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by thisisit 3110 days ago
> most ‘cool’ dapp ideas rely on oracles to publish data about the real world into the block chain. When you dive into it you realize that such an Oracle would be very very expensive to run for even trivial usecases.

how much does it cost to run an Oracle?
1 comments
TheDong 3110 days ago
Depends greatly on the problem domain.

For example, if the problem domain is football games and gambling, well, scraping the results of those games from existing apis isn't too hard nor expensive.

If it's based on real-world stuff with no existing consistent API (e.g. you want a app based on housing), you'll either need to build that API, find a company to research and enter the data, etc.

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Kiro 3110 days ago
What's the point of building the app on Ethereum if the source (the Oracle) is centralized anyway?
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philfrasty 3110 days ago
There are implementations like Chainlink running decentralized oracles. At the end of the day, the data-source is still the bottleneck but they try to discourage bad actors through e.g. reputation mechanisms.
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thisisit 3110 days ago
Okay, how much cost will it cost to run an Oracle for some existing API?
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pests 3110 days ago
An Oracle is just a program that movies data onto the blockchain for dapps to use.

The data is an input to a transaction that eventually results in the EVM storing that data into a contracts (dapps) memory (which you pay per byte) that can then be exposed to other dapps.

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thisisit 3110 days ago
Thank for that explanation. How much would you say a simple Data input will cost?
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pests 3110 days ago
So both instructions and memory uses something called gas. Right now 1 gas = 0.00000002 eth.

Now a MUL costs 5 gas and a ADD costs 3 for example. So you have to pay for contract complexity.

Now memory costs are not linear. The current gas cost equation for memory is Gmem * a * (a^2/512) where Gmem is a constant that is currently 3 and 'a' is the number of 255bit words (ints) you are storing.

This is for EVM internal memory that can later be accessed by the smart contract or other contracts. There is a way for contracts to output data that can be read out-of-band called logs but that is for getting data out of the EVM, not in.

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