vbuterin
Oct 2 2020
I absolutely agree with this. I do think it’s important to note that at least in the short term, as far as I can tell we have no choice. The L1 is nearly unusable for many classes of applications, and there’s no non-L2 path that can get us to scalability in the short-to-medium term. The $17.76 in fees it took me to make a bet on Augur last week itself makes present-day Augur very much “for the niche people and not for the world”. That said, I think there are ways to minimize the tradeoffs!
One major thing that I think we are already doing is to avoid (at least at first) trying to use layer 2s as an opportunity to try to “make a better VM”; instead, we should try to just keep things as close to the current EVM as possible. Also, we should maintain a hard commitment of what security properties a “legitimate layer 2” should have: if you have an asset inside the layer 2, you should be able to follow some procedure to unilaterally withdraw it, even if everyone else in the layer 2 system is trying to cheat you. We should put a lot of resources into security-auditing the major layer 2’s, and making sure they actually satisfy this requirement, and steer people toward the more solid and established solutions. Additionally (perhaps most importantly?), we should work with major wallets (metamask, status, imtoken?) to integrate support for the major L2s. L2s being inside the wallet and wallets being relatively trusted reduces the risk of people putting their coins into “fake L2s”.
I expect that a lot of the work will be done by the major defi projects, who have a large incentive to economize on fees and to make sure that their systems continue to be easy to use; we can do a lot by leaning on them as highly motivated early adopters. Even Gitcoin has already helped the ecosystem ease quite a bit into seeing what an L2-centric world will look like.
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698/3
#ethereum #butters