Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum

I continue to see promise in Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1) versus Layer 2 (L2) network. I think the idea of one blockchain "winning" is not likely, and would likely be a bad thing. Ethereum's approach is much like the Internet itself, a network of networks. This blog post is exploring how much more scale is needed in Ethereum in order to support this vision, and in the short term doesn't making L1 gas fees super low actually discourage L2 adoption? As usual I found Buterin's analysis logical and I particularly liked the different use cases he highlights.

With today's technology (ZK-SNARKs), this is a cost of ~500,000 per L2, and so Ethereum would only be able to support 36 L2s (compare: L2beat tracks about 150, including validiums and optimiums). But what's more important is that it is too economically unviable to do this: at an approximate long-term average gas price of 15 gwei and an ETH price of $2500, the cost per year of submitting is 500000 * 15 * 10**-9 * (31556926 / 12) * 2500 = $49M per year . If we used aggregation protocols, the cost could again drop, in the limit perhaps about 10,000 gas per submission because the aggregation mechanism is somewhat more complex than just updating a single storage slot. This would make submission cost about $1M per year per L2.

So yes, Ethereum needs to get at least another order of magnitude cheaper and faster to support this. The example of a L2 going rogue and all assets needing to be moved off of it is an interesting one. Reading this continues to make me wish that Gnosis would transition to a proper L2.