In a new blog post published On February 28, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin documented the continued need to improve the eponymous network to facilitate ETH as a means of payment. In one case, Buterin shared how he tried to pay for tea for himself and his friends at a coffee shop in Argentina in 2021, but had to pay 0.01 ETH (about $40 at the time) as that was the minimum deposit for the owner exchange account. . “I didn’t mind the 3x overpayment and treated it as a tip,” the co-founder wrote.
In another case, Buterin explained how he tried to pay for tea elsewhere in 2022, but two separate transactions failed due to requiring “additional gasoline to process the transfer” and a UI glitch in his mobile wallet. Furthermore, Buterin also raised the issue of unpredictable transaction times, writing:
“Many times, there has been a surprisingly long delay between my transaction being accepted on-chain and the service acknowledging the transaction, even as ‘unconfirmed.’ Some of those times, I was definitely concerned that there was something wrong with the system. payment on your side”.
As told by Buterin, outliers remain on the Ethereum network despite recent improvements. “If you submit a transaction at the same time many others are submitting transactions and the base fee is increasing, you risk the base fee being too high and your transaction not being honored,” she wrote. “Even worse, the wallet UIs suck at showing this. There are no big flashing red alerts, and very little clear indication of what you are supposed to do to resolve this issue.” Buterin added that even experts can get confused on how to speed up transactions in such cases.
“A UI that is clean and elegant, but does something weird and inexplicable 0.723% of the time that causes big problems, is worse than a UI that exposes more gritty details to the user, but at least makes it easier to understand.” what’s happening”. and fix any problems that arise.
Among other issues, Buterin raised the issue that the Internet is “not 100% reliable” and the need for potential offline proof that customers transferred their transaction data directly to the merchant. Another issue raised was “losing a small amount of BTC and ETH”, due to secret sharing based off-chain social recovery methods for wallets, which Buterin considered fragile. According to YCharts, Ethereum transaction fees fell to an average of $0.656 at press time, which is much lower than the $20 average seen during the peak of the crypto bull market in 2021.
“Along with the all-important issue of high transaction fees due to scaling still not being fully resolved, user experience is a key reason why many Ethereum users, especially in the Global South, often They opt for centralized solutions over on-chain decentralized alternatives that keep the power in the hands of the user and their friends and family or the local community.”
