The eternal fee debate – The network Ethereum, the birthplace of DeFi, is at the heart of innovation. However, its technical limitations lead to significant congestion problems. A subject dear to the heart of Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin gives feedback
Vitalik Buterin likes to share his feelings and experiments on his personal blog. Thus, on February 28, he shared a feedback on theuse cryptocurrencies as means of payment. His conclusion: cryptocurrencies still have effort to make to become practical means of payment.
internet addiction
The first example dates back to 2013, when Vitalik Buterin tried to settle a restaurant sushi in BTC. When paying the bill, the restaurant presents a QR Code that Buterin scans in order to send his payment.
However, the transaction did not appear to be successful. Although the payment seems to have been made, it does not arrive on the restaurant’s wallet.
“I quickly realized that the problem was that my mobile internet was not working well at the time. I had to walk more than 50 meters to access the conference wifi, which finally allowed me to send the transaction. »
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The problem of costs in general
The second experience dates back to 2021, when Vitalik Buterin wanted to pay for a coffee in ETH in Argentina. So, he sent a transaction of 0.003 ETH to the CEX address provided by the coffee shop boss.
“Unfortunately, my first transaction of 0.003 ETH was not accepted. Probably because it was lower than the exchange’s minimum deposit of 0.01 ETH. »
Following which Vitalik had to perform another transaction of 0.007 ETH to reach the limit of 0.01. Eventually, both transactions were confirmed, but this required sending 3x more than the original amount.
In 2022, Vitalik Buterin once again paid the price for transaction fees. So, when paying for a tea, the transaction failed, because his mobile wallet had a default limit of 21,000 gas.
“Attempts to send a second transaction failed. An interface problem in my phone wallet did not allow scrolling and editing the field containing the gas limit. »
Transaction inclusion time
Who has never sent a transaction just before a gas increase only to see their transaction blocked? Not Vitalik Buterin anyway.
Indeed, like many of us, he is subject to the changing inclusion time of transactions.
“There can be a surprisingly long and unpredictable delay between sending a transaction and accepting that transaction in a block. Sometimes a transaction is accepted in seconds, but other times it takes minutes or even hours. »
Lessons from Buterin
Each of these misadventures allowed Buterin to learn from his experience.
The first experiment highlighted the internet dependency that crypto payments have. His conclusion: Internet is not 100% reliable and this part should be managed on the merchant side.
“In-person payment systems need to have functionality to allow customers to push their transaction data directly to the merchant, if that’s the best way to distribute it. »
During the following experiments, Vitalik Buterin made several conclusions. On the one hand, on the importance of simple and robust user interfaces. Indeed, they must be functional before being elegant. On the other hand, many information such as gas must be calculated by the wallet in order to obfuscate this complex notion to the user.
As for the transaction inclusion time, user interface needs improvement according to Buterin. For example, by systematically increasing the max-basefee so that a transaction is not blocked following a sudden rise in gas.
Note that since the deployment of the EIP-1559, the average waiting time for the inclusion of a transaction a decreases.
As far as transaction fees are concerned, second-layer solutions already make it possible to mitigate the problem. In particular, Optimism wants to move up a gear. In effect, the project unveiled Superchains, a horizontal scalability solution.
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