10 ms·

Goodbye Gas Fees

69 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

shiohime 5y ago
"Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high" https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/981090555697405952 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/981090555697405952
- AtticHacker 5y ago
  I was looking for this
hestefisk 5y ago
What is an L2?
jacob_rezi 5y ago
Timely article - Polygon is what we've used for our blockchain verified resume https://www.rezi.ai/rezi-blockchain-verified-resume https://www.rezi.ai/rezi-blockchain-verified-resume
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beachy 5y ago
  I would like to understand more about your product. Does it ensure the accuracy of your resume? I.e that you really did work for Google since 2020? Or is it more to simply ensure that the content has not changed. But if so, who cares if your resume has changed?
  - zeusk 5y ago
    > What is a Blockchain Verified Resume? > When the owner of a resume decides to create a blockchain resume, Rezi makes an encrypted record of: issuer, recipient, resume, date of creation. These pieces of data are encrypted right onto the blockchain. This means that every blockchain resume is incredibly secure. Secure from what?
    - landemva 5y ago
      They could put the resume file on ipfs and be done. They made what looks like a tech course final project.
      - zeusk 5y ago
        or even better, put it on github or google drive.
        corobo 5y ago
        or just email it or attach it to a form for whoever needs it when you're applying (which is how they'll ask for it)
  - jacob_rezi 5y ago
    This is the first step we've taken towards the bigger goal of ensuring truthfulness of the experiences on the resume. But for now, it does two things - ensures the resume has not been altered since created (think recruiter's incentives to do so) and serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful. We're just launching, so let's see how it evolves over time
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      >ensures the resume has not been altered since created (think recruiter's incentives to do so) How often do recruiters actually modify your PDF resume after you submit it? Why would they do that when the company can just verify its contents on LinkedIn? Do you actually have any kind of data on this? And if you're actually worried about rogue recruiters modifying your resume after you make it, why would you not sign your PDF? >serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful. Because it's on the blockchain it's not bullshit? This is quite honestly one of the dumber product pitches I have heard in a while. It sounds like you just pulled a word out of the hat to figure out what to blockchainify next.
      - jacob_rezi 5y ago
        let me answer these questions in a year once we've had time to see the result. The feature comes from asking our users what they'd like to see improved on our existing software. The topics of trust/authenticity have been left unexplored in relation to the resume. We'll gladly be the first.
    - beachy 5y ago
      I still don't get it - when you give your resume to a recruiter they can rework it as they see fit, but they can't change your original. That's on your hard drive/wherever. What does Blockchain add to that? And as to a promise that the resume is truthful - thats just your assurance, what does block chain have to do with that either? Asking with genuine interest as we are in the HR space so often discussing these sort of things.
      - 5y ago
- bestcoder69 5y ago
  What does this protect against? Nothing too bad has happened to me so far with my non-blockchain PDFs. From the site copy it seems to say I can just verify that it was uploaded at a certain time. Why does that matter?
  - jacob_rezi 5y ago
    I agree with you, I've never had issues with my non-blockchain PDF, but having the option to put a resume on the blockchain is something that the majority of our users responded they'd like to be able to do. Ultimately it's a small part of our software, but it does allow users to prove they are the one who created the resume originally. The value of this is yet to be determined.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  Does the blockchain verify my identity? Or that I worked any of the places I claimed to work?
  - jacob_rezi 5y ago
    It would verify that you are the original creator of the resume. It would also allow the hiring manager to instantly and independently verify that the resume has not been altered by anyone accept you. It does not verify claims of your experiences - that is a messier endeavor.
    - kanwisher 5y ago
      So its not useful at all, good job
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      Fyi I can sign my pdf resume with my national id card with a legally binding digital signature. This provides all the same guarantees, without using a third party blockchain-based service.
- sour-taste 5y ago
  > You have no idea how your career goals are related to the job you want I don't know whether an employer can help me meet my own career goals, but an AI does? And somehow the blockchain factors into this? This is one of the more patronizing startups I've ever seen.
  - jacob_rezi 5y ago
