# Anatoly Questions

How does Solana reach consensus?

Solana transactions currently cost 0.000005 SOL or about $0.0001 -- enough to be negligible. Who decides this fee? Do some transactions, like Ethereum smart contract ones, cost more due to larger size?

What role does Proof of History play in Solana's network?

Under what scenario would you imagine that there could be a contentious hard fork on Solana?

How practical is it for Solana as a network to be forked where the network of validators and complexity of code may make it difficult to continue?

Currently half the fees paid on the network are burnt. Where are these burn transactions found? Is Solana meant to produce enough on-chain activity that the portion of fees burnt exceeds the inflation?

What about privacy on Solana? What is the most promising way by which people can gain privacy on this account-based network where everything is so easily traced? Is a TornadoCash type mixer the only thing?

Solana block times are 400ms -- is this as low as a decentralised network can get given the limitations of physics on Earth with internet latencies? What more work is there to be done after Solana if it's stretched the limit in this regard for speed?

What do you say to people who insist that Solana is just a "VC-chain" or "datacenter-chain"?

There are dozens of Proof of Stake chains out there that boast of being more environmentalyl friendly and performant layer 1's for decentralised applications. To name some: Tezos, Algorand, Cosmos, Cardano, Polkadot, Tron, Terra, Avalanche. Where does Solana fit into all this? Is there a role for a bunch of these kinds of chains and then some interoperability to be done? Are some doomed to be irrelevant in the future?

Now that you have seen Solana live in mainnet for over a year, you've seen tons of apps running on it, what are the 2 main things you would have done differently with what you know now, 1 on the business dimensino, and 2 on the technical design / approach that Solana uses?

## Centralisation issues

EOS is widely considered a failure due to how it creates an oligarchy of a handful of validators that control the network -- how is Solana's PoS prevent this?

The cumulative stake on Solana at the moment is such that the top 16 validators can halt the network (https://solanabeach.io/validators). How much damage can validators do in this scenario?

How decentralised is the development on Solana? Can anyone just start joining the project by submitting code? In practice, is it the Solana Foundation devs just dominating development?

Vitalik said a couple years ago ( https://twitter.com/bchaininsider/status/1072872825294282752 ) that Ethereum would be fine without him at this point. How long does Solana have to go before the Solana foundation can die in a plane crash without it impacting Solana's viability as a network?

What is your team's plan to broaden the development and strategic vision of Solana such that it is no longer in the hands of yourself and the Solana Foundation?

In December 2020 there was a mainnet stall https://medium.com/solana-labs/mainnet-beta-stall-postmortem-ba0c6064e3 which required an effort to gather all validators to reboot the network.

How would a state actor most effectively compromise Solana? Via the developers or the validators?

Ethereum has been obsessed with various layer 2 solutions, and not raising the gas limit, in the name of being able to run an Ethereum node and maintain decentralisation. Solana boasts of hardware requirements for validators being able to be run on a "high-end gaming PC". Will this principle remain intact into the future?

## Serum

How dependent is the success of Solana on Serum?

What would happen if Alameda gave up on Serum, and stopped bootstrapping this major usecase?

How much influence does Serum have on Solana? If they want to have changes done to the network to accommodate them, how do you deal with that?

## Solana programs

How are Solana programs different from Ethereum smart contracts?

On Serum there is talk of using a "crank" to keep a program running. What is the analogue on Ethereum?

How do people trustlessly interact with Solana programs? Can a program be closed-source so you don't know what it does with the funds that are on? How can defi work on Solana without things being completely open-source?

When using a wallet like Phantom or Sollet to interact with applications like Serum on Solana, it feels very difficult to know whether transactions I am accepting are easy to verify. A screen pops up, shows some meta data, and i just sort of accept it, without knowing whether the payload is actually doing what I want it to do rather than just, say, transferring all of my SOL away.

## Solana Community

Do you think the Solana community is too token-happy? If the base assumption is that anything worth doing on Solana is monetisable, then what are the point of Solana Foundation grants? It seems every Solana project just launches a token anyway

Vitalik has often gotten triggered that Ethereum's main use case has been peer to peer penny stocks("If all that we accomplish is lambo memes and immature puns about "sharting", then I WILL leave."). Would you consider it a failure if Solana was only being used by people to do similar? What would trigger you to leave?

Solana's long-term "inflation" (rate of increase of SOL money supply) is 1.5%, slightly below the long-term inflation target of the Fed and ECB. (https://docs.solana.com/inflation/inflation_schedule) Is this meant to be adequate to cover validator expenses? How expensive does SOL have to be for this to be practical for covering hardware/electricity costs?

Can I become a validator right now? When I go to https://solana.com/validator-registration it says Registration is closed. Are there special permissions to join the network?

## Transparency

Solana recently raised 300 million -- what were the terms of this?

Transparency report stopped pubilshing after December 2020 -- whats the deal with this? https://solana.com/transparency

## Scalability

Solana is meant to handle 50,000 TPS at the moment. What if the world sent 1 million transactions every second to Solana right now? With no mempool or fee market, how are they prioritsed?

How does Solana scale if more and more projects onboard that are clogging the pipeline of transactions?

If more hardware is thrown at the network in order to scale Solana more and more, does that mean validators will require more and more hardware too? Making it more centralised?

With all the activity going through Solana, how big is the blockchain these days? How big will it continue to grow? how difficult will it be for a server to reliably serve up the data for people who want to be able to see their old transactions etc?

What does a validator need to store on its harddrive to trustlessly function, without having to store the whole blockchain?

Is Layer 2 scaling on Solana just not necessary, and is there no benefits to other things like sidechains?

## Misc Stuff

What is the point of Ethereum if Solana succeeds and scales?

Is the Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance (ESG) meme the end of Proof of Work? What about other consensus mechanisms like Proof of Space and Time?

# ALREADY ASKED [READ ABOVE QUESTIONS BEFORE ADDING ANY ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS TO AVOID DUPES]

How do you intend to deal with load growing faster than network capacity? Would you consider introducing a fee market?