Sale of Bored Apes' Metaverse Land Made Gas Fees Skyrocket Past $3,000 (mashable.com) 111
There's a new metaverse project from the creators of the "Bored Apes Yacht Club" NFTs. Last night they held a "virtual land" sale, reports Bloomberg, raising nearly a third of a billion dollars.
At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening: If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw.
For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees.
Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."
"Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees....
"Over $175 million was spent on gas alone."
Mashable adds: An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone.
As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through.
Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees....
However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale.
Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan — or more than the price of the deed itself." Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.
At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening: If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw.
For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees.
Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."
"Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees....
"Over $175 million was spent on gas alone."
Mashable adds: An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone.
As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through.
Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees....
However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale.
Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan — or more than the price of the deed itself." Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.
Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
Ethereum is architecturally unsound.
If a third-party is able to bring the ecosystem to its knees, it is evident that there exist intractable flaws.
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
Just this week the Solana network went down because a couple NFT bots spammed it with transactions.
Remember, people want to reinvent finances around these.
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people want to reinvent finances around these.
Only really stupid people.
We've known for ages that digital currencies are absolutely awful at their raison d'etre. Ten years from now, we'll be reading stories about that crazy time the world spent billions buying nothing.
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That's what the dot com bubble was.
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Visa processes thousands upon thousands of transactions per second, for a transaction cost of pennies on the dollar.
Anything the purports to be a worthwhile "currency" needs to be able to do the same.
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Worse has happened before. Not too long ago they had to completely fork Ethereum to roll back some transactions. https://spectrum.ieee.org/hack... [ieee.org]
I wouldn't trust Ethereum for anything serious. It's a fun toy though, I will definitely say that.
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Sure, it's a fun way to watch the world burn.
They claim they're going to PoS any day now, but if they're still having problems like these I'm betting they're going to push that back indefinitely.
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these "problems" -- by which you mean network congestion due to popularity of the platform
Wipe your mouth before you say that shit. A properly designed platform wouldn't become unusable because it became popular. This is caused by inadequate design.
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I didn't say it was easy. But I don't care how easy it is, or isn't. I didn't say they were a bunch of big dum-dums because it was inadequate.
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Nakamoto knew what he was doing.
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Nakamoto knew what he was doing."
Indeed and apparently some of the knockoff holders have mod points to abuse.
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No major problems to date...
Oh, honey. [nist.gov]
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Given the fucking blockchain had to be forked in order to "fix" the issue, i'd tone down the smugness.
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You think you are highlighting a problem with Bitcoin, this is actually an example of bitcoin using the 51% feature to solve the sort of major issues that creep up from time to time in financial systems and normally can only be resolved by the intervention of a central bank or authority.
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That is like saying SMTP is broken because your outlook client had an error which caused it to spam the emails you sent in the last 24hrs 10,000 times and the email admin in your organization decided to roll back the mail storage to purge most of the spam.
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A buffer overflow in the app is just a code bug. Bugs are an inevitable fact of software development, all software has them and they can cause an error (or one of similar relative severity) in traditional fiat currency handling systems and banks just as well as crypto. If you write a new app the problem is fixed. At scale people agreed it was the right thing to fork but it didn't HAVE to happen. Simi
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As opposed to bitcoin that had to hack it in afterward?
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As opposed to bitcoin that had to hack it in afterward?
Sounds to me they all have the same fundamental issues...
Re:Architecture (Score:5, Informative)
They do.
The defining characteristic of cryptocurrency is that the transactions are processed in a distributed way. That means you have to figure out how to let randos on the Internet process transactions while also preventing them from doing what randos on the Internet do best (break things). The only solution to that problem is Satoshi's proof of work algorithm, which directly ties security to how expensive transactions are to process. The more expensive, the more secure. And if you want to use it for anything significant, it better be damn expensive. Like, expensive enough to deter superpowers. On top of that, since you're looking for bazillions of volunteers (the more, the more secure) to do all this, you not only need to pay them for their electricity and hardware, you need to pay them enough profit to make it worthwhile.