    Cleaned up that lazy copy-writing. Thanks for that. We use GPT-3 to write content following best practices. I am sure you understood that much from the website. Blockchain verified resume is one of four download types along with PDF, DOCX, Drive. Not a huge component of the software by any stretch of the imagination. The software is quite nice, no patronizing here.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Don't blame GPT-3, there aren't that many words on there.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > We use GPT-3 to write content following best practices. Sadly I cannot tell if this entire subthread is actually a joke or not, but if it is, it's a pretty good one.
ipaddr 5y ago
How do these airdrops work?
- TimJRobinson 5y ago
  It's basically like the company does an IPO, but instead of giving their shares to their investors, they give them to their users instead.
rvz 5y ago
> Thankfully, a number of crypto exchanges have started natively supporting Layer 2 withdrawals, meaning you can send your funds straight from the exchange to the L2 of your choice. What is the point of going back to centralized crypto exchanges once again, just to move, swap your cryptocurrencies and then bringing up the argument of decentralization? Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap were supposed to make it possible to get rid of the reliance on centralized exchanges. But even using that or similar decentralized exchanges, the gas fees are still high. This post is enough to put off any cryptocurrency-skeptic who would be wondering if they can ever use Ethereum to pay for their groceries at the local supermarket. I guess after reading the mentioned beta contraptions, multiple steps, still expensive gas fees and the coins and layers you need to know just to 'use it' gives the TL;DR of: Nope, It is not ready and I cannot use it. So I will wait.
- miralabs 5y ago
  amazing how the crypto narrative changes... before: ETH fees needs to be cheap (remember the bitcoin fees and eth wanted fees to belower?), now: ETH fees was meant to be high! before: we need to get away from centralized exchanges for decentralization now: we need centralized exchanges crazy.
outside1234 5y ago
What a joke - it’s all ponzu and speculation the whole way down
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post generic flamewar comments to HN. It leads to generic flamewar hell, which is just what we don't want here. Needless to say, that has nothing to do with how right you are, or feel you are, about the underlying topic. It has to do with comment quality. We want to avoid the worst sort of internet comments and most of all the sort that evoke predictable flamewars. (Cryptocurrency flamewars are probably the most predictable of all, these days—it's one big endless same thing.) If you don't have something curious and thoughtful to say, not posting is a good alternative. If you don't find one thread stimulating of your intellectual curiosity, there are plenty of others to look at. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I don't really get why we have a thousand coins trying to solve the same problem that Bitcoin Cash solved in 2017. (Or, in 2009, if you accept that BCH is the same formula as original Bitcoin, and that it is Bitcoin Core that changed its design. They share the same history.) If you want cheap transactions, for actual cash-like usage rather than a "settlement layer", you need big blocks. It is not rocket science.
- landemva 5y ago
  BCH cheap payments as ethereum side chain could be interesting experiment.
- v64 5y ago
  Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash's scripting capabilities aren't comparable to Ethereum's smart contracts. Making Ethereum transactions cheaper is a different and more complex problem.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    I'm not referring to Ethereum, I'm talking about the "layer 2" coins described in the article or, more specifically, what they are used for.
    - fhaldridge7 5y ago
      all of these chains that are described in the article are EVM-compatible and allow running ethereum smart contracts for example the uniswap contracts can be deployed on arbitrum. users can then swap coins on the arbitrum blockchain rather than ethereum and therefore save gas costs
      - landemva 5y ago
        Problems with composability and liquidity pool fragmentation.
- miracle2k 5y ago
smaddox 5y ago
Sooo, still only "useful" for digital "asset" speculation, then?
obulpathi 5y ago
Why use L2 when one can have a better experience with much lower fees (Solana, Avalance, Flow & Near). The new generation Blockchains like Solana and Avalance are far better than Ethereum. They are going throgh some growing pains, other wise, they beat Ethereum to dust in terms of speed, latency and performance. Solana takes a second to confirm a transaction, with 0.00025$ fees and can support more than 100,000 tx/s. While Ethereum take a minute to confirm a transaction and cost about 100$ and can only process about 15 tx/s. Also, Ethereum is about 1000 times more energy hungry than Solana.
- dereg 5y ago
  If you scale up Avalanche's fees to ETH's market cap, the fees are essentially the same. The low fees on Solana make it more prone to spam. The entire chain was down for 17 hours in September and has recently been facing some major congestion issues. There's no silver bullet here and I think we should be honest about the capabilities and tradeoffs of each approach to scaling.
- HorizonXP 5y ago
