In a brand new weblog publish revealed on Feb. 28, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin documented the continued want to enhance the community to higher facilitate Ether (ETH) as a method of fee.
Buterin shared how he tried to pay for tea for himself and associates at a espresso store in Argentina in 2021 however had to pay 0.01 ETH (round $40 on the time), as that was the minimal deposit for the proprietor’s alternate account. “I did not mind the 3x overpayment and treated it as a tip,” the co-founder wrote.
In one other occasion, Buterin defined how how he tried to pay for tea at one other location in 2022, however two separate transactions failed due to requiring “extra gas to process the transfer” and a UI glitch in his cellular pockets. Buterin additionally raised the problem of unpredictable transaction occasions, writing:
“Many times, there has been a surprisingly long time delay between my transaction getting accepted on-chain, and the service acknowledging the transaction, even as ‘unconfirmed.’ Some of those times, I definitely got worried that there was some glitch with the payment system on their side.”
According to Buterin, outliers nonetheless stay on the Ethereum community regardless of latest enhancements. “If you send a transaction at the same time as when many others are sending transactions and the base fee is spiking up, you risk the base fee going too high and your transaction not getting accepted,” he wrote. “Even worse, wallet UIs suck at showing this. There are no big red flashing alerts, and very little clear indication of what you’re supposed to do to solve this problem.” Buterin added that even consultants might be confused about how to pace up transactions in such circumstances.
“Good user experience is not about the average case, it is about the worst case. A UI that is clean and sleek, but does some weird and unexplainable thing 0.723% of the time that causes big problems, is worse than a UI that exposes more gritty details to the user but at least makes it easier to understand what’s going on and fix any problem that does arise.”
Among different points, Buterin raised the issue of the web being “not 100% reliable” and the necessity for doable offline proof that prospects certainly transfered their transaction knowledge immediately to the service provider. Another concern raised was “losing a small amount of BTC and ETH” due to secret-sharing-based off-chain social restoration strategies for wallets, which Buterin deemed as fragile.
According to YCharts, Ethereum transaction fees have fallen to a median of $0.656 on the time of publication, which is way decrease than the typical of $20 witnessed in the course of the peak of the crypto bull market in 2021.
“Along with the all-important issue of high transaction fees due to scaling not yet being fully solved, user experience is a key reason why many Ethereum users, especially in the Global South, often opt for centralized solutions instead of on-chain decentralized alternatives that keep power in the hands of the user and their friends and family or local community.”
