> Notably, EIP-4488 is a "short-term" remedy for Ethereum's sky-high gas fees.
No, it would not be a remedy at all. The high gas fees wouldn't be reduced a lot by a reduction of the calldata gas cost.
> Arguably, the main update that is expected to solve Ethereum’s scalability issue is the shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.
Another bad take. Changing the consensus engine does nothing for gas fees. Sharding is expected to do that but that is not planned to be introduced in 2022.
What EIP-4488 would do is reduce the cost of Layer 2 (L2) solutions like rollups. Those need to commit their state hashes to the L1 blockchain. But those are currently somewhat expensive as well because of the high calldata gas cost.
EIP-4488 might help with gas fees indirectly if it encourages the usage of L2 solutions which will then have less gas costs to commit to L1.
It would reduce the cost of rollup transactions by as much as 80%. And rollups are already 90-99% cheaper than L1, so I'd argue it provides a huge incentive to users and applications to migrate to L2, and helps relieve quite a bit of burden until sharding is released.
Are rollups generally expected to be 'native' to etherium, or orthogonal - but packaged in a way that becomes well-integrated with L1? Or said another way, it seems like there are L2 rollup 'providers' - are these 3rd party providers inherent in an L2 solution, or are they features that will be subsumed later by the parent protocol?
According to current roadmap, they will remain independent of core. This is partly because it allows for experimentation and competition and partly because different rollups may have unique features and tradeoffs. For example, one could imagine a privacy focused rollup or even a corporate rollup (maybe VISA could operate its own rollup) which might have additional requirements to participate. The tech is also very new at this stage, in particular with regards to zero knowledge rollups that operate on zkProofs. We don't really know what the limits of zk technology are, and it's best to allow for multiple competitors to experiment and try different approaches out.
The nice thing about rollups is that although they trade-off some centralization for scale, you can always escape hatch to layer 1 by posting a fraud proof of validity proof and your funds are secured by L1.
Eventually rollups will begin to decentralize themselves, as is the plan for some of the most promising rollups such as StarkNet and zkSync. Right now the sequencers and provers are operated by the founders of these organizations, but they will split these off into a federated network over the next year.
Those 3rd party L2 providers are inherent to Ethereum's scaling roadmap. No need to ossify them or integrate them tightly with the protocol layer, they can remain modular and in free market competition on the smart contract layer.
Can you elaborate on how this is implemented? I find the actual EIP language to be obtuse.
Are they changing how calldata is processed? or are they changing an ordering mechanism? or are they privileging calldata to have lower gas cost via a simple conditional statement? something else?
It's simply privileging calldata with lower gas (changing a constant) plus adding a cap on the maximum amount of calldata that can be in a given block to prevent crazy state bloat. It's effectively baking in L2s as something the protocol wants to encourage by giving them a "tax break". Note that the gas market is still in effect, so this is "tuning call data against the other costly aspects of ETH tx processing" rather than some "magic price reduction".
Gas fees have been too high since Cryptokitties in 2017. Actually, even before Ethereum launched, anyone with a calculator could have predicted the scaling issues. After all, bitcoin was never built for millions of consumers to transact onchain.
And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.
I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.
So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.
This eip goes against everything you are claiming. It is pro-user and pro-scaling. The current eth mainnet was always essentially a proof of concept. Everyone knows the goal has been to find a scaling solution. L2s and rollups are that solution. Sustainable scaling was never guaranteed and yet now, due to some incredible brains, we have the technical roadmap worked out and coming to fruition. This eip lowers costs for L2/roll-up users it is completely pro-user and not to just make existing eth holders richer.
I get what you mean, but I do see a difference between scaling strategies. Imagine if Facebook adopted multi-layer scaling, like Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing. Students and alumni of elite universities would have access to Facebook Layer 1, but non-elites would be stuck on Layer 2. Does that sound awesome to you?
To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.
> From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly.
So we replace a (in-theory democratically accountable) central bank with a cabal of banks?
How is this better? This is like replacing the Federal reserve with the agreements of LIBOR traders.
