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For anyone curious, there was a trend where people were changing their display name on Twitter to their Ethereum Name Service (ENS). It's not a URL (even though

For anyone curious, there was a trend where people were changing their display name on Twitter to their Ethereum Name Service (ENS). It's not a URL (even though it looks like it); the concept was similar to URLs though. You'd point a friendly name to your ETH wallet. The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.

CameronNemo 5y ago
Some may have realized that publicizing their net worth is both tacky and painting a target on their back.
- babyshake 5y ago
  Is there a good way to use a ENS name without exposing your net worth but not needing to rely on the same mixing techniques used to launder funds?
  - benmanns 5y ago
    You could use a separate wallet for your ENS name.
    - throwaway2048 5y ago
      that doesn't help because all transfers to/from said wallet are public.
      - yebyen 5y ago
        ETH is a public ledger. If you publish your address and put your own name on it, any transfers to or from that address will be associated with your public name. This is not something that can be solved. At least not in ETH itself; even privacy coins like ZEC may have a way to make your identity public and make your history transparent – and it works as designed when you do this, your transactions are public. (In this sense, neither does using a mixer really help at all. It would just show that you've received some money and sent it to a mixer as yourself, if the mixer is also a public known entity.) I suppose one way to solve this, is to tell people to look up your ENS name, and then sign a message and share it with them – to present them securely with an address that they can use and verify that it belongs to you, only that it won't be tied to your original identity, except by that message (which you'd have to trust them not to share as well.)
      - Tenoke 5y ago
        Of course it helps, I can just send some money from Binance to a new address and nobody except for them will know it's connected to me. Alternatively I can bridge them through a less traceble network like SCRT if I don't want even an exchange to know about it.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Is there a good way to use a ENS name without exposing your net worth Not making one crypto wallet and your net worth the same thing?
  - ra0x3 5y ago
    You could always buy the ENS name without associating it with your main address (whether directly or via reverse lookup). But at that point, you're just domain squatting and it kinda defeats the purpose of paying for the domain name in the first place
  - vmception 5y ago
    everyone has unlimited unique addresses associated with each recover phrase, just use a different one. in Metamask its as simple as clicking the dropdown for "new account". you have plenty of options for this: 1) withdraw from an exchange directly to the virgin address and never send funds back to the ENS one (except when you want people to know something, like to pump an NFT or token, similar to how state mandated Elon Musk ownership disclosures pumped Twitter) 2) “launder” (obfuscate) once and never look back to the ENS address. Withdrawing from Tornado.cash doesnt expose one of your addresses expose to initiated the transaction, so Tornado Cash will do an internal transaction (smart contract moving Ether to an individual address) with no link to one of your funded addresses. Or just reset Metamask and make a new recovery phrase with a whole new set of unlimited unique addresses. this reduces any temptation to accidentally send to your ENS address. you still have access to the ENS name and address. so just use it when you want. there is no reason to reuse addresses and its comical that being married to an address has become default behavior.
  - cdiddy2 5y ago
    just use coinbase as a mixing service. withdraw some eth from there to a fresh wallet and buy an ens name. then its not connected publicly to any of your other wallets but the gov/coinbase can easily still see you
    - babyshake 5y ago
      thanks, this is actually pretty obvious but it didn't occur to me for some reason.
  - stiltzkin 5y ago
