A story to tell you, what problem does EIP-1559 solve?

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a user story

Suppose you are a new user of Ethereum. You just installed Coinbase Wallet and submitted your first Uniswap transaction. Coinbase Wallet tells you that the transaction will be confirmed within a few minutes, so you need to wait patiently. However, when several minutes pass and nothing changes, you must think that something has gone wrong. So you close all programs and try again, but the same problem occurs again, and your transaction is still stuck in the pending state."gas prices"Frustrated, you think there must be something wrong with the app you're using, so you switch to another Ethereum app and try to send the transaction. Unfortunately, the same problem happened again. Then you have the brilliant idea to test if the problem is with the Coinbase wallet by sending yourself some Ether, but alas that way also gets stuck.

Finally you've hit the wall and you decide to seek help. First you try to contact Coinbase, but their support response time is quite long, so you instead decide to go to the Discord server of the app you were originally trying to use. After describing your problem and sharing your Ethereum address with the staff, they explain to you that you have six pending transactions and that the subsequent few transactions will not go through early until the first one goes through. They tell you it's a fixable problem and ask what wallet you're using.

When telling the staff you are using Coinbase Wallet, their response is 😢 and unfortunately tell you that Coinbase Wallet does not provide the necessary tools to rectify the situation. Your only options are to wait and hope gas prices drop, or switch to using other more advanced wallets like MetaMask. this is the first time you heard

, you ask the staff what that is, which leads to a 10 minute long conversation, but in the end you don't really get it either.

Then you go to install MetaMask and it will ask you for your seed phrase. The staff told you to put the seed phrase from the Coinbase wallet, but the Coinbase wallet gave you very clear instructions, never give your seed phrase to anyone! What is your mnemonic? You contact your network of trust and after a few hours are able to verify that MetaMask is legit, it's pretty safe to put your seed phrase into MetaMask, but you should probably create a new wallet after this thing is over."gas prices "You follow these instructions carefully, and your transaction is a success! Then, you check your account balance to see if everything is OK, you find that you have a lot less ETH than you expected, and you also notice that , none of what you're trying to do actually happens. The staff patiently explained that after the jam was cleared, all your other transactions went through right after. They tell you that every failed transaction costs you some gas (again that term you don't quite understand!), which is why your ETH balance drops.

You are told that your account is now working properly and you can try your transaction again, but obviously you should watch the site. No matter what transaction you want to make, you should put the

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Just a one-time problem?

Unfortunately, the above is a very common situation among users, and while it is easy to blame Coinbase, the same type of problem occurs to users of almost all wallets, including advanced wallets such as MetaMask. This problem is most common during times of increasing congestion (when wallets estimate wrong gas prices), but a similar problem occurs during times of less congestion due to a bug in the gas price estimation software.

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a happy ending

Now imagine if we lived in a world where there was no need to predict future Ethereum block space needs. Users only need to set the maximum amount they are willing to pay to get the transaction included, without worrying about paying too much. Rather than sending users into an endless pit of despair while waiting for a transaction, users can simply indicate the maximum amount they are willing to pay to be included in a transaction, and they can trust that they will never pay more than that. This is a market that does not require knowledge/prediction of gas prices.

This is what EIP-1559 provides. It allows Coinbase Wallet to reliably ensure that all transactions of its users are included in the blockchain without requiring their customers to pay exorbitant fees or develop advanced transaction and prediction algorithms in order to accurately estimate fees.

It keeps users from getting stuck in situations that require an expert to get out of.

It allows users to end up not wasting a lot of money on exorbitant gas fees.

It makes the user interface no longer cost a lot of money for no reason because of a simple input error.

What went wrong?

In the above user story, Coinbase is trying to hide gas prices from users, because this is a very complicated topic that the vast majority of users do not understand. Instead, they estimate gas prices on behalf of the user, which works well in most cases. However, when gas prices fluctuate a lot, their algorithm sometimes makes mistakes (not their fault), and users' transactions will be deadlocked at this time. Once a transaction is blocked, it blocks all future transactions until the transaction goes through, regardless of the gas prices of those future transactions. This is what leads users to dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole by trying to solve the problem themselves.

Unfortunately, once the hole has been dug, there is no magic bullet that will get you out. You can use advanced tools like MetaMask with custom nonces (assuming your wallet supports mnemonics) to clear this one transaction, but then all your other transactions (likely including duplicate transactions, expired ones, etc.) Transactions, etc.) will flood and waste gas costs. Instead, you can go in the reverse order and cancel all transactions, but this is a very complicated process for the end user and requires a dedicated support person to sit with you for 10-15 minutes to guide you through the process. Even in this case, you'll still spend gas costs, just less than you would have spent cleaning up the clogged transaction before canceling all other transactions.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results

The root of the problem here is that gas prices are really hard to estimate. There are many tools to try to manipulate this, but it is ultimately an unsolvable problem, because future gas prices are a function of block space requirements and change every moment. There are events during which one can predict an increase in demand, such as ICO launches, new popular projects launching, oracle price feed updates, etc., but keeping track of all of them is nearly impossible. Even if you tracked, it's impossible to have strong guarantees about how much demand any particular event will bring.

Finally, estimators of gas prices generally rely on historical data, and on this basis make predictions about future gas prices. This method works very well some of the time, but it doesn't work when gas prices are going up or down. Worse, you will always have to pay the full gas price you estimated, even if you overestimate the gas price! This means that there is a strong desire for everyone to try to underquote the gas price in the hope of getting a good deal. Even if you don't want to go low, you often want to at least not overpay by a large amount, so you'll pick a mid-range number that gets you into the range quickly.

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What is the solution?

EIP-1559. Most people know this EIP because of the reduced supply of Ethereum, but in my opinion, the real value of 1559 lies in the increased usability of Ethereum. In a world where Ethereum includes EIP-1559, this type of problem will almost completely disappear. While it's still possible to get yourself into a "hole" like this, it's much easier for wallets to help you avoid it in the first place.

With EIP-1559, Coinbase and other wallets don’t need to guess future demand for Ethereum with extreme accuracy and cause users to pay unnecessary fees if they miscalculate. Instead, a fixed miner bribe (probably on the order of 1 nanocoin) that is acceptable to most miners can be added, and the fee cap can be set to 2 times the current base fee plus the miner bribe. With these settings, the only way the user's transaction will not be included in the next 6 blocks is if the demand for block space in the next 6 blocks is doubled compared to the current one, then all blocks will be blocked. Include!