The alternative is not to trust everything to internet randos, but to leave it in the hands of someone more trustworthy. The conventional solution since ancient times, or the 1930s in the US, has been to pick a few chosen agents, and then keep a very close eye on them. The cryptocurrency version 2 solution is called "proof of stake" and puts the power in the hands of people who have a large interest in the success of the currency. So basically the solution the US abandoned in the 1930s, but with extra Internet.
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The only solution to that problem is Satoshi's proof of work algorithm.
There are many solutions to any problem even if you or even no one has thought of them yet. A bit more open minded may help your inventiveness. In this case there are a number of existing solutions with different advantages/disadvantages.
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Bitcoin can be hacked against all day long by entire nation states wi
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Yes, I can see your extensive list of them.
IIRC there are actually some fairly limiting proofs regarding distributed trust models. Not everything is possible simply because you state that it is so and wish for someone else to figure it out for you.
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The entire point of cryptocurrency is to eliminate the dependency on a trust network. Trust networks always fail because nobody remains trustworthy forever.
"The conventional solution since ancient times, or the 1930s in the US, has been to pick a few chosen agents, and then keep a very close eye on them. The cryptocurrency version 2 solution is called "proof of stake" and puts the power
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Proof of stake isn't really very different from a credit union issuing private currency, or any corporation for that matter. Some dudes get together with an initial investment, set things up, then get other people to deposit money or buy shares. Shareholders receive power over the company in proportion to the proportion they own.
It's bad news if there's only one, as demonstrated by the infamous company town. If there are lots of them it works reasonably well for many things. It's a giant pain in the ass for
Re: Architecture (Score:2)
It simply pays out money to early investors who face zero risk.
Like when a cryptocurrency does its ICO but keeps a few billion coins for itself?
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Bitcoin invented the lighting network, literally an off-chain method to handle transactions because using the blockchain is too expensive.
And when you read the details of the lighting network, it is *definitely* a hack.
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Lightning network is essentially millennials rediscovering the joys of fractional banking.
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Ethereum is architecturally unsound.
It's doing exactly what it was designed to do: create artificial scarcity to increase the value for Ethereum HODLers. The fact that it sucks horribly as a currency doesn't matter, because it was designed from the ground up to be a speculative investment for those who missed out on Bitcoin, ostensibly with "features" that make it unique among the vast field of competing shitcoins.
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Re: Architecture (Score:1)
Re: Architecture (Score:2)
It's actually becoming quite spectacularly unsuitable for laundering money now that we have the tooling to track coins through exchanges.
Gas Fees and NFTs? (Score:1)
Is this something to do with European countries needing to buy Russian gas with easily launderable "currencies"?
Future of commerce! (Score:5, Funny)
Cheapest way to send money, bro!
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Re:Future of commerce! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Microsecond Arbitrage... life imitates art.
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And still I wonder why anyone in his, her, or its right mind would choose to carry on business this way. What is the actual value of paying for things with such a volatile currency?
Because a lot of people are not in their right mind
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In this case it hardly matters though. These people didn't "pay for things", they gambled on virtual land in a virtual environment that doesn't even exist yet, solely on the strength that it carries the Bored Ape brand. Apes are cool,
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Yeah... it's all virtual... except for the gigawatts of power burned IRL.
Surely it tells you what the fees are beforehand? (Score:2)
Or are people just sending it out and not bothering to check what the fees are? That's on them if so.
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It certainly tells you, and people are throwing their money anyway.
F.ex. someone paid $3300 in gas fees... for a $25 NFT [twitter.com].
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It certainly tells you, and people are throwing their money anyway.
F.ex. someone paid $3300 in gas fees... for a $25 NFT [twitter.com].
It's amazing that people are falling for the modern version of selling oceanfront property in Kansas. Who the hell is buying this crap anyway?
Re: Surely it tells you what the fees are beforeha (Score:2)
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People in the third world wanting to experience the American dream?
