It costs $436 to deploy a smartcontract on Ethereum
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A few years ago, deploying a smart contract only cost a few dollars. It raised questions like “wouldn’t anyone then spam the blockchain and increase its size in non-scalable way?” I guess pricing “solved” that issue.
We considered Avalanche as an alternative, as it supports the same VM for smart contracts, but integrations with tools (metamask, etherjs) and services (infura, opensea) is not there yet, and or course everybody is on Ethereum anyway so there’s an egg and chicken issue at play.
Avalanche is no different
I mention those modules as those are the ones needed to provide the same services as a notary. This raise the issue that ETH is starting to no longer be competitive with the establishment. It's a bit aggravating as for many this was the main purpose.
is there a standard body of knowledge compiled somewhere abuot this?
For which Openzepplin proposes documentation and an implementation https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/4.x/api/metatx https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts/tree/...
Proxied versions of standard contracts are also proposed by Openzeppelin: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/upgrades-plugins/1.x/writing-u... https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts-upgra...
For KYC you'll need to implement your own ERC20 compatible token with some checks in the transfer functions. The CMTA is the Swiss contract reference and proposes one: https://github.com/CMTA/CMTA20
Amazing, someone went thru the headaches of trying to make ERC20 compliant with some local laws, wow, I'm just speechless.
I suppose there can be some value in unlocking company equity, but placing freezable contract on a public blockchain? I suppose that might make audits easier or something. However, might as well put full trust into the person with the freeze key, would likely be a lot cheaper.
Every stablecoin has the freeze function so far, and that underpins DeFi, which has become sizable. I'm probably just dumb.
It's easier to trust someone when everything they do is public.
> make ERC20 compliant with some local laws, wow, I'm just speechless.
Switzerland is one of the leading actor in blockchain, with rapidely adapting and welcoming regulations (the first "crypto law" was enacted last year) and a fast growing ecosystem (https://cryptovalley.swiss/ https://trustvalley.swiss/ https://www.cmta.ch/).
It kind of make sense if you think about it, as crypto really is the future of banking, that the first banking country is taking the lead.
So yes a lot of people are working on it and a lot of implentations will come from Switzerland. It's also convenient that the Swiss law is very easy to apprehend, is translated in many languages and is often taken as a reference in international law/contacts as it's a no bullshit law without spectacular outcome in litigation.
Like, the biggest culture shock was how it wasnt adversarial. My extremely low bar was just hoping I wasn't fighting intentionally onerous or ignorant bad laws. But Switzerland offers very high bar in this sector, one of collaboration and help!
In other day to day areas there is a lot of red tape. But in fintech and crypto protocols they are doing great things at the right time.
I’ve always contended that public resources could be spent on simply making better smart contracts for the industry to optionally use, as opposed to state actors still incoherently ranting about "regulating crypto" 10 years in, while achieving no consumer or investor protection with any regulatory action or proposal. Consumers and investors can weigh and vet projects more easily partially based on its use of vetted contracts from the state. Thats crazy talk here in the US right now, but not in Switzerland.
the establishment has scale of billions of users and decades or even centuries over which it has evolved its machinery. Doing something "on a computer/over internet" allowed to beat a lot of incumbents in less technical areas, while in this case the incumbent - the fintech - is itself one of the first adopters of the various "on a computer/over internet" tech.
So just doing it "on a blockchain" may be not enough. Especially given that, like negative feedback in control systems, the blockchain has that limiting control loop of "higher demand and wider adoption -> higher transaction fees" which naturally results in curbing of the demand/adoption. I.e. economy of scale works in the opposite direction on blockchain.
What enforcement benefit does the network provide? I'd contend it's entirely superfluous to a smart contract system, which could just offer building blocks from a trusted third party instead for constructing contracts, and that trusted third party could also notary the transaction and provide arbitration.
All of these complex problems are already solved (trust, arbitration etc) and involve recourse to real legal systems whether you use some distributed contract or a traditional one.
The area in business contracts which is a mess and could do with attention is standard clauses for different industries, which are well understood by everyone, diffs between contracts etc etc.
They are autonomous agents that act as your counterparty.
But are they autonomous and do they really have any agency outside the very limited confines of a scripted response to known situations (like if x happens send x ETH)? Are they able to send contract disputes to arbitration or courts in case of disagreement? If not that doesn't strike me as particularly useful.
