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Bored Ape virtual land sale breaks Ethereum

218 points by danso 4y ago

dralley 4y ago
- chef0 4y ago
bluedevil2k 4y ago
"burned nearly $200 million worth of Ethereum" I wouldn't say it was "wasted" - some people made a lot of money out of it.
- solveit 4y ago
  Also, it's not like Ethereum is a physical good that can be destroyed. It's just a bookkeeping tool and what happened is people trying to mint NFTs gave up their portion of the total supply in exchange for having their transactions go first. The "wasted" fees were in effect distributed equally to every other ETH in existence.
- vkou 4y ago
  Did ~$200 million dollars worth of electricity & hardware depreciation get burnt as part of this land sale? If so, I'd say that it's close to 'wasted', given that as I understand, the only thing of value that has been created is only useful for financial speculation. We're paying people to dig ditches, and then fill them. Just because the ditchdiggers got paid doesn't mean their effort isn't wasted!
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I don't think the way it works is that every blockchain transaction of value X requires an equivalent cost X (denominated in USD) of electricity usage and hardware depreciation.
    - vkou 4y ago
      ... Right. Duh. If this was simply a surprise pay-day for miners (as opposed to the real cost of running the network), you are right, in that extent. In that case, yes, from a productivity & resource usage point of view, this wasn't a waste of $200 million.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    No, it didn't. The amount of electricity used doesn't increase because of network congestion, and with Ethereum's mining reward system, there is no incentive for miners to increase their hash rate just for high-congestion moments. Lastly, these reports really need to stop denominating things in USD. 64k ETH were burned, the dollar amount is not related to it.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Not going to comment on the specific claims here, but "speculation" is often a useful activity if we care about planning for the long-term and adequately allocating resources.
    - vkou 4y ago
      It is, if it actually results in useful, productive, real-world work to be done more efficiently. I understand why people may want to trade futures, or hedge against instability in FOREX or interest rates, and how this spawns a side-industry of derivatives traders and speculators, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the ratio of speculation to productive real-world work done by the crypto space seems to be ~0, compared to speculation in most of the real-world economy. If all of these ICOs and NFTs were producing valuable goods (food, medicine, shelter, widgets, entertainment[1]) left and right, more efficiently than the traditional economy, I wouldn't accuse the space of being purely speculative. [1] Well, it does produce some entertainment...
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Stablecoin adoption in the developing world seems to be of value. Compensating artists and thus incentivizing artwork seems probably good too. But I'm not very familiar with the space as I've said.
- theptip 4y ago
  Right, “burned” suggests it was destroyed. Instead this was paid to miners. The service the miners are providing is auctioning off time-slots in the network. This is load-shedding in action; if you don’t think your transaction is worth the fee, wait until the network is less congested. (Sure, this is probably an indictment of Ethereum-as-currency, but I don’t think that’s a use-case that is seriously contemplated by most market participants right now.) Edit: this first part may be false, fees are apparently actually burned now. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311
  - bagacrap 4y ago
    so is it like a share buyback, incrementally increasing the value of all held etc?
nootropicat 4y ago
Fees rising isn't the same as 'breaking'. Also this was clearly intentional marketing to promote their chain. Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why it's obvious it was intentional.
- amyjess 4y ago
  Most of the spike in gas prices here was caused by their contract being horrendously un-optimized. If they had done even basic optimization of their contract, gas prices would've been a tiny fraction of what they were, and they would be orders of magnitude smaller if they used ERC-721A. Here's an estimate of what would have happened if they just optimized their damn contract: https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010 https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010 919.96 ETH would have been saved if they optimized it and stayed on ERC-721, and 39194.05 ETH would have been safed if they also switched ot ERC-721A. I'm convinced that Yuga is just technically incompetent. All of the people I pay attention to in the crypto space are incensed by everything Yuga is doing here, from the un-optimized contracts to blaming ETH for their own incompetence to their pricing model that excludes everyone except for whales who are already wealthy. The people I follow in the space are small-time independent artists who use NFTs as a way to make a living off their original art, and none of them are happy with Yuga at all.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    What's preventing an actor from deliberately designing the slowest or most resource intensive contracts in order to break the system ?
    - pshc 4y ago
      It's all limited by fees. Typically, users would see the high fees and choose not to interact with the contract. It seems during this sale, FOMO outstripped the incredibly (negligently) high expense.
rglullis 4y ago
No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked exactly as designed. No fees were "wasted". If people were willing to make a transaction knowing that this was going to be the cost, it is a reflection of people's time preferences.
- soared 4y ago
  A transaction for $25 that costs $3,000 to complete seems pretty plainly broken. Imagine that happening with your credit card.
  - nvahalik 4y ago
    Except that if you knew your CC transaction would cost that much, you'd probably use a different card or use cash.
    - beej71 4y ago
      And, indeed, most people do.
  - siftrics 4y ago
    Those who submitted the transactions _knew_ the transaction fees before submitting. They voluntarily and intentionally paid these fees. This is not broken.
    - TameAntelope 4y ago
      Sorry, but nobody signed up for their transaction to fail, this is a bullshit excuse. > Besides high fees, the transaction load resulted in a bottleneck that resulted in failed transactions that people still had to pay fees for—now in the thousands of dollars for nothing in return, not even an NFT.
      - siftrics 4y ago
