So how can rollups win in the long run?To my mind, there are two ways: one is that a non-rollup sidechain catastrophically fails, and the industry learns a lesson à la Mt. Gox. And catastrophically fail doesn’t just mean “nodes can’t sync.” It means “the money is gone” or “the chain has completely halted.” That’s possible, but probably unlikely.So that leaves us with the other way: rollups have to actually become significantly better than the alternatives. Decentralization virtue signaling is not enough. For this, I personally only see one path forward, which is the promise of cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs.

(Note that ZK rollups don’t suffer from this issue, since their withdrawals are effectively instant.)