We should connect the logic to the reason we are increasing the minimum which is less arbitrary.
Makes sense.
If I understand correctly
- Selling blobs for free during a lack of congestion is not a problem at all. It’s actually great, as blobs being free minimizes L2 cost and helps to maximize investment in Ethereum’s network effects.
- The reason for this EIP is to fix the blob gas market from being non-responsive during the initial stages of sustained congestion due to the number of consecutive congested blocks it takes for a 1 wei base fee to grow to become non de minimis.
- This EIP’s strategy is to increase the minimum blob base fee, which seems reasonable.
- In terms of opportunity cost of this EIP’s strategy, it can be useful to enumerate any alternative approaches. One alternative could be to ramp up the base fee much faster below a threshold, but this is more complex. Raising the minimum base fee is the (perhaps provably) simplest approach, so let’s start there. But we don’t want blobs to be unnecessarily expensive without congestion, so we need a method to determine the new minimum base fee. Max gives one method (5 cent method). Here is another possible method:
Assuming the current blob base fee is 1 wei and then the sudden onset of sustained congestion
- Today, how many blocks with 6 blobs does it take for the base fee to ramp up from 1 wei to become non de minimis?
- How many blocks do we want it to take?
- What new minimum base fee is implied by how many blocks we want it to take?
- For illustrative purposes, given our proposed new minimum blob base fee, what would be the DA cost component of a rollup transaction for a simple transfer or swap? What if the price of ETH rises to $50k? With ETH at $50k, is DA still effectively free for end-users if blobs are not congested (this seems like a good goal)?