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It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum

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

#101
post #15

For those not that involved in this stuff, ETH2 fixes this issue by switching to proof-of-stake. There are already billions being staked in ETH2 validators today in preparation for the switch and Vitalik has written and talked a lot about it if you’re curious. It’s been making progress and Vitalik is a smart and capable leader of the project imo. High gas fees in the current system are arguably a sign of high demand.

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).

Why does PoS have little to do with transaction costs? I thought it enabled massive throughput without the need for block computation? Am I wrong?

Layer 2 is a hack given the current constraints, but it comes with its own trade offs that I think are worse.

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

#102
This is why Polygon/Matic, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and other scaling solutions are popping up.

Many are literally forking popular DApps like Pancake Swap and just shifting the underlying chain to one of the better scaled solutions.

Because you can "peg" an asset from ethereum to an equivalent on BSC and then swap back, I don't think the "many-smartchains, one-main-chain" approach of Polkadot or Cardano will ever be sustainable long term. Simply no point.

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

#103
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS is much cheaper computationally than PoW so it absolutely does increase the throughput of a network.

Not really, the computational cost of PoW is not related to the throughput. PoW is not the work that the nodes put into processing transactions, PoW is by definition a useless computation, and it being useless is neccessary for the game theory behind it to work. You can have the same amount of PoW on very little or very high throughput networks, the two are almost completely orthogonal.

You're right that the specific computation of PoW is supposed to be useless for game theory reasons [0], but the computation requirement itself still delays updating the network (while block size constrains how many transactions can happen between each block update). It takes time for those updates to get published back across the network.

If you drop the computation requirement and move enforcement to validators and slashing you can easily 10x-100x this without off chain layer 2 hacks. I was originally skeptical of this because it gives up the computational security guarantees of PoW in favor of game theory guarantees, but I was ultimately persuaded after reading more about it.

I think there's a place for both, digital gold like BTC with very low throughput and slow transactions for holding value and rarely moving currency, and ETH (and tokens backed by ETH's protocol) for everything else. With maybe some special situations for something like Zcash.

[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/97030/beginners-...

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

#104
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of leadership is why BTC elevated a con artist pretending to be satoshi and is still arguing over block size. I think hard improvements require effective coordination and someone who can pull that off. Vitalik is part of the reason I think ETH is more likely to be successful than competitors in the space (in addition to their head start).

Having strong leadership isn't a substitute for having clear rules and stipulations about the different outcomes when taking people's money. Right now the ETH 2.0 staking rules are "you'll get it back when 2.0 is ready, trust us". There's also the fact that strong leadership trades away most of the decentralisation. I'm sure this software project which has changed scope and has been delayed many times and is led by a…

Yeah - ETH2 is a high risk long bet on the future of ETH, that risk is why the rewards for doing it are pretty high right now. I haven't personally staked anything because of that risk.

My point was billions of dollars of wealth are already being staked so there are a lot of people that have already bought in. This doesn't mean it is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean there are pretty strong incentives in place for it.

I suppose the other argument would be an ETH2 failure would likely devalue ETH too, so I'm not sure how much holding ETH is a hedge against failure.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of leadership is why BTC elevated a con artist pretending to be satoshi and is still arguing over block size. I think hard improvements require effective coordination and someone who can pull that off. Vitalik is part of the reason I think ETH is more likely to be successful than competitors in the space (in addition to their head start).

ETH had only one war so far (ETH vs ETC) where Vitalik won the leadership role. But at some point governments will want to control Vitalik (which isn't that hard, as he's just 1 person). I believe that something like the blocksize wars with BTC is inevitable in the ETH space as well.

Vitalik's role is dependent on consensus of most of the community - he's not a dictator. He won ETH vs. ETC because the majority of the community thought he was right.

If that changes then he'll lose his influence (imo), but from listening to him I think he's a pretty earnest guy and I've been impressed [0].

[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/intellectual-honesty-c...

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

#106
post #100
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may have differing concepts of what a certificate of authenticity is. To me, the certificate of authenticity is what guarantees that it can't be copied. That is the NFT with the uri that lives on the blockchain.

You are right, it cannot be copied, and the URI lives on the blockchain. But the resource pointed by that URI does not. So the server doing the redirection via that JSON can redirect to whatever else, because even in the JSON we only have the asset URI, and a blockchain navigator can only check whether the JSON is according to the schema. So yes, nobody can steal your NFT, but your NFT might tomorrow be instead of a…

[deleted]

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

#107
post #100
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may have differing concepts of what a certificate of authenticity is. To me, the certificate of authenticity is what guarantees that it can't be copied. That is the NFT with the uri that lives on the blockchain.

You are right, it cannot be copied, and the URI lives on the blockchain. But the resource pointed by that URI does not. So the server doing the redirection via that JSON can redirect to whatever else, because even in the JSON we only have the asset URI, and a blockchain navigator can only check whether the JSON is according to the schema. So yes, nobody can steal your NFT, but your NFT might tomorrow be instead of a…

The recommended way to handle this is to use a URI which uniquely identifies the content, such as an IPFS address. Then, while the data is still stored outside the blockchain, anyone who has a copy can trivially prove that it's authentic and you aren't reliant on a particular server. (Just make sure you save/pin a copy of the file on your own system so it doesn't disappear.)

I would agree that an NFT pointing at some plain HTTP(S) URL on some random server without so much as a hash to identify the original content is pretty much worthless.

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

#108
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These sorts of extreme costs are inherent to any trustless decentralized system like Ethereum. Do you have a demonstration of that proposition? I see no reason why that needs to be true at all. There's a big gap between "free" and "extreme costs".

As long as storage, electricity, and network costs are somewhat in the ballpark of where they are now, and interest in eth is sufficiently high, there's no way around it. You can't just put something on thousands of devices, indefinitely, for low to no cost. In fact, it _has_ to be at least more expensive that whatever the cheapest highly reliable storage provider offers. Otherwise I'm going to be using everyone's ma…

If one wanted to attack the network, and had the resources, could they scale up the network nodes they had control over to starve participants by making it too expensive to perform operations?

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

#109
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, it cannot be copied, and the URI lives on the blockchain. But the resource pointed by that URI does not. So the server doing the redirection via that JSON can redirect to whatever else, because even in the JSON we only have the asset URI, and a blockchain navigator can only check whether the JSON is according to the schema. So yes, nobody can steal your NFT, but your NFT might tomorrow be instead of a…

The recommended way to handle this is to use a URI which uniquely identifies the content, such as an IPFS address. Then, while the data is still stored outside the blockchain, anyone who has a copy can trivially prove that it's authentic and you aren't reliant on a particular server. (Just make sure you save/pin a copy of the file on your own system so it doesn't disappear.) I would agree that an NFT pointing at some…

Okay this is the first time I hear about the IPFS bit. Somehow all I read is missing this point - but it makes fully sense, thank you!

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

#110
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.

The point is that you don't have to pay for its continued existence, in direct contrast to putting a compute instance on AWS or any other cloud provider.
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