Probably more nuanced than “destroyed.” The entire value of the coin didn’t exist like 6 years ago and is now $500B. The burned coins are just going to be factored into the price in some way.
It was first proposed by Vitalik in 2018 but lay dormant for a while before being picked up by community members and being prepared for inclusion. IIRC it took about 2 years to get it into production.
Besides the technical changes it's interesting as the most vocal proponents weren't developers and as such its inclusion was truly driven by the community.
> As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.
Solana is open source. What is stopping a community, perhaps even a DAO, from forking all the hard work those VCs so generously open sourced?
(side note - I fuckin love open source for this reason)
Afaik solana full nodes require basically datacenter level networking (unless you have like gigabit fiber at home) while more people could run an Eth full node at home on cable internet. That's one aspect of a sacrifice in decentralization in the Eth vs Solana debate.
Good question. I don't have the answer, but maybe it has to do with the market game theory? I mean, there's easier ways to make money. Like, copypasta smart contracts from Ethereum to EVM-compatible chains. But, to fork Solana or another distributed state machine that's currently in beta and quite unstable (and has an unintuitive programming model) is to take on immense complexity, and therefore liability.
If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.
If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.
Does anyone know where the actual latest design for ETH 2.0 sharding is? Whitepaper/repo because w/o sharding you can't scale layer 1, and if you don't scale layer 1, you can't address layer 1 gas costs.
I've always been of the opinion that their sharding effort would fail, but I want to stay well informed. Sharding POS is very hard because the "trilemma" is correct for POS (kadena.io / explorer.chainweb.com being the example that the trilemma is solvable if you stick to POW).
Layer 2/zk-rollups will only help successful dapp devs lower their gas costs (see: DyDx). It doesn't relieve the pressure on layer 1 as other apps/patterns move in until a new equilibrium is reached.
Ethereum continues to promote designs that lower fees in the future. Users anticipate a more usable system in the future, even though it has very high fees at the moment.
If Ethereum was not working on lowering fees, users would quickly migrate to another chain.
from a guy that many years ago said that the more code a consensus algorithm has - the worse it is. and we've only seen more and more code, turning the knobs and coming up with workarounds, year after year.
Agreed. And it just gets worse. The latest generation of 'VC chains' are more complex again. One popular one even failed to produce blocks for 17 hours.
Even when >50% of the miners were kicked out of Chinam Bitcoin didn't fail. It took a few weeks of slower blocks until the consensus agreed on a lesser difficulty.
Complexity is the enemy of security. These systems just grow more complex and fragile as they progress.
They just grow faster and get patched quickly. Bitcoin has had brief and temporary service failures a variety of times early on. A brief issue during a chain's first year of operation really isn't as damning as you think it is.
There is a lot of immediate commerce right now which is awkward to disrupt, but just patch and move on.
nope, same standard as i have for bitcoin. consensus algorithm barely changed in 12 years. the only known consensus-breaking bug that caused a chain rollback was found long before bitcoin had any significant financial relevance in the world. developers have extreme propensity for slow, gradual, cautious changes, especially when it comes to consensus algorithm, realizing that "moving fast and breaking things" is not a great basis for stable system and a horrible precedent for future development/governance.
Well the person above was originally talking about Solana
And I thought I was responding to a no-coiner, but it seems you are conflating everything not-bitcoin together
Blocks stopped briefly and it was inconvenient because there is a bit of commerce since the adoption curve is way faster, we can just say “thank you bitcoin for paving the way” and move on. That circumstance is just not different enough.
Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap explicitly tries to push code out of the consensus layer into the smart contract layer, in contrast with other chains that try to make the chain's entire feature set monolithic in a single protocol spec. This calldata change is a very small consensus code change in comparison to the bigger picture here.
And yes, they have been turning the knobs year after year, but turning knobs is a lot different than adding more and more code.
Yes, it hasn't taken any shortcuts or sacrifices to the blockchain trilemma. They have the best balance of decentralization, scalability, and security.
