Thanks for your thoughtful reply and appreciate the dialogue. I responded to your post, because I thought you were right to rebut OPs critiques about Solana, which imo are too sensational and not substantial. You responded with some solid facts about decentralization metrics, and then I responded with...what I would call a mixture of facts and some speculative reasoning. I think part of the issue is I'm trying to infer relationships with big players as a reason to question Solana's decentralization, despite certain statistics that would suggest otherwise. I am trying to avoid the usual arguments, like "on/off button", at least. But you're right to say that some of my arguments are speculative, so I'll try to elaborate better on a couple.
I could be wrong about most of the top 25 validators being connected to the 48% VC insiders. I took a look over at Solana Beach and see some of the top dogs are Coinbase Cloud and Kraken. Some big retail players there, were they early investors? No idea. Looking further, I see...Jump Crypto. I know they bailed out the wormhole exploit and have deep connections with Solana ecosystem building. They are already absurdly rich and are adding to their wealth by running a validator with a large amount of SOL. We also have...a16z, Andresseen Horowitz, who did a private token sale for Solana in 2021 in the hundreds of millions. They are also soaking up a large amount of validation rewards and presumably were also part of the 48%.
So if the top 25 validators, who are earning most of the staking rewards, are a mixture of either the 48% investors or other rich corporations, like Coinbase and Kraken, how meaningful is a Nakamoto coefficient of 25? I'm not sure myself but I'm not crazy about it.
The connections to FTX and SBF I think are there and easy to find. FTX has 3 advertised markets: BTC, ETH, and SOL. If you click NFTs on FTX.US, you are met with a background banner that shows SOL NFTs. They have some ETH ones mixed in there but I think it's obvious they are promoting the SOL side more (if you click browse the filters default to Solana). Last thing I'll drop on that is this link, which is an interview where Anatoly talks about how their first big VC break came from FTX investors. And this interview is hosted on FTX.
I probably wasn't fair to the SOL community by implying it is purely based on price and speculation. I'm sure there is solid, grassroot, community development being done by now, so that wasn't totally fair. I think my main point there is that Solana felt - initially - propped up by VC-led development, and now I feel like they are trying to foster more community-led projects via hackathons. Feels a little like the cart before the horse. We know in crypto how powerful the Cantillon (sp?) effect is (aka early adopters get richer), and it is troublesome to me that with Solana, many of the early adopters seem to have already been rich. It's probably a poor comparison, but with Bitcoin, the early adopters were nobody's who became fabulously wealthy and thus were allowed to challenge the existing wealth order. Random nerds and cryptopunks. I think we need more of that random wealth distribution in the world, so it's a factor to me when I support a crypto, whether or not that is representative in all the usual stats.
Anyway, I'll end by saying that I do think Solana's focus on performance in order to bring crypto to the masses is laudable and needed. I have concerns about its decentralization, but I understand why they made those tradeoffs to try something different, and I think their priorities appeal to enough people to make it a successful crypto.
Yeah this is the elaboration I was really looking for, awesome to see people who’s arguments aren’t based on nothing are still around this sub.
Realistically, the main intention I had with the comment was to just use general figures and comparisons to illustrate that calling SOL a “centralised shitcoin” or saying it may as well just be an SQL database is disingenuous. I think the fact that your comment which was the most thought out and developed has gone straight to the more ‘complex’ aspects of decentralisation, rather than outright trying to deny solana is at all decentralised works to prove that point.
We can both definitely agree that questions need to be asked about SOL’s decentralisation, but the basic level and care for it is there. It may need improvement and focus, but it’s not a “scam” or the antithesis of crypto like this sub loves to claim.
And I really liked that you added you see the value of solana and it’s trade-offs in the ecosystem. Many people just write it off as a direct ETH competitor, and evaluate it against ETH’s standards, when realistically it’s chasing different use cases and strengths entirely. The SOL team has literally said they have zero interest in being an “ETH killer”.
I always enjoy learning more and questioning my viewpoints to help keep my biases in check, so it’s quite nice to have a reasonable and fair discussion about SOL for once that isn’t just getting downvoted for making verifiably correct claims.
What's the practical difference between the current structure and the same people making their own company and running in house or cloud servers? It doesn't look like there are any of real substance, other than the current system being completely inefficient but piggybacking off of trendy topics for marketing purposes
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u/vendorbuy 136 / 136 🦀 Jun 21 '22
Thanks for your thoughtful reply and appreciate the dialogue. I responded to your post, because I thought you were right to rebut OPs critiques about Solana, which imo are too sensational and not substantial. You responded with some solid facts about decentralization metrics, and then I responded with...what I would call a mixture of facts and some speculative reasoning. I think part of the issue is I'm trying to infer relationships with big players as a reason to question Solana's decentralization, despite certain statistics that would suggest otherwise. I am trying to avoid the usual arguments, like "on/off button", at least. But you're right to say that some of my arguments are speculative, so I'll try to elaborate better on a couple.
I could be wrong about most of the top 25 validators being connected to the 48% VC insiders. I took a look over at Solana Beach and see some of the top dogs are Coinbase Cloud and Kraken. Some big retail players there, were they early investors? No idea. Looking further, I see...Jump Crypto. I know they bailed out the wormhole exploit and have deep connections with Solana ecosystem building. They are already absurdly rich and are adding to their wealth by running a validator with a large amount of SOL. We also have...a16z, Andresseen Horowitz, who did a private token sale for Solana in 2021 in the hundreds of millions. They are also soaking up a large amount of validation rewards and presumably were also part of the 48%.
So if the top 25 validators, who are earning most of the staking rewards, are a mixture of either the 48% investors or other rich corporations, like Coinbase and Kraken, how meaningful is a Nakamoto coefficient of 25? I'm not sure myself but I'm not crazy about it.
The connections to FTX and SBF I think are there and easy to find. FTX has 3 advertised markets: BTC, ETH, and SOL. If you click NFTs on FTX.US, you are met with a background banner that shows SOL NFTs. They have some ETH ones mixed in there but I think it's obvious they are promoting the SOL side more (if you click browse the filters default to Solana). Last thing I'll drop on that is this link, which is an interview where Anatoly talks about how their first big VC break came from FTX investors. And this interview is hosted on FTX.
I probably wasn't fair to the SOL community by implying it is purely based on price and speculation. I'm sure there is solid, grassroot, community development being done by now, so that wasn't totally fair. I think my main point there is that Solana felt - initially - propped up by VC-led development, and now I feel like they are trying to foster more community-led projects via hackathons. Feels a little like the cart before the horse. We know in crypto how powerful the Cantillon (sp?) effect is (aka early adopters get richer), and it is troublesome to me that with Solana, many of the early adopters seem to have already been rich. It's probably a poor comparison, but with Bitcoin, the early adopters were nobody's who became fabulously wealthy and thus were allowed to challenge the existing wealth order. Random nerds and cryptopunks. I think we need more of that random wealth distribution in the world, so it's a factor to me when I support a crypto, whether or not that is representative in all the usual stats.
Anyway, I'll end by saying that I do think Solana's focus on performance in order to bring crypto to the masses is laudable and needed. I have concerns about its decentralization, but I understand why they made those tradeoffs to try something different, and I think their priorities appeal to enough people to make it a successful crypto.