For anyone curious, there was a trend where people were changing their display name on Twitter to their Ethereum Name Service (ENS). It's not a URL (even though it looks like it); the concept was similar to URLs though. You'd point a friendly name to your ETH wallet.
The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.
It's really interesting to have been on the internet for decades and have watched fads like this come and die so often. Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style, or the one where everyone started putting their pronouns in their profile, or that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was. It's such an odd feeling to be outside these fads and seeing them so objectively.
> that time when half the internet switched to ICQ and I'm still not sure how it was better than AIM but I was convinced it was
I had a six digit ICQ, and I knew some people with 5 digits, so you could instantly tell how cool people were. Also, ICQ would say uh-oh when you got new messages, and AIM just dinged.
On a technical side, ICQ did offline messages forever and AIM didn't do offline until after AOL bought ICQ. ICQ also needed UDP to work and did peer to peer messaging when possible (coordinated through the central server) and I think you could send files sooner. Otoh, AIM servers responded on all tcp ports, so if you had a derpy corporate firewall that just looked at ports, and you had any ports open to the internet, you were golden; the java applet client was convenient too.
I think ICQ is still around, AOL sold it to some Russian company a decade ago, but AIM is dead; Verizon didn't want to keep it running, or Yahoo Messenger either.
> Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style
This takes me back. A decade ago I paid someone $5 on Fiverr to draw me as a Simpsons character. She was one of several people on the site doing this. I just checked and she's still at it, with over 8k reviews. A niche market but one that doesn't seem to have completely dried up yet.
My impression as a European was rather that AIM was not well know outside the US, while ICQ was. (It was the "America Online" instant messenger, no? So while AOL became available to other countries, I don't believe it reached the same market share and notoriety).
So I assume the rest of the world was adopting ICQ "from the beginning", and then maybe there was a phase in the US where, in the interest of international communication, they started to adopt ICQ as well? Just conjecture, I wasn't in the US at that time.
Inevitably they get bored or the fad dies out, nothing is gained, but then people still excitedly go along with the next one every time as if they have no memory of the previous 1000 iterations.
I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee, which didn't make a whole of sense to me given the immutable nature of the blockchain - there's more overhead involved in expiring them but more profit to be made for the next renewal. The price was also ridiculously high if you ask me for something so basic, just like a bytes => address mapping, doesn't require a genius to make, although it seems like they managed to get some partnerships/integrations behind it which add the main value as it seems like there's some integration with web3 libs to know how to leverage ENS.
Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.
> Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee
I have no proof, but I doubt any of them were paying for it. I tried to figure out how some of them got their names by looking at the blockchain. There were some patterns where I thought it looked like someone bought up a bunch of popular names and transferred them to the influencers. I'm not very well versed in blockchain though, so I couldn't follow it well enough to do anything more than speculate.
I think it was nothing more than promotion. It would be interesting to know if anyone got paid because they should be disclosing it as paid promotion if they did. Having the domain given to you is a type of payment (if that happened).
> I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active
If you weren't looking at a 3 or 4 letter domain you were probably seeing super high transaction fees which made the initial transaction very expensive. The registration is supposed to cost about $5 per year. I bought one a few months ago and that's how it worked.
I paid $11 in transaction fees for the first transaction where you submit your order + secret. Then I paid $72 in transaction fees for the registration plus $55 for 10 years of registration. I also got about $5 transferred back to me by the ETH ENS registrar. So the cost of the domain registration was $5 / year, but the transaction fees were around $85.
I watched gas prices for a week and tried to time my order with low fees. The cost of the second transaction went up by $20 while I waited for the 1 minute delay required between transactions. It's crazy.
You also need to pay transaction fees every time you want to update the record. Now imagine a proof of stake system where the rich (ie: early adopters) get a cut of transaction fees just for holding a bunch of tokens. I think that's why enthusiasts are so excited. Imagine getting paid every time someone needs to update a record in a database.
I don't think blockchain domains have any benefits. In fact I think they're significantly worse than our current system. However, I did buy one to match my favorite / best .com domain because even if they're a terrible idea they could still get popular and I thought it was worth $135 USD to ensure I didn't have to worry about someone squatting on my name.
