Maybe a good comparison would be to high speed trading companies who pay exorbitant rent to get their servers as close to the stock market servers as possible and reduce latency that way and get their orders in before others.

I think GP's example of the Apple store line matches a lot better. The high fees on Ethereum were for 2 or 3 hours, similar to Apple's line when they sell a new phone. If you don't absolutely need to run a transaction during that time period, you just.. wait.

For example - I was looking to move some USDC, but I saw the fees, and just came back a few hours later and submitted it with no problems.

Wait… so you were doing nothing at all involved with Bored Apes purchasing, just wanting to use your crypto coins for an ordinary thing, but would have paid an exorbitant fee to have done it at that time?

So if you had just finished shopping at IKEA, which we all know is a time sink beyond compare, and unloaded your burdened cart onto the conveyor, and went to pay … you’d have been dinged by an enormous gas fee or abandon the goods and piss everyone off? Have them hold it for a few hours? Have you seen those lineups, they can’t stash everyone’s crap until gas fees return to some sort of reasonable charge.

That is nuts. Unworkable. I must be misunderstanding.

When you pay things with your credit card at Ikea, the transaction is not being settled at the exact instant. It's not like your bank is sending money to Ikea's bank directly.

When/If people get to be using crypto to pay for things at Ikea, it will be the same. They won't be using the blockchain directly. They will be using "layer-2" systems. These systems will be more efficient because they can batch multiple transactions into one.

(With decentralized tech, there is also the possibility that IKEA itself can provide banking/financing services separate from their furniture retail business and that people might be using their "IKEA card" to pay for things anywhere.)

> When you pay things with your credit card at Ikea, the transaction is not being settled at the exact instant.

For all intents and purposes, it very much is. When I use my credit card to purchase something from a foreign supplier, the current exchange rate is used. It isn’t the exchange rate a few days later, nor the exchange rate when I settle the my account: it’s the exchange rate at the time of purchase.

Further, some cards do settle near immediately: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/visa-direct/small-bus...

Now, please explain the “layer 2” solution: on the day that BApes drove wth gas fees sky-high, did layer 2 charges remain stable and low-cost? Who foots the bill for the difference? Is settlement delayed until the price comes back down? What happens if eth gas fees remain sky-high for days?

> Further, some cards do settle near immediately: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/visa-direct/small-bus...

I'd argue that isn't really "settlement" though. The funds do arrive (which is at least better than the status code), but they can still be clawed back for any number of reasons at that point.

> (With decentralized tech, there is also the possibility that IKEA itself can provide banking/financing services separate from their furniture retail business and that people might be using their "IKEA card" to pay for things anywhere.)

IKEA has already been running a regular bank for years FWIW: https://ikanobank.se/

IKEA are already moving towards the latter with normal banking. Large retailers offering banking services is fairly common in some places.

The idea of blockchain is prevention of double spending. How will those "layer-2" systems are supposed to achieve it?

Sorry, I missed this question last week.

A short way to explain is that every participant of a layer-2 system locks funds into a smart contract, which gives you a balance in the system. The off-chain system them keeps its own separate accounting and settlement mechanisms, which do not require the blockchain and can be done cheaply. You only need to use the blockchain when you want to withdraw your funds from the layer-2 back to the main chain.

The different systems have their own approach for this off-chain tracking of the funds, but the important characteristic of all of them is that the users are in control of the funds at all times. Unlike sidechains, l2 systems all have mechanisms for users to prove the ownership of the funds and are allowed to unilaterally withdraw.

I think shopping on Amazon would be a better comparison.

That works when crypto is just a speculative asset but in the "crypto wins" future where everything gets piled into crypto like evangelists claim will happen and is desirable it's an absolute nightmare. You're out of gas and need to get home but oh no some crazy new NFT has spiked the gas price now it's thousands of dollars to fill up. Any transaction processing that does that is unusable for anything touching real life.

In this case they understand what they are getting into, here most Eth users will just be saying wtf

It's not the duty of anyone except myself to understand the risks of my own actions.

What the responses that people are sending to you are trying to point out, is that while this is an honorable rule of thumb, it doesn't scale. You cannot build a society this way, or none of us would be able to function reasonably.

It is unreasonable to build tools for other people to use, that will break the user's expectation of consistent, reliable and safe use.

This is a not an abstract idea, this is a fundamental legal concept in the west.

If everyone using Ethereum was expecting these fees, and are fine with it, then good for them, and no harm no foul. But this approach will not scale to larger communities, and it is unreasonable, cruel, and legally wrong to put the burden of "they should have known how to avoid this" on the larger populace, which is, of course, what crypto evangelizes the ultimate end-goal to be.

This is where comments like soared comes in. "I hope you don't use public transit, electricity, plumbing, or breathe central air." A human being simply cannot function in society if we have to study local EPA data to know whether its safe to breathe along our commute to work, that our electricity will be safe to use with all of our devices, that my car won't explode if I press a button in a different way, and that I won't go bankrupt if I use my crypto card to pay for a meal.

Expecting everyone to research how every tool works before they use it fails Kants categorical imperative, because it is simply impossible for everyone one of us to research every tool we use given a finite lifetime. Hence the responses you are receiving here.

> Imagine if you had to...

