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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart contract. To someone like me who is interested in the technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to interact with a contract, this is a dream come true.

Right, it's a centralized clone of ethereum operated by Binance. If you're ok with centralization just fire up an EC2 instance. The free tier includes 750 hours per month.

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I don't think hosting your own node allows you to interact with contracts for free. I can (and have) played on the devnet, but you're limited there to interacting with contracts hosted on devnet. Can you elaborate what you mean?

My point was rather that if you're ok with centralization, ok without censorship resistance, and ok without meaningful absolute reliability guarantees - all of which is true on BSC - and you value low cost and low latency, what on earth are you doing using a blockchain?

At $0.12 per execution that's one heck of an expensive AWS Lambda function, which are normally priced at $0.0000002 each and $0.0000133334 per GB-second of execution on ARM.

Lambda is about 625,000 times cheaper per request than BSC while offering the same-or-dramatically-better guarantees. [1]

[edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

I'm interested in finance and analytics. So I like to monitor and occasionally write bots to trade crypto currencies on decentralized exchanges in a real world environment. Could I do algo trading without blockchain? I guess but the transparency and tooling of EVM is unmatched, and I don't know the tax and legal consequences of doing it in proper exchanges. Blockchain is the wild west and for someone who is curious and likes to tinker, it's the environment I prefer.

What's the self-hosted lambda alternative for what I want to do?

> [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain.

Can we stop with the moral panic? If I live in a state where its a crime to gamble (except for heavily advertised state run lottery that targets poor people), and I am of sound body and mind and want to legally gamble and learn something about probability, psychology and technology in the meantime, why is this a bad thing? Give me a break

No moral panic here, I've got nothing against gambling. I love to gamble. However, crypto is clearly utilized in this case for the trading of unregistered securities via regulatory arbitrage. That's just fact.

Good luck out there, and I hope you win! You'll need it, though, it is after all a mob casino you're gambling in.

This is the classic "I know it's a crooked casino but it's the only game in town" argument. The big issue there is you can't know the odds because the house is playing against you and they can see your hand and they can and do frequently turn the lights off if things start to move against them. This is of course why we register securities and regulate brokerages.

I'm pretty confident we'll recapitulate that in due time.

Gambling and unregistered securities are fundamentally very different things. Gambling is activity where usually house is guaranteed to win, and player is guaranteed to lose.

Unregistered securities are just securities, but not government approved. Generally it is believed that unregulated securities are way more risky. However also government approved securities can be scams or bad investments.

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