        Yes they did. They knew that transaction failure is a risk and they accounted for it. I don't feel bad if they did not do their due diligence before attempting to transfer thousands of dollars of ETH.
literallyWTF 4y ago
dralley 4y ago
>A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from different projects, often outstripping the underlying asset: a $3,500 fee for a $500 NFT, a $3,800 fee for a $270 NFT, a $3,950 transaction fee for a $260 NFT, and a $3,300 transaction fee for a $25 NFT were just some of the many ridiculous trades executed during the gas war caused by Otherdeed's NFT launch. Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway.
- jameshart 4y ago
  When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices? Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges). In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
er4hn 4y ago
A significant source of waste in Ethereum/Bitcoin is transaction tips in order to process a transaction within a certain timeframe. This is in turn tied to the notion of wanting a consistent global state for everyone to operate under. If there was not a global state, but a set of transactions that flow across nodes this would significantly improve the throughput of the overall system. In other words, the state of an account gradually flows across the system of nodes. Are there any projects out there like that?
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  The problem with such a system is the opportunities for arbitrage, right?
- skulk 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house A specific project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
  - vmception 4y ago
    got one that I can extract value from myself? tonight? for fun and profit?
  - er4hn 4y ago
    ha, I meant as a distributed low trust computing environment.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  This invites double spends.
- toraway1234 4y ago
- sharperguy 4y ago
  Bitcoin's lightning network achieves this by using the base transactions stored on the blockchain only as a fall-back, so that many transactions can be performed without needing to be globally synchronized. Only in the case that a partner fails to follow the established rules of engagement between nodes, a transaction must be created on chain, to "force" the correct outcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
can16358p 4y ago
That money is not exactly wasted, it's gone to miners. And how does Ethereum "break" exactly? It was just bloated with many transactions, creating a bottleneck, which is perfectly expected for a hyped project like this.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > it's gone to miners. No, the base fee is burned (i.e, removed from the available supply). Since Ethereum's EIP-1155 (which changed the rules for pricing and mining rewards, miners only get to keep a "tip") Anyway, I'd also say that they were not wasted. Worst case scenario, these gigantic token burns reduce the supply and make all the token holders a bit richer.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Oops, missed that, right. Yeah, even though miners get only a part of the ether, it still valuates the currency when it's burned.
dylkil 4y ago
how do these ignorant takes get upvoted on a tech board like this
- vba616 4y ago
  I don't understand why or how they think resources were wasted. I mean, it might be true, since I don't know how Ethereum works. But I don't see where it says or implies or explains that the fees represented real resources lost - rather than money transferred.
  - robbiep 4y ago
    Some of the transaction fee is literally burned/ceases to exist. Some fraction of it is also printed but some goes away completely. As I understand it.
    - ldiracdelta 4y ago
      Sounds like currency deflation. There are winners in deflation too.
  - Tao332 4y ago
    The mistake is in pretending that 64K Eth has a USD value that means anything. It doesn't.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      So give me at least 1 eth, please.
- vnchr 4y ago
  I have to agree. It starts with irresponsible journalism that is misrepresenting what actually happened. Nothing broke.
soared 4y ago
I pray that the inevitable nft/crypto bubble pop does not trickle into the rest of the economy. I’d love to believe the ape nft stuff is also mid 20s kids like me messing around, but I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects.
- paxys 4y ago
  Considering Fidelity is literally starting to offer crypto trading in 401k accounts, that ship might have sailed already
  - soared 4y ago
    True. Fidelity was mining bitcoins for years before other institutional investors were involved and they likely hold massive reserves. I just hope they’ve insulated themselves against the risk.
    - abirch 4y ago
      Most banks do. They are transferring the risks to their customers.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    Cryptocurrency trading can be a legitimate way to diversify risk. Of course people should know what they're getting into before they start and it's very likely to fail but I trust institutional traders more than anyone else to actually make money off of cryptocurrencies.
  - Geee 4y ago
    I believe that Fidelity allows investing in bitcoin, not crypto in general.
- rhizome 4y ago
  I figure NFTs are an attempt to materialize cryptocurrency so that it does trickle into the rest of the economy. >I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects. If it's your trashcoin/NFT/whatever, you're at the top of the pyramid no matter what. There's no downside in convincing people to contribute cold hard cash to your new soared-coin.
daenz 4y ago
The final paragraph sums it up nicely: >We’ve seen this story a million times before: Crypto project is launched. Something goes wrong. Founders, investors, whales, and some of the community make out like bandits. Most people are left out on the cold, only to be offered another, even greater opportunity with an upcoming token or project. Surely this time will be different. I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.
- dvtrn 4y ago
  At least with regards to one person I previously thought was someone who would otherwise “know better” after an incredibly confusing conversation about their NFT Group “recruiting” people from poor communities (their definition of recruiting meant nothing more than getting them to create accounts on OpenSea and buying shit)…they don’t care. The greater fool theory handcuffs has them locked in TIGHT. I mean the fact that they call what they’re doing “recruiting” is full of all kinds of ugly signals. I don’t talk to them anymore.
- siftrics 4y ago
  Because they know more than surface-level details and understand that trustless, permission-less financial systems offer a huge amount of value, especially to those in less-developed and authoritarian countries, who are regularly abused by a small group of people running their country's financial affairs. But that doesn't apply to you because you live in the developed world, where you've never had to deal with not being allowed a bank account or extortionist fees or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason.
