The author has an excellent reply to a question on twitter
> What are the gas prices like for copying a pointer?
Copying an nft_ptr is illegal.
Moving an nft_ptr takes 87,169 gas:
https://goerli.etherscan.io/tx/0xcbe06fdd54bd9d221993c875022...
at mainnet gas prices of ~100 Gwei, equal to 0.0087169 ETH, or $18.69 USD.
(This was intentionally written to waste resources for no benefit, just like cryptocurrencies themselves)
The C++ "as-if" rule means the compiler is allowed to optimize away the move, but it still needs to charge the $18.
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The author has an excellent reply to a question on twitter