What criticism does Ethereum often face?

原文标题：《 Addressing common criticisms about Ethereum 》

原文来源： Liberosist，  Reddit

ECN Ethereum Chinese Community

Below is a list of some of the common criticisms of Ethereum, along with my own thoughts. These criticisms are rife with misconceptions, FUDs, and lies, and I hope this article will encourage you to think critically and get accurate information for yourself. If you have any other questions, please leave a comment. If you don't agree with this article, I do, and I have expressed my opinion. Of course, if there is an inconsistency with the facts or an omission, I will revise my opinion.

Special thanks to our friends at r/ethfinance who collected the questions.

Q: Ethereum can't scale?

This is clearly the wrong idea, as there are currently multiple rollups online, some of which have been running for a year! Examples include Loopring, ZKSync, Deversifi, Hermez, Aztec, DyDx, and Immutable X. Most of these projects can reach thousands of TPS with very low Gas costs, and some of them are subsidized (or reduced Gas costs for the user experience).

What is currently missing is the Universal Programmable Rollups. Optimism has been active on the mainnet since January, but is currently limited to Synthetix. Optimism's next major release is Uniswap V3, which will open for public smart contract deployment in July or later. By the way, this year's performance in terms of communication is not satisfactory, so criticism is justified. Engineering project or not, communication and public relations are always important.

But Optimism is only one solution. Other solutions such as ZKSync 2.0, Arbitrum and Starknet will be launched this year, with the likes of OMGX and Cartesi joining the fray. In fact, it now seems that Arbitrum will be used before Optimism. Not to mention side chains or commitchains such as Polygon, XDAI, or other EVM chains such as BSC or Avalanche. Eventually, all of this will become part of the expanded Ethereum ecosystem.

At the same time, there is some truth to this view. I would point out that Gas costs for Ethereum L1 are likely to remain high forever due to the lack of support that does not yet exist. Even for Rollup, Gas rates won't drop to rock-bottom levels until the shard is released, which won't happen for years, and even if it does, it won't meet long-term demand. In addition, there is still a very high demand for EVM block space.

Opinion: Rollups are 4th Gen Blockchains: Cryptocurrency (Reddit.com)

Q: Will high Gas charges kill Ethereum?

This strange idea is widely circulated in cryptocurrency circles, but it has no basis at all. Does excessive demand for a product cause it to fail? Graphics card prices are already prohibitively high, so will AMD and Nvidia soon become obsolete?

The answer, of course, is no, and the reality is that, as mentioned above, the demand for EVM block space is very high and the supply of Gas is limited. Right now, the high Gas bill is a sign that there is so much demand for Ethereum L1 space that people are willing to pay a hefty premium for it.

That's where the Ethereum network and ETH are valuable. After two months, each ETH stakeholder is able to capture the value based on the EIP-1559 mechanism.

Over time, Gas supply will increase and Gas costs will decrease -- in the long run, the supply of block space will never meet the global demand for EVM block space. There will be hybrid solutions like Rollups, ZKPorter /Validium, side chains/alternative chains, and centralized solutions. The entire Ethereum ecosystem will work in concert, making different trade-offs between decentralization and transaction costs.

Q: Ethereum is a centralized system where all decisions are made by Vitalik?

While Vitalik is still an important part of the Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum development has become sufficiently decentralized over time. What's unique about Ethereum is that it uses multiple clients, and researchers and developers work together to create easy-to-understand specifications. The specification is then applied by multiple client developers working independently. This is different from all other blockchain projects, where a single client is developed by a core team. Of course, there is now support for a single client -- concentrating all resources on one client so that the quality of that client can be higher than the other four or five independent clients, but developing multiple clients is clearly the most decentralized approach. For example, Ethereum currently has four Consensus Layer clients and one more in development, all of which are developed by teams that are independent of the Ethereum Foundation in addition to being funded. For any consensus upgrade, the five development teams must agree, and then the 135,000 + verification nodes must be updated as well. This is the opposite of a centralized network. Not to mention Ethereum's powerful "Layer 0", the Ethereum community, in which all developers and validation nodes are involved. EIP-1559, for example, is largely driven by community will.

Q: Ethereum has adopted a pre-mining mechanism, Vitalik is controlling Ethereum? (from U/AAQY and U/EC265)

I'm not a big fan of ICOs, although Ethereum does have one. I also don't like ninja mining, like Bitcoin. We have seen some fair ways to launch the Defi project, including air drops to users, which is certainly the best way to allocate tokens.

