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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
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.