[prepend]

So it looks like the transaction price to update the billboard is “ 0.009975466857533094 Ether ($32.79)”

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.

[DennisP]

That's why they're working on scaling.

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.

[prepend]

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.

[TekMol]

    You know any tech platforms that took
    six years to scale to the point of usability?

The internet comes to mind. It started in 1970 with ARPANET. And we still have scaling issues :)

[prepend]

Arpanet was really useful early on and got more useful as they added nodes and protocols.

[DennisP]

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.

[ekianjo]

> This is what makes me think Etherium is just for speculators as there are no use cases where a $32 transaction fee makes sense.

If you transfer 10 000 dollars, 32 dollars in fees is absolutely nothing.

Also, in usual transactions, you can define how fast you'd like the transaction to be verified and you can lower the fees.

[prepend]

Transferring $10k by ACH costs $0. A visa transaction is like $.30, there’s no speed for a “usual” transaction on Eth to cost that low.

Practically speaking, transactions should cost billionths of a cent.

[ekianjo]

Transferring money across borders is way more expensive than that.

[JimWestergren]

I remember when the transaction fee was $800 ... I had to wait for next day when it was back to around $120.

[capableweb]

When was this exactly? https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price shows the peak to have been 939 Gwei in late 2016, which would be around 0.0027 EUR.

Are you sure you're not talking about a call to a contract rather than the fee to just make a transaction?

[mszcz]

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 ;)

[JimWestergren]

Yeah, it must have been a call to a contract. My son wanted to buy an NFT on opensea for the first time. Initiating his wallet or something like that.

[Jxl180]

When I tried buying a hyped NFT, the estimated gas price/transaction fee was around $80,000 lol.

[askmike]

I updated it: ad price was <$0.01, gas fee was $6.83

EDIT: I got outbid, I didn't post any NFT ad

[PretzelPirate]

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.