MetaMask now has over 8M users | Hacker News Reader

MetaMask now has over 8M users

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46 pointsomarfarooq59 comments

I guess a lot of people want to spend $200 in gas fees to buy a URL to a JPEG that comes with no rights whatsoever to the image itself. What a time to be alive.

Maybe I was wrong, maybe the Fed's loose monetary policy has gone too far after all haha.

You are entirely misunderstanding the purpose of NFTs.

As a first-hand buyer, you are paying to act as a patron for artists/projects that you believe in. You enable those people to spend time producing more art that you like.

This is a very interesting and valuable use-case in and of itself.

I have recently started putting up my digital work and it is the first time in my life (41) that I can create unique works and have access to a market that allows people to support me.

Don't poo poo what you don't really understand.

For anyone interested: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

I have a store up here: https://www.ramijames.com/

> Don't poo poo what you don't really understand.

Don't assume anyone who disagrees with you doesn't understand haha. I'm quite familiar with the various narratives. I really do understand haha.

You can support artists without NFTs, obviously, people in many western cultures just don't want to support artists. The speculation is totally unrelated to supporting artists. There's something in it for them. That's more than likely money laundering plus a few lucky folks getting swept up in the speculation or manufacturing their own speculative demand in an illiquid market through wash sales.

If we look at the biggest most successful NFT project in recent weeks, BAYC, that was some dude who paid artists a few bucks on Fiverr then re-sold the resulting work for hundreds of millions of dollars. The artists got almost nothing, on Fiverr, it was the speculator who cashed in.

If you're interested in expanding your perspective, this podcast explores both sides - with an NFT artist and a crypto skeptic, who are friends IRL, discussing the market for an hour. It's a fairly balanced take for the most part, IMO. [1]

I can be a patron of artists I want to support with PayPal, Stripe or Patreon. That's been the case forever. That's not what this is about.

So... I regularly listen to both sides of the debate. Do you?

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/7KcZ8uZLre4Wuzj5Lf8JPc?si=y...

My wife had a conference yesterday that was initially going to be held in Berlin but because of the pandemic, happened entirely online. The conference organizers set up a virtual environment in Gather.town where your avatar could walk around a game-like virtual room and initiate conversations with people (over Zoom) by walking up to them. There were different rooms where you could attend different sessions.

For my wife and most of the academics present, it was their first virtual/gaming experience, and they all loved it.

People don’t realize it but the metaverse is here already. In the metaverse, your avatar is your digital identity. How much would people be willing to pay for a more desirable digital identity (avatar)? What if that digital identity also got you exclusive access to select clubs?

None of this is new - people pay tons of money for more desirable real world identities (clothes, makeup, accessories).

If we spend half our lives online, is it really surprising that people will eventually want a more desirable online identity too?

Gamers have been spending real money for proprietary "skins" for quite a while now. Epic makes billions on FortNite through such a system. But they are only able to charge such fees because they are in control of the system. They would never voluntarily give up that control if they could. Making the world that players choose to socialize in is where the hard work is.

Facebook is betting that the Metaverse is the next step. The Metaverse is already here, and it's called VRchat. There are millions of skins that chatters can use for free, though like early YouTube much of it is breaking copyright.

It takes real skill to create a skin, and if you want a custom skin there are people willing to pay for the creation of a skin that fits them. These custom jobs can take modelers tens to hundreds of hours sculpting and animating and they can charge thousands for their hardwork. This is all already happening.

That is to say, I see no reason that NFTs or cryptocurrency changes any of this. It's just false scarcity. The artists are already getting paid for their work.

It disappoints me that comments on crypto threads on HN have the same tone as NYTimes crypto articles.

I would have expected this place to be more curious and less dismissive

> more curious and less dismissive

If a thing doesn't make sense to me, it must be that the thing is foolish, not that I lack understanding.

What's really foolish is thinking in linear, mean-reverting, zero-sum terms in the face of exponentially increasing knowledge and value.

I tried to sell some AI-generated cat pictures and it didn't work. Nobody wanted to pay for it.

I think some element of it is a famous person doing it, so the spending is associated with the person, not the URL to the art.

Which basically means, if you're famous, you can get some free money from idiots.

You need to create customers and wide appeal first. Cryptopunks were free at the start, so were cryptokitties. Lootproject just launched and anyone could mint a free loot bag and the floor is now 10 ETH. Beeple NFTs were dirt cheap. Pixel portraits were dirt cheap. Maybe you set your price too high and didnt do a good job of marketing? Learn about the space before you try to make a quick cash grab?

Oh I just figured it was designed to be a free cash grab, I set the price pretty low actually. Not really interested in learning how to market vaporware but if idiots want to pay me for nothing I'll take it

You got downvoted because in order to win the money, you have to play the game. You can't be openly cynical. Keep that inside! :)

This is true for all art markets - nothing surprising. Outside of a few masters, you can’t expect immediate liquidity from your art.

> Nobody wanted to pay for it

Easy to solve with shill bidding to manufacture an illusion of demand and value.

Is there a service that can shill bid for me? Well actually is there a service that can take any crap JPEG, post it as NFT, deal with all the PR, take half the profits and give me the other half?

If services like this exist, why wouldn't they keep 100% for themselves?

BAYC gave rights to NFT owners, and that's why they became the example. Larva Labs / Punks is doing it wrong IMO.

I think the main point is that people are happy to do so cause they can sell that JPEG for more later on

The gas problem is well known and it has been addressed with the London upgrade

> The gas problem is well known and it has been addressed with the London upgrade

Gas prices are up. London only made the prices more predictable; high and predictable. "prices go high and low" is not a problems who's solution is "keep it high all the time".