  Solana and Avalanche are fantastic L1s, and I am optimistic for their future. But I'm skeptical of their ability to replace Ethereum. To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana. The same is true in some ways for Avalanche, but I think their current EVM-compatible C-chain means most developers will spend their time porting existing Solidity-based dApps, rather than build something new or novel. Look at Fantom and its DAG-based blockchain. Having used Arbitrum, Boba, and Optimism, I can say that they're very fast and work very well. How they handle load as we scale up remains to be seen. I still have to spend time with the zkRollup L2s; sad to see that StarkNet gets mentioned before Loopring. Polygon's investment into the space is interesting too. To me, lower fees are irrelevant if there are no dApps to use, and low liquidity. I'm an avid user of a very promising dApp on Arbitrum that has done very well since launching in August. However, they're looking to launch on Avalanche now due to the low liquidity and uptake on Arbitrum. What that also tells me is that momentum matters. And right now, Ethereum has got it. You won't be bridging your NFTs from Ethereum into Solana anytime soon. But on the L2s? Yeah, probably.
obulpathi 5y ago
I don't buy the argument: "ETH fees was meant to be high!". Its the same as saying "ETH is meant to be unusable for people other than whales."
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  Isn’t a low number of transactions per second essentially built in to the original ETH spec? If so, surely it’s likely that each transaction should be expensive?
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Yes, but that's just because a design goal is for modest computers to be able to fully participate in the protocol, and the low number of transactions was the best they could do. They've also been planning to scale since early days. Here are some of Vitalik's blog posts on scaling back in 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-building-top/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-metacoin-history-multichain/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-meta... And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    If I remember correctly, L1 ETH can handle ~13 transactions per second. Meanwhile L1 Bitcoin can handle ~4 transactions per second. At the time it was introduced, one of Ethereum's selling points was that it was able to handle 3x more transactions per second than Bitcoin, IIRC. 300% more is usually considered a good upgrade for most things (Apple is touting a whopping 20% speed increase on their latest iPad, for example). It's just that six years is a long time in this space and they've learned how to make things a lot faster since.
- ryeights 5y ago
Uptrenda 5y ago
Doesn't this just make on-boarding users even more convoluted? You'll have to probably get a large amount of Ether and then 'commit' it to another L2 to receive whatever their backed token equivalent is. Then you'll use this token to pay for things which will have no network effect, apps, or merchants in the beginning. Basically all adoption goes back to square one while providing a confusing and worse user-experience for everyone. How are wallets supposed to explain this shit to users?
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  You're right, it sucks in the short term. The way I look at ethereum/defi is that we're interacting with the protocol directly right now. Imagine if you could only use your bank by working directly with the API, and then some people hacked together crude tools to make the API more tolerable. Over time this will all be abstracted away and typical users won't have to worry how it's all working underneath (unless they really want to).
- throwaway21332 5y ago
  Binance is supporting direct deposits/withdrawals to Arbitrum. I'd expect more exchanges to do this with other L2s.
  - rvz 5y ago
    So once again, Ethereum users relying on centralized exchanges to bring the gas fees down (when the steps involved confuses users and the fees are still high). Given that being the case, the general decentralization argument would be pointless. For the many users who need to be able to pay for their groceries quickly, you might as well use Solana then, since everyone needs to eat. The whole point of Uniswap is to move away from these centralized exchanges. Perhaps using that has gotten more complicated to use or the swaps have also gotten too expensive even if it is on an L2; making that useless as well?
    - throwaway21332 5y ago
      Arbitrum doesn't require you to use a centralized exchange, it's just easier to onboard with "fiat -> centralized exchange -> arbitrum" than "fiat -> centralized exchange -> ethereum -> arbitrum".
jlebar 5y ago
> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. Count me among those not in the know! I...really don't get it. Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency. Then we realized that it's too slow and too energy-hungry for that. So we retcon'ed it into, it's a store of value! Etherium was supposed to be a place for smart contracts. Then we realized it's too slow and gas-hungry for that. So...we retcon'ed it, too?
- btown 5y ago
  Think of Ethereum instead as the tamper-proof store for the audit log of the history of all smart contracts in the world. While in the early days you could just transact on that, it doesn't scale if everyone's trying to "write to disk" for every single transaction all at once. So the article, and the companion piece by the same author at https://every.to/almanack/defriday-2-polygon-s-surge-ethereum-s-future https://every.to/almanack/defriday-2-polygon-s-surge-ethereu... describe ways to have other, more lightweight chains that periodically flush their changes to the Ethereum chain. It's elegant, and as with all things cryptocurrency, just requires people to believe that running validator and miner nodes is worth it.
  - soco 5y ago