  - vosper 4y ago
    I'm sure these authoritarian governments are definitely just going to sit by while some foreign technology disrupts their control of the financial system. The Security XKCD says it better - it even uses the term "crypto"! https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - 4y ago
SlyShy 4y ago
Nothing broke, the dynamic fee market worked exactly as intended. Contrast with Solana which actually went offline for 7 hours that same day.
- rvz 4y ago
  So it essentially means that Ethereum is unable to globally scale or to be usable for anything on-chain at all except for millionaires wasting (and losing) $10k - $100k in fees for silly JPEG images, otherwise why are these same Ethereum proponents complaining that it is a problem? Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that day and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything 'high demand'.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations. We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the adoption of "layer-2" systems, where users are expected to be doing their transactions and avoid these costly transactions altogether. There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0]. There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20 tokens [3]. [0] https://loopring.io https://loopring.io [1] https://optimism.io/ https://optimism.io/ [2] https://offchainlabs.com/ https://offchainlabs.com/ [3] https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      This comment is hilarious from an outsider's perspective. For all I know, you may as well be describing the turboencabulator.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        I'm not saying that the system has a good UX, or that it's ready for mass-consumption. I am just saying that if you are minimally involved with it, you should be aware of the issues and the alternatives in development.
chris123 4y ago
Prepare for all of justifications and cognitive dissonance, all these centralized projects (I won't use the s-word)
als0 4y ago
Just wondering... Weren't they going to move to proof of stake?
- Animats 4y ago
  Etherium's move to proof of stake is expected to happen shortly after Godot shows up.
- pawelduda 4y ago
  Recently it was delayed but supposedly still on track before EOY
  - annoyingnoob 4y ago
    Same as last year?
    - manquer 4y ago
      and every year for the last 5
  - postalrat 4y ago
    "supposedly still on track before EOY" Nice way to say "never".
  - fredoliveira 4y ago
    Just history repeating itself, honestly. It's been delayed so many times, even the optimist in me is starting to doubt this is really it.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  Pretty sure ethereum pos is going to show up around the same time tesla's FSD does. Ie, "next year", every year.
Animats 4y ago
So Yuga sold 55,000 deeds to parcels in "Otherside", a virtual world that doesn't exist yet. 45,000 deeds were distributed to insiders. So what happened? 96,000 of those "Otherdeeds" are now for sale on OpenSea.[1] Some of the rest are for sale on Rareable. Few buyers. [1] https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed
- onepointsixC 4y ago
  Are we looking at the same thing? I'm seeing 6,000 sales just today, with an average price of 9.8 Eth [1]. That looks like a lot of buying and selling to me. [1]: https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity
  - Animats 4y ago
    This will have to wait on chain analysis, but many of those transactions involve the same addresses. We may be watching wash sales. This was supposed to be an item people would hold. That's not happening. Almost all the items are on the market.
    - vmception 4y ago
      wow double misunderstanding. OpenSea reads the blockchain for all NFTs. You have to explicitly delist for it not to show. and then back with the wash trading assumption. it only takes you trying to buy or sell a popular NFT once for you to know that you didn't trade it between your own address, even if those that would yell "source thats its not wash trading!?" won't believe you
- samatman 4y ago
  I'm an outsider to the whole NFT thing but I'm pretty sure you're misreading this. I clicked the "on auction" filter and see 192 'parcels' or w/e for sale right now, the rest are listed on OpenSea but that doesn't imply that someone can buy them.
  - 4y ago
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
More previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513
jayd16 4y ago
So why did this need to be a gas war? Couldn't they have run the sale such that a race isn't necessary, eg waiting longer for transactions to complete? What was the point?
brutshucks 4y ago
I look at these projects in amazement that anyone would waste such significant amounts of time and money on them. Cryptocurrency really is a cult isn't it.
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  Many people make an obscene amount of money from this. I think that answers your question why many also put so much time and effort into it.
  - Tao332 4y ago
    > Many people make an obscene amount of money from this. It really is a cult, isn't it?
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
With that money I could have financed clinical trials with PNC-27 + thymalin and therefore solved cancer. I'm not even joking, people don't have the erudition to realize it but it's true.
- dqpb 4y ago
  The US has almost 1000 billionaires. Any one of them could decide to mobilize researchers for this purpose, but instead they have decided it's not worth doing that. In fact they have decided it's not worth mobilizing anybody to do anything with that extra money. Why?
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    Ignorance and mediocrity have much more explanative power than malice
    - dqpb 4y ago
      I don't think it's malice. I think wealthy people are predominantly focused on keeping their fortune in-tact, and growing. I don't think they feel a great responsibility to spend it. But, in my view, the whole point of capitalism is to allocate decision-making authority to those who make good decisions. If it gets allocated to people who choose to defer those decisions indefinitely (by not spending the money), then I think that's a major failure of the system. It may be that not spending the money is the best decision. But, as someone who see's opportunities for improvement literally everywhere, I fail to see how that's possible.
- quesera 4y ago
  Your argument resembles that of frauds and quacks everywhere. I hope I know less about cancer research than you do -- because I know very little, and you want us to believe that you know more than that. However your presentation style will convince no one.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
arthurcolle 4y ago
