There are some pretty obvious facts that ETH will remain an expensive chain yet grow even bigger.
It's like that annoying neighbor that everyone hates but never seems to confront. That toxic relationship that we can't seem to put an end to. Basically the shit in our lives that we seem to keep creating room for rather than taking it out.
Why?
We’d be looking at numbers but first, what's up with Ethereum lately?
Remember when everyone said moving to pos was simply going to make it cheap, well, that speculation led to less greedy validators but definitely didn't get us a cheap chain and yet, every new shit that comes out of Vitalik’s mouth is being carried by the media as the solution to Ethereum's high cost.
Let's face the facts. Taking Ethereum off pow was only to make it easier to control. Could have been left on pow and some lightning network type shit would be dreamed up and hyped around like with Bitcoin.
The movement was all about control, in my opinion.
That said, recent Ethereum centric news has it that Vitalik proposed to increase the gas limit as a way to lower the cost of transactions.
Given that this essentially means more transactions can be added to a block, this is speculated to reduce the cost of transactions.
During a Reddit ask-me-anything (AMA) organized by the Ethereum Foundation’s research team on Jan. 10, Buterin noted that the gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, the longest time ever in the protocol’s history.
“Honestly, I think doing a modest gas limit increase even today is reasonable,” said Buterin during the research team’s 11th AMA.
Buterin also made some brief calculations, saying this would imply an increase to around 40 million. The current gas limit is 30 million, according to Etherscan, so Buterin suggests an increase of 33%.
This report is one of many that has termed the next Ethereum development as the solution of high gas fees.
But they just don't get it, spikes in gas fees is something the validators want.
So no amount of tweaking basic designs will fix this, validators will always find a way to prioritize high gas payers forcing others to pay high.
Already, Ethereum developers have kicked against Vitalik’s proposal, saying that increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow.
Numbers Don't Lie
People on Ethereum want it costly. This includes software developers and validators, business developers and even the users.
If they didn't, Ethereum would either be cheap right now or dead. But it's neither because they are actually comfortable with it being expensive for obvious reasons for validators but for the users, simply recall the annoying neighbor analogy.
At the time of writing, there's at least 60,000+ transactions in Ethereum's mempool according to blockchair.com. I thought people usually stop using something when it's bad? but this is like 60k people still moving shit on this network and guess what? 1.09 million transactions have already been confirmed today and the average gas is like $1.98 - $6?
There's still lots of developer activities on this network, new businesses just keep heading there despite the obvious flaws. It's a big community already, there's no going back now.
There are lots of alternatives to Ethereum in current times. If people really did give enough shit about gas, Ethereum would be dead right now. But it's obvious it's all just a pretend to be crying in public then suck it up and pay that $6 gas to buy your memecoins in play.
Ethereum might never be a cheap chain, I think it's high time people accept that.