I came across this article criticizing Solana, and I'm curious what everyone's reaction to it is. Is there some truth to it, or does the author not know what they're talking about?
Excerpt:
Solana brute-forced their way into speed instead of using clever design and the costs of their brute force approach make the project unworkable. The blockchain blackouts are too frequent to make this is a serious project. Just one blackout would be unacceptable and they have already had two. The reason is obvious, the blockchain time is too short for the nodes to coordinate with each other and the chain is threatened with forking as groups of validator nodes become separated from each other. So they shut down the network and stop making blocks. This has happened twice in the very short history of Solana and will happen again. Because it has to happen, the block time is too short.
400ms block times cannot work, ever. That isn’t enough time between blocks for the validator nodes to coordinate their activities. If you change the time between blocks it linearly affects the transactions per second the blockchain is capable of. If you cut the time between when blocks are added to the blockchain, usually called the blocktime, in half then you double the transactions per second. If you triple the blocktime then you reduce the transactions per second by two thirds. The bizarrely low blocktime for Solana is one part of its overall brute force attempt to solve the speed problem. But it doesn’t and can’t work.
The fundamental activity of any blockchain is validating transactions. In a proof of work system like Bitcoin, this is open to be done by anyone and a new block of transactions is validated every ten minutes. Once a block full of transactions has been validated and added to the blockchain there is a small chance of a reorganization happening and that recent addition becoming irrelevant, it becomes as if it never happened. This is rare and becomes rarer as more blocks are added. After two more blocks have been added after a block most people assume that block, and the transactions within it, are permanent additions to the blockchain. If you paid for something with Bitcoin after two blocks have been added to the blockchain after the block containing your transaction everyone will treat this payment as final, though there is a tiny chance of a reorganization still happening. After a hundred blocks the chances of a reorganization making that block irrelevant are down to being a once every ten years or longer event. It could happen, but people treat it as impossible because it is so rare. This type of event might not happen with Bitcoin again in your lifetime.
Read the rest:
https://thinkspot.com/discourse/Dpu2mb/post/success-culture/solana-is-dead-on-the-beach/YEtryGn
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