Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Author: Doug Colkitt, founder of Ambient
Doug Colkitt, founder of the decentralized trading protocol Ambient Finance, recently wrote that in the foreseeable future, the plan to accumulate L1 value through DA seems to be a "dead end."
In response to this, Ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans posted a response and discussed Ethereum’s L2 revenue and Blob fees, assuming that the DA cost rose to about 50% of the total L2 revenue.
Based on this assumption, Doug Colkitt wrote again and refuted it, believing that DA cannot be close to 50% of the L2 fee. The following are the content details:
Ryan Berckmans’ analysis is great and the most compelling reason to be bullish on DA. But personally, I think it is absolutely impossible for DA to be close to 50% of the L2 fee. For structural economic reasons, sequencers will always generate greater value than DA.
Blockchain is basically the business of selling block space. Since the block space is not easily interchangeable between chains, it is close to a monopoly.
But not all monopolies can earn excess profits. The key lies in price differentiation for consumers. Without price discrimination, monopoly profits would hardly be higher than commodity profits.
Think about how airlines differentiate between price-insensitive business travelers and consumers looking for cheap airfares. Or how the same SUV model is sold under the Audi and Lamborghini brands at vastly different prices.
Priority fees are an amazing price discrimination mechanism in blockchain. The fees paid by the highest priority transactions are actually orders of magnitude higher than the median. 
Both L2s and Solana achieve high throughput and high revenue by using sequencer priority as a form of price discrimination.
The fees paid for marginal transactions are very low, thus enabling huge TPS. But transactions that are not price-sensitive are squeezed, paying for most network fees.
Below is the distribution of 5 blocks randomly drawn from Base L2. This is a clear Pareto distribution, which makes price discrimination very effective.
PANews Note: Pareto distribution means that through market transactions, 20% of people will occupy 80% of social wealth. If transactions can continue, then "there is a general inconsistency between cause and effect, effort and gain." A typical situation of balanced relationship is: 80% of the gains come from 20% of the efforts; the other 80% of the effort only brings 20% of the results."
The first 10% of transactions pay a 30% fee. The bottom 10% of transactions pay less than 1%. 
The problem is, while the sequencer makes a lot of money from this, the DA layer can't because it doesn't have the ability to price discriminate.
This ultra-high value arbitrage pays the same fee for Ethereum DA as a 1 Wei spam transaction because they are settled in the same batch.
Since the value of marginal transactions is very low, high TPS can only be achieved if the cost of the median transaction is close to zero. But with DA, the payment is basically the same for every transaction. The DA tier can have both high throughput and high revenue. But you can’t have both.
This makes rollups essentially impossible to scale without causing a revenue collapse for the Ethereum network.
The rollup-centric roadmap is fundamentally flawed because it abandons valuable parts of the network (ordering) in the belief that it can be earned back through worthless parts (DA).
The author was initially bullish on a rollup-centric roadmap because he believed that any reasonable person would recognize the economics of price discrimination and that it would parallel L1 expansion.
High-value users who are not price-sensitive will use L1 for its traceability, security, and reliability. L2s, on the other hand, focus on marginalizing low-income users. Therefore, Ethereum will still receive significant sequencer rent.
But Ethereum leadership has repeatedly emphasized that L1 is effectively dead as an application layer and will never be able to scale. As a result, users and developers have responded very rationally, and the L1 application ecosystem is now dying, taking Ethereum network revenue with it. 
If you consider the long-term value proposition of ETH to be that of a monetary asset, then it's still possible. Let more people own ETH and make it a form of currency. Subsidizing L2s that add zero value to the base layer should help achieve this goal.
But if you believe that the long-term value proposition of ETH is network equity in a widely used protocol, then you need value accumulation.
Clearly, there are structural problems with Ethereum’s development due to poor economic assumptions.
(The above content is excerpted and reprinted with the authorization of our partner PANews, original text link)
Statement: The article only represents the author's personal views and opinions, and does not represent the objective views and positions of the blockchain. All contents and opinions are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors should make their own decisions and transactions, and the author and Blockchain Client will not be held responsible for any direct or indirect losses caused by investors' transactions.
"The dispute over ETH's development route: Rollup as the center may have structural economic flaws" This article was first published on "Blocker".
