Thread by @TimBeiko

Lots of thoughts on the conversations this weekend, and while I think there is a charitable interpretation to some of the criticisms, let me start by saying it's pretty rich to criticize people for "jerking off and watching the burn" when well....

https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1368074280949272580

Obviously, narratives get distilled on Twitter, but, to say the least, i makes it harder to educate folks about the subtleties (e.g. willeip1559lowergasprices.org) when this is what's pushed.

Similarly, no one ever dropped the "1.x roadmap": it was literally the last Ethereum event that happened pre-COVID and work on its various aspects is progressing (not to mention 1559 was part of it...)

One of the big bits of 1.x was capping the amount of data nodes need to store. With The Merge happening, it's a good time to have this conversation, and we literally had it on the last AllCoreDevs, see:

https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1459246064096006144

The reason these things take time is that Ethereum supports billions (trillions?) in economic activity, and we can't break the chain. Similarly, we can't break all the applications that are built on it. Otherwise, we'd have done State Rent in 6 months.

It's 100x easier to fork geth, claim you've fixed something which isn't the actual bottleneck, launch your token and complain that Ethereum "isn't doing anything" while you never submit a single upstream PR.

That being said, I hear the concern that fees are too high, L2 adoption isn't as widespread as we'd like, and that the EVM isn't improving fast enough. A lot of smart people working on Ethereum are aware of this and spending their time trying to fix it.

We just *can't* have Ethereum go down to ship these changes, and that's 50%+ of the complexity of these things. Similarly, we want to keep node hardware requirements low enough for normal people to verify the chain, which makes a lot of "easy" solutions not possible for Ethereum.

And while there might be a better point along the gas limit/hardware requirement curve than we currently are at, a 20% increase just isn't going to cut it. We need multiple 10-100x increases, which aren't as simple to ship.

That being said, it's a free market, so if we fail at delivering this, of course users and applications will end up elsewhere!

The best we can do is to keep attracting the best people, aligning them on the largest challenges, and shipping solutions. I'm confident we have them today, and the vast majority of them aren't on Twitter arguing, but making sure Ethereum is gmi. Thank god. Rant over 🙏

One more thing, just stumbled upon this very accessible thread by @ChainLinkGod explaining the tradeoffs of blockchain scaling. Highly recommend it if you're trying to understand the different approaches:

https://twitter.com/ChainLinkGod/status/1462544950181126145

@ChainLinkGod Other interesting thing for those interested, here are the "readiness checklists" we've used for 1559 and are now using for The Merge to gauge when a change is ready to deploy to mainnet:

1559: github.com/ethereum/pm/bl…
Merge: github.com/ethereum/pm/bl…