I’ve Recently been considering a certain post-apocalyptic wasteland. For the purposes of this article, I will be referring to this particular scene from Mad Max: Fury Road. After escaping their first wave of captors, the main characters flee ahead. To survive, they must not only keep moving, but they must also be able to repair the truck they are driving while they are still moving. This is a great metaphor for Ethereum core development.
Changes to the Ethereum protocol occur in real-time, and upgrades must be made while ensuring that everything and everyone is progressing (if possible). Complex engineering is required, and while there may be some bumps in the blockchain wilderness, the overall situation is good. As long as the platform moves at a steady pace, it will outperform any marauding vehicle (technical credits). So, let’s move towards the horizon. New proposals may be disruptive to the status quo in the short-term, but they can make the protocol more efficient in the long-term.
What would you like me to discuss? “Ethereum 1.x” is a category, not one single part of the Stateless Ethereum Initiative. This initiative is comprised of a new gas market/block-size mechanism, and it has been a great case study in community engagement and developer feedback. There are many things to learn from the evolution of EIPs through developer discussion. You can think of ideas and possibly have some aphorisms to guide the discussion. You can make important changes to the status quo.
EIP 1559
The original EIP 1559 is straightforward to comprehend, and is a great place for beginners. The current “first price auction” fee model on Ethereum is inefficient and expensive. This EIP proposes replacing it with a mechanism that adjusts network demand-based base network fees. This improves pricing efficiency and simplifies client software requirements to avoid excessively high fees.
When blocks are almost full, the cost to include a transaction to the next blocks may rise as users bid to be included. Although miners may be able to increase the transaction count in a block at the moment it isn’t possible to do so very quickly. Miners are more likely to capitalize on small blocks than to increase the gas limit. If your wallet uses pricing algorithms to list targets in a given timeframe (read, to provide a normal user interface), you could be charged quite outrageous fees to get your transaction in the next block (almost full).
EIP 1559 introduces dynamically-adjusted gas rates, so that gas consumption in a block is closer than the current limit at 10,000,000 gas. Instead of giving miners the initial price, the base fee is not given to miners but is burned. This mechanism attempts to solve the problem that wallet developers are trying to automatically calculate network fees.
There are many websites that provide information about EIP1559, and I highly recommend them all. Vitalik’s EIP1559 Frequently Asked Questions, Barnabe’s Jupyter Notebook, you can go deeper if you wish.
The Next challenger is here Escalator
The inefficiency of the current first price auction system on Ethereum fees is not disputed. It is important to stress this fact. While everyone agrees that there needs to be a better system for charging fees, it is evident that there are ways to improve the efficiency of the process. Ethereum as a whole – at the end of the day, it will make things better for both developers and end-users.
The “Escalator” is a new proposal that seeks to improve the current fee structure. It proposes a mechanism that dynamically adjusts the base fee based on network demand. This means that if more users are trying to use the network, the base fee increases, and if less users are trying to use the network, the base fee decreases. This helps to ensure that the network remains efficient and that users are not charged excessive fees.
The Escalator is a clever mechanism that uses a combination of dynamic pricing and network demand to adjust the base fee for a transaction. This helps to ensure that users are not charged excessively
The Ethereum upgrade horizon has been a hot topic of discussion lately, especially with the proposed EIP 1559. This article delves into the debate and introduces an interesting alternative to the status quo – the Escalator Algorithm.
The Escalator Algorithm, proposed by Dan Finlay, is a mechanism that is very similar in design to the 1559 system, but with some key differences. Instead of submitting a transaction with a fixed offer to be included, users can submit “escalated offers” with the appropriate names and the maximum amount they will accept. This number of offers in the queue will increase gradually and predictably, allowing for efficient price discovery.
It shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as 1559, and also allows for more nuanced conversation. To demonstrate how the wallet’s parameters might appear to users, Dan Mockups were created. This article also examines the user strategy section of the proposal, and provides a comparison of three models for transaction processing.
EIP 1559/Escalator offers a reasonable alternative that allows developers to reframe critics and prioritize user issues. The discussion has cleverly opened new exploration possibilities, and developers who can translate this experience into code can help keep proposals moving in the direction of a successful update.
The journey of improving Ethereum and other public blockchains is a tiring one, but it is possible to find a path that both allows for major improvements and also ensures that developers and users are represented and have their concerns addressed. By staying ahead of the problem of state inflation, we can continue to make progress on the upgrade horizon.
