Everyone’s trying to get on-board! Source: BTCManager

What a week for the Ethereum network!

Ethereum network’s scaling issue rears its ugly head again.

This time due to a certain exchange’s controversial decision that makes participants liable to spam the network

https://www.coindesk.com/new-crypto-exchange-draws-fire-over-controversial-business-model/

It started on the 30th June Saturday afternoon. I was making multiple transactions with a low gas price of 1 gwei. Over the course of issuing the transactions, the default gas price suggested by MetaMask had risen from the default 4 gwei to 10 gwei. The situation escalated when Monday came and the gas price peaked at > 100 gwei over the course of week. As of this writing, this morning, the safe low gas price reported by ETH gas station has fallen back to around 12 gwei, but still easily 3 times over during “peaceful” times.

The thing with congested network is not only the increased cost of conducting transactions, but also that it brings a certain amount of uncertainty to the completion time to pending transactions. As gas price increases, newer transactions are likely to pay for higher gas prices beyond a certain financial limit. This pushes all the pending transactions even more to the backburner.

Current wallet and tool UX also does not help matters. Plenty of my transactions are stuck and when I checked my transaction hashes on Etherscan, it says the transaction hashes could not be found. Even tried executing new transactions with the new gas prices also yields no result.

It turns out that there is a “bug” with MetaMask. After reinstalling it, I was able to execute new transactions again (paying the high gas price). The issue was reported by many awhile back, but it does not seem to have been resolved yet.

The lack of feedback on gas price effect on transaction times as part of the wallet interface could also have mitigated users guessing the effect of gas price changes. It should take a long while before we even see adoption by mainstream users as these are many new concepts. Perhaps eventually when the scaling issues has been resolved, this issue might go away or users will have to re-educate themselves to new concepts that is brought on by the scaling solution.

If Blockchain is indeed the infra layer of decentralized apps, perhaps one day mainstream users do not really need to be too bothered about it, just like how our cables and wires are hidden beneath us.