[jhunter1016]

This is an interesting read. I just deployed my first contract to mainnet last week and despite my best optimization efforts, it still cost us almost $300. There is a lot of work to do still for Ethereum to be usable in a cost efficient way. In a perfect world, I can deploy as many contracts as I want for less than the price of cloud storage. Decentralization cannot be the only selling point. There has to be competition on price at some point too.

[basicallydan]

Congratulations!

I agree, it needs to be much more cost-effective. Someone In The Know told me that there's some attempts being made to make it more cost-effective with something called Optimism (https://twitter.com/optimismPBC) - but after looking into it, it does seem like you'd need to buy tokens. I specifically wanted this Game of Life to be driven by ETH!

You don't need to share of course but I am curious - is your contract a more "legitimate" use than mine? Something which is a genuine utility?

Thanks for reading btw!

[jhunter1016]

I think utility is all relative. Your contract has utility among those who want to use it. It’s sort of like what my dad used to tell me about baseball cards: they’re only valuable if someone wants to pay you for them.

My contract was more traditional. We needed to mint NFT and sell them in a single transaction. Normally an NFT is minted and transferred then the user can sell it to other people later. In our case, we were selling a very specific asset that demanded payment before (or at the same time) as the NFT was being minted. So I wrote an ERC721 contract that also included Escrow payment capabilities.

It was definitely a good experience, but if I was doing this on my own and not for my job, there’s no way I’d pay almost $300 to deploy a smart contract.