Well, they're told lies while getting scammed by ruthless manipulators who don't care about them and see them only as ignorant marks.
It looks to me like they're experiencing the American dream all right.
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People in the third world wanting to experience the American dream?
Well - it isn't going to work for them.
So many people are totally convinced that they can become wealthy overnight. They use the few as examples that they can do it. Not thinking that there are what - 8 billion people on earth, and those who achieve overnight success are the huge exception.
And with that outlook - we start to understand why grifters are so successful. People demand to be grifted.
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So many people are totally convinced that they can become wealthy overnight. Actually, the sociologists that study this shit, instead of make random assumptions, claim that it's more a matter of hopelessness or lack of alternatives. You might very well understand the true odds of winning the lottery, but if you feel like nothing you can do with $2 will help you at all, you might as well buy a ticket.
They should have had some psychologists in that mix as well. Because for a normal person, ya gotta play the long game. As a person who was supposed to fail and fail hard, I grew up in poverty. But I knew early on that relying on luck was the fast track to failure.
So I worked hard paid for my own education, made several retirement accounts, ended up paid very well, and retired as a 10 percenter - in retirement - at 55.
Meanwhile A few of my wife's friends are the same age as me, never planned, despite
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That shit is fucking expensive.
Re: Surely it tells you what the fees are beforeha (Score:1)
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It's going to the moon bro.
Re: Surely it tells you what the fees are beforeha (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with the Etherium network, but on the Bitcoin network, it doesn't tell you, because that's difficult. What happens is when each computer is attempting to mine a block, they pick what transactions they wish to include. Each miner picks their own set of transactions. Generally, it's safe to assume most miners will pick the highest fee transactions they can, but these transactions can come in at the last second, and not every miner necessarily sees every potential transaction. So it's theoreti
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Re: Surely it tells you what the fees are beforeha (Score:2)
Oh, that was the old FOMO: fear of missing-out .
This here is the new FOMO: fear of moving on. Of recognising cryptocoin's promise was a worthless consensual hallucination, of realising so much time and effort went to waste.
Things Designed By Techies failing? (Score:1)
'Gas fee'??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's like the no interest for six months furniture store scams. Absolutely no interest, but those service fees add up to a suspicious 20% / a.
crypto will fail for day to day use with fees like (Score:4, Insightful)
crypto will fail for day to day use with fees like this and do you really want to deal with long lines if you don't want to pay and have to wait for the low fee transaction to happen.
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It can't fail for day to day use, because it's utterly useless for day to day use to begin with.
That's like saying water will fail to be human :)
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Until that L2 becomes bogged down and we need an L3, L4, L5, L6, L7.
How do you know you can trust an "L2"? There will obviously be thousands, if not tens of thousands of them.
The transaction rate needs to be increased by around 5 orders of magnitude to even begin to be acceptable. Is that even possible? And how fast will the size of the blockchain grow then?
It's just a terrible, awful, no-good solution.
That's not fair (Score:2)
small and slow network (Score:5, Insightful)
It is important to keep the network slow and small to make sure you can pull of the best grift during busy times.
How is this even legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
> "When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."
How is this not an outright theft? Why are transactions not atomic and fees not an integral part of a transaction?
Re:How is this even legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
> "When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."
How is this not an outright theft? Why are transactions not atomic and fees not an integral part of a transaction?
Because in a crypto world, there is no such thing as theft. They make this shit up as they go along, and the base premise is to run dollars into vapor. They get the dollars, and you get the vapor. All legitimate by cryptodefinition.
Re:How is this even legal? (Score:5, Informative)
> "When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."
How is this not an outright theft? Why are transactions not atomic and fees not an integral part of a transaction?
Ethereum (and any other proof-of-work cryptocurrency) can't scale to more than a few tens of transactions per second. If you had to pay a transaction fee only if the transaction was successful, it would be trivial to DDoS the network by sending lots of transactions for the equivalent of a fraction of a cent. As it is, you can still try that, but it quickly gets expensive.