Solana has made many sacrifices to decentralization and basically requires a super computer to operate a validator. As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day which is unacceptable.
Cardano is just a hot mess. They spent years in research to "fo things right from the get go" and since their launch have had a ton of issues and realized why ethereum made the decisions they've made.
Polkadot is pretty much following ethereum's rollup design but their downside is it's pretty much a vc chain like the others.
Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc). They come in with a huge marketing budget to mislead the likes knowledgeable mainstream, but the builders see through all that nonsense and as Palmer says, "developers, developers, developers".
> Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared, just like nobody misses the previous wave of "eth killers" (eos, neo, tezos, lisk, etc).
I used to believe this, but despite the inferiority of these chains I no longer think this is the case. I think NFTs are the use case a lot of Crypto was looking for, and there are now a significant number of people making their living via NFTs on chains like Solana & Tezos. The volume from their activity alone (not to mention defi) I think is enough to sustain appetite towards developing these chains in a direction for the better. Wether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but certainly plenty of folks would miss these chains if they went belly up.
> NFTs are the use case a lot of Crypto was looking for
I have a hard time taking this sentiment seriously.. NFTs seem like vaporware. Their demonstration of ownership is unenforceable on chain nor off chain.
I'm sure we can discuss this at length... but regardless of how you view NFTs as a representation of ownership, my main point is that enough people use the NFT ecosystem on these chains to the point that it gives these chains importance.
NFT as a governance token solution HEAVILY needs decentralisation and trust onchain to fullfill its usecase.
Solana, Bnb etc are tbh a joke, most validator nodes are under one team’s control, why call it a cryptocurrency when your “blockchain” is essentially under control of one team.
I get your point, a ton of money is being made with nft art , etc on those chains, but its mostly snakeoil salesman stuff.
Eth atleast has real potential to be something more then that. Idc if it takes 10 years, might as well wait and do it the right way.
> As a result the chain is so centralized it actually went offline for a day
While the post-mortem [1] is lacking (mostly in terms of follow-up), my read was that the network was simply overloaded to the point where validators were crashing, not that some critical centralized component went down. I'd imagine there's similar DoS attacks one could execute against the older chains (but probably much harder to find given their maturity).
I suppose if you wanted to make an argument against decentralization on Solana it would be that it seems low-probability near-term that there would ever be an alternative validator implementation due to the complexity of Solana and VC-funded nature of the main one (it could always be forked though, I suppose).
> my read was that the network was simply overloaded to the point where validators were crashing, not that some critical centralized component went down
Solana has chosen to use the same underlying infra for consensus as for transactions. Validator votes are simply transactions in a block. This means there is no natural QoS to prioritize consensus traffic from regular traffic. This lead to massive issues when Solana underwent its first real-world load test.
> Yes, it hasn't taken any shortcuts or sacrifices to the blockchain trilemma
Eth has sacrificed on scalability. Whether you find that the balance is subjective.
Cardano's issue to this point is that their eUTXO model and their smart contract tooling is a bit too esoteric for the current crypto community. What you get in return is deterministic and verifiable smart contracts. Whether that will matter in practice time will tell
Eth didn't come up with the rollup design.
I agree with your Steve Balmer take, but the rest of your assessment is something else.
> Nobody would miss these chains if they disappeared
I think you are vastly underestimating some of these alternative chains and the amount of development effort that some of these ecosystems have been building this year. As more people use blockchain technology people are just not going to be able to afford Ethereum unless they solve their gas and scalability issues sooner than later. I can't even recommend using ETH to any of my friends or coworkers because of how financially impractical it currently is. Solana being out for a day is pretty trivial compared to being able to actually use the chain now instead of the theoretical future where ETH's zkRollups, and their various L2 solutions are in place.
I'm pretty sure the only people that can actually use ETH are people that got in years ago, or have institutional money. That is not a chain I can sell to people despite me really enjoying the tech and thinking it is a cool product.
Seriously. Imagine trying to convince someone that isn't in crypto already to use Ethereum when transactions cost upwards of $100. It's absolute insanity, and not worth the cost currently. I really hope ongoing development efforts work out sooner than later.