    What guarantees there are for what happens off-chain? Because if that is garbage, the Ethereum will store tamper-proof garbage.
    - btown 5y ago
      The thing off-chain is itself a blockchain, with miners incentivized to work in good faith. I imagine, though haven’t verified, that ensuring the right consensus is committed to ETH can be figured out with mutual staking orchestrated via smart contracts on both ends.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      With zkrollups, there's a cryptographic guarantee that the off-chain computation is valid. With optimistic rollups, there's a withdrawal delay so people have an opportunity to submit proof of fraud.
jbirer 5y ago
I am amused by the mental gymnastics deployed by Ethereum holders such as "It was meant to have high fees", or "High fees keep it decentralized". Guess what, BitTorrent is decentralized they charge nothing. It's okay to admit that you made a wrong investment / choice and pick another option, you can always change mind and pick a better option (I will not recommend or shill any one of them here).
- poisonborz 5y ago
  ...and look at the sea of unseeded torrents, basically all that is older than a few weeks and not backed by some paid/autseeded tracker or devout datahoarder (not defending Ethereum's approach here though).
  - soco 5y ago
    If people are not interested anymore on that torrent, it disappears. Same how it happens with an IPFS file.
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      Except, there's not really a clear signal of "Hey, a bunch of people want this!" unless they all just hop on the torrent and hope for a seeder to join. If I go to a store and they don't have bread, I'm not waiting for their next bread delivery for them to stock the aisles...
- tzs 5y ago
  Is comparing Ethereum costs to BitTorrent costs reasonable? They are both decentralized, but they do completely different things. It seems it would be like if I compared the price of gasoline ($3.80/gallon here) to the price of water ($0.00018/gallon if I use a lot, 25% less if I use an ordinary amount) and said this shows that gasoline is way overpriced because they are both liquids.
Rapzid 5y ago
Or.. just wait for the merge? What am I missing?
- TimJRobinson 5y ago
  The merge only lowers Ethereum's electricity usage by moving it to Proof of Stake, it doesn't lower gas fees.
mmmeff 5y ago
Why is nobody talking about IOTA?! 7 years of development on feeless smart contract development and tangible results bolstered with robust private and public partnerships. Germany is bullish on IOTA
- detaro 5y ago
  > Germany is bullish on IOTA that's ... not exactly an endorsement.
- soco 5y ago
  Maybe because they are private, keep changing every year their specs and those results are only in test projects, so far?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mangecoeur 5y ago
It's blockchains all the way down >_<
MrMan 5y ago
I like algorand
- binkHN 5y ago
  Seconded. They're Level 1 with great technology and really are a dark horse in this race.
f0xJtpvHYTVQ88B 5y ago
> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. The goal for Etheruem is not to be the chain most consumers transact on. It’s to be the settlement layer for a number of other chains sitting on top of it, which can run much faster and much cheaper, because they’re backed by Ethereum’s security and infrastructure. In other words: the consensus layer for a variety of networks. Is there is source where Vitalik states this? Is this was the case then why bother creating Eth2?
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Almost certainly not. Here's a video[1] from at least back in 2017 where he's criticizing bitcoin for having fees of 5 cents per transaction and saying 'The internet of money should not cost 5 cents per transaction, that's absurd.' Also here's a more recent tweet from him in July 2020 that says the high gas fees are risking making Ethereum even LESS secure[2]. Also here's his response to someone mentioning his initial quote about 5 cents per transaction and accusing Vitalik that he has since become more accepting of higher transaction fees: "Wait what? Why do you think half the ecosystem is working nonstop on rollups and eth2?"[3] I think it's safe to assume that Vitalik does not share the opinion of the linked article that Ethereum is intended to have high fees or that it helps security by having those high fees. [1]: https://youtu.be/unMnAVAGIp0 https://youtu.be/unMnAVAGIp0 [2]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1285593115672358912 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/128559311567235891... [3]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1297896017468129281 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/129789601746812928...
- TimJRobinson 5y ago
  Vitalik originally proposed it here: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... ETH2 is where Ethereum goes from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and as a result uses 99% less electricity. The second phase of ETH2 is sharding where instead of Ethereum being one big chain it has one execution chain and 64 additional data shards. This makes it scale incredibly well when it's a settlement layer for rollups (up to 14 million TPS with 1024 shards - See https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...)
TimJRobinson 5y ago
I really resonate with Nat's DeFi articles. If you're wondering "What are blockchains even useful for" I highly urge you to look at his other articles on the Almanack. He does deep dive's into all the interesting DeFi products, and almost all are products that are not possible without a blockchain.