However, it is important to understand the context of the Ethereum ICO at the time. This is the fairest way to raise money in 2014. After Ethereum was created, the Ethereum Foundation held about 12 million ETH. Over the years, however, a lot of ETH has been distributed, and a lot of it has been used to raise money, as was the case with Ethereum. Currently, the Ethereum Foundation and early developers hold up to 2% of the supply. Vitalik holds 0.3% of the total ETH.

In contrast to other project founders who tend to hold 20 percent or more of their tokens, such as at publicly traded companies like Tesla or Amazon, Satoshi Nakamoto holds 5 percent of the total BTC (in 2009-10, his holdings were as high as more than 50 percent, but these Bitcoins are considered missing, so they are not comparable). So I would say 0.3% is not enough incentive for Vitalik to continue Ethereum development!

Do I want to see a fairer distribution of ETH tokens? The answer is yes. But today, compared to all the other projects, Ethereum has the fairest distribution of tokens.

Q: Mining is damaging the environment?

While it is true that there are subtle differences between different mining mechanisms, this is true to a certain extent -- the workload proves that mining mechanisms are extremely inefficient. Ethereum will move to Proof of Interest in the coming months, which will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by more than 99%.

And it's not just electricity. We know there's a severe shortage of semiconductors around the world. Many of TSMC's limited wafer supplies are currently used to make mining cards, such as ASICs and GPUs, and these resources can be reallocated to services in engineering, science, and, of course, gaming.

Q: Ethereum had a rollback, could it happen again?

People like to use the DAO fork as an example of how Ethereum can roll back. But there are many details that have been selectively overlooked:

  ,First, DAO forking is not a rollback. This was a special case where the attacker had to wait 28 days to withdraw money, so the community performed the action to change the smart contract.

  ,There is a strong consensus among developers, users, miners, and the community -- so rolling back is hardly a centralized decision.

  ,Those who refused to roll back simply opted for the Ethereum Classic. It's a win-win for everyone.

  ,Ethereum was a very, very new project at the time. Do you know of a project that rolled back less than two years after it was born? See: Value Overflow Incident - Bitcoin Wiki

  ,The rejection of EIP-999 is the strongest evidence against this hypothesis. There was an opportunity to roll back 500,000 ETH for an entity managed by one of Ethereum's co-founders, but the community strongly opposed the decision. Ethereum is not going to roll back again.

Q: Ethereum relies on Infura?

While it is true that Infura is a dominant service provider, and the Ethereum ecosystem certainly needs to diversify, this is clearly a mistaken view. In November 2020, Infura suffered a massive outage, but Ethereum has been running fine. Of course, this incident caused disruption to some front-ends, exchanges, and wallets, but you can fix the problem by running your own nodes or using a different service provider. Since the outage, many front ends and wallets have started running their own nodes and using alternatives like Alchemy. While there's still a lot of work to be done on this front, it's a mistake to think Ethereum is relying on Infura.

Q: Ethereum state is growing too fast?

That's certainly true when compared to Bitcoin. If you want a blockchain that traces back data in an archival mode and verifies every transaction since the creation of the block, then Bitcoin is indeed a better choice. So how much is it worth? If you want to use the Bitcoin network, then you already trust the miners. On Ethereum, you can run full nodes (non-archived nodes) on a fourth-generation Raspberry Pi 4 system, sending and verifying transactions on a 1TB SSD. For most users and consumers, this is relatively easy hardware to buy. Some might argue that even running archive nodes is easy with a client like Turbogeth.

Similarly, Ethereum's state growth is closer to Bitcoin's than that of Binance smart chains, EOS, Solana, or other high TPS Layer1 chains. For these chains, the concept of user-authenticated transactions doesn't even exist.

Also note that Ethereum will make more trade-offs in this regard, slowly implementing updates such as weak subjectivity, statelessness, and state overdue mechanisms. Purists will think this is unfair, but it won't matter. Given the other benefits, there will be a group of users who will be happy to synchronize data from the creation block.

Q: There is no fixed cap on ETH supply?

This is true, but there are safety considerations behind it. I would add that after EIP-1559 and the merger takes place, ETH supply is likely to reach around 120 million pieces and continue to deflate or remain stable beyond that point.

Q: Ethereum's monetary policy is unreliable?

That is partly true. While a lot of people exaggerate this, Ethereum's block rewards did go through two cuts, both of which were driven by community consensus rather than code. EIP-1559 and the merger would completely change Ethereum monetary policy. But if these two fail to bring about further changes in Ethereum over the next few years, the criticism will still be valid. Bitcoin remains the standard in terms of the predictability and reliability of token supply -- despite the security risks it faces in the future.

