3 ms·

A comparison of ENS and .com seems super interesting. In another comment you mention the difficulty of comparing chains vs popularity etc. Or comparing market c

A comparison of ENS and .com seems super interesting. In another comment you mention the difficulty of comparing chains vs popularity etc. Or comparing market caps and sich is so weird, what's the "market cap" of USD? Whereas for ENS you have something real to compare to with .com, including registration data. ENS does seem to be getting some adoption mostly at an individual/celebrity level. Here's the leaderboard of top ENS users by # of Twitter followers: https://ethleaderboard.xyz/ https://ethleaderboard.xyz/ I also think the ENS community in general is curious about the questions you're asking. Fundamentally ENS/DNS is pretty boring, so it's hard to get too wildly speculative.

kkielhofner 5y ago
You’ll note I specially avoid any of the financial aspects of blockchain (market cap, etc). I really don’t want to open that can of worms. Chains are difficult to compare popularity because of the anonymous nature and how “users” are considered. How do you translate transactions per day and active addresses into users? Almost all users have more than one address. Transfers from hot to cold storage for a single user count as a transaction and involve multiple addresses, as one example. Bitcoin is 13 years old. Ethereum is seven years old. ENS is five years old. Yet I can’t go to Toyota.eth and learn about their new models or whatever like I could with toyota.com in 1995 (18 months after the web was released). Note I use the Toyota.com example because when my sister and I first got the internet in rural Wisconsin in 1995/1996 we used to watch TV with a pencil and paper to look for the fine print at the bottom of the screen in hopes for a new web address to visit. Toyota.com was one I remember writing down (for some reason). We thought it was so neat you could see something on TV, type a few letters in the computer, and get “taken” right to it immediately. Pick a handful of $bigcorps you can think of and hit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You’ll find out the vast majority of the Fortune 500 had a website up at a .com within a few years (archive starts in ‘96, I believe). Not to mention the millions of users that had been building websites on geocities and elsewhere since ‘95. By 2006 the web had over 85 million websites. In 1998 (using five years of ENS) there were over 2 million (including Google). There are currently 247 thousand ENS owners. 13 year old platform. Five year old service. Once again a fraction of adoption when compared to the web over the same time span. Don’t take this the wrong way but a leaderboard of celebrities with Twitter accounts that starts with Paris Hilton isn’t going to change any minds on the credibility of the platform. Rather the opposite. Frankly anyone who thinks Paris Hilton being the leading proponent of a five year old technology platform is a good thing is either desperate or delusional. It validates the huckster hype perspective. She was on late night TV recently in a very awkward “interview” promoting NFTs. Many have commented it resembled a video one might see released by someone in a hostage situation reading a propaganda statement [1][2][3]. In any case I’d be more interested to see an analysis of those top accounts and what percentage are actively selling NFTs or any other crypto-something. I’m betting it’s extremely high. Otherwise, there's always the Fyre Fest angle where most celebrities will sell anything with no due diligence or scruples whatsoever as long as the check (in fiat, of course) clears. ENS is not boring - having an ENS address is a marketing tool to the cryptosphere for whatever you’re trying to sell them. This is one area where it’s identical to DNS. [1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1/are-celebrities-getting-paid-to-shill-nfts-paris-hilton-jimmy-fallon-post-malone https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1... [2] https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-interest-bored-ape-nfts/ https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-i... [3] https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showing-off-their-nfts-is-the-longest-77-seconds-ever/ https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showin...
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Yes agree re: avoiding pricing and focusing on utility like ENS. Your examples about web dev in the 90s got me wondering "what does Coinbase do today with ENS?". They're fans of ENS, surely whatever's great about ENS, Coinbase must be using it. Well, as of today their ENS profile isn't anything radical [1], just an address, image, and link to their ENS delegate page. That gets me thinking more about toyota.com. Do you think they had internal sites and computer resources before their public website? Just makes me wonder where their "toyota.com" site came from, was it as simple as "they heard about the web and then BAM immediately built a website". Wary of doing mental gymnastics myself tho, maybe this all just does mean crypto stuff is overhyped and not very useful. [1] https://app.ens.domains/name/coinbase.eth/details https://app.ens.domains/name/coinbase.eth/details

kkielhofner 5y ago

You’ll note I specially avoid any of the financial aspects of blockchain (market cap, etc). I really don’t want to open that can of worms. Chains are difficult to compare popularity because of the anonymous nature and how “users” are considered. How do you translate transactions per day and active addresses into users? Almost all users have more than one address. Transfers from hot to cold storage for a single user count as a transaction and involve multiple addresses, as one example. Bitcoin is 13 years old. Ethereum is seven years old. ENS is five years old. Yet I can’t go to Toyota.eth and learn about their new models or whatever like I could with toyota.com in 1995 (18 months after the web was released). Note I use the Toyota.com example because when my sister and I first got the internet in rural Wisconsin in 1995/1996 we used to watch TV with a pencil and paper to look for the fine print at the bottom of the screen in hopes for a new web address to visit. Toyota.com was one I remember writing down (for some reason). We thought it was so neat you could see something on TV, type a few letters in the computer, and get “taken” right to it immediately. Pick a handful of $bigcorps you can think of and hit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You’ll find out the vast majority of the Fortune 500 had a website up at a .com within a few years (archive starts in ‘96, I believe). Not to mention the millions of users that had been building websites on geocities and elsewhere since ‘95. By 2006 the web had over 85 million websites. In 1998 (using five years of ENS) there were over 2 million (including Google). There are currently 247 thousand ENS owners. 13 year old platform. Five year old service. Once again a fraction of adoption when compared to the web over the same time span. Don’t take this the wrong way but a leaderboard of celebrities with Twitter accounts that starts with Paris Hilton isn’t going to change any minds on the credibility of the platform. Rather the opposite. Frankly anyone who thinks Paris Hilton being the leading proponent of a five year old technology platform is a good thing is either desperate or delusional. It validates the huckster hype perspective. She was on late night TV recently in a very awkward “interview” promoting NFTs. Many have commented it resembled a video one might see released by someone in a hostage situation reading a propaganda statement [1][2][3]. In any case I’d be more interested to see an analysis of those top accounts and what percentage are actively selling NFTs or any other crypto-something. I’m betting it’s extremely high. Otherwise, there's always the Fyre Fest angle where most celebrities will sell anything with no due diligence or scruples whatsoever as long as the check (in fiat, of course) clears. ENS is not boring - having an ENS address is a marketing tool to the cryptosphere for whatever you’re trying to sell them. This is one area where it’s identical to DNS. [1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1/are-celebrities-getting-paid-to-shill-nfts-paris-hilton-jimmy-fallon-post-malone https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1... [2] https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-interest-bored-ape-nfts/ https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-i... [3] https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showing-off-their-nfts-is-the-longest-77-seconds-ever/ https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showin...

magicjosh 5y ago
Yes agree re: avoiding pricing and focusing on utility like ENS. Your examples about web dev in the 90s got me wondering "what does Coinbase do today with ENS?". They're fans of ENS, surely whatever's great about ENS, Coinbase must be using it. Well, as of today their ENS profile isn't anything radical [1], just an address, image, and link to their ENS delegate page. That gets me thinking more about toyota.com. Do you think they had internal sites and computer resources before their public website? Just makes me wonder where their "toyota.com" site came from, was it as simple as "they heard about the web and then BAM immediately built a website". Wary of doing mental gymnastics myself tho, maybe this all just does mean crypto stuff is overhyped and not very useful. [1] https://app.ens.domains/name/coinbase.eth/details https://app.ens.domains/name/coinbase.eth/details