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That's not how it works. There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art, but that doesn't mean the sale price of the art will be negligible too. T

That's not how it works. There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art, but that doesn't mean the sale price of the art will be negligible too. That's because like fine art, the mechanism that produces block space can only generate a very limited amount per unit time, and latent demand is always orders of magnitude higher than the supply. You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.

dale_glass 3y ago
> There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art ...no? Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Either paying an expert to laboriously reproduce tiny intricacies of the original, or building and programming a robot to do it. And of course you'd have to research all the paints, strokes, etc, involved. > You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies. And that's the overhead, yeah. Even after PoS, it's still a network that doesn't scale. Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
- everfree 3y ago
  > Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived). > Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way. I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once. Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.

dale_glass 3y ago

> There's negligible "overhead" to paint a famous work of art ...no? Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Either paying an expert to laboriously reproduce tiny intricacies of the original, or building and programming a robot to do it. And of course you'd have to research all the paints, strokes, etc, involved. > You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies. And that's the overhead, yeah. Even after PoS, it's still a network that doesn't scale. Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.

everfree 3y ago
> Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived). > Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way. I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once. Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.