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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
by rglullis 5y 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 5y agoA transaction for $25 that costs $3,000 to complete seems pretty plainly broken. Imagine that happening with your credit card.
- nvahalik 5y agoExcept that if you knew your CC transaction would cost that much, you'd probably use a different card or use cash.
- beej71 5y agoAnd, indeed, most people do.
- siftrics 5y agoThose who submitted the transactions _knew_ the transaction fees before submitting. They voluntarily and intentionally paid these fees. This is not broken.
- TameAntelope 5y agoSorry, 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 5y agoYes 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- db_admin 5y agoWhy are they [0] offering a return of the gas spent, then? [0] https://twitter.com/yugalabs/status/1520612364839661568 https://twitter.com/yugalabs/status/1520612364839661568
- tofuahdude 5y agoMarketing and brand.
- siftrics 5y agoBecause it's profitable for Yuga Labs to do that? They're a business making a business decision. They know users are more likely to participate in the community in the future if Yuga is willing to cover costs out-of-pocket. Again, assess the risks yourself. Assume responsibility for your own actions. Especially in an environment like crypto today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoSo what you're telling us is, as far as I can see, that if you're someone who might want to execute payments on a time-sensitive basis without accepting the risk of losing huge fees to transactions that fail anyway ... if that is not within your risk appetite ... you better stay away from the Ethereum Mainnet. Right?
- ChrisClark 5y ago
- rtkwe 5y agoThis is broken for anyone attempting to use ETH beyond a speculative asset. Consider if we get into the "crypto wins" future where it takes over as a payment method and replaces/live beside and equal to USD or traditional currencies. People can't just wait hours to buy random things there's a certain amount of transactions that are time sensitive. It's even worse when you think about the future where other record keeping has moved on chain because that too has a certain immediacy. Go to the doctor at the wrong time and suddenly it's thousands of dollars in fees to add to your on-chain medical records.
- can16358p 5y agoIt was intentional. They paid that amount to move in front of others trying to get the same thing. Something similar to starting to wait in line hours ago in front of Apple Store to buy a new iPhone: you are sacrificing something to get something that you think is more valuable from what you've sacrificed, earlier than others, to avoid a potential unavailability. Yeah it looks ridiculous, but that was paid to get something that might potentially be valued 1000x the current price (at least, the buyer believes in so, which isn't impossible to be fair) so that they will make more money than they've "wasted".
- ajmurmann 5y agoMaybe a good comparison would be to high speed trading companies who pay exorbitant rent to get their servers as close to the stock market servers as possible and reduce latency that way and get their orders in before others.
- m3kw9 5y agoIn this case they understand what they are getting into, here most Eth users will just be saying wtf
- siftrics 5y agoIt's not the duty of anyone except myself to understand the risks of my own actions.
- canadaduane 5y agoThis is a good maxim for oneself, but a poor one when trying to understand or improve systems.
- ajmurmann 5y agoSuch a great point! I wish more people embraced having two philosophies. One for them as an individual and one for policy making/discussion. E.g. I never want to myself rely on the social safety net. Yet at the same time, I want nobody, no matter how bad their decisions are to die because their basic human needs like food and shelter aren't met. I think a functioning society, especially a democracy, requires these two mindsets from their citizenry.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoThe system sucks. It isn't broken.
- serf 5y agoone could argue that surge pricing on Uber during the holidays feels 'broken' in the same respect, but the characteristically high costs during those times are precisely the indicator that the system is working as intended.
- vkou 5y agoIf someone tried to pitch to me that we should replace the existing car, taxi, and bus infrastructure with 'transit 3.0' that sometimes has the cost of a ride increase by ~500,000% - I'd laugh them out of the room. Even if their system were 'working as intended'. A footgun is working as intended when it sends you to the hospital - and it's defective by design.
- fuddle 5y agolist price + tx fee = market price. Vitalik summed up up well - https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1520621813209784321?s=20&t=NZ53vfxJNABs2VCCWpgTPw https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/152062181320978432...
