(unconfirmed to Confirmed-ish) ETH transactions cost $1000,= "gas" fee!

Okay, this article is one I'm going to fact-check and research as I am writing it. The prompt for it was a reddit post (THIS ONE) which in an edit to the OP stated that a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain costs $1000,= at this time.

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Wut!? o.O you're kidding, right?

That was my reaction at first as well. I mean, it's no secret that the ETH's so-called grass fee (Gwei?) was getting high enough for the most fervent Ethereum lovers to go nuts when they want to do a $10-$50 transfer of a token on the EC20 or on the ETH blockchain itself they were paying over $100 in transfer fees. But this ridiculously huge sum of money??

Let's check facts, shall we?

The screenshot linked to the edit in the OP was this one:

And I have to admit that at first glance, this looks a bit legit. But still. Let's check some more. DuckDuckGo, we need you!!!

Searching with "ETH gas fee 1000 dollar" one of the top hits I got was the site automatedwebtools.com and its usd-eth-gas-fee calculator. This gives an estimate of this:

So if I understand this right it takes a transaction of about an equivalent of 4 ETH to get a gas fee charge of around $1000!!

Not going to lie, THAT IS CRAZY high costs for making a transaction!

Anyway, the screenshot and claim that $1000 gas fees were charged are not at all implausible, to be honest. On Reddits /r/cryptocurrency there are tons of posts ranting about the ETH gas fees.

How come (besides not being as good as Bitcoin Cash) their fees are so high?

Here, too, I think the whole thing comes down to scalability. The Ethereum blockchain can only handle about 400 or 500 transactions per block. So when the number of transactions kept rocketing up (with all the tokens and defi and nft's running on the Ethereum blockchain (through the EC20 sidechain if I am not mistaking) then they found that there were not enough blocks to validate the transactions. Sound familiar??

Check, facts, not "if I am not mistaking" we want stats dammit!!!

And rightly so my dear Bitcoin Cash loving read.cash friends! You're learning!! Facts with sources that are verifiable, or it's fake news. So here I go finding some facts for you. Hang on, I'll be right back!!

Insert backward muzak tune like on the phone when you're on hold

I'm back!!!

Just like Bitcoin Cash has block explorers like THIS ONE or THIS ONE so does the Ethereum blockchain! And on one of those explorers, I found they listed the transactions that were verified in that block. So I took a random recent block and this is what I got:

And just to make sure this wasn't an anomaly, i took another random block:

This leads to the conclusion that there are between 55 and 155 transactions handled per block.

Taking that last block, let's have a look at some transactions in it. The top of the list:

So what do we have in there. Transaction on the top is a transaction worth less than 0.00000 ETH cost a transfer fee of 0.00622 ETH (which is just under €20) and the miner fee (the gas money) was 160Gwei.

Using the tool from automatedwebtools.com again, we see that 160Gwei turns out to be:

So for a transaction that was worth ZERO!!1!!

The costs were:

$23.37+$177.51=$200.88

Which is scary, to me at least!!

Let us see a transaction that had some actual worth, then, just to make sure this one wasn't a freaky oddball transaction:

Let's just take the 10th transaction from the top:

0x8bf474f9…0x9c19b0497997…0xc04b6044e27c…

Transaction value: 0.00899 ETH $33.78

Transaction fee: 0.00319 ETH $11.98

Gas price: 152 GWei $168.63

So a transaction of the value of $33.78 cost $11.98+$168.63=$180.61

Holy crap! I can imagine people having ETH or tokens based on it are pi$$ed right now!

This basically means that if you're not moving, swapping, trading, withdrawing, or depositing hundreds of dollars worth of ETH you are paying double, triple, or more times the value of your transaction to actually have the transaction take place.

It is taking SOOOOO much effort for me not to mention BCH in Reddit

Every complaint, rant and whine post on Reddit right now is, to me, just BEGGING me to remind them of the prices and speeds of the ONCHAIN transactions of Bitcoin Cash. How your transaction of $0.05 worth of BCH is done and confirmed in minutes, and costs at most a couple of dollarcents.

But I have, mostly, been able to contain myself and didn't do it. But I ask you, shouldn't we keep ramming on those ETH rants to show that there is a better alternative, and it's called Bitcoin Cash, the real Bitcoin?!?!

Anyway, I found this remarkable and decided to abuse my keyboard a bit to see what's what with these "Gwei" gas fees. Hope you enjoyed it!

Thanks for reading this!

Stay safe and stay happy!

@AnonSunamun