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Deploying a whole ass web application on small, immutable smart contracts seems inane to me. Reminds me of something programmers do not because its powerful, bu

Deploying a whole ass web application on small, immutable smart contracts seems inane to me. Reminds me of something programmers do not because its powerful, but because its hard and it makes them feel cool.

SrslyJosh 4y ago
They won't, because they can't. Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. Everything you see would still be served by an ordinary web server, and interactions with the blorpchain are all mediated by one or two centralized API services. It's a potemkin village.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement. Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by every node on the network, which is providing security and uptime for the network. Some software transactions have external costs associated with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an international bank transfer may simply boil down to a credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it though, and marking up their products and services to accommodate that fee. But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the limited block space. Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x. Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus. This technology is still early, but rapidly improving. Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale improvement range. Some rollups currently in production: https://arbitrum.io/ https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/
  - ipython 4y ago
    What international bank transfer costs “thousands” of dollars to complete? What ethereum transaction only costs 3% to complete? Are you saying that a retailer accepting crypto will suddenly no longer need to “eat” the transaction costs because… crypto?
    - Tenoke 4y ago
      Any sufficiently large transaction costs less than 3% on Ethereum. MetaMask claims a transfer would cost me 63 cents, so a pure Eth transfer of more than $22 for example. Though of course you can do it a lot cheaper on L2s.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Every transfer service has transfer limits. Have you ever tried to send $1M or $10M internationally? What service provider would you go through to execute the transaction? What are their fees? Not only will your transaction be delayed as much as weeks, you'll have additional forms to fill out and fees and expenses associated with such a transfer. Even more so if you are converting to another currency. On Ethereum, you can execute a swap from one currency to another (0.3% fee) and have the transfer execute to anyone in the world in 15 seconds. Even in a highly congested time on the network, that will cost at most a few dozen dollars. Doesn't matter if you're sending $1K or $1B. Crypto isn't ready for retail use cases yet, but it's within the next few years (less than 3) that it gets there. Retail transactions will occur on rollups. The retailers will pay transaction fees of a few pennies to a few dozen cents. It will not be percentage based on the transaction value as VISA, AMEX, etc currently get away with.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- miracle2k 4y ago
  And yet, Tornado Cash is still running.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    I'm just wondering what would happen if there is a court order to take down a smart contract.
    - m4jor 4y ago
      It would be like a court order to ban encryption. Its just math. You cant do it and it would be meaningless.
chrisco255 4y ago
It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime. Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange, except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty of other good examples in web3. https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/
- WalterSear 4y ago
  > Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4! https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular computer, or even a raspberry pi?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      ^ Basically sums up what Ethereum is and isn't If a Pi solves your use case, for God's sake don't use the EVM. If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
      - Tenoke 4y ago
        You can't really run Uniswap and expect it to be useful on a Pi for obvious reasons so a Pi doesn't solve the same issues.
- leonsegal 4y ago
  are there any non-crypto examples?
  - 4y ago
derefr 4y ago
You don't, actually, though. You only put what little stuff that people might distrust if any one party had centralized control over — like ownership — into smart-contract state. Everything else is fine to be stuffed into a database or centralized web backend somewhere; or just left to everyone individually to derive + implement themselves however they like. For example: CryptoKitties. The only things in the on-chain state of CryptoKitties' contracts, are the kitties' ownerships, and their "genes" (an entropy blob, a bit like Pokemon https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values.) Because these are the two things that, if they were entirely in the hands of CryptoKitties themselves, you'd be suspicious that they might "cheat" on, by e.g. making their friends special kitties with genes nobody else can have; or deciding one day that kitties that aren't "cared for" should be forcibly transferred back to an "adoption agency." If either of these things were found to be possible, the value of kitties would quickly drop to zero. Meanwhile, what exactly a kitty's genes translate to in terms of actual kitty features, is dictated by some arbitrary centralized Javascript on the CryptoKitties website. Nobody distrusts CryptoKitties on this aspect, because it doesn't really impact the value of their investment relative to other people's. If the same gene makes kitties render with wings one day and vampire fangs the next, that might upset people, but it won't make them do a mass sell-off of their kitties. After all, CryptoKitties could always change it back, so why would you sell "early" rather than wait to see if they do? Or, in short: you put data in a smart contract if a game-theoretic prerequisite of your system working out is for certain data to be only updated in an openly-audited, multilaterally-agreed-upon way. (Good non-crypto example: the dealer's shuffle between hands at a card game at a casino. Done right in front of all the players, because otherwise they wouldn't trust it.)

