this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Ethereum
1 readers
1 users here now
Resources
- Website & Blog
- White Paper & Yellow Paper
- Documentation & Stack Exchange
- Learn Solidity
- Source Code on Github
- Bounty program
- Chat on Gitter
- Network Status & Gas Price Market
- List of DApps
- Meetups
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It poses an interesting question: What happens if everyone starts using Ethereum as a data archive service?
One interesting aspect of this, and this applies to most blockchains, is that you pay for the data a single time upfront but you expect it to remain there forever.
Does this make any sense to you at scale? Does this at all sound sustainable? Because it isn't. It's a tragedy of the commons problem. It can even get worse if a naive pricing mechanism is added for rent, where you rely on hardcoded parameters to gauge the price of storage in a fluctuating market.
You only solve this issue with a market mechanism, something fundamental. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting coupled with a finite ledger is a good solution: basically, all transactions have a set lifespan and at the end they must be rebroadcast, paying the average fee/byte new txs paid over their lifespan.
If you fund it well enough (or if it's on Saito and your staking rewards offset your rent) you can have data that lasts forever on a chain with a sustainable economic model.
It might seem like a downgrade because you don't get to pay once and live forever - but consider that paying once and living forever is a straight road to economic ruin and is simply pushing costs onto future users, thus continually removing users from the chain until it dies.
If you actually can pay for storage at a market rate, the chance that your data survives hundreds of years is far greater.
You're forgetting that the cost of storing data has always decreased. By having the revolutionary upfront price for data storage, it's a huge bet on this trend.
The price of ETH goes to the moon. ETH price is determined not only by speculation but also by actual demand to pay to put data on chain. If it becomes commonplace to store data on chain, it will greatly increase demand for ETH.
I've made https://clonk.me to have conversations and share files on chain as NFTs and https://newgeocities.com to upload web pages on chain.
It doesn't matter if Eth price goes to the moon, the economic model is fundamentally flawed.
> Users start dumping data on-chain that must remain forever
> Eth price goes to the moon
Where in this equation are nodes being compensated for storing data? The fees that users pay to *add* data do not count -- that's a completely different cost than storing data. The nodes that join any time in the future are burdened **without payment** for all data that came before - the payment went to the nodes that added it and, apparently, Eth holders, if your solutions is 'Eth price goes to moon.'
If your argument is that people won't be able to add such data because it's too expensive -- just mete it out. Add it during low demand. It really doesn't matter; nodes get paid to *add* data, nobody gets paid to *keep* data; at least they aren't paid anything like a market rate. The solution now is just let fees increase to compensate the node cost, meaning new users pay for old uers - a truly awful economic model.
Anticipating the next argument: "the chain will just stay small enough so that storage costs decrease more quickly than archive costs." You are now a slightly better version of small-block Bitcoin (same economic model: don't allow arbitrary scaling) i.e. you have economic parameters set by developers and not the free market.
Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting solves it. It gives you market prices for storage and pays that money to nodes actually storing it.