Show HN: The Billboard, a fully decentralised billboard stored in Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Billboard, a fully decentralised billboard stored in Ethereum

thebillboard.vercel.app

43 pointsdbuidl41 comments

So it looks like the transaction price to update the billboard is “ 0.009975466857533094 Ether ($32.79)”

This is what makes me think Etherium is just for speculators as there are no use cases where a $32 transaction fee makes sense.

This is ending up like Ticketmaster with the completely useless fees.

It costs less to trade on CharlesSchwab than Eth.

Otherwise seems like a fun project, but too expensive to be fun.

I updated it: ad price was <$0.01, gas fee was $6.83

EDIT: I got outbid, I didn't post any NFT ad

I remember when the transaction fee was $800 ... I had to wait for next day when it was back to around $120.

When was this exactly? https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price shows the peak to have been 939 Gwei in late 2016, which would be around 0.0027 EUR.

Are you sure you're not talking about a call to a contract rather than the fee to just make a transaction?

It all depends on the complexity of the method of the contract being called. I can surely imagine an $800 fee in peak times for a complex multihop swap on Sushiswap or something ;)

Yeah, it must have been a call to a contract. My son wanted to buy an NFT on opensea for the first time. Initiating his wallet or something like that.

This project could have deployed on an Ethereum Layer 2 and the fee would be much lower. If it was a useful enough project, they could have deployed their own volition-based layer2 and transaction fees could be free.

When I tried buying a hyped NFT, the estimated gas price/transaction fee was around $80,000 lol.

That's why they're working on scaling.

Available now but still working on adoption/UI: rollups, which essentially compress the data on chain. Those bring transaction capacity from several dozen to a couple thousand tx/sec.

In a year or two, data sharding, which multiplies the capacity of rollups. That takes throughput to 20K-100K tx/sec.

With that in place, quadratic scaling kicks in, where hardware improvements multiply both the capacity of shards and the number of shards, so e.g. a 3X hardware improvement means a 9X capacity improvement.

They’ve been working on scaling for six years. You know any tech platforms that took six years to scale to the point of usability?

If they cared about scaling rather than milking greater fools, I think it would be solved.

Imagine if someone presented a database or OS that worked so inpractically and they said they were still working on scaling after six years. That would be the dumbest startup ever.

    You know any tech platforms that took
    six years to scale to the point of usability?

The internet comes to mind. It started in 1970 with ARPANET. And we still have scaling issues :)

Arpanet was really useful early on and got more useful as they added nodes and protocols.

As I mentioned above, rollups are available today. In six years it's gone from 7 tx/sec (Bitcoin's max on chain) to a couple thousand tx/sec, improving by almost three orders of magnitude. If it continues at that rate, it'll be around a million tx/sec six years from now.

The roadmap I described above actually does get to that level if we assume a 3X hardware and bandwidth improvement over that period.

> This is what makes me think Etherium is just for speculators as there are no use cases where a $32 transaction fee makes sense.

If you transfer 10 000 dollars, 32 dollars in fees is absolutely nothing.

Also, in usual transactions, you can define how fast you'd like the transaction to be verified and you can lower the fees.

Transferring $10k by ACH costs $0. A visa transaction is like $.30, there’s no speed for a “usual” transaction on Eth to cost that low.

Practically speaking, transactions should cost billionths of a cent.

Transferring money across borders is way more expensive than that.

So, the million dollars home page, crypto edition?

I really should fire up archive.org to dig those old projects that worked in the 2000. Sticking a blockchain on them seems to be a nice way to make some bucks.

It's visually a lot less interesting than the million dollar home page though.

One red paper clip is up next? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip

Already exists - see PaperclipDAO https://clip.mirror.xyz/mOCENLvP1aYXOBOPiLoLjBlSTvJWBqccfkn4...

No, that one was already claimed. https://thousandetherhomepage.com/

something similar posted few weeks ago: https://project-memento.com

“Fully decentralized experiment to see how much money strangers will give me.”