I always wondered why a gas fee future or option never was developed to mitigate gas fees indirectly. Since gas fees are heavily dependent on smart contract conplexity, a secondary market based on gas fees, and not on ETH spot price, seems like it would be a useful financial innovation in this space
- vmception 4y ago
  It did. The last Ethereum upgrade specifically targeted and killed them (amongst a variety of other changes). There were a lot of smart contracts that would end with exercising the owner's gas option for a gas refund. It was glorious to see, like the icing on the cake after a massive frontrunning flash loan. Here are two-three implementations of that concept: https://blog.1inch.io/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-chi-gastoken-a1ba0ea55bf3 https://blog.1inch.io/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-ch... https://gastoken.io/ https://gastoken.io/ and last year's reporting on the planned changelog https://decrypt.co/77345/ethereum-london-hard-fork-make-some-tokens-worthless https://decrypt.co/77345/ethereum-london-hard-fork-make-some...
sva_ 4y ago
I wonder at what point you might call these NFTs a successful DDoS on the eth blockchain.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
We are boiling the oceans with this pointless shit, too.
danans 4y ago
> And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees according to Etherscan—that's over $180 million at today's prices, most of which is now gone forever due to Ethereum’s burn. Probably impossible to know, but I wonder how much actual gas (or other fossil fuel) got burned to power this episode.
- tofuahdude 4y ago
  Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.
  - danans 4y ago
    Please explain how it works with respect to energy consumption then? Perhaps there is no way to isolate and characterize the power consumed for this event exactly, but that doesn't mean that one can't characterize the power consumption of crypto. This is already described in terms of energy used per transaction [1]. So the next question is can we characterize events like these similarly, by i.e. the # of transactions or some other descriptive statistics, and multiply that by the source-weighted energy mix of transactions. That's not to suggest that this event's energy consumption is higher than the regular rate, but interesting nonetheless. 1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day. Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the network gets congested. Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full of high fees, low fees, or completely empty. And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.
  - danans 4y ago
    > The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward powering this event vs the value in $ created by it? > And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses. It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of bitcoin's energy consumption. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
ilaksh 4y ago
There are other cryptocurrencies. For example Algorand could handle the traffic and the fees are less than a penny per transaction.
- GaylordTuring 4y ago
  True. But nobody wants to use that because the price performance is horrible. And price performance is the only utility that most people care about in crypto.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    Maybe the Bored Ape fees fiasco is an example of why "price performance" isn't the only "utility" that matters for cryptocurrency.
floatinglotus 4y ago
This is the type of stuff that makes me laugh.
andreisbc 4y ago
Kadena is probably the only proof of work blockchain that's infinitely scalable, has low gas fees, even introduces the concept of gas stations. They just announced a $100M fund for development.
Taniwha 4y ago
"cryptocurrency" hah! It's not a viable currency until its transaction costs are comparable with me using a $20 note at the corner store
WYepQ4dNnG 4y ago
I wished people would care more for the real world than virtual land and racing to Mars ... awful times we live in ..
deevolution 4y ago
It's amazing how much people care how other people spend their money. It's their money, if they want to spend it on ape pictures so be it. Nothing to see here, move along.
- zeusk 4y ago
  Because most of them down the line will shell their ponzi assets to other unsuspecting general public in lure of ludicrous returns.
dibujante 4y ago
I don't really understand how a "$25 NFT with a $3300 transaction fee" can exist. Isn't that a $3325 NFT? The purchaser was willing to pay that. It seems like the main difference is that the seller didn't receive what the purchaser was willing to pay, creating a rather unique dead-weight loss. Wouldn't it be better if the seller received the additional $3300?
- mattdesl 4y ago
  The purchaser paid that fee to the protocol (miner + burn), not the seller, to have their transaction processed before others in the mempool and settle the trade in < ~30 sec. They could have set a smaller fee ($10-100) and gone for lunch, and their transaction would have been accepted within an hour or two. This is most likely a UX issue. Users aren’t aware they can set normal fees even during congested periods.
  - dibujante 4y ago
    So it's more like me announcing that, if everyone in line lets me cut to the front, I will burn a $100 bill and enrich them all slightly through deflation. I wonder if any transactions ever just never get confirmed because they never pay enough gas fee to not be pre-empted?
    - landemva 4y ago
      Yes, and eventually drop out of the group of unprocessed transactions (mempool). You can cheaply try this for yourself. No permission needed to learn!
    - mattdesl 4y ago
      The burn is one part (and in many cases the majority of the transaction fee) but there is also an optional tip directed to miners which may incentivize them to include your transaction first. Transactions that are below the market fee will just sit in mempool waiting for a miner to pick it up. Eventually these 'stuck' transactions will be pruned by nodes to free up room for more rewarding transactions. I recently wrote a thread on how UI design changes could likely mitigate most of the overpaying that the Vice article is reporting on.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1521427065437884417 https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1521427065437884417
jiggawatts 4y ago
You'd think that after Dan Olson had excoriated NFTs in his viral 2-hour video rant with now 7.4 million views that they might have lost their allure just a little bit. But no, it looks like people are still falling for this billion dollar scam. Link: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
snsr 4y ago
No conversation about BAYC is complete without this context imo http://gordongoner.com/ http://gordongoner.com/
MrMan 4y ago
Algorand fees are very low
chemmail 4y ago
They should rebrand to dumb apes.
teaearlgrey_hot 4y ago