The registration fee that is paid to the ens dao varies on length. Shorter names are much more expensive. But for 5 characters or more, its 'only' $5 per year. What is expensive is the gas fees to claim the name, mint the NFT to complete the registration, and then set a reverse resolver for it. Even at lowish gas fees it can be $50-$100.
Yeah, a few months ago when I first noticed it appearing everywhere I looked into buying one, but when I saw the current price of eth + gas fees etc I left an alert on to alert me when fee's were lower.
Never got an alert, so never bought/rented one.
Happy I didn't.
Same goes with NFTs, the fee's are just crazy. + I don't think the average joe can make any money on it.
Key problem ENS domains are only available on Ethereum mainnet where gas fees are really high. There are NFT domains as Unstoppable Domains which you pay only once and your domain NFT is yours forever, but UD have not taken much popularity as ENS.
Other think to know you can use your .XYZ domain on ethereum as ENS.
Most experienced crypto users would use multiple wallets. But advertising any of your wallet addresses is asking for people to send you scam coins. It just pollutes your wallet and makes it that much more likely that you will trip up and interact with a scam smart contract.
.xyz has a public resolver for ETH addresses for browsers so - foo.eth - you could type in foo.eth.xyz and it'll resolve to a placeholder of sorts for information in the .eth profile (pointers to wallets, Twitter handles, NFTs currently held, etc). I think it's interesting in the "online business card" sense - but not too much beyond that.
EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
I imagine this is just a website with the domain eth.xyz and with some subdomain shenanigans. You make it sound like it's sponsored by the TLD or something.
> EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
It is though.
> Eth.xyz was created for the ENS community with love by the XYZ Registry, the company behind .xyz domain names. The project is open for contribution or feedback on GitHub. Send us a message @xyz on Twitter! [1]
It's kind of neat, but seems like a registry taking on a lot of extra liability that they typically don't have as a domain registry. Putting a disclaimer on the sites doesn't exempt them from the law.
> The profile content on this page is automatically generated from publicly available information provided through ENS and is ultimately controlled by the relevant ENS user. Nothing on this page implies any endorsement or affiliation between XYZ or ENS and the person or organization whose profile information appears on this page.
So what gain does the blockchain get you? XYZ isn't judgement proof like the blockchain, so they'll have to follow the current laws for trademarks, copyrights, etc.. If the blockchain isn't adding any revolutionary tech, is slower, is expensive, and is only accessible using gateways that are subjected to current laws, what's the appeal?
Limo has the same thing. If you go to `ensnamehere.eth.limo`, the backend will look up `ensnamehere.eth` and look for a record holding an `IPFS` or `IPNS` address, fetch it, and serve it to you. I host my personal site this way [0], although the process of resolving an IPNS name and fetching data over IPFS is too slow to be usable (takes about 30 seconds for me).
There's not really any advantage to this, because you have to trust `eth.limo`, but ENS names are in theory technically superior to traditional domain names, so I'm excited about this development. For instance, in theory ENS names have no need for certificate authorities for instance, or centralized registrars that we have to socially pressure every few years not to sell .org to a private company or whatever.
At risk of sounding like a jerk, this post is just raw data. The “implication” you brought up and the rejection of said implication was all done by you.
By its very definition, an implication is something that is not explicitly stated. And since nobody would collect information this specific for no reason, there is definitely some inherent sentiment in tracking this kind of thing. It can be debated exactly what, but come on. Nobody does anything without some intent somehow.
Makes sense for verified merchant payments / donations to human readable addresses (myshopname.eth), makes less sense for individuals to use it whilst tying their address to their entire wallet, storing NFTs, net worth, permissions on there.
As for ENS itself, it is the only working valid use case for NFTs. Too bad it is implemented on something that is sluggish and expensive for users to use, which is Ethereum.
In practice you can go to example.eth directly in web3 browsers (most mobile wallets have built in browsers). For browsers like Chrome or safari you can access them through gateways, for example, Cloudflare has a .link gateway so on chrome you can use example.eth.link (my preferred gateway is eth.limo).
Huh, I just thought that was a thing cryptobros did because they thought it sounded cool. I had no idea it was an address I could have been sending malicious payloads to if they annoyed me!
