Ethereum Is Kinda the Polar Opposite of Microservices

Instead of splitting your application up into a billion pieces we bundle it up with everyone else’s app into a huge monolith.

Then every user gets their own copy of it.

And because of that each service actually has to be tiny and do a single job only.

In fact you need to be even more obsessive about making sure that’s true.

Obviously you can’t just put everyone’s app on the same machine and expect that to work.

In addition to many other problems the database would get HUGE immediately.

Every app in the world writing to the same database? No way. It’ll get too big.

There needs to be a throttle.

That’s where gas comes in. Users bid to get their transaction into the database next. This makes sure that the most economically important transactions can always get in quickly and the ones that are less important can wait.

Authors of less economically important apps tend to get mad at this idea. NFT folks complain about gas a lot because it feels silly to spend $100 to transfer a jpeg.

So in a way spending $100 on gas to mint an NFT is like paying to make a necklace out of gold. You’re using a scarce resource that is in high demand and you’re making some dumb bullshit out of it.

That’s jewelry. That’s how rich people have shown off for millennia.