The actual promised solution to high gas prices is sharing. Which got delayed behind proof of stake backed validation. Aka: delayed until other long delayed feature is shipped.

Yes that was my point, it was the main change for eth 2.0 but it still has a long way to go.

I guess other chain that use an utility token and main token have a better control over the transaction fee as compared as eth.

What rights do you get if you buy a painting? Can you enforce any rights you give yourself after buying a painting?

The right of ownership of the actual asset, not of a paper in the safe with the written address of the asset :)

I did some coding on a project idea with Metamask / web3.js (https://web3js.readthedocs.io/) about a year ago - tooling was pretty rough around the edges. Distinctly remember thinking if Metamask and web3 worked brilliantly and had great documentation, they'd be on track to win eventually. How good the web3 documentation is imo is the #1 indicator of what ETH market-cap should be, same as Stripe.

Is any one of these 8 million here?

I would love to hear what people do with it.

Metamask is the wallet with the lowest barrier to entry for new folks entering the crypto space. Going from no knowledge to having a wallet is much quicker with metamask than hardware wallet.

Its also great for devs deploying contracts on test networks.

I, for one, am able to access sites without disclosing my identity at all.

I paid for a membership to icy.tools the other day entirely with my metamask account and without using any email/phone number at all

I’d be very, very happy if every site in the world had a “connect with metamask” button where I could log in completely anonymously

I'm one of them, used years ago to test some development on the Blockchain and now I use it mainly as wallet for some small holdings that I've in few tokens

I use it to hold a fair amount of my crypto holdings. I personally don't spend crypto particularly often but I have a friend who uses crypto whenever he can, if you go a bit out of your way you can do a lot of your purchases that way. The metamask UX is nice and pancakeswap integration is useful too. Wish it supported Solana.

I imagine the audience crossover between crypto and HN is quite high.

I use it via Firefox.

https://satellite.earth/

Hadn't come across this site before. Very cool and exactly what I'd been looking for. Thanks!

i originally used it in 2017 for cryptokitties, now im using it again for degenerate

i bought an urbit planetoid or something

MetaMask is also being used with Avalanche which contains the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in its C-Chain.

I guess it means 8M installs.

But how many are actual active users?

10M MAU https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/metamask-surpasses-...

I used to mine ETH to heat my condo, but at some point mid way through H1 it stopped being interesting. I'd love to know if I'm being counted.

According to Joe Marini (previously Lead Developer Relations for Chrome Web store):

> The number [of weekly users] you see in the Chrome Web Store is the amount of users whose Chrome browser has checked for an update of your app within the last week. It is not the number of people who have installed your item.

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-apps/c/S...

Except chrome will check for update automatically regarardless of whether you use the extension or not.

And all the calls go through Infura which runs on AWS. Joe Lubin (former Goldman Sachs) owns ~50% of both Metamask and Infura.

Centralized much?

I vouched for this comment as I believe it has a point: I think decentralised systems in general have a tendency to yield centralised hotspots for convenience and scalability reasons as networks grow, but in the case of blockchains and Ethereum in particular, running a full node (that can provide the functionality of Infura for instance) is becoming extremely infeasible.

I acknowledge that this is still much more decentralised in comparison to status quo but it is important to acknowledge also that it is still not as decentralised as it is marketed to be.

You can buy a ~$500 intel NUC, install Geth, and run a full node in less than an hour.

For an archival node you might also need to buy a large hard drive, but it's feasible.

That’s not a full node, that’s a “fast sync” node that has to trust third parties about state of the chain.

You can run a full node on AWS in a couple of minutes, they've a managed Blockchain service that allows you to create an eth node in literally a few click.

Not sure what's infeasible for you, but to me that sounds pretty reasonable.

If you've the skills just download geth and run it yourself in your own hardware. There are people who do this on a daily basis to mine eth and they're not hackers.

Not a full node, a fast-sync trusting third party node.

I doubt anyone is able to sync a full node from genesis block anymore.

> I doubt anyone is able to sync a full node from genesis block anymore.

Because 1 terabyte of storage space is so out of reach, today? [1]

Ethereum Chain Full Sync Data Size: 954.28 GB as of 09/06/2021 [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-1TB-SSD-WDS100T2B0A/dp/B073... [2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...

sha256 is only 256 bits, so it's obviously easy to solve right?

i suppose life is more satisfying on the surface, when you only need to argue against straw-men, but surely that's a ticking time bomb?

he simultaneously invokes and cries strawmen, the most common of feats

one invokes straw-man and can't recognize when it's being pointed out by example of another, more ridiculous straw-man. sigh.

just stop and think for a second. you don't need to go down this road. drop the initial straw-man and try asking a question if you don't understand what's being argued.

The beginning of the path to transcending the invocation of strawmen, is to identify your own strawmen.

so why don't you?

if you're unable to walk back the thread, i'll remind that you were the one who started straw-maning by assuming that i think chainsize alone is the problem with syncing a full node.

stop making assumptions and start asking questions.

The irony deepens.

Walk back the thread yourself and notice my opening is a question.

You replied with a strawman disguised as a question instead of answering it.

ah yes, the "i only asked a question!" defense. immediately followed by "your question was dishonest!" hypocrisy. have a nice day.

It was completely within your hands to avoid this, by answering the question.

Is possible in theory, if you don't have the resources to do so is another problem.

There's other options like Alchemy and taichi for those not wanting to use infura or run their own nodes

Great point. Few articles talk about this and other similar issues.

You can specify a custom RPC.

Yes, when infura dies - the music stops in eth world. And since lots of other tokens run on eth - music stops for them too. It’s a joke of a “decentralized” system, really.

Edit: don't read this as "when in future Infura dies", this has already happened in the past and huge chunks of crypto world were left stranding.

The Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ether-metamas...

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