> Elon: Blockchain twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network, unless those "peers" are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.
Anyone able to evaluate this comment? Is this another "poorly batched 1000 RPCs slowing down home timeline" remark?
It's true, and the RPC comment is also very plausible
It's definitely not as ridiculous as what lots of experienced engineers are oddly saying
e.g. simply open up Twitter in Chrome's devtools and look at the networking tab -- I get 148 requests that finish in 6.3 seconds
That is very plausibly "1000 poorly batched RPCs" that makes Twitter slow in other countries -- if it's 6 seconds for me, it's easily 20, 30, or 60 seconds for others
It will be shocking to me if some executive attention on latency can't halve it, in short order. The problem with latency is that no one team is in charge of it -- every team is incentivized to use as much latency budget as possible to ship their feature.
Larry Page harped on at this at Google for a decade, until he kind of gave up / moved on, and Google became nearly as slow as every other website.
So Elon is absolutely doing the right thing with respect to latency -- he's not wrong, and he's not micro-managing.
----
Yes Elon is not infallible -- he made flatly wrong claims about self-driving for years, despite experts in the field telling him otherwise, to his financial benefit. And Tesla is being rightly investigated for those claims (years too late, probably)
It doesn't mean that Twitter isn't slow as hell for extremely basic reasons
I made a similar comment on Reddit and got voted down because Elon fanboyism has apparently turned into Elon hate. People really love to "pick a side" and ignore the facts on the ground.
Simple changes like enabling HTTP/3 and IPv6 would dramatically improve performance in locations outside of the United States. Google developed those specifically to work around performance issues in places like India, or mobile networks pretty much anywhere. Since Twitter is mobile-first, it surprises me they haven't jumped on board with these kinds of advancements.
What were all those thousands of people doing over there!?
Theoretical TPS limit for mainnet and L2s isn't enough to support the scale of twitter. The writes will get expensive very fast unless you offload that and only send a batched proof. Putting actual content on blockchain is a non-starter as well.
Most of the blockchain based social graphs end up using centralized indexer.
Everyone is also dependent on centralized RPC providers for querying and sending transactions since it requires a lot of resources to maintain your own.
So peer to peer isn't possible at their scale depending on how you interpret it.
Anyone able to evaluate this comment? Is this another "poorly batched 1000 RPCs slowing down home timeline" remark?