- sizzle 5y agoI think a more apt analogy would be paying $3,000 to fill your tank for ~$6/gallon gas for your car
- aabbcc1241 5y agoIf you do mining for your own transaction, you don't need to pay transaction fee. If you ask others to mine for you, you're not a direct member of the blockchain network. The additional cost to incentify others to help you depends on the demand and supply. If many people wants to develop their own app but not able to program themselves, they may hire developers to serve them, but if the global population are relying on a few developers, they either have to wait for a long time, or need to pay more to get "premium service" in higher priority (and making others paying less to wait longer because the throughput is mostly fixed)
- McLaren_Ferrari 5y agoIt completely destroys the mechanism of an auction. Especially an online auction During an auction you always know the price and hence the bids are somewhat incremental. You can bid in 1$ increments or even lesser increments. When the network is congested people put a fee on their transaction without knowing anything except that more = better. It is a market failure. The time preference BS is something made up by "true believers" who think that "bad news is good news" because it supposedly supports the winner take all mindset that crypto enthusiast love. Except when the winner is Ken Griffin, in that case we should stop playing , throw a tantrum and ask the refs for a redo lmao
- rglullis 5y agoSince EIP-1155, people submitting transactions knew exactly how much the gas fee is going to be and how much the transaction would cost. The "auction" mechanism for the miners to select the transactions to get into the block is basically irrelevant compared with network congestion itself.
- Barrin92 5y ago'Code is law' must be the new 'the free market is always right'. The starting assumption is that any interaction that happens is a priori 'as designed' merely because it happened and we just reason back from there to justify any insanity. "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." If someone designed Ethereum with this in mind I have to assume masochism is pretty high up on their list of design goals
- akgoel 5y agoThis isn’t completely true. There are 2 types of gas fees - the first is the type you are discussing. The 2nd is the inherent fee of executing the smart contract. $100MM of the fees went to contract execution, over half of which could have been avoided with a more efficiently coded smart contract.
- rglullis 5y agoIf this is the type of discussion you'd like to have, one could argue that they could've launched their NFTs on layer-2 systems like Loopring/Immutable and avoided all of these fees.
- philipov 5y agoTransaction fees can change while you're in the middle of a transaction that you initiated when the fees were lower, so no.
- _6hmp 5y agoThis isn't really true. You submit a transaction with a maximum gas price. All wallets that I know of will show a maximum transaction fee based on this before you submit the transaction, and you can manually lock in any arbitrary gas limit you would like. If gas prices suddenly go up right as you submit your transaction (read: other network users outbid you for use of the network), your transaction will stay pending and either eventually process at the gas price specified, or fail and you will pay either nothing or a partial fee based on your maximum gas price * computation steps used. Gas is basically a means to ensure all computation on ethereum halts.
- rglullis 5y agonot since EIP-1155, no.
- HL33tibCe7 5y agoUnfortunately HN is so vehemently anti-crypto that articles like this get upvoted regardless of the accuracy of their content. I don’t like crypto either for many of the same reasons - most notably crypto’s horrendous environmental impact. But we need to stick to facts when we criticise crypto, and avoid mindless bandwagoning just because it’s currently the in thing to hate on all things crypto.
- bdcravens 5y agoUsurious and predatory loans also work as intended. The person signing the document knows what they are getting into it, and presumably have done the cost/benefit analysis.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoUsurious loans are bad because they effectively enslave borrowers through ever increasing debts that can never be paid off. Nothing of the sort is happening here, it's just people speculating on an asset. They paid 4k in fees because they expected their returns to be greater than that.
- TomGullen 5y agoRational actors acting rationally
- vmception 5y agoI will agree that the "broke Ethereum" rhetoric is stupid. It relies on elevating Yuga Lab's tweets to a level of credibility that they lost, their community should turn on them for deflecting responsibility. But I would say that there are unintended consequences of Ethereum's EIP1559 burning. A lot of tokens sold off as people were positioning for this sale. In the past, this money would have been recirculated from miners back into these leading tokens and projects and economy. This time it hasn't really happened because it was burned. Ethereum hasn't "priced in" any scarcity based on this burning, its still swung by the general tech sector swinging. Not a fan of this outcome personally. But yes, I'm all for letting the burns continue, just want communities and projects to be more discerning.
- Tao332 5y ago> No, Ethereum didn't "break", it worked exactly as designed. These aren't mutually exclusive. The design sucks. > 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. On the contrary, money spent over nothing but FOMO is absolutely wasted. Another thing to consider is that, if it were real money*, the gas fees incurred by Otherside could have bought 6 million Covid vaccines. We ought to pause and raise at least some ethical questions, because even pro-crypto folks are saying this was money people knew they were burning. * Lately I'm of the opinion that assigning USD amounts to large ETH amounts is overlooking how much of ETH is house money. The miners are mining ETH, rewarded in ETH, by people who already have ETH. It's monopoly money going in a circle and 64K ETH ≠ $180 million in any real sense.
- chemmail 5y agoExcept some transactions didn't go through, so gas and your "money" just evaporated.