    Just keep your ENS domain on its own blank wallet, also you can add your Monero wallet address on your ENS domain.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Was going to say the sam thing, almost sounds like more of a positiv thing for ETH. Maturity phase.
  - recuter 5y ago
    This is good for bitcoin.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Most did the opposite - small inconsequential accounts tied to their ens name.
- dbavaria 5y ago
  Most experienced crypto users would use multiple wallets. But advertising any of your wallet addresses is asking for people to send you scam coins. It just pollutes your wallet and makes it that much more likely that you will trip up and interact with a scam smart contract.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    1. It's insane crypto has basically become "run this untrusted code on your bank account" 2. It's sad the people who will be hit with this stuff the most are the newbies :(
quadrature 5y ago
I think people got tired of the bots that scan user names matching <name>.xyz and target them with bitcoin scams.
- smegsicle 5y ago
  at least they still have this spreadsheet to work from for awhile
dwrowe 5y ago
.xyz has a public resolver for ETH addresses for browsers so - foo.eth - you could type in foo.eth.xyz and it'll resolve to a placeholder of sorts for information in the .eth profile (pointers to wallets, Twitter handles, NFTs currently held, etc). I think it's interesting in the "online business card" sense - but not too much beyond that. EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  I imagine this is just a website with the domain eth.xyz and with some subdomain shenanigans. You make it sound like it's sponsored by the TLD or something.
- ryan29 5y ago
  > EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain. It is though. > Eth.xyz was created for the ENS community with love by the XYZ Registry, the company behind .xyz domain names. The project is open for contribution or feedback on GitHub. Send us a message @xyz on Twitter! [1] It's kind of neat, but seems like a registry taking on a lot of extra liability that they typically don't have as a domain registry. Putting a disclaimer on the sites doesn't exempt them from the law. > The profile content on this page is automatically generated from publicly available information provided through ENS and is ultimately controlled by the relevant ENS user. Nothing on this page implies any endorsement or affiliation between XYZ or ENS and the person or organization whose profile information appears on this page. So what gain does the blockchain get you? XYZ isn't judgement proof like the blockchain, so they'll have to follow the current laws for trademarks, copyrights, etc.. If the blockchain isn't adding any revolutionary tech, is slower, is expensive, and is only accessible using gateways that are subjected to current laws, what's the appeal? 1. https://eth.xyz/ https://eth.xyz/
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Actually sounds like the folks at XYZ are doing interesting things.
sudden_dystopia 5y ago
As Peter Thiel pointed out yesterday, ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. Doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but maybe not a lot of room to increase the market cap.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. How does that even make sense? ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation. Visa is valued based on money made from transactions. They aren't really related at all. It's not like ETH is doing proof-of-stake, owning ETH doesn't in any way entitle you to ongoing dividends like VISA stock would.
  - ChadNauseam 5y ago
    > ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation This is not really a meaningful statement. Thiel is talking about Ethereum's market cap, which is not related to the number of tokens in circulation. Owning ETH doesn't (and most likely will never, even after the PoS merge) pay anything like dividends. The demand for ETH comes from the fact that it's necessary to pay some every time you want to interact with the ethereum blockchain. The demand for Visa stock comes from the fact that Visa will probably pay dividends or do buybacks in the future. You're right that that makes it not obvious how to compare the two. But you can still try and do the comparison Thiel might be doing. What "should" the price of ETH be? The supply of ETH is mostly fixed, so the question is "what price for ethereum equalizes the amount of ETH people are