Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

thousandetherhomepage.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 126 posts

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#51

Post by yyyyip »

notahacker wrote: post #29
aaron-lebo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we not seen the effects of this already? YouTube, Kickstarter, Twitter have already made it possible for nobodies to became massively famous. Most of them are mediocre. It seems to me the surest way to guarantee mediocrity is to incentivise blatant money grabs. Here's a million a dollars for your billboard of ads? That's not going to build the future we are hoping for, it's gonna make someone else in 10 years ma…

Plus the punks that skip traditional routes to mainstream attention end up on major record labels just like the original elites anyway. Alex Tew, the original Million Dollar Homepage creator, runs a VC funded startup in Silicon Valley. Social media stars tend to make their money shilling for big brands. I can't think of any internet stars I'm particularly desperate to see go into politics, and that's not because I'm…

Slate star codex/Scott Alexander is a good example of internet-driven democratization of opportunity. A trainee psychiatrist from somewhere in the Midwest, the quality of his blog posts on economic and social issues has led to him being one of the most influential thinkers around at present.

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#52

Post by ontoillogical »

runeks wrote: post #50
strictnein wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing what is interesting about this, from a technical point of view. This is neat, and novel: > "Ads displayed above are loaded directly from the Ethereum Blockchain. This Decentralized Application (DApp) does not have a traditional backend. No MVC framework, no SQL database. It's just a JavaScript application served statically from Github which speaks to the Ethereum blockchain using Web3.js." That…

That is cool! But, if this DApp thing takes off, how will Ethereum nodes be compensated for essentially acting as a free CDN? It works fine as long as there aren’t a lot of users, but once the user count become substantial, Ethereum nodes will need compensation in order to serve the amount of data needed. Is there a workable solution for this?

The images are actually hosted over http (or ipfs or swarm). The former requires you to find a host, and the later two have ways of compensating for traffic :)

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#55

Post by archagon »

OK, so I basically know next to nothing about cryptocurrencies. I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up. At some point, unless drastic steps are taken, this will presumably result in a "heat death of the universe" scenario. (I guess the software is constantly getting updated and there's battle over forks etc., but this can only go so far, right?)

To what extent does this happen with Ethereum, and won't it mean that distributed applications will basically become unworkable at some point in the future?

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ontoillogical wrote: post #2

Author here. My friend and I have been doing some smart contract audits, and we wanted to build a fun contract ourselves. We remembered the Million Dollar Homepage from 12 years ago, and decided to reimagine what it would look like today _on the blockchain_. Not an ICO, more of an experiment / art project. We present, the Thousand Ether Homepage: https://thousandetherhomepage.com/ The smart contract itself: https://e…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#59

Post by virtuexru »

archagon wrote: post #55

OK, so I basically know next to nothing about cryptocurrencies. I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up. At some point, unless drastic steps are taken, this will presumably result in a "heat death of the universe" scenario. (I guess the software is constant…

> I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up.

Completely untrue. Difficulty is proportional to the hash rate. Transaction time varies as a result of multiple factors.

Some reading and historical difficulty/confirmation time data:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa... https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation#Confirmation_Times

Re: Show HN: The Million Dollar Homepage as an Ethereum Smart Contract and DApp

#60

Post by terhechte »

earlybike wrote: post #57

But where exactly is the image data stored?

If you read the source code (https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5fe93ccfec708145d6278b0c71ce...), you'll see that it only stores links to images in the Ethereum blockchain. Thus it is the buyers responsibility to make sure that the image stays. The best way to do that would probably be to store it on IPFS or something else.

[Edit] The (probable) reason why they're not storing the images on Ethereum is that that would (currently) be way too expensive. There's things like Swarm [1] which will allow storing data next to Ethereum in a much cheaper manner.

[1] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/375/what-is-swa...

Post reply on HN