The fleet analogy doesn’t hold. I used the term “lockstep” for a reason.
Fleets of cars are not in lockstep. A degraded fleet is worse than no fleet here, there is no 2 are down, 8 are up here.
A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare. Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
Anyway, we should leave it here. This debate will be referenced in n years as other debates of in previous cycles on here. I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.
> A degraded fleet is worse than no fleet here, there is no 2 are down, 8 are up here.
Ethereum runs at 100% throughput with 100% of its security guarantees, all the way up to a 33% outage of its validator set. So it stays running at 100% capacity even in a 3 down, 7 up scenario. This has been the case since EIP-1559 was implemented in 2021, and it has been empirically tested.
That's more favorable than Bitcoin, which degrades in capacity (though not security) during partial outages. A 30% miner outage means a 30% reduction in transaction throughput.
The entire point of blockchains is that they are able to thrive and run robustly in a "2 down, 8 up" scenario. That's the sole property they sacrifice so much to achieve compared to centralized database software.
> A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare.
Every client is drop-in interchangeable. You don't need different skills to run each one, any more than you need different driving skills to drive a Honda than to drive a Toyota. The only difference is their internals.
To continue with your analogy, you start reaping the rewards of diversity when one car is revealed to have a manufacturing defect and the whole world needs a specific replacement part all at once. This isn't that uncommon. What happens is that the part goes out of stock.
Car diversity causes no maintenance nightmare, because good mechanics are everywhere and they can fix the 500 most popular car models very cheaply despite their varying internals. With Ethereum client diversity, if one of the ten clients breaks down, the fix arrives within hours, for free over the internet - no mechanic trip needed.
> Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
If an airline bought all Boeing 737 Max, which didn't seem like a bad choice at the time, their entire fleet would have been grounded from March 2019 to November 2020.
Southwest suffered a $435 million loss. Everyone who bet on a single aircraft, lost. Everyone who diversified their fleet pulled ahead.
> I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.
It's never a bad idea to burn an identity. But after these conversations, I'm not convinced of the reason.
A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare. Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
Anyway, we should leave it here. This debate will be referenced in n years as other debates of in previous cycles on here. I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.