Ethereum is in a Gas crisis, the "culprit" or FCoin?
Ethereum is in the midst of a "gas crisis".
For some readers who are not familiar with Gas, here is a brief introduction first. Gas can be regarded as an Ethereum commission. Needless to say, the concept of Ethereum, and the execution of contracts on Ethereum requires the burning of Gas, which consists of two parts: Gas limit (limit) and Gas Price (price). Gas Price refers to the money that users are willing to spend on each Gas unit. Gas limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that users are willing to pay for performing an operation or confirming a transaction. Different, so users can set the Gas limit when performing operations.
Last week, MyCrypto CEO Taylor Monahan took to Twitter to remind users to be aware of transaction fees when using ethereum. He cautioned that due to changes in network conditions, some wallet software users may be charged a higher price for completing Ethereum transactions.
Taylor Monaghan tweeted:
"The concept of gas, and how it works, why it's necessary...and where it's not, is actually pretty easy to understand."
Gas price, which is actually the fee that users pay to use the Ethereum network, is also one of the evaluation criteria for calculating the work of miners, which fluctuates according to demand. And now, that demand appears to be escalating to unprecedented levels. In December last year, we have seen the blockchain game "Crypto Kitties" overwhelm the entire Ethereum network - but maybe you don't know, the Gas price was less than half of what it is now.
Eth Gas Station is an online platform that provides Ethereum, USD, EUR and RMB calculation Gas Limit and transaction time and other information inquiries, as well as price calculation services. Last week, the company posted on its official Twitter account:
"Now it seems that the gas price is not very good. Users need to pay about 3.2 US dollars for transactions to be accepted, or need to wait up to 30 minutes for transactions to be accepted by Ethereum blocks."
Although the gas price has dropped now (transaction fees are still high, the drop mentioned here is relative to the peak last week), however, developers are still exploring how to distinguish the gas price from high fluctuations. Tyler Monaghan said:
"The problem is to find the reasons for these fee increases, and at the same time, you need to understand how the general blockchain usability will be affected when the gas price increases."
Tyler Monaghan has a reason for saying this, because every time people see rising transaction costs, they always seem to point to blockchain scaling issues (transaction fees increase as the network reaches its limits). But is that really the case? Or, before Ethereum deploys a more scalable architecture, are there other reliable measures to reduce costs?
Tyler Monaghan pointed out that because the trading tools are not perfect, it is also easy for Gas prices to have problems. For example, there are occasional problems with the Gas pricing algorithm, or some human errors cause the price to rise sharply. He concluded:
“During the past few days, gas prices have been very high due to a few things that have happened to increase demand.”
attack
Gas“attack”
According to Tyler Monaghan, FCoin may be the main reason for the increase in Gas prices.
As a cryptocurrency exchange from China, FCoin has quickly gained attention due to its novel revenue model, which has proven to be popular with users. Last month, the exchange hit an all-time high of $5.6 billion in trading volume, a figure that surpasses even some of the top cryptocurrency exchanges on CoinMarketCap.
However, behind the congestion of Ethereum is most likely due to FCoin's currency listing and bidding ranking model. FCoin adopts the listing mechanism of "accumulative top-up number ranking", which causes users to repeatedly deposit tokens into the exchange to vote for the listing. The result of this situation is that token developers will send airdrops to multiple accounts, which in turn will trigger hundreds of thousands of transactions, which obviously makes the entire Ethereum community unhappy.
Roy Huang, founder of Fresco, said:
"So far, $240,000 worth of gas fees have been paid. If you want this kind of madness, is it still the original intention of the blockchain industry?"
Tyler Monaghan believes that FCoin is definitely one of the most despicable voting mechanisms, and even stimulated the Sybil attack (Sybil attack) - that is, in a peer-to-peer network, a single node has multiple identities, by controlling most of the nodes in the system To weaken the role of redundant backup.
Ethereum researcher Philippe Castonguay calls the situation a "gas price war," where users compete for network inclusion by raising fees. Clearly, gas prices being pushed up has a negative effect: as transaction fees increase, those transactions with lower fees fail, people get frustrated because transactions fail, and in order to prevent accidents, they have to increase the transaction rate. Fees, thus pushing up the transaction price of the entire network.
first level title
network repair
Ethereum developers emphasized that regardless of FCoin’s actions, and regardless of whether such practices will be condemned by the community, they have ways to improve the user transaction experience.
Georgios Konstantopoulos from Loom Network tweeted:
"Gas prices have skyrocketed recently, but I disagree with the criticism of 'spam transactions'. We are in a decentralized, permissionless network, so transactions should not be considered spam as long as someone pays the required fee , it’s not a junk deal.”
As such, Ethereum developers are working deeply to improve the status quo, both in the short and long term.
For example, Ethereum developer Griff Green has launched a proposal based on Alexey Akhunov's research and inspired by Bitcoin, hoping that Ethereum will adopt a A strategy called "child pays the parent" is used to solve the gas price problem. He argues that miners could sort transactions by account and, if given a higher incentive, process those transactions simultaneously rather than processing multiple transactions from the same account at once. In fact, cryptocurrency exchanges do not only process all transactions under the same account every time.
In addition, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, also wrote a proposal to simplify the Gas pricing algorithm and make it easier for the Ethereum network to predict what the correct Gas price should be. This simplified algorithm can ignore the errors in the current Gas pricing market. Although this strategy is widely praised, it requires all users to upgrade the software, which seems to be not very operable.
Griff Green said V God's solution gets to the heart of the problem, but it certainly won't be implemented before the end of the year. As for his proposal, Greif Green said that only miners are required to execute the code, and there is no need to force a hard fork to improve efficiency. He said:
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bigger vision
Although FCoin's currency listing and bidding ranking model may be the "culprit" for the gas price surge this time, it seems that the expansion of the Ethereum network has reached an urgent point. Afri Schoedon, head of corporate communications at Parity, believes that the root of the problem is scaling the ethereum network to meet user demand.
Avery Shorten says:
"In theory, the current gas price market is a good thing, but the problem is that the Ethereum network has reached the limit of transaction processing."
Ethereum developer Castonguay (Castonguay) is now responsible for a short-term expansion project called "GasToken Factory", which allows users to clean up some unnecessary data from the blockchain and profit from it - he also believes that the problem The key lies in network expansion, and said:
“The recent surge in gas prices has actually reflected that the Ethereum blockchain has been close to its maximum throughput for quite some time.”
From this point of view, the sharding expansion solution that Ethereum is pushing seems to have an extremely far-reaching impact on the entire network, but the problem is that the timetable for the completion of this solution is still unknown.
Tyler Monaghan finally added:
“Each of us has a part to play and a role to play in building the future of the Ethereum blockchain. So, we should all try to participate in the discussion, provide valuable feedback on the tools we use, and be part of building Ethereum.” Future Active Participants -The best world is actually the one we create together. "