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Then the entire model is faulty by design. The subject of the purchase should firstly be put in a locked state, transaction should be approved outside of the transaction processing chain and only thrown into the blockchain when successful with known, fixed and approved fees agreed upon before the final checkout.
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Cryptocurrencies aren't some e-commerce site. You're not buying something, you're asking a random computer on the Internet with God-for-10-minutes to pretty please write a message for you. If you include a bribe it's more likely to do it. And there's lots of competition, so really you better include a bribe.
Okay, so it IS kind of like buying concert tickets.
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This proves even more that the entire model is broken.
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Then the entire model is faulty by design. The subject of the purchase should firstly be put in a locked state, transaction should be approved outside of the transaction processing chain and only thrown into the blockchain when successful with known, fixed and approved fees agreed upon before the final checkout.
The reason for all the number crunching is to prevent double spending (sending the same coin to two different accounts) without needing a central authority that keeps track of who has which coins. If you want a locking mechanism that ensures your transaction will succeed before you pay any fees, you either need a central authority that keeps track of which coins are currently locked and where they're due to be sent (which goes against what cryptocurrency is supposed to be), or the locking mechanism will be
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You're on the verge of enlightenment.
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One of the hallmarks of crypto is that you're never buying what you think you're buying. It's why it's such a great scam.
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How is this not an outright theft?
Better yet, why would anyone buy cryptocurrency which operates in this manner in the first place? It's like buying a cigarette lighter that leaks fluid and sometimes sets your hands on fire, by design.
USPS (Score:2)
If you put up with ticketmaster (Score:2)
If you put up with ticketmaster then you are one of the chumps that has no problem with Ethereum fees.
(They named it ticketmaster because Baal-zebub was taken.)
Looks like blockchain 'money' and nft's were created simply to enrich these greedy leeches.
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Excellent point.
Constrained transaction supply? (Score:2)
I guess ETH has a rather constrained supply of transactions, so this makes sense. If the demand for transactions suddenly spikes, and the supply is constrained, then the price for transactions is likely to go up. Simple economics.
This doesn't happen with USD because the supply of transactions is virtually infinite. Somebody on the other side of town could sell a dozen houses in five minutes. It doesn't affect my credit card processing fees.
If the crypto bros can't find a way to make transactions more pl
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That aspect of it might actually be sustainable. I think of it as a betting pool where the event they're betting on never actually occurs. Regulation, as gambling or otherwise, seems like the biggest risk to that. Last year I gave crypto a 2nd look, and soon came to the conclusion that receiving it for goods or services was a non-starter due to the tax treatment--income at market rate as soon as you receive it. Huge PiTA.
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Because I know when I look for a currency (Score:2)
Seriously, we need a new word. "Cryptocurrency" doesn't cut it as these things are completely useless as currencies. And no, layering other protocols on top with exchanges is not a "solution". Especially when more than a few of them have been hacked and the proceeds lost. Or when the exchanges have literally confiscated money because it was "stolen".
Gas fee...part of the scam (Score:1)
Count me out (Score:2)
I'm going to start my own business: (Score:2)
Who is getting these 'gas fees' (Score:3)
Fuck all that mining and speculation crap, just set up some box to collect gas and it seems I will be set.
"Gas Fees" The Symptom (Score:2)
This one thing should disqualify the whole damn enterprise as asinine. There's not a lot of things on the frontiers of technology that really, truly make me shake my head in wonder, but this gets me there. This is an Onion article come to life.
WTF is going on? When did the IQ of the technical world slip 30 points?
This is a basic universal cryptocurrency problem (Score:2)
This has been recorded quite clearly across cryptocurrency every time it starts climbing again.
There have been numerous days-long stretches where you just aren't going to get your Bitcoin transaction through without paying enormous transaction fees.
When Crypto Kitties did it to Ethereum, it was a blast.
This is what I always think about when I see people proselytizing it with "banking for the unbanked!" and "financial freedom from the g
WTF? Is this normal??? (Score:2)