The amount of brainpower needed today to _prove_ that a smart contract does exactly what is intended doesn't scale to a whole financial system. The existing financial system gets away with having "oracles" called judges (in a court). I think we can graft this onto Ethereum by accompanying each smart contract with some natural language that can be interpreted as its "intent", and in the event any bug in the code violates this intent we can bring in a human judge who can decide whether to fork or not.
On the other side, I think any sufficiently strong theorem-proving strategy will resemble simply limiting yourself to a non-Turing-complete subset of the language.
If a smart contract is small enough in scope then eventually you can be reasonably sure it’ll behave the way it’s supposed to.
With enough of these contracts you start to build a financial operating system that can be relied upon.
However I do think the human component is underrated in the crypto space. I imagine the future will consist of humans being injected into the financial operating system itself instead of bypassing it like you describe.
Once you start combining "small" contracts (e.g. they call into each other), you have a large program one way or the other. The combinatorial explosion pretty much guarantees there will be some input combinations that lead to unexpected consequences, even if you claim to know everything there is to know about each particular component. If there's a way to get around this, I'd be very, very interested in reading about it.
Predicate transformer semantics[1] are an approach that would work with sufficient discipline. Given that the cost of a bug is potentially losing everything, maybe smart contracts will finally be impetus developers need to learn enough of the predicate calculus to compose programs that behave as specified.
That's just half of the problem though. The other half is knowing that your specification doesn't admit any unpleasant behaviors. I expect some combination of KISS and model checking is appropriate.
Thanks for the reference. I'm currently studying type theory and the Curry-Howard correspondence, and this seems to be an interesting bridge between that and traditional imperative programming.
As for the second part, do you know off the top of your head if [not checking whether the proved behavior admits abuse] was the issue that resulted in "millions of dollars" worth of coins being stolen in the various debacles we hear about? I have an inkling that almost every time, it's actually this.
The only one I ever looked into was the 2016 DAO[1] hack and I didn't get the impression that it was because they didn't check their code for spec violations, rather they just designed a system that allowed someone to do something bad. I have no idea how we can prevent this, even with all the power of theorem provers.
It sounds like you might appreciate Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics[1] which is a rigorous formal treatment of the subject. Dijkstra's earlier work, A Discipline of Programming[2] lacks mathematical rigor, but is still quite pragmatic and is arguably a much gentler introduction to the subject. It also focuses more on real-world use cases.
Like most of his work, the general theme is "how can we avoid making a mess of things unnecessarily?" Avoiding needless complexity is clearly the programmer's greatest challenge.
Nobody has yet convinced me that the effort spent on blockchain smart contract whatever would not have been better spent un-pretentiously re-writing traditional banking infrastructure with lessons learned in the last 40 or so years.
Good luck with that. Myself and others have lost hope that the current system can ever change. You're never going to convince the people in power to rewrite the current system.
It means that a single transaction can be very computationally expensive, compared to a Bitcoin transaction that is very simple, meaning that it's exponentially harder to scale Ethereum than to scale Bitcoin.
One straight forward one is their scaling. They would bash ethereum's developers saying how stupid they are and cardano spent years on research papers without any practical experience to come up with off-chain payment channels. Just recently (a week ago?) They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better and that they'd start working on those. But with their speed of development, grifting founder, and more interest in marketing than building, I don't expect them to finish any time soon or be relevant.
The project is kindof finished isn't it? The founders managed to scam their way into a top 5 coin for a while, got rich AF, and never had to actually deliver any sort of product. Their ineptitude got laid pretty bare when their "smart contracts" were finally released, and only able to process something like one transaction per day or something absurd like that.
As far as I can tell, even the cringey youtube livestreams have ended at this point. I genuinely don't think that anybody involved with that absolute disaster of a project care. They'll just release more declarations that things are coming eventually, obfuscate everything with more confusing sounding names for things, make more vague promises about "Africa", and deliver nothing while enriching themselves.