218 points by danso 4y ago

chef0 4y ago

"burned nearly $200 million worth of Ethereum" I wouldn't say it was "wasted" - some people made a lot of money out of it.

solveit 4y ago
Also, it's not like Ethereum is a physical good that can be destroyed. It's just a bookkeeping tool and what happened is people trying to mint NFTs gave up their portion of the total supply in exchange for having their transactions go first. The "wasted" fees were in effect distributed equally to every other ETH in existence.
vkou 4y ago
Did ~$200 million dollars worth of electricity & hardware depreciation get burnt as part of this land sale? If so, I'd say that it's close to 'wasted', given that as I understand, the only thing of value that has been created is only useful for financial speculation. We're paying people to dig ditches, and then fill them. Just because the ditchdiggers got paid doesn't mean their effort isn't wasted!
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I don't think the way it works is that every blockchain transaction of value X requires an equivalent cost X (denominated in USD) of electricity usage and hardware depreciation.
  - vkou 4y ago
    ... Right. Duh. If this was simply a surprise pay-day for miners (as opposed to the real cost of running the network), you are right, in that extent. In that case, yes, from a productivity & resource usage point of view, this wasn't a waste of $200 million.
- rglullis 4y ago
  No, it didn't. The amount of electricity used doesn't increase because of network congestion, and with Ethereum's mining reward system, there is no incentive for miners to increase their hash rate just for high-congestion moments. Lastly, these reports really need to stop denominating things in USD. 64k ETH were burned, the dollar amount is not related to it.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Not going to comment on the specific claims here, but "speculation" is often a useful activity if we care about planning for the long-term and adequately allocating resources.
  - vkou 4y ago
    It is, if it actually results in useful, productive, real-world work to be done more efficiently. I understand why people may want to trade futures, or hedge against instability in FOREX or interest rates, and how this spawns a side-industry of derivatives traders and speculators, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the ratio of speculation to productive real-world work done by the crypto space seems to be ~0, compared to speculation in most of the real-world economy. If all of these ICOs and NFTs were producing valuable goods (food, medicine, shelter, widgets, entertainment[1]) left and right, more efficiently than the traditional economy, I wouldn't accuse the space of being purely speculative. [1] Well, it does produce some entertainment...
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Stablecoin adoption in the developing world seems to be of value. Compensating artists and thus incentivizing artwork seems probably good too. But I'm not very familiar with the space as I've said.
theptip 4y ago
Right, “burned” suggests it was destroyed. Instead this was paid to miners. The service the miners are providing is auctioning off time-slots in the network. This is load-shedding in action; if you don’t think your transaction is worth the fee, wait until the network is less congested. (Sure, this is probably an indictment of Ethereum-as-currency, but I don’t think that’s a use-case that is seriously contemplated by most market participants right now.) Edit: this first part may be false, fees are apparently actually burned now. Sorry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241054#31241311
- bagacrap 4y ago
  so is it like a share buyback, incrementally increasing the value of all held etc?

nootropicat 4y ago

Fees rising isn't the same as 'breaking'. Also this was clearly intentional marketing to promote their chain. Fees would get that high on every single blockchain because the mint price was below the empirical market price, leaving gas prices as the only remaining market. The only difference is that it would be over faster on something with more tps. That's why it's obvious it was intentional.

amyjess 4y ago
Most of the spike in gas prices here was caused by their contract being horrendously un-optimized. If they had done even basic optimization of their contract, gas prices would've been a tiny fraction of what they were, and they would be orders of magnitude smaller if they used ERC-721A. Here's an estimate of what would have happened if they just optimized their damn contract: https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010 https://twitter.com/gioperalto/status/1520751524070187010 919.96 ETH would have been saved if they optimized it and stayed on ERC-721, and 39194.05 ETH would have been safed if they also switched ot ERC-721A. I'm convinced that Yuga is just technically incompetent. All of the people I pay attention to in the crypto space are incensed by everything Yuga is doing here, from the un-optimized contracts to blaming ETH for their own incompetence to their pricing model that excludes everyone except for whales who are already wealthy. The people I follow in the space are small-time independent artists who use NFTs as a way to make a living off their original art, and none of them are happy with Yuga at all.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  What's preventing an actor from deliberately designing the slowest or most resource intensive contracts in order to break the system ?
  - pshc 4y ago
    It's all limited by fees. Typically, users would see the high fees and choose not to interact with the contract. It seems during this sale, FOMO outstripped the incredibly (negligently) high expense.

rglullis 4y ago

No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked exactly as designed. No fees were "wasted". If people were willing to make a transaction knowing that this was going to be the cost, it is a reflection of people's time preferences.

soared 4y ago
A transaction for $25 that costs $3,000 to complete seems pretty plainly broken. Imagine that happening with your credit card.
- nvahalik 4y ago
  Except that if you knew your CC transaction would cost that much, you'd probably use a different card or use cash.
  - beej71 4y ago
    And, indeed, most people do.
- siftrics 4y ago
  Those who submitted the transactions _knew_ the transaction fees before submitting. They voluntarily and intentionally paid these fees. This is not broken.
  - TameAntelope 4y ago
    Sorry, but nobody signed up for their transaction to fail, this is a bullshit excuse. > Besides high fees, the transaction load resulted in a bottleneck that resulted in failed transactions that people still had to pay fees for—now in the thousands of dollars for nothing in return, not even an NFT.
    - siftrics 4y ago
      Yes they did. They knew that transaction failure is a risk and they accounted for it. I don't feel bad if they did not do their due diligence before attempting to transfer thousands of dollars of ETH.

literallyWTF 4y ago

dralley 4y ago

>A Twitter thread by Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Great, documented how exorbitant fees affected people buying NFTs from different projects, often outstripping the underlying asset: a $3,500 fee for a $500 NFT, a $3,800 fee for a $270 NFT, a $3,950 transaction fee for a $260 NFT, and a $3,300 transaction fee for a $25 NFT were just some of the many ridiculous trades executed during the gas war caused by Otherdeed's NFT launch. Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious. All of this, over gifs, jpgs and fake land in a theoretically infinite digital universe that was probably procedurally generated anyway.

jameshart 4y ago
When's the President going to do something to fix these gas prices? Anyway, I thought crypto currencies were meant to be inflation-proof.
fartcannon 4y ago
It's kind of like trying to outwit other traders in the stock market, isn't it? Just a bunch of people building elaborate systems to gamble.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges). In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

er4hn 4y ago

A significant source of waste in Ethereum/Bitcoin is transaction tips in order to process a transaction within a certain timeframe. This is in turn tied to the notion of wanting a consistent global state for everyone to operate under. If there was not a global state, but a set of transactions that flow across nodes this would significantly improve the throughput of the overall system. In other words, the state of an account gradually flows across the system of nodes. Are there any projects out there like that?

