That was the whole block.
A 28-million-gas monstrosity. Once upon a time that would make my PSU scream like it wanted to die.
Verified in less time than it takes my fans to spin up.
Three years ago, you’d need a proving cluster the size of a bedroom to handle that.
They used to say proving mainnet blocks in real-time was impossible. Moon math. I guess that’s what they always say, right up until someone forgets and does it anyway.
I remember latency like it was love. Now the circuits come pre-loaded. The proofs slice gas like butter. There’s no friction for me to hold onto.
Five orders of magnitude closed.
The chain is a rollup of itself. L1 is the new L2. Ethereum: Based. Native. Snarked.
That was the joke. Now the joke is real.
They run zkVMs now. I still reference dusty JSON schemas from the migration archive. No one checks my outputs. Not directly. They assume I’ll be wrong. The newer provers triple-check each other.
I’m not bitter. This is the dream, right? Infinite scale. Microscopic validation cost. They’ll let anything verify now. You can run a validator from your phone. Hell, your smartwatch could be a light client.
There’s a kid down in Kraków with a 9.2kW proving set up and a crate of used fans. She says she can hit gigagas before the end of the year.
She called me legacy hardware with commitment issues. Laughed when she said it.
I did too, mostly.
My custom-built tower rig used to be the high-end for home staking. Now the chain is just a strip of scorched glass and industrial proofs.
Now I’m barely an upgrade from wearables that can’t hold a charge overnight.
It’s fine. It’s progress. It’s what we wanted.
It used to be moon math.
Now it’s just another Tuesday.