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?
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.