I do really like the concept of standard contracts though which everyone agrees to just use - could save a lot of lawyer fees on contracts for M&A for example which really should have been standard components plugged together with very little customisation but instead take 6 months of bickering and use copy-pasted contracts inherited from 100 former deals at those lawyers with all sorts of archaic language. If I were in that space I'd be trying to attack that problem and partner with a law firm to take on either very small contracts like wills or very large contracts like M&A in a given vertical.
The reason I called them "autonomous agents" because they don't really fulfill any part of a standard contract. No choice of jurisdiction, no severability clause etc. More of a judge&jury&executioner all in one.
They are rather rigid and somewhat limited today, but I'd guess they are autonomous in the sense you can make them nearly unalterable once deployed. I suppose wih time we will be interacting with AI-agents at some point, there are some rather wild projects trying to do just that.
It may not strike you as particularly useful, but some decentralized exchanges (uniswap, dydx) that now clear more trading volume than Coinbase, a 100 billion dollar company. This has to mean something.
I have no idea if they could ever supercede legal contracts. Maybe in a 100 years.
where does the code actually execute? what's the code writen in?
whats stopping malicious code running?
On every Ethereum node that verifies it. It's usually written in Solidity and compiled to EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) bytecode (so it can also be written in other higher-level languages).
> whats stopping malicious code running?
It's sandboxed and since it's limited to the EVM, there isn't really any "malicious" code that could break out of the EVM AFAIK. Inside the EVM it's probably more of a philosophical question whether any code can actually be considered "malicious".
if the code is sandboxed, then what useful things can it do?
There are many networks that claim to do this, but we have yet to see how this is going to play out. A big question here is if these networks are in practice as resistant to attacks and decentralized as (post DAO) ETH.
Do you have a demonstration of that proposition? I see no reason why that needs to be true at all. There's a big gap between "free" and "extreme costs".
That is only one factor in the equation. The cost of performing a calculation is tiny, on the other hand. How you would, even conceptually, be able to arrive at some minimum dollar figure for such a thing, that is large in comparison to, say a person's average income is unclear.
You can't just put something on thousands of devices, indefinitely, for low to no cost.
In fact, it _has_ to be at least more expensive that whatever the cheapest highly reliable storage provider offers. Otherwise I'm going to be using everyone's machines to host all sorts. Same with webhosting, and any other kind of hosting.
- removed execution from consensus. I believe consensus just gets the execution result from elsewhere and thus doesn’t get slowed down by execution (the bottleneck when I was working on libra/Diem)
- have a random committee that verifies the execution, as opposed to everyone on the network like in Ethereum
Some of you people who down-vote without providing a proper reason are down right evil.
It's amazing watching this unfold in real time, greed really does change people.
People contort themselves into pretzels to deny the obvious, all common sense immediately goes out of the window, sudden onset of selective memory, etc.
Just buy the coin you hate.
But there is a reason why what he posts is just non-sense. Cardano doesn't scale farther than Ethereum or in fact any other blockchain that bets heavily on decentralization. Cardano can do nowadays a theoretical maximum of 6-7 transactions per second [0]. In practice, it's doing around 1 transaction per second because it doesn't see much use [1], which is the true reason why transaction costs are negligible. While Ethereum does 15-20 transactions per second, day in and day out and is working at full capacity [2], which is why Ethereum transactions can be quite costly as the demand is greater than the available blockspace. These are by the way real transactions, not the theoretical maximum I presented for Cardano.
Transaction throughput has nothing to do with the programming language used, it's an intrinsic limitation of the blockchain and is dependent on a bunch of network parameters that you can tweak (block size, block time and transaction size). You can tweak them a bit but if you tweak severely then you pay the cost through decentralization as the compute and network requirements of the node rise quickly, requiring beefier nodes which lead to centralization. A centralized blockchain is pointless, it's like running a SQL database with extra steps. See the recent Solana outage [3].
The programming language thing is just a distraction that has nothing to do with scalability. Ethereum doesn't run Solidity, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) runs the low-level OPCODES that it has defined [4]. Solidity code is transpiled into lower level languages and converted into the EVM's OPCODES. In fact, there are other programming languages to write Ethereum Smart Contracts like Fe (heavily inspired by Rust) [5] or Vyper (heavily inspired by Python) [6]. In the same way, Cardano doesn't run Haskell or Plutus or Marlowe, it runs the OPCODES defined by its Virtual Machine (IELE). Poor language-design and poor transpiling can lead to some inefficiencies in the performance of the code but in the end the true bottleneck is in the network throughput.