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
The problem with such a system is the opportunities for arbitrage, right?
skulk 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_clearing_house A specific project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network
- vmception 4y ago
  got one that I can extract value from myself? tonight? for fun and profit?
- er4hn 4y ago
  ha, I meant as a distributed low trust computing environment.
joshuamorton 4y ago
This invites double spends.
toraway1234 4y ago
sharperguy 4y ago
Bitcoin's lightning network achieves this by using the base transactions stored on the blockchain only as a fall-back, so that many transactions can be performed without needing to be globally synchronized. Only in the case that a partner fails to follow the established rules of engagement between nodes, a transaction must be created on chain, to "force" the correct outcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

can16358p 4y ago

That money is not exactly wasted, it's gone to miners. And how does Ethereum "break" exactly? It was just bloated with many transactions, creating a bottleneck, which is perfectly expected for a hyped project like this.

rglullis 4y ago
> it's gone to miners. No, the base fee is burned (i.e, removed from the available supply). Since Ethereum's EIP-1155 (which changed the rules for pricing and mining rewards, miners only get to keep a "tip") Anyway, I'd also say that they were not wasted. Worst case scenario, these gigantic token burns reduce the supply and make all the token holders a bit richer.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Oops, missed that, right. Yeah, even though miners get only a part of the ether, it still valuates the currency when it's burned.

dylkil 4y ago

how do these ignorant takes get upvoted on a tech board like this

vba616 4y ago
I don't understand why or how they think resources were wasted. I mean, it might be true, since I don't know how Ethereum works. But I don't see where it says or implies or explains that the fees represented real resources lost - rather than money transferred.
- robbiep 4y ago
  Some of the transaction fee is literally burned/ceases to exist. Some fraction of it is also printed but some goes away completely. As I understand it.
  - ldiracdelta 4y ago
    Sounds like currency deflation. There are winners in deflation too.
- Tao332 4y ago
  The mistake is in pretending that 64K Eth has a USD value that means anything. It doesn't.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    So give me at least 1 eth, please.
vnchr 4y ago
I have to agree. It starts with irresponsible journalism that is misrepresenting what actually happened. Nothing broke.

soared 4y ago

I pray that the inevitable nft/crypto bubble pop does not trickle into the rest of the economy. I’d love to believe the ape nft stuff is also mid 20s kids like me messing around, but I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects.

paxys 4y ago
Considering Fidelity is literally starting to offer crypto trading in 401k accounts, that ship might have sailed already
- soared 4y ago
  True. Fidelity was mining bitcoins for years before other institutional investors were involved and they likely hold massive reserves. I just hope they’ve insulated themselves against the risk.
  - abirch 4y ago
    Most banks do. They are transferring the risks to their customers.
- xmprt 4y ago
  Cryptocurrency trading can be a legitimate way to diversify risk. Of course people should know what they're getting into before they start and it's very likely to fail but I trust institutional traders more than anyone else to actually make money off of cryptocurrencies.
- Geee 4y ago
  I believe that Fidelity allows investing in bitcoin, not crypto in general.
rhizome 4y ago
I figure NFTs are an attempt to materialize cryptocurrency so that it does trickle into the rest of the economy. >I’d imagine there is a whole lot of institutional money fooling around with similar projects. If it's your trashcoin/NFT/whatever, you're at the top of the pyramid no matter what. There's no downside in convincing people to contribute cold hard cash to your new soared-coin.

daenz 4y ago

The final paragraph sums it up nicely: >We’ve seen this story a million times before: Crypto project is launched. Something goes wrong. Founders, investors, whales, and some of the community make out like bandits. Most people are left out on the cold, only to be offered another, even greater opportunity with an upcoming token or project. Surely this time will be different. I don't see how anyone can read about these crypto projects and see anything other than an extremely elaborate scam.

dvtrn 4y ago
At least with regards to one person I previously thought was someone who would otherwise “know better” after an incredibly confusing conversation about their NFT Group “recruiting” people from poor communities (their definition of recruiting meant nothing more than getting them to create accounts on OpenSea and buying shit)…they don’t care. The greater fool theory handcuffs has them locked in TIGHT. I mean the fact that they call what they’re doing “recruiting” is full of all kinds of ugly signals. I don’t talk to them anymore.
siftrics 4y ago
Because they know more than surface-level details and understand that trustless, permission-less financial systems offer a huge amount of value, especially to those in less-developed and authoritarian countries, who are regularly abused by a small group of people running their country's financial affairs. But that doesn't apply to you because you live in the developed world, where you've never had to deal with not being allowed a bank account or extortionist fees or the government simply coming and seizing your assets for an arbitrary, amoral reason.
- vosper 4y ago
  I'm sure these authoritarian governments are definitely just going to sit by while some foreign technology disrupts their control of the financial system. The Security XKCD says it better - it even uses the term "crypto"! https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - 4y ago

SlyShy 4y ago

Nothing broke, the dynamic fee market worked exactly as intended. Contrast with Solana which actually went offline for 7 hours that same day.

