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Stories by Polynya on Medium
Personal blog · polynya.medium.comprogrammingeconomics
Stories by Polynya on Medium is a personal blog at polynya.medium.com about programming and economics. Since 2021, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Polynya's Medium posts as technical explainers on Ethereum scaling, rollups and zk-proofs for engineers evaluating Web3. Commenters call the posts well-written and a good overview.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-29
- /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-12-14
- /rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-24
What Hacker News says?
I see you haven't discovered the wonders of ZKRollups yet. Have a read of the works of Polynya [0]. Ethereum will be a settlement layer for these execution chains that can do thousands of TPS at a fraction of the current fee, and their only limit on TPS is data storage, which will be expanded with data shards. [0] https://polynya.medium.com/
Comment linking /
on “Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus”Submitted Addressing Common Rollup Misconceptions as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Have I missed some Turing Award discoveries while I was away? Yes. ZK Rollups - https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da... If you don't understand this post he has many more explaining the technologies behind it.
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “In second largest DeFi hack, Blockchain Bridge loses $320M Ether”Submitted Optimistic rollups are brilliant (and the state of blockchains) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBitcoin only increased the efficiency of gold. Ethereum + L2's will eventually process 14M+ TPS in a completely decentralized, permissionless way [0]. It's not hard to see how a faster, cheaper, more scalable system will be adopted by payment companies, especially when you don't have to trust or rely on any other company or government. 0: ( https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da... )
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn”Submitted Web3 will offer superior UX than web2 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionthanks for the well-written primer. Just one observation. You write: >Over time, Ethereum has proven to be sub-optimal for the incredible demand DeFi services have seen. The network has diseconomies of scale and, given its low throughput capability, gas fees (the cost of executing a transaction on the Ethereum network) have recently been over $150. This makes executing simple low-value transactions, such as swaps on…
Comment linking /rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d
on “An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities”Submitted Convergent evolution: how rollups and data shards became the ultimate solution as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere is a great article to read on why layer1 blockchain scalability isn’t sustainable long-term (for any layer 1): https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-o... When reading about competing blockchains, it’s important to figure out if someone you’re reading values money or decentralization (and therefore individual’s digital autonomy once we enter the Metaverse). Polynya (Liberosist on Reddit) is…
on “An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities”Layer 2's do solve it, and will reach 14M TPS by 2030 [0], which is more than enough for the world. He has explanations of how the different components work in different posts on the site. 0: https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet”This is a good write-up on how zk-proofs can be used to increase the scalability of blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... zcash initially used zk-proofs only for privacy. It is only now looking to utilize it for scalability.
Comment linking /rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d
on “Why I’m Cryptophobic”https://polynya.medium.com/ Scroll to their first article (it's not that far) and work backwards.
Comment linking /
on “Vitalik Buterin Proposes New EIP to Tackle Ethereum’s Sky-High Gas Fees”There is hope that the move to Proof Of Stake and the arrival of various scaling solutions for Ethereum will finally make crypto payments simpler (2022 - 2023 implementation time frame). Here is a short blog post that discusses this tech: https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-elec... I think the other big issue is that current wallet apps are very buggy and their UX sucks in general, so your point…
Comment linking /argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-electronic-cash-system-dream-comes-to-life-8724a64e33f7
on “Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support”Did you even read the article? This kind of misunderstand is exactly what it's addressing. L2's give instant confirmation, process 1000+ TPS, and cost far less than the L1 (ZK Rollups being a couple of cents per transaction), AND they are insanely more secure than Solana. Solana is ok for now if you don't care about decentralization, but it barely handles more than a few thousand TPS without falling over or having d…
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “Goodbye Gas Fees”Vitalik originally proposed it here: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... ETH2 is where Ethereum goes from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and as a result uses 99% less electricity. The second phase of ETH2 is sharding where instead of Ethereum being one big chain it has one execution chain and 64 additional data shards. This makes it scale incredibly well when it's a settlement layer for…
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “Goodbye Gas Fees”Current Ethereum is a non-scaling proof of concept. They kicked that can down the road, but the blueprint solution is now in and many of the components are built. The short of it is that with the modular approach to Blockchain scaling, more nodes will mean more scale. Separating out execution, settlement, and data availability, the blockchain "trillema" is inverted. The writing is a bit technical but I recommend tha…
Comment linking /
on “What is Web3? Interview with Gavin Wood, who coined the term in 2014”While true that more complex smart contract executions are more cost (gas) intensive, zkRollup solutions solve this by actually becoming cheaper as they scale! https://polynya.medium.com/addressing-common-rollup-misconce... https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...
Comment linking /conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e
on “Do developers think Web3 will build a better internet?”That's an excellent point, as scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the arti…
Comment linking /rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d
on “UPI Payments: 10B Transactions a Month Done, Next Stop 100B”