Yes this just looks like a marketing fad. Folks will change their names to promote something all the time. My guess is that a visual change every so often gets folks to notice. So kinda :shrug: from me ;)
Or they are realizing that putting their ENS names is making very easy for other people to track their Blockchain transactions and target them for scams?
Firefox doesn't seem to support it. Trying to go to "shaq.eth" leads to a google search, and "https://shaq.eth" gives a standard "server not found" error page.
As Peter Thiel pointed out yesterday, ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa. Doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but maybe not a lot of room to increase the market cap.
> ETH appears to be accurately valued compared to payment processing companies like Visa.
How does that even make sense? ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation. Visa is valued based on money made from transactions. They aren't really related at all.
It's not like ETH is doing proof-of-stake, owning ETH doesn't in any way entitle you to ongoing dividends like VISA stock would.
I don't see the relation. ENS is a whole separate name service. .tel is an ICANN tld that I guess is supposed to be used for business cards and stuff. ENS could be used for business cards I guess, but it's not designed with that as the primary purpose.
Many of these may have been dropped as a response to Brantly Milligan being fired/canceled/banned from Twitter. At least that's why mine is up there. Could do some analysis on dates to confirm/disprove.
".eth" was a crypto in-group signifier, like those childish "laser eyes" profile pic, hideous NFT profile pic, and saying "gm" ("good morning") to each on Twitter daily. Everyone so desperate to show to to others just how far in the future they were living.
My theory is that every trends/fads is divided between two groups: the engaged people and the haters. If you're engaged, no matter the trend, it'll be fun, you'll be part of a community, and part of something bigger than you at some point in time. If you're a hater, you'll just feel bad about the whole thing and won't understand why you can't enjoy simple things in life anymore. I noticed this when Pokemon Go was such a big thing and yet so many people were so b-hurt about it. Just play the damn game and enjoy being part of something while it last. That's the human experience.
I think you underestimate the sense of community a group of haters can feel. Take for instance r/buttcoin, a community of nearly 100k that has been bashing on Bitcoin (and now cryptocurrency in general) since 2011.
You can also change any GitHub repo URL to flatgithub.com[1] to open any JSON/CSV file inside the repo in a table with useful visualisations (e.g. https://flatgithub.com/the-pudding/data — you can change the file by clicking on "Data File" at the top).
It's part of the Flat Data[2] work that GitHub Next[3] has been exploring.
Several of these still have 'eth' or 'nft' or 'crypto' in their new name, just not '.eth'. One even changed their name to 'nftsdoteth'. Not sure that should really be included on this list.
Also seems like a whole bunch changed from '.eth' at the end to '0x' at the beginning. '0x' is how an ETH wallet address (without the ENS domain) begins, so that's still clearly a reference to crypto.
I don’t know if that’s a reference to crypto for the majority of people - I’ve worked in crypto for years and I had an 0x name for my white hat hacking related accounts (it was trendy there a while back) but never for cryptocurrency stuff
I should clarify I didn't mean every 0x guarantees it's a crypto reference. However, if their previous name had .eth at the end, and especially if there's a 'NFT' in their new username somewhere, it's almost certainly a reference to crypto.
you really don't know how other crypto people think?
every interaction in the wildly popular EVM space has 0x prefixed to it, for all EOAs, for all transaction IDs, for all smart contracts, and for several large projects and several thought leaders in the space
the consensus model does not require the 0x prefix to resolve a transaction destination but pretty much nobody knows that (some regional wallets omit the 0x), and it is almost purely cosmetic
What's interesting to me is that there is also a contingent of people that represent hexadecimal numbers with an "h" suffix, like FACEDEEDh. I always wondered what pushed people one way or the other. I learned 0x first but see "h" most in assembly code listings (which was indeed not my first programming language) and hardware datasheets.
I was just thinking about this the other day. I think around December there was quite a lot of "buzz" around all kinds of Web3 - mostly NFT - topics. I also think that more people are waking up to the fact that the concept is just too outlandish for a normal person to grasp on a technical level, and a complete ponzi scheme on the other side of the coin.
It was funny to me when BoredElonMusk went from being just funny, to seriously and unironically pumping up nft/web3 stuff. He temporarily forgot why we all follow him in the first place.
