Thread by @epolynya

This is the "cost of validator censorship", not decentralization. Validators merely provide a service to the network, i.e. ordering and signing transactions - it's non-validating full nodes that enforce consensus rules. Covered here: polynya.medium.com/security-layer…

Decentralization is:

https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko/status/1441904519877566466

- Ease of running full nodes. If users must trust a validator set, then it's not a trustless network - you're just another bank with a new set of bankers, as Gavin Wood put it.
- A wide token distribution with high monetary premium to increase difficulty of validator censorship.

I'd also add that Solana and monolithic chains are highly inefficient, requiring thousands of nodes for minimal security. Long term, validiums will be a fraction of the cost. A succinct ZKP can verify millions of transactions, while DA layers can have 1-of-N security models.

Yes, prover costs today limit transaction fees to the ~$0.005-$0.01 range, but with GPU/FPGA/ASIC provers and the strength of Moore's Law, this will plummet over time. Through innovative fee model, Immutable X is already offering $0.00 NFT mints - infinitely cheaper than Solana.

In the long term, Solana will fail because it's neither trustless nor efficient. It's archaic tech - too slow, too expensive. The only way to achieve efficiency is through advanced cryptography with ZKPs for validating execution; and KZGs for validating data availability.

Of course, I remain optimistic that Solana is one of the few projects that will not take technological obsolescence lying down and will aggressively move to deploy ZKP tech and reconstruct their network with a modular architecture. I don't bother with Cardano or EOS, for example.