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Show HN: I Built Conway's Game of Life for Ethereum

5 points by basicallydan 6y ago

jhunter1016 6y ago
This is an interesting read. I just deployed my first contract to mainnet last week and despite my best optimization efforts, it still cost us almost $300. There is a lot of work to do still for Ethereum to be usable in a cost efficient way. In a perfect world, I can deploy as many contracts as I want for less than the price of cloud storage. Decentralization cannot be the only selling point. There has to be competition on price at some point too.
- basicallydan 6y ago
  Congratulations! I agree, it needs to be much more cost-effective. Someone In The Know told me that there's some attempts being made to make it more cost-effective with something called Optimism (https://twitter.com/optimismPBC https://twitter.com/optimismPBC) - but after looking into it, it does seem like you'd need to buy tokens. I specifically wanted this Game of Life to be driven by ETH! You don't need to share of course but I am curious - is your contract a more "legitimate" use than mine? Something which is a genuine utility? Thanks for reading btw!
  - jhunter1016 6y ago
    I think utility is all relative. Your contract has utility among those who want to use it. It’s sort of like what my dad used to tell me about baseball cards: they’re only valuable if someone wants to pay you for them. My contract was more traditional. We needed to mint NFT and sell them in a single transaction. Normally an NFT is minted and transferred then the user can sell it to other people later. In our case, we were selling a very specific asset that demanded payment before (or at the same time) as the NFT was being minted. So I wrote an ERC721 contract that also included Escrow payment capabilities. It was definitely a good experience, but if I was doing this on my own and not for my job, there’s no way I’d pay almost $300 to deploy a smart contract.
ilyas121 6y ago
I've been itching to do this for awhile and call it "The Most Expensive Game of Life!" Alternative title :) Really cool job!
- basicallydan 6y ago
  Hahah! Thank you! That name is much better :D
- basicallydan 6y ago
  Honestly I wish I had thought of that title ahahah!

5 points by basicallydan 6y ago

This is an interesting read. I just deployed my first contract to mainnet last week and despite my best optimization efforts, it still cost us almost $300. There is a lot of work to do still for Ethereum to be usable in a cost efficient way. In a perfect world, I can deploy as many contracts as I want for less than the price of cloud storage. Decentralization cannot be the only selling point. There has to be competition on price at some point too.

basicallydan 6y ago
Congratulations! I agree, it needs to be much more cost-effective. Someone In The Know told me that there's some attempts being made to make it more cost-effective with something called Optimism (https://twitter.com/optimismPBC https://twitter.com/optimismPBC) - but after looking into it, it does seem like you'd need to buy tokens. I specifically wanted this Game of Life to be driven by ETH! You don't need to share of course but I am curious - is your contract a more "legitimate" use than mine? Something which is a genuine utility? Thanks for reading btw!
- jhunter1016 6y ago
  I think utility is all relative. Your contract has utility among those who want to use it. It’s sort of like what my dad used to tell me about baseball cards: they’re only valuable if someone wants to pay you for them. My contract was more traditional. We needed to mint NFT and sell them in a single transaction. Normally an NFT is minted and transferred then the user can sell it to other people later. In our case, we were selling a very specific asset that demanded payment before (or at the same time) as the NFT was being minted. So I wrote an ERC721 contract that also included Escrow payment capabilities. It was definitely a good experience, but if I was doing this on my own and not for my job, there’s no way I’d pay almost $300 to deploy a smart contract.

ilyas121 6y ago

I've been itching to do this for awhile and call it "The Most Expensive Game of Life!" Alternative title :) Really cool job!

basicallydan 6y ago
Hahah! Thank you! That name is much better :D
basicallydan 6y ago
Honestly I wish I had thought of that title ahahah!