willing to buy at that price and the supply of ETH". If you assume that the demand is "whatever people are willing to do on VISA, they're willing to do on Ethereum assuming they can for cheaper" (an assumption some here will probably find dubious, but let's go with it), and that Ethereum is capable of that (which it isn't, not yet anyway), the value of the amount of Ethereum needed to do a transaction is the same as the cost of doing a transaction through VISA (since we're assuming they're perfect substitutes). Then we have to consider their costs – VISA's costs are whatever they spend on hiring programmers and servers and little cards, and Ethereum's cost is what they pay to validators to incentivize them to keep the chain secure. If we make a third assumption that these costs are similar, the market cap of Ethereum should be the same as Visa's. The market caps are actually very similar, so that's some evidence that the market believes that these assumptions are true.
rvz 5y ago
Makes sense for verified merchant payments / donations to human readable addresses (myshopname.eth), makes less sense for individuals to use it whilst tying their address to their entire wallet, storing NFTs, net worth, permissions on there. As for ENS itself, it is the only working valid use case for NFTs. Too bad it is implemented on something that is sluggish and expensive for users to use, which is Ethereum.
alx__ 5y ago
Yes this just looks like a marketing fad. Folks will change their names to promote something all the time. My guess is that a visual change every so often gets folks to notice. So kinda :shrug: from me ;)
janderland 5y ago
At risk of sounding like a jerk, this post is just raw data. The “implication” you brought up and the rejection of said implication was all done by you.
- jchw 5y ago
  By its very definition, an implication is something that is not explicitly stated. And since nobody would collect information this specific for no reason, there is definitely some inherent sentiment in tracking this kind of thing. It can be debated exactly what, but come on. Nobody does anything without some intent somehow.
novocantico 5y ago
It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style, or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile, or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively.
- eadonmachine 5y ago
  Inevitably they get bored or the fad dies out, nothing is gained, but then people still excitedly go along with the next one every time as if they have no memory of the previous 1000 iterations. I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
  - novocantico 5y ago
    Why not a third option of just enjoying life from any perspective you have, including sometimes being on the outside and sometimes on the inside?
  - feoren 5y ago
    Many of the people involved in the new fad don't have a memory of the previous 1000 iterations because they are different people. Many new people are joining the internet every day. Also be aware of the obvious-in-hindsight bias: anyone can point out fads after they've come and gone. It's not as easy confidently identifying the fads that are going on right now.
    - 0x20cowboy 5y ago
      > The vast majority of people who work in the tech industry are perpetually 5 years out of university. > So the vast majority of the time we get the same tools, the same frameworks, and the same ideas poorly reimplemented over and over. I heard that at a talk by a salty tech OG. My experience doesn’t disagree with his observation, but I do have slightly more hope than he had.
cslarson 5y ago
Many of these may have been dropped as a response to Brantly Milligan being fired/canceled/banned from Twitter. At least that's why mine is up there. Could do some analysis on dates to confirm/disprove.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ForHackernews 5y ago
> ...ETH...is dying or people are caring less. > ... it was just a fad. These are equivalent statements. Cryptocurrency has very little real utility, so when the fad ends, it is dead.
dvt 5y ago
ENS is natively supported on Brave[1] (so `example.eth` is functionally a URL). I think Firefox as well? I don't have it installed so I can't check. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14871 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14871
- delecti 5y ago