Remember how Twitter added "NFT" profile pics with the hexagon because NFT people kept bothering them to add it - and then no one used them! I think I saw 3 accounts using them and I was deep into Web3 at that time.
I'm still really fascinated/confused by Tobi's demonstrated obsession with crypto/nft/web3. He's obviously not in it to get rich because he's already rich, and he actually has a presumably deep understanding of technology (unlike most of the crypto fanatics), so all I can imagine is that he really must be caught up in the philosophical/cultural trappings of it.
Tis true, I send NFTs and ETH to people all the time using their ENS names. It's like an email address for money and digital stuff. They're dope. Time will tell if it's a fad but it's certainly a trend.
Readit News
The implication of this post is that ETH/ENS is dying or people are caring less. In think in reality, it's probably less exciting... it was just a fad.
I had a six digit ICQ, and I knew some people with 5 digits, so you could instantly tell how cool people were. Also, ICQ would say uh-oh when you got new messages, and AIM just dinged.
On a technical side, ICQ did offline messages forever and AIM didn't do offline until after AOL bought ICQ. ICQ also needed UDP to work and did peer to peer messaging when possible (coordinated through the central server) and I think you could send files sooner. Otoh, AIM servers responded on all tcp ports, so if you had a derpy corporate firewall that just looked at ports, and you had any ports open to the internet, you were golden; the java applet client was convenient too.
I think ICQ is still around, AOL sold it to some Russian company a decade ago, but AIM is dead; Verizon didn't want to keep it running, or Yahoo Messenger either.
This takes me back. A decade ago I paid someone $5 on Fiverr to draw me as a Simpsons character. She was one of several people on the site doing this. I just checked and she's still at it, with over 8k reviews. A niche market but one that doesn't seem to have completely dried up yet.
Living in Europe, I never saw the AIM client in use anywhere. I've never heard of anyone locally who used it. It was all ICQ, or later MSN / Skype.
My impression as a European was rather that AIM was not well know outside the US, while ICQ was. (It was the "America Online" instant messenger, no? So while AOL became available to other countries, I don't believe it reached the same market share and notoriety).
So I assume the rest of the world was adopting ICQ "from the beginning", and then maybe there was a phase in the US where, in the interest of international communication, they started to adopt ICQ as well? Just conjecture, I wasn't in the US at that time.
For 5 years, people were pestering you about giving them "your facebook".
Then came the photo era, with filters, emojis, morphing, animations, etc. With insta, and the likes.
Last years, you would have been a paria for not having a whatsapp account.
Now of course, you got the occasional signal, telegram, teams and zoom, thanks to covid.
But you know what was working in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 and will work and 2025, with everybody, and everywhere ?
SMS and emails.
I think that lots of people still do that. At least from what I've been seeing
I think we're just getting older.
I suppose it's probably more fun than miserably judging everyone from the outside...
Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.
I have no proof, but I doubt any of them were paying for it. I tried to figure out how some of them got their names by looking at the blockchain. There were some patterns where I thought it looked like someone bought up a bunch of popular names and transferred them to the influencers. I'm not very well versed in blockchain though, so I couldn't follow it well enough to do anything more than speculate.
I think it was nothing more than promotion. It would be interesting to know if anyone got paid because they should be disclosing it as paid promotion if they did. Having the domain given to you is a type of payment (if that happened).
> I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active
If you weren't looking at a 3 or 4 letter domain you were probably seeing super high transaction fees which made the initial transaction very expensive. The registration is supposed to cost about $5 per year. I bought one a few months ago and that's how it worked.
I paid $11 in transaction fees for the first transaction where you submit your order + secret. Then I paid $72 in transaction fees for the registration plus $55 for 10 years of registration. I also got about $5 transferred back to me by the ETH ENS registrar. So the cost of the domain registration was $5 / year, but the transaction fees were around $85.
I watched gas prices for a week and tried to time my order with low fees. The cost of the second transaction went up by $20 while I waited for the 1 minute delay required between transactions. It's crazy.
You also need to pay transaction fees every time you want to update the record. Now imagine a proof of stake system where the rich (ie: early adopters) get a cut of transaction fees just for holding a bunch of tokens. I think that's why enthusiasts are so excited. Imagine getting paid every time someone needs to update a record in a database.