Blockchain scalability is solved via Layer 2s and sharding. Cardano is very far behind Ethereum on this regard considering Ethereum has deployed as of today many different layer 2s [7] while Cardano doesn't have any and you cannot expect to see any for the foreseeable future as they just released smart contracts. Cardano's layer 2 roadmap is also antiquated as it relies on state channels [8], which is a scalability solution that is intrinsically more limited than Rollups. State channels were all the rage a couple of years ago but they have been superseded by rollups as they are far less limited [9].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/comments/prbhp4/cardano_blo...
[2] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-attributes-major-outag...
[5] https://github.com/ethereum/fe
[6] https://vyper.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
[8] https://cardanians-io.medium.com/hydra-cardano-scalability-s...
[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/comments/pf25jk/comment/hb1...
That kind of certainty has a beauty to it.
Just for $436 per contract...
Many are literally forking popular DApps like Pancake Swap and just shifting the underlying chain to one of the better scaled solutions.
Because you can "peg" an asset from ethereum to an equivalent on BSC and then swap back, I don't think the "many-smartchains, one-main-chain" approach of Polkadot or Cardano will ever be sustainable long term. Simply no point.
It’s been making progress and Vitalik is a smart and capable leader of the project imo. High gas fees in the current system are arguably a sign of high demand.
From the chain perspective they never really leave the chain. They are either locked (most L2 solutions such as Bitcoin Lightning) or they are held by someone else (most centralized custodians, including exchanges). So the worst that can happen is that the locked/held coins get "stolen".
As I understand it, the idea is you put the data itself off chain but keep hashes on chain. Anyone who downloads the data can verify it by checking that the hash matches what is stored on chain.
It's not about storing off-chain, you compute off-chain and post to the network a cryptographic proof of the computation.
Rollups provide something akin to lossless compression proofs of computation. You execute the computation off-chain with high throughput and post a proof to the Ethereum network, this proof contains everything necessary to verify the correct execution of the computation. Sounds mind-blowing but we can thank smart mathematicians for figuring out the cryptography that makes it possible.
This means that we can scale off-chain while enjoying the security guarantees of the blockchain.
These techniques allow scaling the network throughput towards the 1000-4000 transactions per second range. Which together with data-availability sharding will push the throughput towards the 100K transactions per second range.
To be noted that this is not anymore a theoretical construction, these things are live running today on Ethereum. You can check the different solutions as well as detailed explanations of their trade-offs, limitations, etc... Here: https://l2beat.com
What is and isn't art and artistic value, and whether an indistinguishable copy of the mona lisa should be valued the same is an entire discussion, yes, but it isn't tied to NFT-s. By the way when I say indistinguishable I don't neccessarily mean by world class experts, but for example my guests who happen to spot my (hypothetical) fake mona lisa in my living room.
Edit: yes I have only NFTs as defined in Ethereum in mind. If there are other solutions working better/safer, I am not aware of them...
I would agree that an NFT pointing at some plain HTTP(S) URL on some random server without so much as a hash to identify the original content is pretty much worthless.
You can have the same amount of PoW on very little or very high throughput networks, the two are almost completely orthogonal.
If you drop the computation requirement and move enforcement to validators and slashing you can easily 10x-100x this without off chain layer 2 hacks. I was originally skeptical of this because it gives up the computational security guarantees of PoW in favor of game theory guarantees, but I was ultimately persuaded after reading more about it.
I think there's a place for both, digital gold like BTC with very low throughput and slow transactions for holding value and rarely moving currency, and ETH (and tokens backed by ETH's protocol) for everything else. With maybe some special situations for something like Zcash.
[0]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/97030/beginners-...
Yes, but that's intentional and configurable, e.g. the ten minutes of average time between blocks on the btc chain. You could very easily lower that value by modifying the difficulty adjustment formula. The same amount of pow would be done for a unit of time (say 1 hour), but with higher throughput through more frequent blocks. At that point this becomes a discussion about propagation times, network quality and node speeds, all unrelated to pow.
