Was The Ethereum London Hard Fork Really Necessary?
I’m a complete blockchain noob, the only thing I know about a blockchain and it’s technology are its basics like the definition. But ever since I have taken interest in learning about crypto and it’s technology, I can’t help but try to understand why certain things are acceptable in the crypto world. For instance, the Ethereum high gas fee is still the most outrageous thing in the crypto community right now. For the fact that it hasn’t been fixed yet still gets me worried.
We all know that the Ethereum blockchain technology is really one of the best blockchain technology in the crypto world, the key sentence there is “one of the best” not the best. It has paved ways for other cryptos and inventions like Dapps , NFTs and DEFIs. But how can you be so great and yet cost so much when one of the purpose of crypto is to eliminate high transaction cost. Satoshi Nakamuto is certainly disappointed in that aspect of Ethereum’s characteristic.
Few months back, should be in July or August, we were all anticipating the Ethereum’s London Hard Fork, this was supposed to be an upgrade. According to my understanding, upgrades are supposed to make things easier and better right? The use of Ethereum was soaring really high and this was beginning to affect its scalability and transaction time, so an upgrade was scheduled to be implemented to solve scalability and provide transaction fee transparency.
I stopped using Ethereum as a transfer of value in 2020, then I didn’t know Hive, I thought XRP was the best crypto to use as a means of payment and transfer of value since it’s transaction cost was extremely cheap compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum. But with the announcement of London Hard Fork, I felt the developers were going to consider reducing transaction cost. Making it really affordable to encourage more usage. But instead they decided to implement a deflationary act on it. This deflationary act is to burn or permanently remove some of the fees from circulation. The whole process is to increase scalability right? I haven’t used Ethereum after the fork so I don’t know how successful that is, but the one problem I can’t wrap my head around is the burning of the transaction fees known as the base fees. Why make users pay for a base fee during a transaction then burn it after, besides when you know these fees get burnt after transactions why make them so expensive. It’s like paying $10 to buy $2 bottle of water and watch the cashier incinerate the $10 after you pay for it as a transaction fee. It doesn’t make any sense to me. At least even if they wanted to make it deflationary, they could have made the transaction fee far less cheaper so it won’t be noticeable. Like paying $0.01 as a transaction fee and then burn it, you won’t notice that.
I know the act is to reduce the supply, but why make users pay for it from their own pocket. Because in my opinion, as long as you pay for a base fee, and it gets burnt, your money and hard earned money just got thrown in the fire for nothing. Let’s use Hive as an example, imagine if HIVE wanted to do a periodic token, then the blockchain starts charging outrageous fees from people to accumulate their tokens and burn it so as to reduce the supply, yeah, I know, you won’t be cool with it. That’s what Ethereum is doing and everyone is complaining g but still using it.
This is reducing the supply of Ethereum quite alright, but how long will this last? Because if these fees keep getting burnt and reducing the supply, then I think the whole of ETH supply will get burnt except ETH supply is infinite. Once again, in my opinion, I feel the Ethereum London Hard Fork was unnecessary, it might have improved scalability but it’s disadvantage supersedes it’s advantages. I’m open to more suggestions and what you think, I might be wrong, please enlighten me in the comment section.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