69 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

"Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high" https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/981090555697405952 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/981090555697405952

AtticHacker 5y ago
I was looking for this

hestefisk 5y ago

What is an L2?

jacob_rezi 5y ago

Timely article - Polygon is what we've used for our blockchain verified resume https://www.rezi.ai/rezi-blockchain-verified-resume https://www.rezi.ai/rezi-blockchain-verified-resume

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beachy 5y ago
I would like to understand more about your product. Does it ensure the accuracy of your resume? I.e that you really did work for Google since 2020? Or is it more to simply ensure that the content has not changed. But if so, who cares if your resume has changed?
- zeusk 5y ago
  > What is a Blockchain Verified Resume? > When the owner of a resume decides to create a blockchain resume, Rezi makes an encrypted record of: issuer, recipient, resume, date of creation. These pieces of data are encrypted right onto the blockchain. This means that every blockchain resume is incredibly secure. Secure from what?
  - landemva 5y ago
    They could put the resume file on ipfs and be done. They made what looks like a tech course final project.
    - zeusk 5y ago
      or even better, put it on github or google drive.
      - corobo 5y ago
        or just email it or attach it to a form for whoever needs it when you're applying (which is how they'll ask for it)
- jacob_rezi 5y ago
  This is the first step we've taken towards the bigger goal of ensuring truthfulness of the experiences on the resume. But for now, it does two things - ensures the resume has not been altered since created (think recruiter's incentives to do so) and serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful. We're just launching, so let's see how it evolves over time
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    >ensures the resume has not been altered since created (think recruiter's incentives to do so) How often do recruiters actually modify your PDF resume after you submit it? Why would they do that when the company can just verify its contents on LinkedIn? Do you actually have any kind of data on this? And if you're actually worried about rogue recruiters modifying your resume after you make it, why would you not sign your PDF? >serves as a promise from the job seeker that the resume is truthful. Because it's on the blockchain it's not bullshit? This is quite honestly one of the dumber product pitches I have heard in a while. It sounds like you just pulled a word out of the hat to figure out what to blockchainify next.
    - jacob_rezi 5y ago
      let me answer these questions in a year once we've had time to see the result. The feature comes from asking our users what they'd like to see improved on our existing software. The topics of trust/authenticity have been left unexplored in relation to the resume. We'll gladly be the first.
  - beachy 5y ago
    I still don't get it - when you give your resume to a recruiter they can rework it as they see fit, but they can't change your original. That's on your hard drive/wherever. What does Blockchain add to that? And as to a promise that the resume is truthful - thats just your assurance, what does block chain have to do with that either? Asking with genuine interest as we are in the HR space so often discussing these sort of things.
    - 5y ago
bestcoder69 5y ago
What does this protect against? Nothing too bad has happened to me so far with my non-blockchain PDFs. From the site copy it seems to say I can just verify that it was uploaded at a certain time. Why does that matter?
- jacob_rezi 5y ago
  I agree with you, I've never had issues with my non-blockchain PDF, but having the option to put a resume on the blockchain is something that the majority of our users responded they'd like to be able to do. Ultimately it's a small part of our software, but it does allow users to prove they are the one who created the resume originally. The value of this is yet to be determined.
alasdair_ 5y ago
Does the blockchain verify my identity? Or that I worked any of the places I claimed to work?
- jacob_rezi 5y ago
  It would verify that you are the original creator of the resume. It would also allow the hiring manager to instantly and independently verify that the resume has not been altered by anyone accept you. It does not verify claims of your experiences - that is a messier endeavor.
  - kanwisher 5y ago
    So its not useful at all, good job
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    Fyi I can sign my pdf resume with my national id card with a legally binding digital signature. This provides all the same guarantees, without using a third party blockchain-based service.
sour-taste 5y ago
> You have no idea how your career goals are related to the job you want I don't know whether an employer can help me meet my own career goals, but an AI does? And somehow the blockchain factors into this? This is one of the more patronizing startups I've ever seen.
- jacob_rezi 5y ago
  Cleaned up that lazy copy-writing. Thanks for that. We use GPT-3 to write content following best practices. I am sure you understood that much from the website. Blockchain verified resume is one of four download types along with PDF, DOCX, Drive. Not a huge component of the software by any stretch of the imagination. The software is quite nice, no patronizing here.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Don't blame GPT-3, there aren't that many words on there.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > We use GPT-3 to write content following best practices. Sadly I cannot tell if this entire subthread is actually a joke or not, but if it is, it's a pretty good one.

ipaddr 5y ago

How do these airdrops work?