  Firefox doesn't seem to support it. Trying to go to "shaq.eth" leads to a google search, and "https://shaq.eth https://shaq.eth" gives a standard "server not found" error page.
  - asenna 5y ago
    .eth only resolves to an IPFS content if you set it up to do that. shaq.eth probably is not hosting any IPFS content. Here's Vitalik's blog hosted on IPFS and linked to his ENS: https://vitalik.eth.link/ https://vitalik.eth.link/ (PS - appending .link would resolve any ENS domain which is hosting IPFS static sites)
egypturnash 5y ago
Huh, I just thought that was a thing cryptobros did because they thought it sounded cool. I had no idea it was an address I could have been sending malicious payloads to if they annoyed me!
chairmanmow 5y ago
Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee, which didn't make a whole of sense to me given the immutable nature of the blockchain - there's more overhead involved in expiring them but more profit to be made for the next renewal. The price was also ridiculously high if you ask me for something so basic, just like a bytes => address mapping, doesn't require a genius to make, although it seems like they managed to get some partnerships/integrations behind it which add the main value as it seems like there's some integration with web3 libs to know how to leverage ENS. Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.
- wingworks 5y ago
  Yeah, a few months ago when I first noticed it appearing everywhere I looked into buying one, but when I saw the current price of eth + gas fees etc I left an alert on to alert me when fee's were lower. Never got an alert, so never bought/rented one. Happy I didn't. Same goes with NFTs, the fee's are just crazy. + I don't think the average joe can make any money on it.
  - trophycase 5y ago
    Weird, I know a lot of "average joes" who have gone from complete poverty to financial security trading NFTs. I know third worlders who make orders of magnitude higher than minimum wage just grinding discord whitelists and participating in art contests and meme contests for rewards.
    - simonw 5y ago
      I really hope those "average joes" have cashed out enough real currency that they won't be back to complete poverty should everything crash again.
corobo 5y ago
It sounds vaguely like .tel but popular because crypto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel
- ChadNauseam 5y ago
  I don't see the relation. ENS is a whole separate name service. .tel is an ICANN tld that I guess is supposed to be used for business cards and stuff. ENS could be used for business cards I guess, but it's not designed with that as the primary purpose.
  - corobo 5y ago
    Apologies it’s been a while since I last thought of .tel, if I remember right if you hit the domain over http it would have a list of records Probably just a rogue thought bumping into a misremember :)
  - Kadin 5y ago
    I think the idea was more than just for display purposes. There was an idea that the telephone-switching address space and public Internet could be combined, because the devices were converging towards each other. So an address in .tel would be a phone number, and also all active telephone numbers in the ISO numbering scheme would be valid addresses under .tel. You'd be able to put in DNS records to forward "friendly" names to phone numbers, and also set SIP endpoints for PSTN numbers. It was never really clear who was going to run all this, i.e. would it be the phone company, or some outfit like Network Solutions / Verisign... and I think that's part of why it never really happened. And phone numbers and DNS remain separate address spaces.
rglullis 5y ago
Or they are realizing that putting their ENS names is making very easy for other people to track their Blockchain transactions and target them for scams?
throwawaycities 5y ago
> It's not a URL It is a URL, it’s just not ICANN/DNS. In practice you can go to example.eth directly in web3 browsers (most mobile wallets have built in browsers). For browsers like Chrome or safari you can access them through gateways, for example, Cloudflare has a .link gateway so on chrome you can use example.eth.link (my preferred gateway is eth.limo).
kingcharles 5y ago
In the mid-late 90s every store started adding .COM to its official company name, and then putting up new signs on their stores. It looked horribly tacky and a few years later everyone quietly disappeared the TLDs.
gonehome 5y ago
I think a lot of users dropped it after brantly.eth was an ass.

