goatmeal on Nostr: the truth hurts. layered architecture scares people away. new people are completely ...

the truth hurts. layered architecture scares people away. new people are completely repulsed by it. yes, the tech is superior. layered architecture is the best way to scale a blockchain while preserving decentralization. but from the end user's perspective, all it does is make the product worse. why do I have an onchain balance, a liquid balance, this weird thing called an invoice, and some bullshit ecash? this does nothing to make the product easy. let's just leave the coins in a custodial account and let them sit there. and that's what the super-majority of bitcoin users are doing now. they don't own any coins. the layers are pointless if most people refuse to touch them.

the only other significant cryptocurrency with layered architecture is ethereum. don't start rolling your eyes just yet. we can learn something here. ethereum wants to preserve your ability to run a pruned node on a laptop, and excess activity is offloaded onto rollup L2s, which are being improved and made safer in incremental upgrades. but now the user has to choose between a rollup called arbitrum and a rollup called base, and they might accidentally use mainnet instead where it's still very expensive. this is still a little bit simpler than the mess of solutions that are built on top of bitcoin but for a new person it's still too fucking hard.

the new users are shunning ethereum and its layers in favor of big block solana. why? because solana really is all one thing. they don't give a rat's ass if only a thousand people bother to run a solana validator on expensive ass hardware. they just want it to be easy. it's impossible to accidentally use the expensive network instead of the cheap network. the technology is objectively dumber and less efficient but it doesn't matter because it never ever compromises on the user experience. having one less choice in the wallet software is literally all it takes to siphon off the ethereum userbase.

I am very invested in learning about the different kinds of building blocks that can be used to construct layered architecture. it's very important to me if a rollup or drivechain works better than payment channels. but I'm still not the person you need to appeal to for mass adoption. unless you are ready for custodians to control everything or for people to just leave and use altcoins, you need to make sure that the layered architecture is invisible to the user. do not ever try to sell layers to normal people. they don't want to fucking hear it. they need to feel like it's all one thing.