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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about the Web3/Crypto space beyond the basics - are all of these fees also publicly visible on a ledger?

It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

I've wanted to dabble in the space purely so I could understand it more deeply, but am not really interested in the hype. However, building visualizations to help people understand the insanity...sounds like an interesting project.

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The gas fees don't really correlate to any energy usage. They're actually a fee for computation on the block. It's no different than the Bitcoin miner fee, except it's based upon how much code is being included and the current network demand. It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

Imagine sending $100 to your mom with your bank and then the bank charges you $2,000 and then the transaction doesn't go through because someone sneezed on the keyboard at the bank and forgot to press send and then the bank keeps the $2000 and your mom doesn't get the $100. Only in this case they didn't sneeze on the keyboard, the transaction calculation actively changed to be $3000 and if only you had $3000 in your account your transaction would've gone through so it's your fault your bank didn't have enough money to send your mom $100.

Or more like someone is depositing millions into their bank account in small coins and it’s occupied all the tellers in the bank and no one is available to deposit your granny’s 20€ check

> It still blows my mind people think it is acceptable that the network eat their transaction fee if the transaction doesn't go through, especially when these fees are so high (as if now it can cost $2k to do any sort of NFT stuff).

I agree that this is ludicrous, but I don’t think that people so much accept it as that they tolerate it. Since, for most people (albeit not all), the only utility of cryptocurrencies today is to get rich, it doesn’t really make any sense to abandon a network that sucks from a UX point of view in favor of a much better network, if you believe that the alternative network will net you much less money.

Yes, it is publicly available. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, which includes how much gas was spent.

Here are a few https://etherchain.org/burn https://ultrasound.money/ https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_supply

Platforms don't show this to people because they want people to trade. People that trade don't look for this information/live in blissful ignorance because they would feel bad otherwise.

If anything, by now we should accept that showing people numbers isn't the right way to make them aware of climate change.

> It seems like someone could build a pretty sobering dashboard that shows exactly what you describe if this data is readily available.

Crypto relies on people who don't know to look at dashboards.

Gas fees are publicly visible on the ledger, but not necessarily their value in USD or other irl currency. But you can get that easily enough from exchange APIs and other sources.

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