Ethereum and Solana suck, and they're a great example for why all of web3 is going to die eventually. Technically speaking, their promises of a fast response time are not possible at scale. The bottleneck: Networking + Repetitive Compute across the world for CONSENSUS, every < 20 seconds. (Whereas bitcoin promises to do this in a reasonable 10 minutes per block. And I wouldn't call the lightning network a centralized layer 2 solution. Bitcoin is the real deal, as you can obviously see on SN, since you're here...)

Imagine Amazon trying to implement Ethereum or Solana web3. Every time a user buys something, all the miners in the world have to move funds from the user's wallet, to Amazon's wallet, then also store the transaction in a private database somewhere, then interact with robots to deliver your groceries. The blockchain is not private, every miner has a copy. So Amazon would have to store that Amazon-private data encrypted with a key, on the blockchain, where everyone can see it. That key would have to be saved somewhere private for them still.. They'd have to do the same with all their saved user wallet addresses and their home addresses... It makes no sense, which is why Amazon doesn't do it.

Regardless of how you would TRY to do this as Amazon, think instead of 1 server in the backend handling your request, and 1 server (database) saving the transaction, and 1 server telling the robots to put your groceries in a UPS box (or maybe 100 servers doing that, IDK), instead, with web3, you have thousands of computers all around the world doing all those tasks, just to say they agree you clicked a button and you want your groceries delivered ASAP... It's ridiculous, with no real-world application, besides generating garbage (NFTs and tokens) upon garbage (Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-History, Proof-of-not-work). Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically "proof of time consumed to generate secure value". How do you fake time? You don't.

And if you didn't know, basically every NFT is simply a user's wallet associated on the blockchain with what's called a "string" in programmer terms. The NFT string is a URL pointing to a picture, hosted on a Web2 server. The NFT picture itself is not saved on the blockchain, because that would cost like $1000+ to store on every miner's computer in the whole world. To view your NFT, you have to use a centralized Web2 frontend which calls the web3 backend for only the URL which gets referenced by the web2 frontend in your browser to display it. When you buy an NFT, you are simply paying all the miner's in the world to save your wallet address connected to this URL. It's not the whole picture, just a little URL string that points your browser where to download the picture from.

Don't trust me?:

Many years ago, I made my own web3 website on ethereum, because I was a believer. I spent money on a web2 server to serve up the frontend, so that I could prove the concept of replacing modern day Web2 backend of PHP with Ethereum's Solidity programming language. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I paid a guy in Indonesia to make a pretty Web2 frontend for the Web3 backend (yes, all Web3 is a Web2 Frontend (like amazon) + Web3 backend (like Uniswap)). The site went live and the price to click a button to save a string was $1 back then, so nobody used the site. Now, it's $30+. So, I paid the frontend developer to add Optimism layer 2. It was still like $1 ON LAYER 2, to save a simple little tiny single character string to the blockchain, or the emulated version of it. (whatever layer 2 is...)

If I wanted, I could pay for a Ethereum Solidity smart contract developer $200/hour to come in and optimize my code and write the code to store the strings in some limited string variable type, but I gave up. I came to the conclusion that Web3 is simply hype. Hype, I've come to understand, is people's excited feelings about something, with no logic. The buzz of using something w/ a lack of comprehension of what it is that they're using. People are never going to understand how stupid modern Web3 is, because it's like an infinite casino with infinite rooms full of infinite levers to pull and money might shoot out. These levers cost $30 a pull, unless you use a cetralized layer 2 solution. It's ridiculous.

And it's unfathomable how broken this shit is.

Solana is a prime example of how broken it is. Their system requirements for miners, last time I looked, was something like 128 GB of RAM and a 32 core processor. That's a really powerful computer, yet their blockchain FAILS and has to be "rebooted" every so often, because miners can't keep up with each other. Solana has their response times down to milliseconds, but I don't know how that's even possible, since every mining computer in the world has to verify every little transaction, across the entire world. So whenever you're on a Solana exchange and converting your token from shit-token-1 to shit-token-2, the whole world lights up and somehow confirms in milliseconds..

Long story short, it fails sometimes, and people lose money, but people don't talk about that much, because they're all busy pulling levers and seeing if the money comes out, and it's really frustrating to watch. If you don't believe me, check the Solana uptime history health stats on the Solana Web2 site: https://status.solana.com/uptime?page=3 They have the most powerful computers in the world, computing proof-of-history, the easiest thing to compute, and they still break, once every 3 months or so... Do you think a business that completely shuts down that often deserves a multi billion dollar valuation?...

And ethereum is so broken... New miners that join that network aren't even able to download the whole blockchain because it's being created so fast. So instead, what miners are slowly but surely ALL doing, is downloading just the headers of blocks, and confirming the headers, not the actual data produced, just what some other miner sent to them and told them is the headers.. Ethereum's proof-of-stake miners basically just validate that they're trying to validate.. But again, the infinity shitchain is growing so fast that they can't download the shit over the network fast enough.

Anyway, I've been holding this back for years, had to get it off my chest. I think a lot of people are waiting to learn what is hype and what is not, and I've spent years waiting to read someone talking about it like this, but I just don't see it. SN is a great place for me to share, and I intend to do more of it..

Bitcoin is not hype. It makes the most sense. And lightning is the real web3. Everyone just needs patience. Wait for the next biggest app, like crypto kitties, to kill the ehtereum blockchain again, and if it happens enough times, people will start to get the idea. Oh, you didn't know Crypto Kitties put miners 4 hours behind? Well it did happen, and I haven't seen a popular fun game app since...