Roughly 60% of Ethereum smart contracts have never been interacted with | Hacker News Reader

Roughly 60% of Ethereum smart contracts have never been interacted with

theblockcrypto.com

27 pointscrunchiebones18 comments

Is this bad? Surprising? Ethereum has only been around for a few years. There are only so many tutorial contracts to test out and so many people actually making new contracts that it isn't surprising the initial cut is so limited.

What different would it say, for example, if this were true 25 years after Ethereum got started?

As has been pointed out, a large percentage of these are probably “hello world” types, which is harmless enough.

I’d be interested in what percentage of smart contracts are actually useful. Remove the demo contracts, the horribly broken, the Ponzi schemes and all the ICO token contracts. What do you have left, and does it justify the existence and price of Ethereum?

With those excluded, what you have left is going to be 99.9% gambling.

Fills a demand, sure. But I would assume that every one of these contracts is more shady and less fun than online poker.

I wonder what percentage of those are not rigged.

Why are ICO contracts not useful?

"Why are ICO contracts not useful?"

Burden is on your side: "Why are they useful?"

nope the burden is on yours because apparently people do use them (proven by transactions from different addresses)

The only use case I’ve seen is to evade SEC IPO rules. I consider that worthless.

Well, that and ponzi coins and exit scam coins.

I also see post exit-scam coins still trading above 0, which just screams bubble to me.

The burden of usefulness is on those who present them as useful, not for others to demonstrate that they are not useful.

That 'some people are using them' is not really validation of anything.

If someone can explain why they are practical, give real world use cases, and demonstrate how they are already being used in a practical way, then that would make sense.

Until them it's vapourtech.

useful = users don't overcomplicate things with personal views and bias. People use it end of story.

I think it's important to sat that since you can deploy a smart contract for $2 then a lot of people do it for testing purposes or just deploy a new one for every softwat iteration. Blockchain is immutable and thatt expected.

Imagine counting how many deploys have been written on Heroku before the first user starts using the software.

This stat (or something close to it) could probably be applied to anything that is fairly simple to deploy: apps, websites, Github repos, etc. Is there any reason to believe that something like the Pareto Principle wouldn't apply to Ethereum smart contracts?

Here's a smart contract I deployed that gets regular use: https://etherscan.io/address/0x04b547C56d997A70Fa5fa007bE176...

There were at least prior one version that I deployed where there was a misconfiguration, so it was never interacted with. There were another half dozen versions or so that I deployed to testnets and the main-net for testing purposes that were barely used.

where is the code you pos?

Not surprising considering we're still in the early stages of smart contract adoption. I'm curious what this number will be in 2020.

Roughly 99.999% of web apps have no users.

60% seems low to me

The percentage probably goes up by a lot if you include contracts which have only been interacted with minimally (e.g, once or twice, or only by a single entity).

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