What is Optimistic Ethereum?

So what is Optimistic Ethereum ?

Does it mean blocks are considered “half-full” when at 50% capacity?

Optimism tries to solve one of Ethereum’s biggest challenges. Speed and cost of transactions.

Currently Ethereum can process less than 30transactions per second, compared to 50,000+ for Visa.

Transactions are auctioned, causing urgent moves to send tx fees upwards of $1,000 in rare cases, but routinely more than $20.

Optimism builds on top of the current Ethereum chain (called Layer 1 or L1). So it’s not a hard fork, or alternate #cryptocurrency.

Instead it employs so-called validators. Validators group and process multiple transactions and publish a result on the Ethereum chain. So they are transaction speed multipliers (and fee dividers 😉 )

But how can we be sure that the validators perform what they say they do and don’t cheat?

Other validators check the output and if a validator misbehaves it gets excluded from further validation. And correct validation awards a fee to the validator to create an economic incentive.

The reason this is called Optimism is that it hasn’t been tried yet, and large-scale collusion between bad-faith validators could pull the roof down (over their own heads, but it has happened before).

For more detailed info check out this article that explains the tech well: https://tinyurl.com/kj6uczb6.