TimJRobinson 5y ago
It's basically like the company does an IPO, but instead of giving their shares to their investors, they give them to their users instead.

rvz 5y ago

> Thankfully, a number of crypto exchanges have started natively supporting Layer 2 withdrawals, meaning you can send your funds straight from the exchange to the L2 of your choice. What is the point of going back to centralized crypto exchanges once again, just to move, swap your cryptocurrencies and then bringing up the argument of decentralization? Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap were supposed to make it possible to get rid of the reliance on centralized exchanges. But even using that or similar decentralized exchanges, the gas fees are still high. This post is enough to put off any cryptocurrency-skeptic who would be wondering if they can ever use Ethereum to pay for their groceries at the local supermarket. I guess after reading the mentioned beta contraptions, multiple steps, still expensive gas fees and the coins and layers you need to know just to 'use it' gives the TL;DR of: Nope, It is not ready and I cannot use it. So I will wait.

miralabs 5y ago
amazing how the crypto narrative changes... before: ETH fees needs to be cheap (remember the bitcoin fees and eth wanted fees to belower?), now: ETH fees was meant to be high! before: we need to get away from centralized exchanges for decentralization now: we need centralized exchanges crazy.

outside1234 5y ago

What a joke - it’s all ponzu and speculation the whole way down

dang 5y ago
Please don't post generic flamewar comments to HN. It leads to generic flamewar hell, which is just what we don't want here. Needless to say, that has nothing to do with how right you are, or feel you are, about the underlying topic. It has to do with comment quality. We want to avoid the worst sort of internet comments and most of all the sort that evoke predictable flamewars. (Cryptocurrency flamewars are probably the most predictable of all, these days—it's one big endless same thing.) If you don't have something curious and thoughtful to say, not posting is a good alternative. If you don't find one thread stimulating of your intellectual curiosity, there are plenty of others to look at. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I don't really get why we have a thousand coins trying to solve the same problem that Bitcoin Cash solved in 2017. (Or, in 2009, if you accept that BCH is the same formula as original Bitcoin, and that it is Bitcoin Core that changed its design. They share the same history.) If you want cheap transactions, for actual cash-like usage rather than a "settlement layer", you need big blocks. It is not rocket science.

landemva 5y ago
BCH cheap payments as ethereum side chain could be interesting experiment.
v64 5y ago
Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash's scripting capabilities aren't comparable to Ethereum's smart contracts. Making Ethereum transactions cheaper is a different and more complex problem.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I'm not referring to Ethereum, I'm talking about the "layer 2" coins described in the article or, more specifically, what they are used for.
  - fhaldridge7 5y ago
    all of these chains that are described in the article are EVM-compatible and allow running ethereum smart contracts for example the uniswap contracts can be deployed on arbitrum. users can then swap coins on the arbitrum blockchain rather than ethereum and therefore save gas costs
    - landemva 5y ago
      Problems with composability and liquidity pool fragmentation.
miracle2k 5y ago

smaddox 5y ago

Sooo, still only "useful" for digital "asset" speculation, then?

obulpathi 5y ago

Why use L2 when one can have a better experience with much lower fees (Solana, Avalance, Flow & Near). The new generation Blockchains like Solana and Avalance are far better than Ethereum. They are going throgh some growing pains, other wise, they beat Ethereum to dust in terms of speed, latency and performance. Solana takes a second to confirm a transaction, with 0.00025$ fees and can support more than 100,000 tx/s. While Ethereum take a minute to confirm a transaction and cost about 100$ and can only process about 15 tx/s. Also, Ethereum is about 1000 times more energy hungry than Solana.

dereg 5y ago
If you scale up Avalanche's fees to ETH's market cap, the fees are essentially the same. The low fees on Solana make it more prone to spam. The entire chain was down for 17 hours in September and has recently been facing some major congestion issues. There's no silver bullet here and I think we should be honest about the capabilities and tradeoffs of each approach to scaling.
HorizonXP 5y ago
Solana and Avalanche are fantastic L1s, and I am optimistic for their future. But I'm skeptical of their ability to replace Ethereum. To Solana's credit, they opted to create their own smart contract VM based on Rust, rather than build an EVM-compatible VM. It will take them time to get developer mindshare, but there's a real possibility to build dApps on Solana that couldn't exist on Solana. The same is true in some ways for Avalanche, but I think their current EVM-compatible C-chain means most developers will spend their time porting existing Solidity-based dApps, rather than build something new or novel. Look at Fantom and its DAG-based blockchain. Having used Arbitrum, Boba, and Optimism, I can say that they're very fast and work very well. How they handle load as we scale up remains to be seen. I still have to spend time with the zkRollup L2s; sad to see that StarkNet gets mentioned before Loopring. Polygon's investment into the space is interesting too. To me, lower fees are irrelevant if there are no dApps to use, and low liquidity. I'm an avid user of a very promising dApp on Arbitrum that has done very well since launching in August. However, they're looking to launch on Avalanche now due to the low liquidity and uptake on Arbitrum. What that also tells me is that momentum matters. And right now, Ethereum has got it. You won't be bridging your NFTs from Ethereum into Solana anytime soon. But on the L2s? Yeah, probably.

