Compared against a traditional program how much more does it cost to run an equivalent EVM smart contract ?
I'm looking for some rough estimate like: the same program would cost 100x more in EVM smart contract than on a traditional server.
well, when we talk about smart contract you only pay gas, so if you want to know how much it will cost to you, you need to know the gas price of your target chain and the gas of deploy the contract and call the functions you need to setup the contract, and only that, you don't have to pay any kind of bill for that, just the gas you spend
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I want to estimate gas of minting erc20 token without deploying contract. I am aware of contract.estimateGas but I dont have any contract address to test it. Is it possible to do it without providing contract address?
Each ERC20 contract can have different gas requirements, depending on its implementation.
Generally, token mint consists of one storage write, one event log, few memory operations, and usually one storage read (validating whether the user executing this function is authorized to mint tokens)... Which in total usually costs tens of thousands gas units.
But the actual cost is affected not only by the amount of operations but also number of functions in the contract, whether the mint function is external or public, and many other factors.
TLDR: "Usually tens of thousands of gas units" is the closest you can get without estimating against a specific implementation.
Gas costs for even a simple contract deployment are astronomical. If I spin up my own node and connect directly to it can I deploy on that node and avoid the gas fees?
Can I avoid gas fees by running my own Ethereum node?
Simple answer: No.
A node accepts the transaction, stores it in its mempool, and relays it to other nodes so that they can also store it in their mempool. There's nothing related to gas costs at this point.
Theoretically you could deploy a contract for "free" by running your own miner. But that's impossible without professional hardware costing very large amounts - many times more expensive than what you'd save on the gas fees.
However, in a block that you mined, you could include a transaction deploying a contract with 0 gas price. This sometimes happens - miners do occasionally put their own 0-priced transactions in their own blocks. But apart from that, no miner would accept your transaction with 0 gas price (or any transaction priced lower than the current market rate), as that wouldn't be profitable for them.
I deployed my smart contract(ERC-721) on truffle (Rinkeby | Ropsten | local node) and again on Remix and I keep getting an average cost of 0.0165 ether. This gas fee seems unrealistic to me, even though my contract is pretty simple.
I finally tried deploying to MAINNET using Truffle and the transactions stopped due to a low gas value. I switched over to REMIX and the new total gas fee is 0.65 ($2500) ether.
Is this a realistic amount to deploy a smart contract? or do I need to change some setting on remix?
Do the testnet's give a good representation of what gas fee will cost on mainnet ?
The amount of gas used from gas limit, not the gas price is going to be consistent between mainnet and testnets as the gas used from gas limit represents the amount of work that needs to be done to process the transaction logic in the EVM. Gas price (how much you pay for a unit of gas used) fluctuates as it is dependent on market economics/game theory, which is going to be very different on a test network vs live network.
References
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/
I'm interested in the conceptual topic of creating rights managements systems on the the Ethereum block chain with digital assets represented by an NFT.
I am just reading up on how to write programs that run on Etherium but I have some very basic questions just to get to started.
I read that NFT are created on the Ethereum blockchain. I don't really understand if that is the same block chain on which the currency Ether is maintained? Seems like the ledger will become impossibly large huge if both the every currency transaction and every digital asset and copy thereof that migrates to Ethereum is stored in one single giant ledger and that each miner on the chain has to download the entire ledger to one single machine in order to validate transactions? Have I got big misunderstanding there? I know there is talk about "sharding" in the future, but it seems like that isn't coming very soon.
Cost of running a smart contract on the blockchain? Assuming that the we are talking about the same block chain, from what I can see the price of "Gas" is quite high. I'm reading that the price of ETH transfer from one party to another is 21,000 Gwei, about $0.03 today. Just trying to understand the basics, how much does it cost to create a NFT? And roughly how much does it cosst to execute a simple function on the blockchain (without loops). Let say the equivalent of 5 statement function which takes a few simple params, reads a few blocks, doesn't write to the block chain but just performs some simple math and a few if statements and returns a string? Does that also cost, like, more than penny? Is the conversion to ETH2 switch from proof of work to proof of stake going to bring those costs down by orders of magnitude?
Any good resources or reference on how to write programs which create and manipulate NFTS on Etherium? Most of what I have seen in the bookstores seem to cover financial transactions with Ether.
Yes, it's the same blockchain.
You can see in the stats that full node (stores current state) currently takes about 400 GB and archive node (stores current and historical states as well) takes about 6.6 TB.
My observation is that most web apps using blockchain data don't verify and trust a third-party service running a node (such as Infura). And I believe that most end users or businesses who want/need to verify, usually have the capacity to store 400+ GB and are able to scale.
But if this amount of data is okay or "impossibly large huge", I'll leave that to your decision. :)
Deployment of a token smart contract usually costs between 500k to 3M gas. My estimate is that most token contracts with basic features that were compiled with an optimizer, cost around 1M gas to deploy. With current prices of ~200 Gwei/gas and $1800/ETH, that's about $350. But I remember just few months ago the average gas prices were ~20 and ETH cost $500, so that would be around $10. So yea, the cost of deploying a contract is very volatile.
Simple function that performs validations and transformations in memory is going to cost the base 21k + few hundred gas. (Working with memory data is cheap gas-wise, accessing the storage is much more expensive.) So in current prices around $7, few months ago it could have been $0.25.
As for the question, whether ETH2.0 is going to bring lower gas price: My opinion is that L2 (which should be released earlier than PoS) is going to have some effect on the price since it allows for sidechain transactions (similar to Lightning network on Bitcoin). But this is a development forum, so I'm not not going to dive deeper into price speculations.
I recommend OpenZeppelin docs where they cover their opensource implementations of ERC standards (including ERC-721 NFTs) or googling the topic you're interested in and read articles that catch your eye (at least that's my current approach).
And if you're new to Solidity in general, I recommend at least few chapters from CryptoZombies tutorial. In my opinion, the first few chapters are great and you'll learn a lot, but then the quality slowly fades.
Is it possible to store gas that is not used inside a contract, so it can be used at a later time (presuming it is possible to require a certain amount of gas calling a function)?
I am trying to write a contract that requires user input and does something based upon that input at a later moment in time that will require gas.
As it does not sound really attractive to pay that gas out of the contract owners pocket I am looking for a way to make the user of the contract pay for the gas it needs to complete the request.
In fact, it is really possible to store gas in a contract for later use.
There are some operations in EVM that can return some gas that was payed before:
SSTORE: changing storage value from non-zero to zero releases 15000 gas
SELFDESTRUCT: destroying contract releases 24000 gas
That means that e.g. storing some value requires 20k gas, but deleting it form storage requires only 5k gas and releases 15k gas for later usage in the same transaction. Actually this is a reward for clearing up blockchain storage.
You can get more details by searching "refund" in Yellowpaper.
There is GasToken project that uses this very feature to store gas in contract when it is cheap and release (and use) when it is expensive.
To be clear, I don't think this allows user to issue transactions without paying gas at all.
Seems like you have mixed up a little bit the meaning of gas.
The gas is the Ether you have to pay to have your transaction mined. The gas is always paid by the address that calls the function(Contract) and not from the Contract itself or the owner of the Contract so it doesn't come out of the owners pocket. Also gas is basically ether so "storing gas" is to store Ether in a contract but you cannot store the gas that is used to mine the transaction. If you want to store Ether you have to send Ether to the Contract or have the users send Ether when they call a function.