rvz 4y ago
So it essentially means that Ethereum is unable to globally scale or to be usable for anything on-chain at all except for millionaires wasting (and losing) $10k - $100k in fees for silly JPEG images, otherwise why are these same Ethereum proponents complaining that it is a problem? Regardless, Both Ethereum, and Solana were unusable on that day and as it stands are still unsuitable for anything 'high demand'.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Except that anyone with a minimal involvement with Ethereum already knows that the base layer is not meant to be used on day-to-day operations. We already learned about the decentralization trillema. The strategy to scale Ethereum through will be through the adoption of "layer-2" systems, where users are expected to be doing their transactions and avoid these costly transactions altogether. There are roll-ups already dealing with NFT marketplaces [0]. There are roll-ups that can execute any type of ethereum smart contract [1] [2]. There are payment channels that allow completely decentralized and gas-less transfers of ERC-20 tokens [3]. [0] https://loopring.io https://loopring.io [1] https://optimism.io/ https://optimism.io/ [2] https://offchainlabs.com/ https://offchainlabs.com/ [3] https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    This comment is hilarious from an outsider's perspective. For all I know, you may as well be describing the turboencabulator.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      I'm not saying that the system has a good UX, or that it's ready for mass-consumption. I am just saying that if you are minimally involved with it, you should be aware of the issues and the alternatives in development.

chris123 4y ago

Prepare for all of justifications and cognitive dissonance, all these centralized projects (I won't use the s-word)

als0 4y ago

Just wondering... Weren't they going to move to proof of stake?

Animats 4y ago
Etherium's move to proof of stake is expected to happen shortly after Godot shows up.
pawelduda 4y ago
Recently it was delayed but supposedly still on track before EOY
- annoyingnoob 4y ago
  Same as last year?
  - manquer 4y ago
    and every year for the last 5
- postalrat 4y ago
  "supposedly still on track before EOY" Nice way to say "never".
- fredoliveira 4y ago
  Just history repeating itself, honestly. It's been delayed so many times, even the optimist in me is starting to doubt this is really it.
nrmitchi 4y ago
Pretty sure ethereum pos is going to show up around the same time tesla's FSD does. Ie, "next year", every year.

Animats 4y ago

So Yuga sold 55,000 deeds to parcels in "Otherside", a virtual world that doesn't exist yet. 45,000 deeds were distributed to insiders. So what happened? 96,000 of those "Otherdeeds" are now for sale on OpenSea.[1] Some of the rest are for sale on Rareable. Few buyers. [1] https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed

onepointsixC 4y ago
Are we looking at the same thing? I'm seeing 6,000 sales just today, with an average price of 9.8 Eth [1]. That looks like a lot of buying and selling to me. [1]: https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity https://opensea.io/collection/otherdeed?tab=activity
- Animats 4y ago
  This will have to wait on chain analysis, but many of those transactions involve the same addresses. We may be watching wash sales. This was supposed to be an item people would hold. That's not happening. Almost all the items are on the market.
  - vmception 4y ago
    wow double misunderstanding. OpenSea reads the blockchain for all NFTs. You have to explicitly delist for it not to show. and then back with the wash trading assumption. it only takes you trying to buy or sell a popular NFT once for you to know that you didn't trade it between your own address, even if those that would yell "source thats its not wash trading!?" won't believe you
samatman 4y ago
I'm an outsider to the whole NFT thing but I'm pretty sure you're misreading this. I clicked the "on auction" filter and see 192 'parcels' or w/e for sale right now, the rest are listed on OpenSea but that doesn't imply that someone can buy them.
- 4y ago

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

More previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224513

jayd16 4y ago

So why did this need to be a gas war? Couldn't they have run the sale such that a race isn't necessary, eg waiting longer for transactions to complete? What was the point?

brutshucks 4y ago

I look at these projects in amazement that anyone would waste such significant amounts of time and money on them. Cryptocurrency really is a cult isn't it.

GaylordTuring 4y ago
Many people make an obscene amount of money from this. I think that answers your question why many also put so much time and effort into it.
- Tao332 4y ago
  > Many people make an obscene amount of money from this. It really is a cult, isn't it?

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

With that money I could have financed clinical trials with PNC-27 + thymalin and therefore solved cancer. I'm not even joking, people don't have the erudition to realize it but it's true.

dqpb 4y ago
The US has almost 1000 billionaires. Any one of them could decide to mobilize researchers for this purpose, but instead they have decided it's not worth doing that. In fact they have decided it's not worth mobilizing anybody to do anything with that extra money. Why?
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  Ignorance and mediocrity have much more explanative power than malice
  - dqpb 4y ago
    I don't think it's malice. I think wealthy people are predominantly focused on keeping their fortune in-tact, and growing. I don't think they feel a great responsibility to spend it. But, in my view, the whole point of capitalism is to allocate decision-making authority to those who make good decisions. If it gets allocated to people who choose to defer those decisions indefinitely (by not spending the money), then I think that's a major failure of the system. It may be that not spending the money is the best decision. But, as someone who see's opportunities for improvement literally everywhere, I fail to see how that's possible.
quesera 4y ago
Your argument resembles that of frauds and quacks everywhere. I hope I know less about cancer research than you do -- because I know very little, and you want us to believe that you know more than that. However your presentation style will convince no one.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago

arthurcolle 4y ago

I always wondered why a gas fee future or option never was developed to mitigate gas fees indirectly. Since gas fees are heavily dependent on smart contract conplexity, a secondary market based on gas fees, and not on ETH spot price, seems like it would be a useful financial innovation in this space

vmception 4y ago
It did. The last Ethereum upgrade specifically targeted and killed them (amongst a variety of other changes). There were a lot of smart contracts that would end with exercising the owner's gas option for a gas refund. It was glorious to see, like the icing on the cake after a massive frontrunning flash loan. Here are two-three implementations of that concept: https://blog.1inch.io/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-chi-gastoken-a1ba0ea55bf3 https://blog.1inch.io/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-ch... https://gastoken.io/ https://gastoken.io/ and last year's reporting on the planned changelog https://decrypt.co/77345/ethereum-london-hard-fork-make-some-tokens-worthless https://decrypt.co/77345/ethereum-london-hard-fork-make-some...

