@lunch This is https://ens.domains/ where any change to ENS record requires what I understand is signature done with your ETH key. They amount of ETH sent as displayed in MetaMask is shown as $0 but the gas is tens of $$$.

@kravietz ah yeah that makes sense, ENS does a lot of bookkeeping under the hood that shouldn't have been handled on-chain. I think ENS is a neat idea but it was conceived at a time that nobody really gave a shit about fees or doing things in layer-2 protocols, which is really unfortunate and now there's not really a way to solve it without either ripping up a bunch of existing infrastructure or just waiting for eth2. normal eth transfers can be done for under $5 (and less on weekends), which is still way more than it should be but that's being still addressed

handshake is neat and is a lot cheaper to register names on, but it's its own chain with its own native asset and unfortunately probably won't be not-pow anytime soon.

@kravietz anything on ethereum layer 1 is pretty much unusable at the moment for anything more complicated than simple transfers, which really sucks because in theory there's a ton of cool stuff you could do with it.

@lunch

Thanks, that's very useful. I'm not watching the ETH world too much, just trying stuff that I find interesting and ENS was certainly one of them. Handshake also looks interesting and I'll give it a try. To be honest however, Gnunet GNS seems just as good from the functional point of view and without the whole massive blockchain overhead.

ENS on chain sucks. There is a proposal to move it to L2

https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/general-purpose-layer-2-static-calls-proposal-presentation-by-vitalik-buterin-at-ens-online-2d752906719e

@kravietz @lunch

@1010101 @lunch

I'm just reading about the concept of L2 and it seems like #Ethereum community finally discovered that the usual mantra "do that on blockchain" isn't always the best solution for many reasons. Basically L2 is a nice name for doing things without blockchain (you could even say: "regular computation", as in L2 channels), and then only submitting the final result for the sake of keeping audit trail.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/

@kravietz @1010101 Yeah L2s are actually incredible, Lightning completely changed the paradigms people used to think about scaling distributed ledgers and it's just taking a while for the the academics to work out all the kinks that unlock their potential

one of the cultural issues is that there's not enough PL people in the space to build languages to tackle the complexity involved, which is unfortunate