SrslyJosh 4y ago

They won't, because they can't. Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. Everything you see would still be served by an ordinary web server, and interactions with the blorpchain are all mediated by one or two centralized API services. It's a potemkin village.

chrisco255 4y ago
> Executing a smart contract costs thousands of times more than executing a normal piece of software. No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement. Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by every node on the network, which is providing security and uptime for the network. Some software transactions have external costs associated with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an international bank transfer may simply boil down to a credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it though, and marking up their products and services to accommodate that fee. But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the limited block space. Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x. Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus. This technology is still early, but rapidly improving. Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale improvement range. Some rollups currently in production: https://arbitrum.io/ https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/
- ipython 4y ago
  What international bank transfer costs “thousands” of dollars to complete? What ethereum transaction only costs 3% to complete? Are you saying that a retailer accepting crypto will suddenly no longer need to “eat” the transaction costs because… crypto?
  - Tenoke 4y ago
    Any sufficiently large transaction costs less than 3% on Ethereum. MetaMask claims a transfer would cost me 63 cents, so a pure Eth transfer of more than $22 for example. Though of course you can do it a lot cheaper on L2s.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Every transfer service has transfer limits. Have you ever tried to send $1M or $10M internationally? What service provider would you go through to execute the transaction? What are their fees? Not only will your transaction be delayed as much as weeks, you'll have additional forms to fill out and fees and expenses associated with such a transfer. Even more so if you are converting to another currency. On Ethereum, you can execute a swap from one currency to another (0.3% fee) and have the transfer execute to anyone in the world in 15 seconds. Even in a highly congested time on the network, that will cost at most a few dozen dollars. Doesn't matter if you're sending $1K or $1B. Crypto isn't ready for retail use cases yet, but it's within the next few years (less than 3) that it gets there. Retail transactions will occur on rollups. The retailers will pay transaction fees of a few pennies to a few dozen cents. It will not be percentage based on the transaction value as VISA, AMEX, etc currently get away with.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
miracle2k 4y ago
And yet, Tornado Cash is still running.
- m00dy 4y ago
  I'm just wondering what would happen if there is a court order to take down a smart contract.
  - m4jor 4y ago
    It would be like a court order to ban encryption. Its just math. You cant do it and it would be meaningless.

chrisco255 4y ago

It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime. Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange, except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty of other good examples in web3. https://app.uniswap.org/ https://app.uniswap.org/

WalterSear 4y ago
> Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4! https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
- zeroclip 4y ago
  Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular computer, or even a raspberry pi?
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    ^ Basically sums up what Ethereum is and isn't If a Pi solves your use case, for God's sake don't use the EVM. If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
    - Tenoke 4y ago
      You can't really run Uniswap and expect it to be useful on a Pi for obvious reasons so a Pi doesn't solve the same issues.
leonsegal 4y ago
are there any non-crypto examples?
- 4y ago

derefr 4y ago

You don't, actually, though. You only put what little stuff that people might distrust if any one party had centralized control over — like ownership — into smart-contract state. Everything else is fine to be stuffed into a database or centralized web backend somewhere; or just left to everyone individually to derive + implement themselves however they like. For example: CryptoKitties. The only things in the on-chain state of CryptoKitties' contracts, are the kitties' ownerships, and their "genes" (an entropy blob, a bit like Pokemon https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values.) Because these are the two things that, if they were entirely in the hands of CryptoKitties themselves, you'd be suspicious that they might "cheat" on, by e.g. making their friends special kitties with genes nobody else can have; or deciding one day that kitties that aren't "cared for" should be forcibly transferred back to an "adoption agency." If either of these things were found to be possible, the value of kitties would quickly drop to zero. Meanwhile, what exactly a kitty's genes translate to in terms of actual kitty features, is dictated by some arbitrary centralized Javascript on the CryptoKitties website. Nobody distrusts CryptoKitties on this aspect, because it doesn't really impact the value of their investment relative to other people's. If the same gene makes kitties render with wings one day and vampire fangs the next, that might upset people, but it won't make them do a mass sell-off of their kitties. After all, CryptoKitties could always change it back, so why would you sell "early" rather than wait to see if they do? Or, in short: you put data in a smart contract if a game-theoretic prerequisite of your system working out is for certain data to be only updated in an openly-audited, multilaterally-agreed-upon way. (Good non-crypto example: the dealer's shuffle between hands at a card game at a casino. Done right in front of all the players, because otherwise they wouldn't trust it.)