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I mean, I know it is cheaper because the block time is less than a second and the block size is ~20 k transactions. And I also know that it is fast thanks to Proof of History. But what are the lower-level details of these properties?

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The speed is not due solely to Proof of History - that's just one aspect of it. There are other smaller pieces such as Sealevel, Turbine, GulfStream, higher validator requirements, etc that all add up to give you the performance that you see.

I'd recommend taking a look at: https://medium.com/solana-labs/7-innovations-that-make-solana-the-first-web-scale-blockchain-ddc50b1defda

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When invoking a Solana smart contract, the accounts the contract will touch must be specified in advance. The contract does not have access to the global state as an Ethereum smart contract has for example, this means some things you can do on Ethereum you cannot do on Solana. The advantage is that Solana can execute all contracts in parallel providing there is no overlap of accounts, whereas Ethereum must execute all contracts sequentially. This is one element that explains the massive throughput numbers quoted for this chain.

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Solana can execute thousands of transactions in parallel. However, Ethereum is single-threaded, it has limited capacity to handle the transactions. If there are a lot of transactions at the same time in Ethereum, this will cause slower transactions. So if someone wants their transaction executed first, they will pay more gas fees. Gas fees in Ethereum vary based on the demand for block size. In Solana, there is no competition to get their transaction confirmed first. From this: why-are-solanas-gas-fees-for-transactions-so-low

The higher block time and block size are why the Solana network offers an incredibly low transaction fee of just $0.00025 per transaction. This price makes Solana one of the blockchains with the cheapest transaction fees.

  • The downside of low fees is it makes it easy for bot spamming and attacks.

https://beincrypto.com/latest-solana-network-outage-arbitrage-bot-spam/

https://www.cryptonewsz.com/sol-plunges-as-bots-spam-solanas-candy-machine/

From 04-30-22-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report-mitigation

An enormous amount of inbound transactions (6 million per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100 Gbps of traffic at individual nodes. There is no evidence of a denial of service attack, but instead evidence indicates bots tried to programatically win a new NFT being minted using the popular Candy Machine program. Since the mint price had a fixed floor and not a dynamic Dutch auction, the first user to call the mint received the NFT, which created an economic incentive to send a huge number of transactions in hopes of winning the mint.

The specific reason why consensus stalled was due to validators running out of memory and crashing. The root cause of the high memory usage was insufficient votes landing to finalize earlier blocks, preventing abandoned fork cleanup. The number of forks validators had to evaluate exceeded their capacity to do so, even after a reboot, necessitating manual intervention.

Because of that Anatoly proposed to increase the fee prices early this year and there was some update around june: https://www.techcircle.in/2022/06/17/solana-s-new-gas-fee-will-not-make-the-entire-network-expensive

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Solana's speed and cost-efficiency are not achieved only through Proof-of-History there are a number of them; 1.Tower BFT for optimized consensus. 2.Gulf Stream for pre-validation of transactions. 3. Sea-level for parallel transaction processing. 4. Pipelining for Concurrent transaction stages. 5. Cloudbreak for efficient state management. 6. Turbine for sharded block propagation. 7. Archivers for decentralized data storage.

check out the link below for more information https://solanafloor.com/news/a-comprehensive-technical-overview-of-solana-as-explained-by-streamflow

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The main reason behind Solana being this fast, and scalable with such cheap transaction fees is the consensus mechanism that Solana uses which is Proof of History.

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Solana has a different consensus system called Proof of History vs Proof of Stake or Proof of Work - this reduced memory consumption helps Solana be highly scalable. This deep dive between layer 1 blockchains could be helpful - https://www.alchemy.com/overviews/layer-1-blockchain-ecosystems-overview#7

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    Proof of History is not a consensus mechanism in Solana, and it does not replace Proof of Stake. Solana does use Proof of Stake for consensus. It uses Proof of History for clock synchronization (not for consensus), which takes up significant bandwidth (and elapsed time through communication roundtrips) on other L1 chains.
    – AllBlooming
    Commented Jul 27, 2022 at 6:15

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