ETH Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

There is something about Ethereum’s L2-centric roadmap that I think we need to discuss more honestly.
The usual argument goes like this:
Ethereum L1 is slow and expensive because it prioritizes security and decentralization. If you want fast and cheap transactions, use L2s.
Fair enough.
But then we should also be honest about what that trade-off means.
When people criticize Ethereum for low throughput, the answer is often:
«“You have to include L2s. Ethereum already scales to huge transaction volumes through rollups.”»
When people criticize Ethereum for high fees:
«“Use an L2. Transactions cost almost nothing.”»
But when an L2 has a sequencer outage, bridge exploit, upgrade-key problem, governance failure, or some other security issue:
«“That’s an L2 problem. Ethereum L1 is still secure.”»
Do you see the asymmetry?
If L2 throughput counts as Ethereum’s throughput, and L2 fees count as Ethereum’s low fees, then L2 security assumptions and failures should also be part of the discussion about Ethereum’s security.
You cannot aggregate the benefits and disaggregate the risks.
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L2s do inherit important security properties from Ethereum — but not all of them
This distinction matters.
A properly designed rollup can use Ethereum for data availability and settlement. Validity proofs or fraud proofs can prevent an operator from simply inventing arbitrary state transitions.
That is genuinely valuable.
But that does not mean using an L2 is identical to using Ethereum L1.
Depending on the L2, users may also depend on:
- centralized sequencers
- upgrade keys
- security councils
- bridge contracts
- proof systems
- forced-withdrawal mechanisms
- data availability assumptions
- governance processes
These are additional components and therefore additional failure modes.
An average user does not understand all of this.
They hear:
“This is Ethereum scaling.”
They see ETH and USDC in their wallet.
They are told that rollups inherit Ethereum security.
So if something goes wrong, telling them afterward that:
“Ethereum itself was never compromised”
may be technically correct, but it misses the point from the user's perspective.
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Cheap and fast should not automatically mean better
Crypto seems increasingly obsessed with transaction cost and TPS.
$0.001 transactions are treated as obviously superior to $0.01 transactions.
But blockchains exist because we are willing to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for properties that centralized databases cannot easily provide:
decentralization, censorship resistance, credible neutrality, independent verification, and minimized trust.
If all we wanted were extremely fast and cheap transactions, centralized systems could already do that very well.
So every time we move execution away from the most decentralized layer in order to make transactions cheaper and faster, we should ask:
What trust assumptions did we add in exchange for those savings?
Saving a few cents is not automatically worth introducing another sequencer, bridge, governance key, security council, or proof system between the user and the base layer.
For some applications it absolutely is.
For others, perhaps it isn't.
That should be a user choice, not something hidden behind the simple statement that “L2s inherit Ethereum security.”
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I think Ethereum should be much more ambitious about scaling L1
This is why I am increasingly skeptical of treating L2s as the default destination for ordinary Ethereum users.
Ethereum should absolutely keep L2s.
Different applications need different trade-offs, and L2s can provide enormous throughput and experimentation.
But the goal should not simply be:
L1 = secure but slow and expensive
L2 = where everyone actually uses Ethereum
The better goal should be:
Make L1 as fast and inexpensive as possible without materially sacrificing decentralization, and use L2s when users genuinely need additional scale or specialized functionality.
Developments such as ePBS, BAL, parallelization, statelessness and ZK-based verification potentially make this increasingly realistic.
If Ethereum can dramatically increase L1 capacity while keeping independent verification cheap, why shouldn't we?
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Security is the product
The most valuable thing Ethereum has is not TPS.
It is not $0.001 transactions.
It is the fact that no single company, government, sequencer, or validator can easily control the system.
That property is extremely difficult to build and even harder to rebuild once lost.
So I think Ethereum should be careful about optimizing the ecosystem primarily around making transactions cheaper.
There is a point where reducing a transaction from ten cents to one cent provides very little additional benefit to the user, while even a small increase in trust assumptions can matter enormously when billions or trillions of dollars eventually exist on-chain.
The long-term question should not be:
“How cheap can we make transactions?”
It should be:
“How much throughput can we achieve while preserving the strongest possible security, decentralization and independent verification?”
And when comparing Ethereum with other chains, we should use the same accounting on both sides.
If we count L2 throughput when measuring Ethereum's performance, we should count L2 trust assumptions when discussing Ethereum's security.
If we exclude L2 failures when evaluating Ethereum's security, then we should not use L2 throughput to advertise Ethereum L1's performance.
Count the benefits and the risks at the same boundary.
Otherwise we risk optimizing away the very thing that made public blockchains valuable in the first place.

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