Or am I misunderstanding what you said?
Layer 2 is a hack given the current constraints, but it comes with its own trade offs that I think are worse.
I find it mindblowing that people willingly lock in so much money given how uncertain the whole thing is. There's no specific explanation about what happens if the 2.0 release is delayed repeatedly (like it has been in the past) or if it isn't successful and fails in some way. There's a lot of "trust Vitalik" going around which contradicts everything crypto pretends to be about.
I think hard improvements require effective coordination and someone who can pull that off. Vitalik is part of the reason I think ETH is more likely to be successful than competitors in the space (in addition to their head start).
If that changes then he'll lose his influence (imo), but from listening to him I think he's a pretty earnest guy and I've been impressed [0].
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/intellectual-honesty-c...
To tell you the truth, I can't keep up with zero knowledge cryptography that ETH uses / intends to use, and Ethereum implementations are usually buggy.
I can understand Schnorr signatures and Taproot, but even the Musig/Musig2 multi-signature aggregation schemes are too hard for me, so I won't use them for significant amount of money.
Bitcoin codebase is still readable, even though it's getting somewhat more complex over time.
There's also the fact that strong leadership trades away most of the decentralisation.
I'm sure this software project which has changed scope and has been delayed many times and is led by a 20-something-year-old with a personality cult around him will be successful. So convinced that I'll send them money which they promise they'll send back at an unspecified date.
Decentralised and trustless? Please...
It's just a (very) long position in eth. If you hold eth and the 2.0 transition fails to happen, you can practically say goodbye to your money anyways.
My point was billions of dollars of wealth are already being staked so there are a lot of people that have already bought in. This doesn't mean it is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean there are pretty strong incentives in place for it.
I suppose the other argument would be an ETH2 failure would likely devalue ETH too, so I'm not sure how much holding ETH is a hedge against failure.
https://www.coinspeaker.com/guides/what-is-initial-litigatio...
We've been doing vesting of assets for 4 years. You can also use an oracle (cron job with conditional metadata) to determine which portions to withhold for taxes under various tax regimes.
You can autoliquidate those tax withheld assets into a liquidity pool if your company needs the liquidity for taxes.
Many projects and services have locked assets but we found it incredibly difficult to conform that concept to the US tax system until we built our own way. What’s onchain is similar to any token lock agreement. Just autoredirecting portions of payouts and autoliquidating for this purpose is still not common.
Although we don't find programmatic vesting to be novel, anymore, and just the tax withholding part to be better: outside of the smart contract space we see a ridiculous amount of overhead, confusion, opaqueness, time and red tape just to accomplish a vesting agreement. So, we aren't evangelizing smart contracts and “blockchain” anymore but we will tell people about the more relatable things that we are doing.
... few hours later, after hitting the free 100,000 requests/day limit:
> We've hit the free 100k req/day on @infura_io, and switched to @AlchemyPlatform
But in his own screenshot it shows AlchemyPlatform also has a 100,000 requests/day free limit. Ummm? OK. $436 to deploy a smartcontract, $0 to pay for a server running static HTML and some JavaScript bundle.
> project-memento.com
Wait, what is this? You pay this guy to own a letter in his 20x20 ASCII square? It's a joke, right? Why would someone pay money for that? I will pay you twelve cucumbers to write LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME from x:0 - y:16 to x:19 - y:16.
"Crypto" hits a new peak insanity every day. Absolutely bonkers.
Curious why you think so? Also agree Solana is quite centralized but I wouldn't say it's a scam.
There's also no disclosure on what price did the initial round happen at. 40 cents/80 cents /1$? If you buy Gold/Copper you have a fair idea on what the mining cost is for the industry. These are just fairytales propagated by further vc money to build more virtual fantasies on the database they control.
I guess 30% for miners is a nice alibi.
There will be never be dilution of Solana holders to allow for decentralisation. To earn coins through staking you need to be a preexisting holder.
Running a node doesn't make economic sense and there are plenty of validators which don't charge a commission for delegation. You have no variable costs as an entrenched holder who can just stake coins for more coins till eternity.
All future supply on Solana will only take place through staking unless the backers think otherwise. https://etherscan.io/chart/ethersupplygrowth
Time to scrap ETH and start from scratch?
revolutionary = bought the presale