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

It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 121 posts

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#51

Post by askmike »

soco wrote: post #40
askmike wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the whole world uses DigitalOcean for NFTs sure, but maybe we end up in a world where there are many providers. And not one that controls everything (by which point it's not centralized). Similar to right now many crypto is stored in exchanges but not one exchange holds all.

I can hack into those providers as well, right? My worry was that the chain of trust is broken by definition - as soon as you store things outside the chain. I really don't understand why one would dilute the value proposition of the blockchain like that. If I have a Ferrari I shouldn't put monster truck wheels on it only because it can't drive over speed bumps - it kills the "ferrari-ness".

> My worry was that the chain of trust is broken by definition - as soon as you store things outside the chain.

From the chain perspective they never really leave the chain. They are either locked (most L2 solutions such as Bitcoin Lightning) or they are held by someone else (most centralized custodians, including exchanges). So the worst that can happen is that the locked/held coins get "stolen".

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#52

Post by josephg »

soco wrote: post #40
askmike wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the whole world uses DigitalOcean for NFTs sure, but maybe we end up in a world where there are many providers. And not one that controls everything (by which point it's not centralized). Similar to right now many crypto is stored in exchanges but not one exchange holds all.

I can hack into those providers as well, right? My worry was that the chain of trust is broken by definition - as soon as you store things outside the chain. I really don't understand why one would dilute the value proposition of the blockchain like that. If I have a Ferrari I shouldn't put monster truck wheels on it only because it can't drive over speed bumps - it kills the "ferrari-ness".

> My worry was that the chain of trust is broken by definition

As I understand it, the idea is you put the data itself off chain but keep hashes on chain. Anyone who downloads the data can verify it by checking that the hash matches what is stored on chain.

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#53

Post by inter_netuser »

malikNF wrote: post #49
xvilka wrote: post #21

This is why Cardano[1] might be interesting with their Plutus [2] and Marlowe[3] languages. [1] https://cardano.org/ [2] https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus [3] https://alpha.marlowe.iohkdev.io/

Why is this comment so heavily down-voted? The parent provides an alternative blockchain, that has been really well engineered by a world class team of developers. Is decentralized, has the ability to write smart contracts, has already implemented some of the features eth 2.0 is promising, currently sitting 3rd place in terms of market-cap right behind Ethereum (which we are talking about here). Some of you people wh…

Reading through comments it seems this forum has bought in very heavily into eth and doesn't like challengers that could potentially bankrupt their investment.

It's amazing watching this unfold in real time, greed really does change people.

People contort themselves into pretzels to deny the obvious, all common sense immediately goes out of the window, sudden onset of selective memory, etc.

Just buy the coin you hate.

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#54

Post by grey-area »

inter_netuser wrote: post #41
grey-area wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a contract between two counterparties need to use a network with thousands of nodes at all? What enforcement benefit does the network provide? I'd contend it's entirely superfluous to a smart contract system, which could just offer building blocks from a trusted third party instead for constructing contracts, and that trusted third party could also notary the transaction and provide arbitration. All of these…

That's because they are not contracts per se, smart or otherwise. They are autonomous agents that act as your counterparty.

Wow, that sounds fancy and sounds almost like an AI counterparty when you put it that way. Did you mean counterparty (the other person in the transaction) or trusted third party (the third leg of most transactions, like lawyers who negotiate then witness a deal). My understanding was smart contracts attempt to replace the trusted third party with a trusted system.

But are they autonomous and do they really have any agency outside the very limited confines of a scripted response to known situations (like if x happens send x ETH)? Are they able to send contract disputes to arbitration or courts in case of disagreement? If not that doesn't strike me as particularly useful.

I do really like the concept of standard contracts though which everyone agrees to just use - could save a lot of lawyer fees on contracts for M&A for example which really should have been standard components plugged together with very little customisation but instead take 6 months of bickering and use copy-pasted contracts inherited from 100 former deals at those lawyers with all sorts of archaic language. If I were in that space I'd be trying to attack that problem and partner with a law firm to take on either very small contracts like wills or very large contracts like M&A in a given vertical.