> only able to process something like one transaction per day or something absurd like that.
why are you blatantly lying?
[1]: To split the logic across different branches and enforce more parallelism, it is essential to build DApps and other solutions using multiple UTXOs. This provides benefits in terms of scaling, just like developing Bitcoin services prerequisites splitting one wallet into sub wallets. DApps built on Cardano are not limited to one transaction per block. In fact, the block budget (that is the maximum number of transactions it can hold) allows the execution of hundreds of simple transactions and several complex scripts. However, the eUTXO model allows spending a transaction output only once. Given that users can face contention issues trying to access the same UTXO, it is important to use many different UTXOs. Note that this is important unless such a design would benefit from a strict ordering of clients. Sets of UTXOs can be used to implement design patterns that include semaphores. In addition, different users can interact with one smart contract without any concurrency failure.
Maybe it changed? I know when the smart contracts were finally released, there was a bunch of discussion about only being able to do one transaction per day, or per block, or per wallet per day, or per wallet per block per day or something ridiculously small like that.
It doesn't matter if it's one transaction per day, or one transaction per block per wallet per day or whatever they eventually got it to. That is way, way too slow.
(I could be wrong about this. I pulled the ripcord on cardano when I started seeing the extremely bizarre youtube livestreams about vaccines, and the bizzare, 5 hour word salad interview with lex friedman.)
What you're talking about is the concurrency "issue". It was a bad designed app.To code Smart Contract on Cardano you have to learn the "Cardano way" of building Smart Contracts. It's like multi-core systems : you have to learn how to take advantages of the several cores.
Cardano does have significant benefits though. For example native tokens rather than wrapping things in smart contracts saves a lot of space, computation, and expense.
Maybe! I do trust in Cardanos robustness so there could be a move towards them if something goes wrong in an Ethereum fork, or if the fees don’t come down. However I think Ethereum may be the JavaScript of blockchain - imperfect, but the winner nonetheless.
I don't know when this would happen - it'd be a big deal, like a fork I think. The point is on Ethereum we might create an ERC-20 token for NewCoin that wraps it and then all of our interactions with NewCoin is via smart contracts. On Cardano these would be native to the chain in the same way as Ether is on Ethereum (or Ada on Cardano). If you need a layer of logic over the token you'd need to introduce a smart contract but for things like transferring, getting supply, etc, it's the same as doing that for Ether on Ethereum - they're essentially primitive functions on the chain.
> They finally submitted and confirmed rollups were better
Again, it's a lie : Can you provide a link to an official statement made by IOHK about this ? No, of course : Input endorsers is the official path for scaling, it's not a surprise : they are part of the first 2016 Ouroboros paper. There are some experiments on Rollups because it can have use cases, but there are no official statement about using Rollups.
They’re working on Marlowe and Blockly to reduce that barrier though. I spoke to Charles a while back and got the sense he’d have used a different language if he’d done it again.
On Ethereum, Solidity has access to the global state of the blockchain and it's very hard do create secure program with it. Cardano's language Plutus has only access to UTXOs ( bitcoin way to manage account) and store a local state in it. It's really functional programming applied to the blockchain space. The language is functional ( Haskell subset ) and the ledger too. One advantage of this design is that fees are deterministic. For a given transaction input you will have exactly the same fees.
Ethereum is slightly less decentralized than Bitcoin when it comes to node count, but that’s about it. Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only chains with high number of nodes.
Ethereum has 10 different, independent teams working on their own clients, far more than Bitcoin, so we could say that the development is way more decentralized.
> Ethereum and Bitcoin are the only chains with high number of nodes.
Am I looking at the correct source here? [1] It says 2997. This is lower than the total number of Cardano staking (validating) pools, which is currently 3135 [2].
Ethernodes.org crawler isn’t capturing all the nodes, but supposedly it’s either getting updated or a new one is coming out that should see all of them.
There are many, but the most obvious is that Ethereum is the oldest of the turing complete layer 1 blockchains, and it has an order of magnitude more core protocol developers and indie developers building on top of it. Same is true for developer tooling.