Given the historical context of these systems working reasonably well for decades, I've decided to take for granted that I won't get rugged by my public transit, or my electricity company, or the food in the grocery store. Still, I do assess tap water before I drink it, even in the US.

If you're the type of person who likes to blindly trust systems without studying them, that's fine; you can wait to partake in crypto until this sense of trust has been built. No one is holding a gun to your head and saying "run arbitrary code against your crypto holdings." Yet people do it. This is their fault. If they don't want to take the time to study the code, then they should have waited until the community did the due diligence for them to whatever is their own personal level of satisfaction.

I believe you have missed the point of my post. I have updated it in the hope that perhaps I have made the point clearer.

This is a good maxim for oneself, but a poor one when trying to understand or improve systems.

Such a great point! I wish more people embraced having two philosophies. One for them as an individual and one for policy making/discussion. E.g. I never want to myself rely on the social safety net. Yet at the same time, I want nobody, no matter how bad their decisions are to die because their basic human needs like food and shelter aren't met. I think a functioning society, especially a democracy, requires these two mindsets from their citizenry.

Honestly, I agree. It can both be true that 1) a system could be improved so as to reduce harm to the average user and 2) ultimately the users are responsible for assessing risks before participating in the system.

The problem is as soon as you argue for (2) everyone reacts like you're the most evil, heartless person on the planet.

Because the system you're passionately defending via the "personal responsibility" angle has so far demonstrably shown itself to be susceptible to the same externalizes of greed, avarice and "fuck you I got mine" misbehavior as the current system and people are lining up in droves to have their chance turning the grinder as long as it means they get a ticket to the sweepstakes.

And the responses you're giving of "just be risk aware/just read the source code/just know what you're getting into" doesn't change that, doesn't educate the people who probably and realistically could benefit, and it doesn't change the fact that there is a LOT of obfuscation, misinformation and mishandling of trust going on in order to separate people from their actual fungible money.

I just feel like they're not incompatible. I think we can help these people who get screwed without assigning the costs to unknowing, unrelated passers-by.

I think we can too.

I just don't trust....90% of the people, platforms and providers who claim that's what they're doing via crypto.

I agree! It's a huge problem and it's right for people to point it out.

Hope you don’t use public transit, electricity, plumbing, or breathe central air.

I don't understand how that contradicts what I said. I'm not arguing against public goods. And I'm not arguing against improving systems for those who don't do due diligence.

I'm just saying take responsibility for your own actions and your own decisions. The world doesn't owe you anything. Such statements are not incompatible with improving the standard of living for everyone, even those who are actively liabilities.

There is no risk really, it’s just a bad experience to have to deal with sometimes 50$ tx fees, and sometimes 5000$. Just when I really need to send Eth you never know if you can afford a tx

But I believe it is the duty of everyone to not cheat/scam other people

Sure. No contradiction.

or how I wish markets actually worked.

If this is the system working as intended, and you think that is a good thing, then I don't think there is any way to convince you otherwise.

To, on one hand, talk about helping the unbanked in Africa while at the same time justifying thousand dollar fees as "working as intended" is farcical.

> If this is the system working as intended, and you think that is a good thing, then I don't think there is any way to convince you otherwise.

They have just admitted that Ethereum is a millionaires playground, and it isn't useful for the 98% of users. If it wasn't a problem, why are many users complaining about it?

Also, if a bunch of rich whales wanted to rush and mint hundreds of JPEG apes or virtual land, that would mean 98% of all transactions for wallets on the platform would either fail or take their left over ETH to spend it all on fees for a single transaction. That could be bots with over >100k worth of ETH to snipe and mint these NFTs quicker than most.

If that is 'working as intended' then they are also saying that it is designed not to globally scale be useful at all. If you wanted to send payments or buy something at the supermarket store using a crypto debit card with ETH, the unpredictable fees will make the transaction fail or use up all your ETH for the fees; paying thousands for a $10 purchase at the supermarket which is wORKiNG aS iNTEndeD; even in the real world.

The banks are really scared and shaking in their boots over Ethereum's absurd and unpredictable gas prices. /s

The problem with your rant is that you are comparing apples with oranges.

Ethereum's base layer is not meant to compete with credit cards. Ethereum's base layer is not even meant to be a bank.

If you want to compare with "credit cards", then you need to look at the layer-2 systems, which (a) already exist and (b) are cheaper than most credit card transactions (cents on the dollar for Loopring) and (c) are just as permissionless and accessible as the base layer.

The fact that a bunch of "rich whales" decided to play with their money did not make the layer-2 systems less secure or less efficient. Quite the opposite.

The system is working as designed.

So there are two issues here.

The first is the fee market. That's working exactly as intended. Ethereum didn't exactly "break," it just didn't have the scaling to handle the traffic, and prices rose accordingly.

The second issue is the scaling, and everyone in the community agrees that Ethereum needs to scale a lot better. There's a lot of work being done on that front, including rollups and sharding.

the unbanked stuff is a lie, the working as intended part is the truth

Customers shouldn’t need to understand why suddenly the tx fees are jack to high heavens. The UX is broken.

Fair point. Metamask might add a notice mechanism on top like "because of current network traffic is high, your transaction might take a longer time to clear" with a "speed up" button which unlocks higher gas fee options with a warning that it might cost too much.