In a new blog post published on Feb. 28, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin documents the need for continuous improvements to the network to better facilitate Ether as a means of payment.
Buterin shared how he tried to pay himself and a friend tea at a coffee shop in Argentina in 2021, but had to pay 0.01 ETH (about $40 at the time) because it was the minimum deposit for the owner’s exchange account. "I don't mind a 3x overpayment and consider it a tip," the co-founder wrote.
In another example, Buterin explained how he tried to pay for tea at another location in 2022, but two separate transactions failed due to the need for "extra gas to process the transfer" and a UI glitch in his mobile wallet up. Buterin also raised the issue of unpredictable transaction times, 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, despite recent improvements, outliers still exist in the ethereum network. “If you send a transaction at the same time as many others are sending and the base fee spikes, you run the risk of your transaction not being accepted because the base fee is too high,” he wrote. “Worse, wallet users The interface doesn't do a good job of showing this. There's no big red flashing alert and no clear indication of what you should be doing to fix the problem." Buterin added that even experts in this situation may have questions about how to expedite a transaction. Speed is confused.
Among other issues, Buterin raised the issue of the internet being "not 100% reliable," and the need for possible offline proof that customers were indeed transmitting their transaction data directly to merchants. Another issue raised was the “lost small amount of BTC and ETH” due to the wallet’s secret-sharing-based off-chain social recovery method, which Buterin argued was vulnerable.
According to YCharts, Ethereum transaction fees have dropped to an average of $0.656 at press time, well below the $20 average at the peak of the cryptocurrency’s bull market in 2021.