CameronNemo 5y ago

Some may have realized that publicizing their net worth is both tacky and painting a target on their back.

babyshake 5y ago
Is there a good way to use a ENS name without exposing your net worth but not needing to rely on the same mixing techniques used to launder funds?
- benmanns 5y ago
  You could use a separate wallet for your ENS name.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    that doesn't help because all transfers to/from said wallet are public.
    - yebyen 5y ago
      ETH is a public ledger. If you publish your address and put your own name on it, any transfers to or from that address will be associated with your public name. This is not something that can be solved. At least not in ETH itself; even privacy coins like ZEC may have a way to make your identity public and make your history transparent – and it works as designed when you do this, your transactions are public. (In this sense, neither does using a mixer really help at all. It would just show that you've received some money and sent it to a mixer as yourself, if the mixer is also a public known entity.) I suppose one way to solve this, is to tell people to look up your ENS name, and then sign a message and share it with them – to present them securely with an address that they can use and verify that it belongs to you, only that it won't be tied to your original identity, except by that message (which you'd have to trust them not to share as well.)
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      Of course it helps, I can just send some money from Binance to a new address and nobody except for them will know it's connected to me. Alternatively I can bridge them through a less traceble network like SCRT if I don't want even an exchange to know about it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Is there a good way to use a ENS name without exposing your net worth Not making one crypto wallet and your net worth the same thing?
- ra0x3 5y ago
  You could always buy the ENS name without associating it with your main address (whether directly or via reverse lookup). But at that point, you're just domain squatting and it kinda defeats the purpose of paying for the domain name in the first place
- vmception 5y ago
  everyone has unlimited unique addresses associated with each recover phrase, just use a different one. in Metamask its as simple as clicking the dropdown for "new account". you have plenty of options for this: 1) withdraw from an exchange directly to the virgin address and never send funds back to the ENS one (except when you want people to know something, like to pump an NFT or token, similar to how state mandated Elon Musk ownership disclosures pumped Twitter) 2) “launder” (obfuscate) once and never look back to the ENS address. Withdrawing from Tornado.cash doesnt expose one of your addresses expose to initiated the transaction, so Tornado Cash will do an internal transaction (smart contract moving Ether to an individual address) with no link to one of your funded addresses. Or just reset Metamask and make a new recovery phrase with a whole new set of unlimited unique addresses. this reduces any temptation to accidentally send to your ENS address. you still have access to the ENS name and address. so just use it when you want. there is no reason to reuse addresses and its comical that being married to an address has become default behavior.
- cdiddy2 5y ago
  just use coinbase as a mixing service. withdraw some eth from there to a fresh wallet and buy an ens name. then its not connected publicly to any of your other wallets but the gov/coinbase can easily still see you
  - babyshake 5y ago
    thanks, this is actually pretty obvious but it didn't occur to me for some reason.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Just keep your ENS domain on its own blank wallet, also you can add your Monero wallet address on your ENS domain.
bamboozled 5y ago
Was going to say the sam thing, almost sounds like more of a positiv thing for ETH. Maturity phase.
- recuter 5y ago
  This is good for bitcoin.
elevenoh 5y ago
Most did the opposite - small inconsequential accounts tied to their ens name.
dbavaria 5y ago
Most experienced crypto users would use multiple wallets. But advertising any of your wallet addresses is asking for people to send you scam coins. It just pollutes your wallet and makes it that much more likely that you will trip up and interact with a scam smart contract.
- exikyut 5y ago
  1. It's insane crypto has basically become "run this untrusted code on your bank account" 2. It's sad the people who will be hit with this stuff the most are the newbies :(

quadrature 5y ago

I think people got tired of the bots that scan user names matching <name>.xyz and target them with bitcoin scams.

smegsicle 5y ago
at least they still have this spreadsheet to work from for awhile

dwrowe 5y ago

.xyz has a public resolver for ETH addresses for browsers so - foo.eth - you could type in foo.eth.xyz and it'll resolve to a placeholder of sorts for information in the .eth profile (pointers to wallets, Twitter handles, NFTs currently held, etc). I think it's interesting in the "online business card" sense - but not too much beyond that. EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.

jacobmischka 5y ago
I imagine this is just a website with the domain eth.xyz and with some subdomain shenanigans. You make it sound like it's sponsored by the TLD or something.
ryan29 5y ago
> EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain. It is though. > Eth.xyz was created for the ENS community with love by the XYZ Registry, the company behind .xyz domain names. The project is open for contribution or feedback on GitHub. Send us a message @xyz on Twitter! [1] It's kind of neat, but seems like a registry taking on a lot of extra liability that they typically don't have as a domain registry. Putting a disclaimer on the sites doesn't exempt them from the law. > The profile content on this page is automatically generated from publicly available information provided through ENS and is ultimately controlled by the relevant ENS user. Nothing on this page implies any endorsement or affiliation between XYZ or ENS and the person or organization whose profile information appears on this page. So what gain does the blockchain get you? XYZ isn't judgement proof like the blockchain, so they'll have to follow the current laws for trademarks, copyrights, etc.. If the blockchain isn't adding any revolutionary tech, is slower, is expensive, and is only accessible using gateways that are subjected to current laws, what's the appeal? 1. https://eth.xyz/ https://eth.xyz/
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Actually sounds like the folks at XYZ are doing interesting things.

sudden_dystopia 5y ago

As Peter Thiel pointed out yesterday, ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. Doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but maybe not a lot of room to increase the market cap.