obulpathi 5y ago

I don't buy the argument: "ETH fees was meant to be high!". Its the same as saying "ETH is meant to be unusable for people other than whales."

alasdair_ 5y ago
Isn’t a low number of transactions per second essentially built in to the original ETH spec? If so, surely it’s likely that each transaction should be expensive?
- DennisP 5y ago
  Yes, but that's just because a design goal is for modest computers to be able to fully participate in the protocol, and the low number of transactions was the best they could do. They've also been planning to scale since early days. Here are some of Vitalik's blog posts on scaling back in 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-building-top/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-metacoin-history-multichain/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-meta... And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
- cableshaft 5y ago
  If I remember correctly, L1 ETH can handle ~13 transactions per second. Meanwhile L1 Bitcoin can handle ~4 transactions per second. At the time it was introduced, one of Ethereum's selling points was that it was able to handle 3x more transactions per second than Bitcoin, IIRC. 300% more is usually considered a good upgrade for most things (Apple is touting a whopping 20% speed increase on their latest iPad, for example). It's just that six years is a long time in this space and they've learned how to make things a lot faster since.
ryeights 5y ago

Uptrenda 5y ago

Doesn't this just make on-boarding users even more convoluted? You'll have to probably get a large amount of Ether and then 'commit' it to another L2 to receive whatever their backed token equivalent is. Then you'll use this token to pay for things which will have no network effect, apps, or merchants in the beginning. Basically all adoption goes back to square one while providing a confusing and worse user-experience for everyone. How are wallets supposed to explain this shit to users?

chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
You're right, it sucks in the short term. The way I look at ethereum/defi is that we're interacting with the protocol directly right now. Imagine if you could only use your bank by working directly with the API, and then some people hacked together crude tools to make the API more tolerable. Over time this will all be abstracted away and typical users won't have to worry how it's all working underneath (unless they really want to).
throwaway21332 5y ago
Binance is supporting direct deposits/withdrawals to Arbitrum. I'd expect more exchanges to do this with other L2s.
- rvz 5y ago
  So once again, Ethereum users relying on centralized exchanges to bring the gas fees down (when the steps involved confuses users and the fees are still high). Given that being the case, the general decentralization argument would be pointless. For the many users who need to be able to pay for their groceries quickly, you might as well use Solana then, since everyone needs to eat. The whole point of Uniswap is to move away from these centralized exchanges. Perhaps using that has gotten more complicated to use or the swaps have also gotten too expensive even if it is on an L2; making that useless as well?
  - throwaway21332 5y ago
    Arbitrum doesn't require you to use a centralized exchange, it's just easier to onboard with "fiat -> centralized exchange -> arbitrum" than "fiat -> centralized exchange -> ethereum -> arbitrum".

jlebar 5y ago

> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. Count me among those not in the know! I...really don't get it. Bitcoin was supposed to be a currency. Then we realized that it's too slow and too energy-hungry for that. So we retcon'ed it into, it's a store of value! Etherium was supposed to be a place for smart contracts. Then we realized it's too slow and gas-hungry for that. So...we retcon'ed it, too?

btown 5y ago
Think of Ethereum instead as the tamper-proof store for the audit log of the history of all smart contracts in the world. While in the early days you could just transact on that, it doesn't scale if everyone's trying to "write to disk" for every single transaction all at once. So the article, and the companion piece by the same author at https://every.to/almanack/defriday-2-polygon-s-surge-ethereum-s-future https://every.to/almanack/defriday-2-polygon-s-surge-ethereu... describe ways to have other, more lightweight chains that periodically flush their changes to the Ethereum chain. It's elegant, and as with all things cryptocurrency, just requires people to believe that running validator and miner nodes is worth it.
- soco 5y ago
  What guarantees there are for what happens off-chain? Because if that is garbage, the Ethereum will store tamper-proof garbage.
  - btown 5y ago
    The thing off-chain is itself a blockchain, with miners incentivized to work in good faith. I imagine, though haven’t verified, that ensuring the right consensus is committed to ETH can be figured out with mutual staking orchestrated via smart contracts on both ends.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    With zkrollups, there's a cryptographic guarantee that the off-chain computation is valid. With optimistic rollups, there's a withdrawal delay so people have an opportunity to submit proof of fraud.