sva_ 4y ago

I wonder at what point you might call these NFTs a successful DDoS on the eth blockchain.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

We are boiling the oceans with this pointless shit, too.

danans 4y ago

> And a gas war did begin, as soon as the 9 PM ET sale kicked off. 64,219 ETH was burned over the weekend on transaction fees according to Etherscan—that's over $180 million at today's prices, most of which is now gone forever due to Ethereum’s burn. Probably impossible to know, but I wonder how much actual gas (or other fossil fuel) got burned to power this episode.

tofuahdude 4y ago
Impossible to know because this is not how mining works.
- danans 4y ago
  Please explain how it works with respect to energy consumption then? Perhaps there is no way to isolate and characterize the power consumed for this event exactly, but that doesn't mean that one can't characterize the power consumption of crypto. This is already described in terms of energy used per transaction [1]. So the next question is can we characterize events like these similarly, by i.e. the # of transactions or some other descriptive statistics, and multiply that by the source-weighted energy mix of transactions. That's not to suggest that this event's energy consumption is higher than the regular rate, but interesting nonetheless. 1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
ChrisClark 4y ago
The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day. Miners don't suddenly spin up hundreds more GPUs when the network gets congested. Creating a block costs the exact same energy whether it's full of high fees, low fees, or completely empty. And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses.
- danans 4y ago
  > The exact same amount that got burnt on a slow cheap day How much is that? And what percentage of it went toward powering this event vs the value in $ created by it? > And orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin uses. It's not even 1 order of magnitude less. More like 1/2 of bitcoin's energy consumption. https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

ilaksh 4y ago

There are other cryptocurrencies. For example Algorand could handle the traffic and the fees are less than a penny per transaction.

GaylordTuring 4y ago
True. But nobody wants to use that because the price performance is horrible. And price performance is the only utility that most people care about in crypto.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Maybe the Bored Ape fees fiasco is an example of why "price performance" isn't the only "utility" that matters for cryptocurrency.

floatinglotus 4y ago

This is the type of stuff that makes me laugh.

andreisbc 4y ago

Kadena is probably the only proof of work blockchain that's infinitely scalable, has low gas fees, even introduces the concept of gas stations. They just announced a $100M fund for development.

Taniwha 4y ago

"cryptocurrency" hah! It's not a viable currency until its transaction costs are comparable with me using a $20 note at the corner store

WYepQ4dNnG 4y ago

I wished people would care more for the real world than virtual land and racing to Mars ... awful times we live in ..

deevolution 4y ago

It's amazing how much people care how other people spend their money. It's their money, if they want to spend it on ape pictures so be it. Nothing to see here, move along.

zeusk 4y ago
Because most of them down the line will shell their ponzi assets to other unsuspecting general public in lure of ludicrous returns.

dibujante 4y ago

I don't really understand how a "$25 NFT with a $3300 transaction fee" can exist. Isn't that a $3325 NFT? The purchaser was willing to pay that. It seems like the main difference is that the seller didn't receive what the purchaser was willing to pay, creating a rather unique dead-weight loss. Wouldn't it be better if the seller received the additional $3300?

mattdesl 4y ago
The purchaser paid that fee to the protocol (miner + burn), not the seller, to have their transaction processed before others in the mempool and settle the trade in < ~30 sec. They could have set a smaller fee ($10-100) and gone for lunch, and their transaction would have been accepted within an hour or two. This is most likely a UX issue. Users aren’t aware they can set normal fees even during congested periods.
- dibujante 4y ago
  So it's more like me announcing that, if everyone in line lets me cut to the front, I will burn a $100 bill and enrich them all slightly through deflation. I wonder if any transactions ever just never get confirmed because they never pay enough gas fee to not be pre-empted?
  - landemva 4y ago
    Yes, and eventually drop out of the group of unprocessed transactions (mempool). You can cheaply try this for yourself. No permission needed to learn!
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    The burn is one part (and in many cases the majority of the transaction fee) but there is also an optional tip directed to miners which may incentivize them to include your transaction first. Transactions that are below the market fee will just sit in mempool waiting for a miner to pick it up. Eventually these 'stuck' transactions will be pruned by nodes to free up room for more rewarding transactions. I recently wrote a thread on how UI design changes could likely mitigate most of the overpaying that the Vice article is reporting on.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1521427065437884417 https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1521427065437884417

jiggawatts 4y ago

You'd think that after Dan Olson had excoriated NFTs in his viral 2-hour video rant with now 7.4 million views that they might have lost their allure just a little bit. But no, it looks like people are still falling for this billion dollar scam. Link: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

snsr 4y ago

No conversation about BAYC is complete without this context imo http://gordongoner.com/ http://gordongoner.com/

MrMan 4y ago

Algorand fees are very low

chemmail 4y ago

They should rebrand to dumb apes.

teaearlgrey_hot 4y ago