@Jordan S

some of you don't realize how important this thing was

eeeeeeew they have jared kushner standing there. he is so freaky looking. he has a face that could make a baby cry.

solana, the network that has the trump and melania memecoins on it, has completely seized up after hitting around 800 transactions per second. users are reporting 5+ hour delays in withdrawing SOL and USDC from CEX onto this network. coinbase has started to just cancel all of the stuck transactions. the largest DEX aggregator on the network is also shitting itself. the solana developers lied about the performance of the network. they are claiming that it can handle thousands of TPS in the marketing materials but it is unable to deliver acceptable performance before it even hits 1000. the same marketing materials claim it has thousands (plural) of validators but the real number is slightly north of 1000, because it requires enterprise grade hardware to run a validator. these validator nodes are struggling to keep up even when run by seasoned professionals, as evidenced by the CEX issues. this is just reinforcing my belief that big block scaling is not going to work. the solana developers shunned layered architecture and stuck with big blocks because it was the easy path. they were rightfully afraid of confusing their users with different layers and they built it as all one thing. this ended up destroying the user experience anyway. you need layered architecture. the challenge is in building second layer scaling solutions that don't suck for the user. it should be easy and safe, and ideally the user shouldn't even notice that there are different layers. bitcoin and ethereum are the only two cryptocurrencies that are actively focusing on layered architecture and neither one is quite there yet. one or two UX issues are all it takes for people to disengage and go with a custodian or an altcoin.

the truth hurts. layered architecture scares people away. new people are completely repulsed by it. yes, the tech is superior. layered architecture is the best way to scale a blockchain while preserving decentralization. but from the end user's perspective, all it does is make the product worse. why do I have an onchain balance, a liquid balance, this weird thing called an invoice, and some bullshit ecash? this does nothing to make the product easy. let's just leave the coins in a custodial account and let them sit there. and that's what the super-majority of bitcoin users are doing now. they don't own any coins. the layers are pointless if most people refuse to touch them. the only other significant cryptocurrency with layered architecture is ethereum. don't start rolling your eyes just yet. we can learn something here. ethereum wants to preserve your ability to run a pruned node on a laptop, and excess activity is offloaded onto rollup L2s, which are being improved and made safer in incremental upgrades. but now the user has to choose between a rollup called arbitrum and a rollup called base, and they might accidentally use mainnet instead where it's still very expensive. this is still a little bit simpler than the mess of solutions that are built on top of bitcoin but for a new person it's still too fucking hard. the new users are shunning ethereum and its layers in favor of big block solana. why? because solana really is all one thing. they don't give a rat's ass if only a thousand people bother to run a solana validator on expensive ass hardware. they just want it to be easy. it's impossible to accidentally use the expensive network instead of the cheap network. the technology is objectively dumber and less efficient but it doesn't matter because it never ever compromises on the user experience. having one less choice in the wallet software is literally all it takes to siphon off the ethereum userbase. I am very invested in learning about the different kinds of building blocks that can be used to construct layered architecture. it's very important to me if a rollup or drivechain works better than payment channels. but I'm still not the person you need to appeal to for mass adoption. unless you are ready for custodians to control everything or for people to just leave and use altcoins, you need to make sure that the layered architecture is invisible to the user. do not ever try to sell layers to normal people. they don't want to fucking hear it. they need to feel like it's all one thing.