jbirer 5y ago

I am amused by the mental gymnastics deployed by Ethereum holders such as "It was meant to have high fees", or "High fees keep it decentralized". Guess what, BitTorrent is decentralized they charge nothing. It's okay to admit that you made a wrong investment / choice and pick another option, you can always change mind and pick a better option (I will not recommend or shill any one of them here).

poisonborz 5y ago
...and look at the sea of unseeded torrents, basically all that is older than a few weeks and not backed by some paid/autseeded tracker or devout datahoarder (not defending Ethereum's approach here though).
- soco 5y ago
  If people are not interested anymore on that torrent, it disappears. Same how it happens with an IPFS file.
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    Except, there's not really a clear signal of "Hey, a bunch of people want this!" unless they all just hop on the torrent and hope for a seeder to join. If I go to a store and they don't have bread, I'm not waiting for their next bread delivery for them to stock the aisles...
tzs 5y ago
Is comparing Ethereum costs to BitTorrent costs reasonable? They are both decentralized, but they do completely different things. It seems it would be like if I compared the price of gasoline ($3.80/gallon here) to the price of water ($0.00018/gallon if I use a lot, 25% less if I use an ordinary amount) and said this shows that gasoline is way overpriced because they are both liquids.

Rapzid 5y ago

Or.. just wait for the merge? What am I missing?

TimJRobinson 5y ago
The merge only lowers Ethereum's electricity usage by moving it to Proof of Stake, it doesn't lower gas fees.

mmmeff 5y ago

Why is nobody talking about IOTA?! 7 years of development on feeless smart contract development and tangible results bolstered with robust private and public partnerships. Germany is bullish on IOTA

detaro 5y ago
> Germany is bullish on IOTA that's ... not exactly an endorsement.
soco 5y ago
Maybe because they are private, keep changing every year their specs and those results are only in test projects, so far?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mangecoeur 5y ago

It's blockchains all the way down >_<

MrMan 5y ago

I like algorand

binkHN 5y ago
Seconded. They're Level 1 with great technology and really are a dark horse in this race.

f0xJtpvHYTVQ88B 5y ago

> What most people don’t know is: Gas fees on Ethereum are supposed to be high. The goal for Etheruem is not to be the chain most consumers transact on. It’s to be the settlement layer for a number of other chains sitting on top of it, which can run much faster and much cheaper, because they’re backed by Ethereum’s security and infrastructure. In other words: the consensus layer for a variety of networks. Is there is source where Vitalik states this? Is this was the case then why bother creating Eth2?

cableshaft 5y ago
Almost certainly not. Here's a video[1] from at least back in 2017 where he's criticizing bitcoin for having fees of 5 cents per transaction and saying 'The internet of money should not cost 5 cents per transaction, that's absurd.' Also here's a more recent tweet from him in July 2020 that says the high gas fees are risking making Ethereum even LESS secure[2]. Also here's his response to someone mentioning his initial quote about 5 cents per transaction and accusing Vitalik that he has since become more accepting of higher transaction fees: "Wait what? Why do you think half the ecosystem is working nonstop on rollups and eth2?"[3] I think it's safe to assume that Vitalik does not share the opinion of the linked article that Ethereum is intended to have high fees or that it helps security by having those high fees. [1]: https://youtu.be/unMnAVAGIp0 https://youtu.be/unMnAVAGIp0 [2]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1285593115672358912 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/128559311567235891... [3]: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1297896017468129281 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/129789601746812928...
TimJRobinson 5y ago
Vitalik originally proposed it here: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... ETH2 is where Ethereum goes from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and as a result uses 99% less electricity. The second phase of ETH2 is sharding where instead of Ethereum being one big chain it has one execution chain and 64 additional data shards. This makes it scale incredibly well when it's a settlement layer for rollups (up to 14 million TPS with 1024 shards - See https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-data-shards-scale-in-2030-14-million-tps-933b87ca622e https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...)

TimJRobinson 5y ago

I really resonate with Nat's DeFi articles. If you're wondering "What are blockchains even useful for" I highly urge you to look at his other articles on the Almanack. He does deep dive's into all the interesting DeFi products, and almost all are products that are not possible without a blockchain.