plasma. It required lots of work and always-online overhead to monitor the side chain for misbehavior. You also need to pay the ERC20 gas fee twice when opening and closing the state channel. It has all the downsides to Lightning, which itself is facing lack of adoption. There is a super long challenge period to exit a side chain via Plasma, which means a 1 week settlement. And a mass exit would complete congest the Ethereum blockchain. > > Both Optimistic and ZK Rollups are handled off-chain and require a separate network nodes or smart contracts as infrastructure to validate transactions or generate ZK Proofs. > > **L2 - Optimistic Rollups are expensive and slow**: > > They settle in [1 week](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) because there is a challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud-proof to show if there was an illegitimate transaction. People get anxious over 30-minute finality. How are they going to deal with 1 week settlement? Also, optimistic rollups are inherently insecure by design in order to reduce fees because they outsource validation offchain. The operator can influence transaction ordering. You can have faster withdrawals if you pay a market maker or verifier to jump in and swap your transaction, but why bother with the additional hassle and fees? I don't think the average crypto user will have any use cases for optimistic rollups. Optimistic rollups currently cost [$1-2 on Arbitrum One and Optimism](https://l2fees.info/). Unless you need to use a smart contract (which aren't supported on ZK Rollups), why would anyone anyone want to babysit their transactions for 1 week when ZK Rollups are faster, cheaper, and more secure? > > **L2 - ZK Rollup limitations**: > > ZK Rollup require special infrastructure to generate ZK Proofs. These are very computationally-expensive (potentially [thousands of times](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html) more expensive that just doing the computation directly). On-chain cost of a ZK Rollup is cheap at about [$0.20 to $.40](https://l2fees.info/), but there is a separate infrastructure cost that is rarely mentioned. Loopring is rolling up its costs into its trading fees, currently 0.80%, so their feeless transfer claims are misleading. For transfers of $10K, that's $80 of fees. In any case, even at $0.40, these are still ~100x more expensive than transferring microtransaction-friendly coins such as XLM, XRP, Nano, etc. FWIW, it's a huge improvement over current Layer 1 costs ... when the platforms I use support them some year in the future. The big limitation is that smart contracts can't use ZK Rollups. > > **Ethereum 2.0 arriving later than competitors**: > > Ethereum is separated into Casper FFG (Friendly Finality Gadget) and Casper CBC (Correct by Construction). Casper FFG is a BFT PoS consensus overlay of PoW based on the GHOST protocol. We don't have much details on Casper CBC since its design is still in progress. Its main purpose is to increase transaction speeds and reduce energy costs while sacrificing decentralization and security. > > The ETH 2.0 Beacon chain, a completely separate blockchain from ETH, won't merge with the main blockchain [until 2022](https://decrypt.co/78690/ethereum-2-staking-tops-21-billion-merge-horizon), giving competitors plenty of time to steal a share of smart contract projects. Even then, Vitalik said that [scaling will still rely on ZK Rollups until the 64-chain sharding phase](https://decrypt.co/34204/ethereum-2-0-will-walk-and-roll-for-two-years-before-it-can-run) arriving later in 2022 or 2023. It'll likely lose some market share to existing alternatives like Algo, Solana, Cardano, and others. > > Unlike Cardano PoS staking, Ethereum 2.0 PoS staking uses slashing. The system cannot tell between being offline or being censored. It's pretty damn scary. > 50% downtime is breakeven (unless there's no prepare + commit). Slash punishment can be very harsh. In the first months, we already had multiple examples of large slashings on the Beacon ETH 2.0 chain caused by simple errors: [Bugs](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) can cause slashing. [Timestamp](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/eth2-medalla-testnet-incident-f7fbc3cc934a) being off and cause slashing. QoS and [redundancy mistakes](https://medium.com/stakefish/ethereum-2-0-the-first-slash-a-retrospective-99e4fdcd563a) can cause slashing. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/pz4vav/rcc_cointest_top_10_ethereum_conarguments_october/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Ethereum) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ttir1a/monthly_skeptics_discussion_april_2022/).