An upvote purchase site is marketed there. It specifically says get to the top of Hacker news. I find that a bit disturbing

“Fully decentralized”

Domainname: vervel.app

Vervel has centralized control to shut your app down. This is not decentralized.

It's not much of a billboard either.

A billboard is something that tons of people can't help but notice.

This requires installing a bunch of software, identifying peers on the Ethererum mainnet, asking them for their idea of the latest block, determining the most-worked-branch, validating its entire history, looking up a particular contract, determining its state at that block, extracting some text from it, and then somehow displaying it, for one person to see. At least that would be the somewhat trustless and decentralized way to do it.

> A billboard is something that tons of people can't help but notice.

That's an interesting definition of a billboard. So if there is a billboard next to a road, and the road goes under construction for weeks/months it ceases to be a billboard for that time? Or if most people leave a village and it empties out.

> This requires installing a bunch of software, identifying peers on the Ethererum mainnet, asking them for their idea of the latest block, determining the most-worked-branch, validating its entire history, looking up a particular contract, determining its state at that block, extracting some text from it, and then somehow displaying it, for one person to see. At least that would be the somewhat trustless and decentralized way to do it.

Trustless and decentralized are not the same thing. I agree that would be "somewhat" trustless (Do you trust your OS? Do you trust your compile toolchain? How deep does trustless need to go?)

Instead, this is a webapp with a link to a blockchain explorer. It's trivial to check another blockchain explorer or your own node if you want.

Since it no longer serves to advertise to the public, its utility as a billboard ceases. So yes, it stops being a billboard.

> So if there is a billboard next to a road, and the road goes under construction for weeks/months it ceases to be a billboard for that time?

You could still call it a billboard but I am pretty sure the company paying for the ad on it will pause their payments. Maybe even sue if they were not given any notice in advance.

> So if there is a billboard next to a road, and the road goes under construction for weeks/months it ceases to be a billboard for that time? Or if most people leave a village and it empties out.

If a tree falls in a forest... :D

The billboard lives in the blockchain, it also generates its metadata in it.

For example, this is the current metadata being generated right now when someone calls the "tokenURI(1)" method:

data:application/json;base64,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

Nice and I just tried it with the amount 0,003.

But first and third line disappeared :( https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3c4ba696cc0996a9fa2bc12d3c4b04cebf...

It was supposed to be:

TheSpaceWar.com

New fast-paced strategic 2 player card game

No pay-to-win game - all cards included!

Can it be fixed please? I am using Firefox with uBlock Origin.

Seems like there's a 50 character limit, it may have truncated your message to fit.

Well, the website says: "Each line has a limit of 50 bytes (50 standard characters). "

Hey Jim! I answered you on Twitter https://twitter.com/dbuidl/status/1444281093000159233?s=21

There might be a bug in the form, but you can see the current one being displayed has also 3 lines and a pretty long ones.

> Can it be fixed please?

Lol, did you really just dive into this without knowing that blockchains can not be changed after they are published?

I had this exact idea some time ago, I'm happy someone made it :-) Inadvertently it highlights the fee problem of Ethereum, but I'm sure someone will pay for it. I was about to enter a haiku from Roland Barthes' "Préparation du roman":

  Les citadins

  Rameaux d’érable dans les mains

  Train du retour

but Metamask wanted me to pay 17$ for it.

I was waiting for someone to rip-off the one from last month and just lower the fee and pretty much nothing else

https://sagivo.com/2021/09/13/Crypto-Billboard.html

I don’t want to click on it myself to find out but a friend to whom I shared the link to the page the HN post link landed on said it took him through a whole bunch of redirects and landed on a shopping page of some kind. Was the page perhaps compromised?

Amusing that one of the things on the billboard is

> https://<SITENAME>.club Marketing that actually works. (like getting posts on HN's main page) 0.000000100000000011Ξ

I did the exact same thing some years ago with 3 ads. The top one reached above 1 ETH :)

However ETH was way cheaper and my ads would display on more than just the one site.

Good luck!

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