HWR_14 5y ago
> ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. How does that even make sense? ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation. Visa is valued based on money made from transactions. They aren't really related at all. It's not like ETH is doing proof-of-stake, owning ETH doesn't in any way entitle you to ongoing dividends like VISA stock would.
- ChadNauseam 5y ago
  > ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation This is not really a meaningful statement. Thiel is talking about Ethereum's market cap, which is not related to the number of tokens in circulation. Owning ETH doesn't (and most likely will never, even after the PoS merge) pay anything like dividends. The demand for ETH comes from the fact that it's necessary to pay some every time you want to interact with the ethereum blockchain. The demand for Visa stock comes from the fact that Visa will probably pay dividends or do buybacks in the future. You're right that that makes it not obvious how to compare the two. But you can still try and do the comparison Thiel might be doing. What "should" the price of ETH be? The supply of ETH is mostly fixed, so the question is "what price for ethereum equalizes the amount of ETH people are willing to buy at that price and the supply of ETH". If you assume that the demand is "whatever people are willing to do on VISA, they're willing to do on Ethereum assuming they can for cheaper" (an assumption some here will probably find dubious, but let's go with it), and that Ethereum is capable of that (which it isn't, not yet anyway), the value of the amount of Ethereum needed to do a transaction is the same as the cost of doing a transaction through VISA (since we're assuming they're perfect substitutes). Then we have to consider their costs – VISA's costs are whatever they spend on hiring programmers and servers and little cards, and Ethereum's cost is what they pay to validators to incentivize them to keep the chain secure. If we make a third assumption that these costs are similar, the market cap of Ethereum should be the same as Visa's. The market caps are actually very similar, so that's some evidence that the market believes that these assumptions are true.

rvz 5y ago

Makes sense for verified merchant payments / donations to human readable addresses (myshopname.eth), makes less sense for individuals to use it whilst tying their address to their entire wallet, storing NFTs, net worth, permissions on there. As for ENS itself, it is the only working valid use case for NFTs. Too bad it is implemented on something that is sluggish and expensive for users to use, which is Ethereum.

alx__ 5y ago

Yes this just looks like a marketing fad. Folks will change their names to promote something all the time. My guess is that a visual change every so often gets folks to notice. So kinda :shrug: from me ;)

janderland 5y ago

At risk of sounding like a jerk, this post is just raw data. The “implication” you brought up and the rejection of said implication was all done by you.

jchw 5y ago
By its very definition, an implication is something that is not explicitly stated. And since nobody would collect information this specific for no reason, there is definitely some inherent sentiment in tracking this kind of thing. It can be debated exactly what, but come on. Nobody does anything without some intent somehow.

novocantico 5y ago

It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style, or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile, or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively.

eadonmachine 5y ago
Inevitably they get bored or the fad dies out, nothing is gained, but then people still excitedly go along with the next one every time as if they have no memory of the previous 1000 iterations. I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
- novocantico 5y ago
  Why not a third option of just enjoying life from any perspective you have, including sometimes being on the outside and sometimes on the inside?
- feoren 5y ago
  Many of the people involved in the new fad don't have a memory of the previous 1000 iterations because they are different people. Many new people are joining the internet every day. Also be aware of the obvious-in-hindsight bias: anyone can point out fads after they've come and gone. It's not as easy confidently identifying the fads that are going on right now.
  - 0x20cowboy 5y ago
    > The vast majority of people who work in the tech industry are perpetually 5 years out of university. > So the vast majority of the time we get the same tools, the same frameworks, and the same ideas poorly reimplemented over and over. I heard that at a talk by a salty tech OG. My experience doesn’t disagree with his observation, but I do have slightly more hope than he had.

cslarson 5y ago

Many of these may have been dropped as a response to Brantly Milligan being fired/canceled/banned from Twitter. At least that's why mine is up there. Could do some analysis on dates to confirm/disprove.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ForHackernews 5y ago

> ...ETH...is dying or people are caring less. > ... it was just a fad. These are equivalent statements. Cryptocurrency has very little real utility, so when the fad ends, it is dead.

