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Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

vitalik.eth.limo

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Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#401

Post by pcthrowaway »

kemotep wrote: post #393
pcthrowaway wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely bitcoin diehards out there who look at the price of everything relative to bitcoin. From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer it if the currency used by their country of residence increased in value relative to other global currencies, rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary countries, even that would be a major improvement). Although stability relative t…

But the argument is that the grandparent comment is making is that you should build your application on the ethereum network, eth is the “oil” of this machine, and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is. So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be high…

I don't agree with this, but also think you're arguing a different point.

My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.

> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service

I mean this is exactly how many of these things work. Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on Steam.

Even if the price was the same in the currency you're using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.

> and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.

And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who purchase ETH, the higher the value is.

But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#403

Post by xotesos »

bawolff wrote: post #142

> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build with this broader ecosystem in mind. I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as th…

To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.

A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.

People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.

There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#404

Post by kemotep »

rglullis wrote: post #394
kemotep wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should you not want the price to be stable? If an arcade game’s price went from 50 cents per play to 5 dollars per play because more people are using a delivery application on the other side of the world that doesn’t make much sense from a consumer perspective.

If the stakes of the arcade game were so high that people wanted to have its logic running on the base-layer - e.g, high prizes for winners, or the possibility of using power ups obtained in other games - then the price to play would have to depend on the network activity. But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.

But does the layer 2 coin have a stable exchange rate with the layer 1 coin?

And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as cryptocurrency does?

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#405

Post by rglullis »

kemotep wrote: post #404
rglullis wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the stakes of the arcade game were so high that people wanted to have its logic running on the base-layer - e.g, high prizes for winners, or the possibility of using power ups obtained in other games - then the price to play would have to depend on the network activity. But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.

But does the layer 2 coin have a stable exchange rate with the layer 1 coin? And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the…

Why not just use a stable currency to price your "game token"? Once you are out of the base layer, there is no need to tie any transaction costs to the base layer token.

So, in your example, the game company could easily just say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to play".

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#406

Post by pcthrowaway »

rglullis wrote: post #392
pcthrowaway wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly. I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. They do all have different (proof of stake still) consensus…

Let's get Polygon out, because they are not a base-layer blockchain. > a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has a different set of costs for the operations. If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent amount, then yes, transact…

Transaction volume meaning.. the number of transactions processed by the network?

If you meant monetary volume, you should have used a different term than one which is well-recognized to refer to the number of transactions (both in and out of blockchain applications of that term)

edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to think EVM networks will have a straightforward relationship between the number of transactions and the cost denominated in their gas token.

I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely a function of network constants and usage, which have more to do with what people are willing to pay to get their transaction into a block.

Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's basically a floating multiplier which adjusts automatically based on the "fullness" of the most recent however many blocks, but the principle is that you need some form of congestion control

In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to get a transaction included.

So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many networks can handle as many transactions as ethereum while having much cheaper transaction fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing against

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#407

Post by rglullis »

wslh wrote: post #397
rglullis wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked for "source" because I know that this is "repeated ad nauseam in the Internet" while being provably false. The very first result on your google query is a bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this: The Ethereum network started off with a supply of 72 million Ether (ETH). Eighty-three percent of that (60 million) was distributed to people who had purchased ETH in a crowd sale that was conducted in…

You know that Algorand and Solana supports a bigger number of TPSs that Ethereum and with lower fees and different consensus mechanisms, if you don't know that I am talking about someone that tries to show expertise but don't have any real one. It is a fact. Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.

I also know that Solana had frequent outages and issues where they could resolve their transaction sequence, because their hardware and connectivity requirements make it prohibitive for "casual enthusiasts" to run a node.

And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#408

Post by wslh »

rglullis wrote: post #407
wslh wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that Algorand and Solana supports a bigger number of TPSs that Ethereum and with lower fees and different consensus mechanisms, if you don't know that I am talking about someone that tries to show expertise but don't have any real one. It is a fact. Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.

I also know that Solana had frequent outages and issues where they could resolve their transaction sequence, because their hardware and connectivity requirements make it prohibitive for "casual enthusiasts" to run a node. And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.

Again you are not following the argument, you cherry picked Solana, Algorand didn't have any issue. Follow logical argumentation please...

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#409

Post by ForHackernews »

everfree wrote: post #286
ForHackernews wrote: post #174

> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but…

Typically when there's a highly technical topic on HN that I don't understand, I don't comment on the thread about the domain jargon going over my head. I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry? Gaussian splat rendering? We are deep into angels dancing on a pin territory. Just use jQuery." I just don't understand the mentality of comments like yours, I suppose.

I suppose the difference is that in most technical topics the complexity is either inherent (quantum mechanics just is this way) or exists for a good reason (consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem).

IMHO this is not true in cryptocurrency, which is more akin to a self-sustaining pyramid scheme where the complexity serves to obscure the reality of the thing and draw in more rubes. All the nonsensical jargon around NFTs was trying to hide the fact that paying money for a URL to a jpeg of a monkey is stupid. As best I can gather, all this new "layer 2" nonsense is to try and hide the fact that blockchain is a slow, crappy database.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#410

Post by evantbyrne »

godelski wrote: post #358
evantbyrne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a…

I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.

Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
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