Q: Ethereum 2.0 is many years away?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Ethereum 2.0, although to a large extent, Ethereum's research and developers are responsible for the vagueness of the messaging. First of all, we're not going to call it "Ethereum 2.0" right now. In short, this is a series of upgrades. Beacon Chain went live in December 2020, the first upgrade, and the folks involved are actively moving forward with the merger, which is planned for the end of 2021. I'm going to talk about sharding. Another misconception is that the Gas bill will be lower after these upgrades -- but this will never happen at Layer 1. The purpose of sharding is to speed up rollups. Stateless and late combination of states will have a greater impact on Layer1, plus shard execution if needed (this is not yet clear).

Q: Ethereum has no intrinsic value, is it created out of thin air?

Ethereum is a globally decentralized SaaS platform that generates revenue through transaction fees. Now those transaction fees are substantial -- more than $1 billion a month. Ethereum ranks second in revenue compared to the world's largest companies. I don't think it's sustainable at the moment, but I mean it's possible, and there's some sense of the future.

EIP-1559 will go live in July and most of the transaction fees will be destroyed, directly creating value for ETH stakeholders. After the merger, the remaining undestroyed transaction fees (TIPS) will be distributed to the pledgers in addition to the proceeds generated by the pledge.

Ethereum is not only one of the most productive assets in the world, it also has the most advanced value capture mechanism.

Q: ETH is too difficult to pledge?

This view is very true, 32 ETH is a lot of money. However, I think there is a serious misunderstanding about the definition of a pledge. In many delegate blockchains, when you "pledge", you are actually delegating validation. Newer consensus models like Algorand randomize the process, but you're still delegating rather than verifying yourself. You're actually doing nothing to make a profit.

In the Ethereum beacons chain, you pledge your ETH to become the verification node, and you earn the pledge revenue by providing a service to the network.

For those who just want to pledge and don't care about the technical details, the beacon chain is the base layer from which a variety of pledge services have been derived, with varying degrees of decentralization. These services allow you to pledge small amounts of ETH for rewards. Click here for a list of Pledge Services: Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain (Phase 0) Block Chain Explorer - Ethereum 2.0 Staking Services Overview - Beaconcha.in-2021

Q: Ethereum never executes updates on time and changes plans frequently? (from u/ i_haven-t_reddit)

Is Ethereum constantly changing its plans? That's absolutely true, but it's very much in line with actual needs. The cryptocurrency industry is innovating at a rapid pace, and there's no point in sticking with old technology when you're making breakthroughs. Even if you haven't studied the industry for a year or so, it still makes sense to abandon the PoW/PoS hybrid consensus. It makes sense for Ethereum to adopt a Rollup-centric roadmap, as it will dramatically increase Ethereum's scalability, which is arriving faster than we thought. Upgrades are indeed under way, the beacon chain will go live in December 2020, EIP-1559 will be implemented within two months, and we are less than six months from the merger.

Q: Proof of stake will aggregate assets and lead to centralization? (From U/Epic_Trader and U /Mathje, U/SN00FY)

While this may seem plausible at first glance, there are a number of nuances involved:

 ,The proof-of-work mechanism that has been running for more than six years has brought many benefits to Ethereum, during which time we have seen effective token allocation. Ethereum is now second only to Bitcoin in terms of decentralized token distribution.

 ,The verification node and (non-verification node) pledgers also have participation costs. While the cost of hardware is significantly lower, there are tax issues and redistributive costs.

 ,One of the biggest factors that is often overlooked is that token issuance under Proof of Stake is very low. After the merger, circulation is about 0.5%. The community is proposing to cap the number of verification nodes and then limit circulation to around 0.8%.

Q: If Ethereum gets adopted by companies, will they only run private chains? (From U/SN00FY)

Not only companies, but also private chains for consumers will be launched in the future. This is already happening on Binance smart chains, but I think in the future big companies such as governments, banks and corporations will run private chains.

Of course, enterprises will also adopt public chains that support B2B.

As stated at the beginning, Ethereum Layer1 consumes very little gas in the long run. But it doesn't matter, Layer1's space will always remain 100% saturated, while other solutions built on Ethereum will increase their network effects and Lindy effects.

Q: Ethereum is using old technology. Will a new blockchain be using newer technology? (From U /Mathje)

Although there is a lot of misinformation in the crypto space that causes a lot of panic, confusion and uncertainty, this is the one point that bothers me the most. Ethereum has always been at the forefront of innovation and will continue to be so. While there are indeed innovative projects in this area, none have attempted to solve the big problem: blockchain cannot be triangulated. Consider a situation where all other smart contract chains use some form of delegated consensus mechanism, and many have hard-tops on the number of validation nodes. For example, Cosmos: 300 (currently 150); Polkadot: 1000; Binance Smart Chain and EOS: 21. Ultimately, for blockchain, the more verification nodes there are, the less scalable it is.

