03-21-2022, 07:54 PM
Lead ETH dev makes "ominous" thread about Ethereum. Not sure what to make of it...bu
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) @peter_szilagyi Mar 18 </p> <p>Complexity is an often overlooked aspect of a system because usually someone else is paying the price for it, not the person creating it.</p> <p>But don't be mistaken, someone <em>is</em> paying the price - whether money, time or mental capacity. They might not be willing/able to do forever. </p> <p>As with scalability, complexity also keeps trickling unseen up to the breaking point. At that time, it's already past the point of no return.</p> <p>Complexity also has the nasty effect of causing cascading failures. Overload people too much, lose capacity, leading to even larger load. </p> <p>In #Ethereum's history, complexity never decreased. Every EIP is piling on top. Every major change (1559, merge, sharding, verkle, stateless, L2, etc) is one more nail.</p> <p>I'm extremely frustrated when a research proposal says "everything's figured out, it's just engineering now". </p> <p>As good as it feels that we're approaching The Merge, I must emphasize that #Ethereum is not going in a clean direction. Tangentially it's achieving results, but it's also piling complexity like there's no tomorrow.</p> <p>If the protocol doesn't get slimmer, it's not going to make it. </p> <p>I feel the root cause is the disconnect between the research and the dev teams. The former has to "only" dream up elegant - standalone - ideas.</p> <p>The latter needs to juggle every single idea that was ever introduced, whilst surgically expanding the dimensionality of the space. </p> <p>There have been engineering attempts to reduce the complexity (module split in Erigon, responsibility split in The Merge). Yet there was never an attempt to reduce the protocol complexity. </p> <p>We are already past the point of anyone having a full picture of the system. This is bad. </p> <p>I can't say what the solution is, but my 2c is to stop adding features and start culling, even at the expense of breaking things.</p> <p>There are less and less people knowing and willing to piece together a broken network. And each change pushes more away. /FIN </p> <p>LINK to the thread itself: <a href="https://nitter.net/peter_szilagyi/status/1504887154761244673#m">https://nitter.net/peter_szilagyi/status/1504887154761244673#m</a></p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/The_Gabe_G"> /u/The_Gabe_G </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/tj82mi/lead_eth_dev_makes_ominous_thread_about_ethereum/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/tj82mi/lead_eth_dev_makes_ominous_thread_about_ethereum/">[comments]</a></span>Kind Regards R
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) @peter_szilagyi Mar 18 </p> <p>Complexity is an often overlooked aspect of a system because usually someone else is paying the price for it, not the person creating it.</p> <p>But don't be mistaken, someone <em>is</em> paying the price - whether money, time or mental capacity. They might not be willing/able to do forever. </p> <p>As with scalability, complexity also keeps trickling unseen up to the breaking point. At that time, it's already past the point of no return.</p> <p>Complexity also has the nasty effect of causing cascading failures. Overload people too much, lose capacity, leading to even larger load. </p> <p>In #Ethereum's history, complexity never decreased. Every EIP is piling on top. Every major change (1559, merge, sharding, verkle, stateless, L2, etc) is one more nail.</p> <p>I'm extremely frustrated when a research proposal says "everything's figured out, it's just engineering now". </p> <p>As good as it feels that we're approaching The Merge, I must emphasize that #Ethereum is not going in a clean direction. Tangentially it's achieving results, but it's also piling complexity like there's no tomorrow.</p> <p>If the protocol doesn't get slimmer, it's not going to make it. </p> <p>I feel the root cause is the disconnect between the research and the dev teams. The former has to "only" dream up elegant - standalone - ideas.</p> <p>The latter needs to juggle every single idea that was ever introduced, whilst surgically expanding the dimensionality of the space. </p> <p>There have been engineering attempts to reduce the complexity (module split in Erigon, responsibility split in The Merge). Yet there was never an attempt to reduce the protocol complexity. </p> <p>We are already past the point of anyone having a full picture of the system. This is bad. </p> <p>I can't say what the solution is, but my 2c is to stop adding features and start culling, even at the expense of breaking things.</p> <p>There are less and less people knowing and willing to piece together a broken network. And each change pushes more away. /FIN </p> <p>LINK to the thread itself: <a href="https://nitter.net/peter_szilagyi/status/1504887154761244673#m">https://nitter.net/peter_szilagyi/status/1504887154761244673#m</a></p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/The_Gabe_G"> /u/The_Gabe_G </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/tj82mi/lead_eth_dev_makes_ominous_thread_about_ethereum/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/tj82mi/lead_eth_dev_makes_ominous_thread_about_ethereum/">[comments]</a></span>Kind Regards R