The question in my mind is: will Ethereum's network effect buy it enough time to scale and get to an optimal "ETH 2.0" state where fees are negligible and throughput is high? Or will it be supplanted before then? My money is on the former, but it's certainly a question worth pondering!
3. Ethereum is far more secure in an adversarial environment. 51% attacking Ethereum would require more capital than performing a similar attack on other chains.
Solana, beyond the extreme hardware requirements to run a node, is deeply economically centralizing. It's more or less a standard delegated proof of stake stake system with one nasty twist - validators have to pay transaction fees to vote. At current sol prices this is about $100,000/year. This has some very big implications in a dpos system. In dpos, a validator gets validation slots proportional to their delegation and staking level, and you earn the transaction fees paid in those slots. More delegation, more slots, more fees earned from users and from other validators voting on the correctness of the chain. The net effect is that if your validator has a delegation level below the average of all the validators, you will bleed out your capital over time to validators that have an above average delegation. To add a nastier twist to this, the Solana foundation in their generosity, contributes delegation out of their Sol allocation to validators that they like. Essentially, the foundation gets to decide who will be a profitable validator and who won't.
It’s more like social networks. Sure you may have a similar (or better) Twitter but everyone is on Twitter so it’s hard to get any traction.
If you do capture a significant number of real users than yes there’s not much difference.
People will mention the fees or efficiency but the fact is a lot of the underdogs have not had to face any actual load so it’s easy to brag about low fees.
Anyone can fork a coin and add a few minor features.
Yet, the fork would have nearly zero value. And history has shown that coins with near zero value very soon have no users and die.
That tells you that it isn't the features that give a cryptocurrency its value. The value is in the pool of users who believe it has value. The features of a cryptocurrency are in many ways irrelevant.
I'd like to believe that. But then I see projects like Bitcoin Gold
that just replaced the PoW and enriched the authors with 100,000
coins and somehow it's valued at nearly $1B...
I think many people assume there will be a multi-chain universe, with some chains emerging as good for some applications and some for other. There will be private chains, too, and all these data need to be communicated across chains, which is already happening.
I can't imagine that a clear winner would emerge any time soon or maybe ever.
Interop between blockchains seems doable (I guess Coinbase, more or less, does this). At that point what makes one cryptocurrency worth more than another?
The applications and communities built on top of each network as well as the security profile of the chain.
There are thousands of applications that live on Ethereum, that have smart contracts controlling their treasuries, that have access to interoperable liquidity, that have established history and user base, etc.
I love the idea that a fundamental economic problem (high demand) can be met with another half-baked technological solution. It's crypto comedy gold. Hint: speed up the timeline for the deployment of ETH2 / Proof of Stake if you want to lower gas fees - a.k.a. increase capacity beyond 10k transactions a day.
Sharding is a very simple to understand concept and it's used in database systems today. Effectively, Ethereum's long-term data will become split across 4 partitions (which function as one chain). A validator would not be required to validate data on all 4 shards, they could validate across just one.
Ethereum's execution will continue to be serialized while the data layer is parallelized.
This allows the chain data to grow without excessive hardware requirements.
sharding is a pipe dream. literally no different to just throwing your hands up, spinning up few more parallel ethereum networks and proclaiming you've solved a scalability problem.
> Notably, EIP-4488 is a "short-term" remedy for Ethereum's sky-high gas fees.
No, it would not be a remedy at all. The high gas fees wouldn't be reduced a lot by a reduction of the calldata gas cost.
> Arguably, the main update that is expected to solve Ethereum’s scalability issue is the shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.
Another bad take. Changing the consensus engine does nothing for gas fees. Sharding is expected to do that but that is not planned to be introduced in 2022.
What EIP-4488 would do is reduce the cost of Layer 2 (L2) solutions like rollups. Those need to commit their state hashes to the L1 blockchain. But those are currently somewhat expensive as well because of the high calldata gas cost.
EIP-4488 might help with gas fees indirectly if it encourages the usage of L2 solutions which will then have less gas costs to commit to L1.