The beacon chain uses revolutionary new technologies, such as weak subjectivity and signature aggregation, to support up to 1 million verification nodes and achieve large-scale decentralization. There are already 135,000 verification nodes, with thousands more joining every week. Not to mention that the beacon chain verification node does not need to be on 24/7 like the other chains.

Case 1: In terms of ETH transfers, the throughput of these Layer1 chains can surpass that of Ethereum (around 55 TPS), and overall throughput can surpass that of Ethereum (around 20 TPS). But Ethereum is using groundbreaking new technologies, such as data availability sampling, to reach more than 100,000 TPS through enabling rollup and data sharding without compromising decentralization. Even if decentralization were completely abandoned, Layer1 would not have achieved this high TPS. With hybrid solutions like ZKPorter and Validium, Ethereum can achieve higher TPS.

Case 2: The most innovative blockchain is actually Rollup. Starknet has been a great success, and the reason why Rollups solutions like Starknet are based on Ethereum is that Ethereum has the best consensus mechanism in the industry.

Third scenario: Almost all innovative new smart contracts are released on Ethereum and then replicated on other chains.

In short, the Ethereum ecosystem has some of the most cutting-edge technology in the industry.

Q: Ethereum has no real usage scenario, is it just a gambler's game, or is it a trading platform for some equally useless tokens? (From U/SN00FY)

Gamblers also pay transaction fees like everyone else, and Ethereum allows people to do just about anything through the platform, based on trusted neutrality and the need for permits.

That said, much of the activity on Ethereum seems to be speculative in nature, which is a real concern. Of course, this is true of all early technologies. We've also seen big companies actually adopt Ethereum, such as Visa, and the European Investment Bank has issued bonds on Ethereum. We still have a lot of work to do to extend these real-world use cases.

Q: Rollup is centralized?

Indeed, some early Rollup had centralized sequencers. But this is not a security risk, as proof of fraud or proof of validity would provide the same security as the Ethereum mainnet. Active and audit risks also exist, and centralized Sequencers are by no means a trustless system. Fortunately, most Rollups have plans in their roadmap to decentralize Sequencer, so this won't be a long-term problem.

Q: The Ethereum Roadmap is Rollup-centric and will break composability? (From Epic_Trader)

Yes, but no. Inside Rollup, everything is composable, but the composability between layer1 and Rollup and between Rollup and Rollup is really broken. Fortunately, there are a number of projects that are working to address this issue and achieve relatively smooth Layer2 interoperability, but it's still a work in progress, and composability looks more like an engineering problem than a theoretical hurdle at this point.

Q: Ethereum is like a monster with two blockchains and two assets, ETH1 and ETH2?

This is wrong. There is only one ETH token. Although there are now two chains running in parallel, you can think of the beacon chain as a motivational test network to ensure that the new consensus mechanism runs smoothly. These two chains will merge into one Ethereum in the near future.

Responses to some of the comments:

I think half of the comments below are ignoring the fact that blockchain can't possibly be triangulated. There is no project other than Ethereum that has solved this problem, and there is no attempt to solve this problem. With the exception of Bitcoin and Ethereum, all projects have compromised decentralization and security to varying degrees, and most still don't offer the scalability of Ethereum Rollup, which can be even more scalable once shards are put into use. If you apply a non-delegated consensus mechanism with 135,000 verification nodes (let alone a million), while keeping the state under control and running that blockchain on a consumer laptop or fourth-generation Raspberry Pi 4, you are dreaming. As mentioned earlier, most blockchains have at most a few hundred verification nodes, which are entrusted to do centralized pledging. Solana was mentioned, according to the system requirements page (validation node requirements | Solana Docs), if you want to run a Solana nodes, need to spend $1200 a month rent cloud instance, state size will increase a few TB every month. It's just a different type of product, not in the same league as Ethereum. But there is nothing wrong with Solana's design, as I mentioned above, there are pros and cons to either Etherium-based or parallel solutions, a trade-off between decentralization and transaction costs.

  ,Ninety percent of the comments that criticized the article seemed to relate to transaction fees. I would like to reiterate that the Ethereum ecosystem has unique advantages for the impossible triangulation of blockchain. It can be highly decentralized, secure and highly scalable through Rollup. Gas charges for Layer1 will remain high, which is an acceptable situation as most people will be trading through Rollup, Zkporter /Validium hybrid solutions or even a centralized side chain. I think a lot of people have a rigid mindset that Rollup is equal to other Layer1 solutions. Rollup, on the other hand, is a direct competitor to replace these solutions and has an advantage in almost every aspect. Crucially, many seem to be under the misconception that no single Layer1 can provide the scalability demonstrated by the Ethereum ecosystem across multiple layers.

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