Reminds me of the (largely failed) bitcoin XT fork. Bitcoiners didn't choose what was right for the network- they chose the easy path in an attempt to prevent fragmentation and keep the price high.
I have no reason to expect that ETH users won't do the same, just as they did in the DAO hack fork: they just choose whatever fork happens to profit them in the short-term at the expense of the decentralization of the network. Because at the end of the day it's just a money-making scheme to them.
>What's new here is the cost as it forces participants (stakers) to choose a side.
It doesn't force the stakers to do anything. The default behavior is to do nothing and accept censorship, in the same way that the default behavior for Bitcoin was to do nothing and accept small block sizes.
That's not what happened. Bitcoiners defended decentralization over throughput. The argument back then was that we should first experiment with scaling with other solutions and try to innovate as far as possible, and after that see how much actual L1 block space is needed. Now we are starting to see that it was the right choice.
How is LN the right choice for decentralization? you need central relay nodes with a ton of liquidity. Besides there is nothing stopping you from setting up LN over a L1 that isn't cramped, you have a limited throughput of settlement transactions.
Satoshi himself even suggested a blocksize increase. It is really a no-brainier when the cost of storage and bandwidth will continue to decrease over time, especially in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin where the vast majority of the hashrate is from ASIC farms that can bear the cost of a single node while the rest simply use SPV wallets.
Well, the idea is that most people should be able to run a full node. Even now, you need a quite large SSD to sync and store the blockchain. Ideally, you'd want to run full node on a mobile device. Block size can be increased in the future when it's reasonable to do so.
Even with larger blocks, there's still the issue of latency and throughput. LN offers trustless instant settlement with very high throughput. Everyone is able to run their own node and open channels, so it doesn't really depend on any central third parties, even if there's some degree of concentration of liquidity. There should always be multiple routes and it should be possible to circumvent any bad actors. And obviously, L1 is still available for everyone.
In addition, there are other L2 solutions such as fedimints and statechains. The beauty of layered architecture is that there can be multiple competing solutions on L2, and L1 can be kept simple, secure and decentralized.
Doing nothing is still a choice, and will result in their stake being slashed in the non censored "fork". If socially the non censored chain is deemed legitimate, this is a negative outcome that cannot be undone - hence a "commitment".
Without slashing, miners do not have to make any commitments - their funds are duplicated in both chains and they can switch to mining whenever they like.
Reminds me of the (largely failed) bitcoin XT fork. Bitcoiners didn't choose what was right for the network- they chose the easy path in an attempt to prevent fragmentation and keep the price high.
I have no reason to expect that ETH users won't do the same, just as they did in the DAO hack fork: they just choose whatever fork happens to profit them in the short-term at the expense of the decentralization of the network. Because at the end of the day it's just a money-making scheme to them.
>What's new here is the cost as it forces participants (stakers) to choose a side.
It doesn't force the stakers to do anything. The default behavior is to do nothing and accept censorship, in the same way that the default behavior for Bitcoin was to do nothing and accept small block sizes.