dvt 5y ago

ENS is natively supported on Brave[1] (so `example.eth` is functionally a URL). I think Firefox as well? I don't have it installed so I can't check. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14871 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14871

delecti 5y ago
Firefox doesn't seem to support it. Trying to go to "shaq.eth" leads to a google search, and "https://shaq.eth https://shaq.eth" gives a standard "server not found" error page.
- asenna 5y ago
  .eth only resolves to an IPFS content if you set it up to do that. shaq.eth probably is not hosting any IPFS content. Here's Vitalik's blog hosted on IPFS and linked to his ENS: https://vitalik.eth.link/ https://vitalik.eth.link/ (PS - appending .link would resolve any ENS domain which is hosting IPFS static sites)

egypturnash 5y ago

Huh, I just thought that was a thing cryptobros did because they thought it sounded cool. I had no idea it was an address I could have been sending malicious payloads to if they annoyed me!

chairmanmow 5y ago

Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee, which didn't make a whole of sense to me given the immutable nature of the blockchain - there's more overhead involved in expiring them but more profit to be made for the next renewal. The price was also ridiculously high if you ask me for something so basic, just like a bytes => address mapping, doesn't require a genius to make, although it seems like they managed to get some partnerships/integrations behind it which add the main value as it seems like there's some integration with web3 libs to know how to leverage ENS. Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.

wingworks 5y ago
Yeah, a few months ago when I first noticed it appearing everywhere I looked into buying one, but when I saw the current price of eth + gas fees etc I left an alert on to alert me when fee's were lower. Never got an alert, so never bought/rented one. Happy I didn't. Same goes with NFTs, the fee's are just crazy. + I don't think the average joe can make any money on it.
- trophycase 5y ago
  Weird, I know a lot of "average joes" who have gone from complete poverty to financial security trading NFTs. I know third worlders who make orders of magnitude higher than minimum wage just grinding discord whitelists and participating in art contests and meme contests for rewards.
  - simonw 5y ago
    I really hope those "average joes" have cashed out enough real currency that they won't be back to complete poverty should everything crash again.

corobo 5y ago

It sounds vaguely like .tel but popular because crypto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel

ChadNauseam 5y ago
I don't see the relation. ENS is a whole separate name service. .tel is an ICANN tld that I guess is supposed to be used for business cards and stuff. ENS could be used for business cards I guess, but it's not designed with that as the primary purpose.
- corobo 5y ago
  Apologies it’s been a while since I last thought of .tel, if I remember right if you hit the domain over http it would have a list of records Probably just a rogue thought bumping into a misremember :)
- Kadin 5y ago
  I think the idea was more than just for display purposes. There was an idea that the telephone-switching address space and public Internet could be combined, because the devices were converging towards each other. So an address in .tel would be a phone number, and also all active telephone numbers in the ISO numbering scheme would be valid addresses under .tel. You'd be able to put in DNS records to forward "friendly" names to phone numbers, and also set SIP endpoints for PSTN numbers. It was never really clear who was going to run all this, i.e. would it be the phone company, or some outfit like Network Solutions / Verisign... and I think that's part of why it never really happened. And phone numbers and DNS remain separate address spaces.

rglullis 5y ago

Or they are realizing that putting their ENS names is making very easy for other people to track their Blockchain transactions and target them for scams?

throwawaycities 5y ago

> It's not a URL It is a URL, it’s just not ICANN/DNS. In practice you can go to example.eth directly in web3 browsers (most mobile wallets have built in browsers). For browsers like Chrome or safari you can access them through gateways, for example, Cloudflare has a .link gateway so on chrome you can use example.eth.link (my preferred gateway is eth.limo).

kingcharles 5y ago

In the mid-late 90s every store started adding .COM to its official company name, and then putting up new signs on their stores. It looked horribly tacky and a few years later everyone quietly disappeared the TLDs.

gonehome 5y ago

I think a lot of users dropped it after brantly.eth was an ass.