That's true, H-E is rather limited when it comes to the information we can find on certain operations.
Have you spent much time with ... Whatever the name is of this new initiative I seem to have seen somewhere about an entirely new platform for L2 tokens on Hive? If so, what are your impressions of it?
Do you mean VSC? No, I haven't. Hopefully, it will overcome some of the limitations of Hive-Engine.
Personally, I keep looking for an announcement that, at long last, our Hive blockchain has added true smart contract functionality at the L1 level of the blockchain.
I don't think we will have them on L1. The chosen way seems to be on L2 and more teams seem to have them on their roadmap for L2, besides VSC. Blocktrades is one of them.
Yes, I think VSC sounds right. I know nothing about it, but I have seen mention of it made here and there.
Hmmm. Maybe. But if Hive is ever going to have any of the functionality even remotely close to say ETH and its smart contracts, it has to be L1. Then, on top of that functionality, any L2 token has what it needs.
If that day ever comes, Hive Engine would become obsolete, I believe.
Note: I intentionally say if that day ever comes, because I have been reading about this coming, at some point in the future, since I became active on Hive in early 2018, closing fast on 6 years ago ...
I could be wrong, but that is my current understanding.
ETH has many issues (especially with the high fees) because of having smart contracts at L1 and having all the nodes to run all of them, regardless of the type of smart contracts. That's why all the L2 EVM chains came into existence which had the main mission, at first, to be the low-fee alternative to Ethereum.
Understood. And long known.
Do you agree without some of the functionality of ETH, these blockchains would not exist? Certainly not in their present form?
None of the copycats would exist without EVM, and L2 chains wouldn't exist without Ethereum.
But that doesn't mean smart contracts at L1 was a good idea. They just can't reverse course from this software architecture, too much has been built using L1 smart contracts on Ethereum and the EVM copycats. And they probably won't admit smart contracts at L1 was a bad idea, just like bitcoin maxis don't see anything else but bitcoin.