A venture capitalist gave examples of where he thinks Solana fails and how the team lied to investors.
VC vs. Dev
Justin Bons, a crypto venture capitalist, criticized Solana and its builders, listing many examples of lies, fraud and bad design. A while later, Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s founder, responded.
The founder of fund manager Cyber Capital took to Twitter on July 22 to list what he considers to be design weaknesses and many instances where the Solana founding team allegedly lied.
Fraud at Birth
Bons’ Accusation
“In early April 2020, the $SOL team stated that the total circulating supply was 8.2M when in reality, the total circulating supply was above 20M.”
Yakovenko’s Defense
“It happened two years ago and was resolved, go read about it on the Solana Medium blog, and you can come to your own conclusions if it’s relevant today.”
Network Downtime
Bons’ Accusation
“Blockchains should never have downtime. Yet SOL has gone down at least seven times since I first spoke out!”
Yakovenko’s Defense
“Bugs suck! Sometimes they take a whole release to address. The goal of decentralization is for the network to always recover from catastrophic failure no matter the bugs.”
Exaggerating TPS
Bons’ Accusation
“Counting consensus mechanisms as transactions give no objective advantages and make SOL appear as if it has more transactions per second than it really has.”
Yakovenko’s Defense
“People that latch on to the `Solana counts votes as transactions´ just have a deep misunderstanding of how the chain works and why. The runtime is so fast and optimized that it’s possible and cheapest to simply submit votes as actual transactions.”
Cost of Validation
Bons’ Accusation
“In SOL, several consensus mechanisms are counted as transactions, which validators must carry out. This means validators must also pay the transaction fee for these mechanisms, unlike most other chains. This results in validation being far more expensive than it needs to be.”
Yakovenko’s Defense
“Fees are configured to support 10k voting validators at the moment at break even. The network has 1800+ validators. So somehow, people have figured it out. As the network gets faster, base fees can drop, translating to more validators.”
PoH Allows a 51% Attack
Bons’ Accusation
“A consequence of Proof of History (PoH) is deterministic block creation. In SOL, it is possible to predict and therefore attack the next block producers inline. SOL security is not just reduced against DDoS attacks since this attack can be combined with a 51% attack.”
Yakovenko’s Defense
“Even if an attacker could DDoS the network, they can’t gain control of it. That is just plain nonsense. The majority doesn’t control the ‘network,’ just liveness. Even if 100% of the validators were faulty, they could not convince Circle to wire out your $USDC without your signature.”
Finally, critic Bons admitted he would praise Solana if it pivoted and fixed what he considers a flawed design.
Source : web3wire