I don't think blockchain domains have any benefits. In fact I think they're significantly worse than our current system. However, I did buy one to match my favorite / best .com domain because even if they're a terrible idea they could still get popular and I thought it was worth $135 USD to ensure I didn't have to worry about someone squatting on my name.
Same goes with NFTs, the fee's are just crazy. + I don't think the average joe can make any money on it.
Other think to know you can use your .XYZ domain on ethereum as ENS.
EDIT: Apologies - as pointed out below - not my intent to align the site with the TLD - I could have worded that better. I think the domain is more likely a product of the ENS team, but I don't know for certain.
It is though.
> Eth.xyz was created for the ENS community with love by the XYZ Registry, the company behind .xyz domain names. The project is open for contribution or feedback on GitHub. Send us a message @xyz on Twitter! [1]
It's kind of neat, but seems like a registry taking on a lot of extra liability that they typically don't have as a domain registry. Putting a disclaimer on the sites doesn't exempt them from the law.
> The profile content on this page is automatically generated from publicly available information provided through ENS and is ultimately controlled by the relevant ENS user. Nothing on this page implies any endorsement or affiliation between XYZ or ENS and the person or organization whose profile information appears on this page.
So what gain does the blockchain get you? XYZ isn't judgement proof like the blockchain, so they'll have to follow the current laws for trademarks, copyrights, etc.. If the blockchain isn't adding any revolutionary tech, is slower, is expensive, and is only accessible using gateways that are subjected to current laws, what's the appeal?
1. https://eth.xyz/
There's not really any advantage to this, because you have to trust `eth.limo`, but ENS names are in theory technically superior to traditional domain names, so I'm excited about this development. For instance, in theory ENS names have no need for certificate authorities for instance, or centralized registrars that we have to socially pressure every few years not to sell .org to a private company or whatever.
[0]: https://nauseam.eth.limo
As for ENS itself, it is the only working valid use case for NFTs. Too bad it is implemented on something that is sluggish and expensive for users to use, which is Ethereum.
It is a URL, it’s just not ICANN/DNS.
In practice you can go to example.eth directly in web3 browsers (most mobile wallets have built in browsers). For browsers like Chrome or safari you can access them through gateways, for example, Cloudflare has a .link gateway so on chrome you can use example.eth.link (my preferred gateway is eth.limo).
It looked horribly tacky and a few years later everyone quietly disappeared the TLDs.
> ... it was just a fad.
These are equivalent statements. Cryptocurrency has very little real utility, so when the fad ends, it is dead.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14871
How does that even make sense? ETH is valued based on tokens in circulation. Visa is valued based on money made from transactions. They aren't really related at all.
It's not like ETH is doing proof-of-stake, owning ETH doesn't in any way entitle you to ongoing dividends like VISA stock would.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel
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What's the most current one? "WAGMI"?
WAGMI - we are gonna make it
NGMI - not gonna make it
Seems to me it's used to promote such and such project. Like they're saying "me and you will make a lot of money from this investment!"
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It's part of the Flat Data[2] work that GitHub Next[3] has been exploring.
[1] https://flatgithub.com [2] https://next.github.com/projects/flat-data/ [3] https://next.github.com
https://github.com/leaflet-maps-course/resources/blob/33fef0...
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Also seems like a whole bunch changed from '.eth' at the end to '0x' at the beginning. '0x' is how an ETH wallet address (without the ENS domain) begins, so that's still clearly a reference to crypto.
every interaction in the wildly popular EVM space has 0x prefixed to it, for all EOAs, for all transaction IDs, for all smart contracts, and for several large projects and several thought leaders in the space
the consensus model does not require the 0x prefix to resolve a transaction destination but pretty much nobody knows that (some regional wallets omit the 0x), and it is almost purely cosmetic
In many programming languages 0x at the start of a number means the number is encoded in base 16 (0123456789ABCDEF) instead of base 10 (0-9).
see 0xDEADBEEF, 0xCAFEBABE, and for the eternal NFT crowd 0xFACEDEED.
But if their most previous name was .eth, it almost certainly is a reference to crypto.
Correct, he hasn't P&D dogecoin in a long time!
2. It was initially only available via Twitter Blue which itself is only available in certain places.