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#55

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #36
askmike wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other blockchains technology that support higher throughput are providing exactly the same capabilities for a few pennies There are many networks that claim to do this, but we have yet to see how this is going to play out. A big question here is if these networks are in practice as resistant to attacks and decentralized as (post DAO) ETH.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#56

Post by askmike »

williamtrask wrote: post #38
askmike wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you deploy it it will be there, forever running on a decentralized immutable computation machine which is made up of nodes and miners all over the world being incentivized a certain way. That kind of certainty has a beauty to it.

There’s little to indicate it will be there forever. Today’s computers are tomorrow’s stone tablets.

For sure, I guess you can say it will there for as long as at least one person in the world (or in space, not sure on your timeline) keeps running the node software. It doesn't rely on any companies or currently existing groups of people.

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#57

Post by baby »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #7

These sorts of extreme costs are inherent to any trustless decentralized system like Ethereum. Storing and verifying contracts across tens if not hundreds of thousands of nodes is not free.

That’s why I’m really curious about Algorand. I think they did two interesting things, although I haven’t really looked at it, but they:

- removed execution from consensus. I believe consensus just gets the execution result from elsewhere and thus doesn’t get slowed down by execution (the bottleneck when I was working on libra/Diem)

- have a random committee that verifies the execution, as opposed to everyone on the network like in Ethereum

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#58

Post by pa7x1 »

soco wrote: post #25
proto-n wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake has little to do with transaction costs. The roadmap to scaling is sharding + layer 2 tech (optimistic and zk rollup, some of it is already live like arbitrum).

But storing things off-chain kinda kills the entire concept, doesn't it? If I hack into DigitalOcean I can mess everybody's NFTs by tampering with one database.

> But storing things off-chain kinda kills the entire concept, doesn't it? If I hack into DigitalOcean I can mess everybody's NFTs by tampering with one database.

It's not about storing off-chain, you compute off-chain and post to the network a cryptographic proof of the computation.

Rollups provide something akin to lossless compression proofs of computation. You execute the computation off-chain with high throughput and post a proof to the Ethereum network, this proof contains everything necessary to verify the correct execution of the computation. Sounds mind-blowing but we can thank smart mathematicians for figuring out the cryptography that makes it possible.

This means that we can scale off-chain while enjoying the security guarantees of the blockchain.

These techniques allow scaling the network throughput towards the 1000-4000 transactions per second range. Which together with data-availability sharding will push the throughput towards the 100K transactions per second range.

To be noted that this is not anymore a theoretical construction, these things are live running today on Ethereum. You can check the different solutions as well as detailed explanations of their trade-offs, limitations, etc... Here: https://l2beat.com

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#59

Post by baby »

inter_netuser wrote: post #12
lalaland1125 wrote: post #7

These sorts of extreme costs are inherent to any trustless decentralized system like Ethereum. Storing and verifying contracts across tens if not hundreds of thousands of nodes is not free.

why does one need to execute the contact on thousands of nodes, when a verification proof (e.g. pinocchio) would be sufficient?

It doesn’t but this is how Ethereum was designed: everybody re executes.

Re: It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

#60

Post by trhway »

satellite2 wrote: post #37

That's cute. Now if you want to add a few modules like KYC, make it upgradeable (need to deploy a proxy and a proxy admin) and gasless (deployment through a forwarder) and you'll be around ~3000$. I mention those modules as those are the ones needed to provide the same services as a notary. This raise the issue that ETH is starting to no longer be competitive with the establishment. It's a bit aggravating as for many…

>is starting to no longer be competitive with the establishment

the establishment has scale of billions of users and decades or even centuries over which it has evolved its machinery. Doing something "on a computer/over internet" allowed to beat a lot of incumbents in less technical areas, while in this case the incumbent - the fintech - is itself one of the first adopters of the various "on a computer/over internet" tech.

So just doing it "on a blockchain" may be not enough. Especially given that, like negative feedback in control systems, the blockchain has that limiting control loop of "higher demand and wider adoption -> higher transaction fees" which naturally results in curbing of the demand/adoption. I.e. economy of scale works in the opposite direction on blockchain.

Post reply on HN