Earlier, Plasma gave the feeling that it could change everything. In 2017, everyone was excited, saying 'Wow, thousands of transactions per second, Ethereum will no longer choke on gas, and we will finally build something normal.' There was a sense that this was a real breakthrough, and all ideas seemed absolutely feasible. Vitalik and Joseph Poon released the white paper, and then things started to take off. Everyone rushed to create child chains, Merkle trees, fraud proofs, mass exits... it sounded really cool.
And then real life began.
And here emerges what I consider the 'shadow debt of the system'. It manifests when you initially think that you just added one cool feature, but in reality, you signed up for lifetime cleaning after it.
Because in Plasma, a user cannot just put their wallet down and forget. They must watch if someone is trying to withdraw their money fraudulently. And believe me, it really stresses you out when you realize that without supervision, your money could go somewhere on its own. So theoretically, yes, there are fraud proofs. But in practice, it means that you either sit and monitor yourself or pay someone to sit and monitor for you. Or you hope that someone else will do it for free (spoiler: no one does). And it's because of this that I realized that decentralization is not about comfort; it's about responsibility.
And that's not all.
The child chain operator can be honest... today.
It can be centralized... well, almost always.
It can suddenly turn off, crash, forget to update the client, or just abandon the project, and then the fun mass exit begins, which clogs the main chain completely.
And now imagine that you are a dApp developer.
You have been battling the integration into Plasma for a year.
Then Ethereum goes to sharding, then to PoS, then something else changes — and you have to rewrite half of the project again.
And so every year.
And you still have to explain to users why their 'pending' has been there for 40 minutes, why the bridge is glitching, why 'your funds are safu' is not always true.
This is the same fatigue from constantly maintaining the ecosystem.
Most people who actually did something on Plasma (OMG, old versions of Polygon, Loom, etc.) quietly stepped aside at some point. Not because the technology is 'bad'. Just because it turned out to be too costly in human nerves and hours.
Now almost no one talks about 'let's make Plasma v2'.
Everyone has jumped into optimistic rollups, zk-rollups, validium, etc.
Why? Because at least most of the 'cleaning' is hidden inside the protocol, not resting on the shoulders of the user or dApp developer.
But even now, when we seem to have 'won' in scaling, that same maintenance debt hasn't gone anywhere — it just moved to another place; it seems to me it's like in life: problems don’t disappear; they just shift.
Now we are arguing about sequencer downtime, about centralized proposers, about data availability committees, about who will pay for posting data on L1...
So we just swapped one type of fatigue for another.
I believe that this is fundamentally important in blockchain: every time you make scaling cheaper and faster, you make it more expensive and complicated somewhere else. At first, this is not visible. Because a real solution is never without work, and in this case, part of the work is simply deferred.
Plasma was the first to show this very clearly.
So when someone says 'I wish we could go back to simple solutions', I smile and think to myself 'there are no simple solutions'; sometimes most of the difficulties appear later.
But that's a completely different story.@Plasma #Plasma $XPL
