Trying to scale an L1 blockchain with new layers is avoidance, not solutions

Some of us have always pointed out that layer 2 blockchains don't solve the problems of an L1, not for Ethereum and certainly not for Bitcoin or any other L1 blockchain out there.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the original vision of layer-2 scaling “no longer makes sense,” arguing that many L2s have failed to properly inherit Ethereum’s security and that scaling should increasingly come from the mainnet and native rollups.

“We need a new path,” Buterin said in a post to X on Tuesday, arguing that many layer-2s have failed to decentralize and that the Ethereum mainnet is now sufficiently scaling, with improvements coming from gas limit increases and soon native rollups. — Cointelegraph report

I find it rather so interesting that the moment Ethereum seems to gain meaningful improvements to transaction costs and speed, that Vitalik finds it necessary to call L2 blockchains useless.

Bend the story how ever you want, but his post is corporate language for "you L2s haven't solved none of Ethereum's problems and you're all centralized."

And he isn't wrong.

He isn't wrong because the concept of a layer 2 blockchain scaling an L1 was always flawed, but it just sounds marketable for VC funds, maybe?

Think about it. Imagine that the foundation of a house is bad, is the solution to build another house over it?

Here are two ways that would look:

Firstly, we could directly place the new house ontop the first, and what we'd get is two houses with one weak or bad foundation.

The second way it could be executed is that the second house would have its own foundation over the other house.

That would generally mean that it won't be affected by the bad foundation of the first, which would be true, but we shouldn't forget that the whole point was to solve the problems of the first house, and this simply doesn't do that.

To bring this to the blockchain world, the first means of execution is an example of a layer 2 blockchain that is completely dependent on the L1 for everything from governance to security that it has very minimal or zero control over anything on its own, but hey, it lacks the bad foundation at its own layer right?

The second would be a L2 that is not greatly dependent on the L1 for anything, but it's still positioned as a layer over the L1, so it just some centralized alternative network over the flawed first chain.

There are no executions where the layer 2 can solve the problems of the layer 1 because those problems need to be solved at the L1 level.

Everything else is a third-party, regardless of dependency or interoperability, both these things are simply bridges that can be gotten rid of.

When we try to approach fixing a problem that is fundamental to an L1 blockchain by introducing an L2, we are not solving problems, we are avoiding them and effectively creating additional problems.

L2s have always and will always be stand-alone networks that simply bridge to whatever L1 they want. They can be decentralized on their own of course, but the concept that their decentralization or security will be tied to an L2 is just crazy thinking because outsourcing security is just welcoming compromise and believing you're secure.

Posted Using INLEO