I definitely agree that we need to find a better way to price blobs. However, I don’t think the domination of execution gas in L2 costs is necessarily an issue.
The decrease in blob demand due to high execution gas prices demonstrates negative cross-elasticity of demand, indicating that blob gas and execution gas are complementary goods. This joint demand relationship is straightforward to understand since both are required for blob-carrying transactions. Consider the analogy of electricity and appliances: rising electricity prices may reduce demand for electrical appliances. However, it would be absurd to argue that appliance prices should rise alongside electricity prices simply because high electricity costs dominate appliance usage expenses. This would only further reduce appliance demand. Coffee and milk provide another useful analogy.
I’m not suggesting that fee markets for blobs and gas should be completely independent. In most cases involving complementary goods, their prices are interconnected. For example, companies often employ strategies like pricing printers low and ink cartridges high to maximize profits, or similarly with gaming consoles and games. Therefore, I’d like to see whether bound markets for various resources could maximize Ethereum’s overall benefit. If not, such binding may simply complicate the pricing process for both resources, potentially causing significant problems.
In my opinion, regarding the proposed implementation changes, the execution gas price simply serves as a price dampening mechanism for blob gas prices to establish a price floor. The resulting price may appear functional in the future, but it will no longer accurately reflect the supply and demand dynamics for blobs alone.
There are several fundamental questions we need to answer:
- Under the multidimensional gas roadmap, should fee markets for different resources be independent or bound together? Independent fee markets offer clear benefits: resource prices reflect only their own demand, and we can optimize usage of different resources separately. Bound fee markets, however, require further research.
- If we choose bound fee markets, why would this design be superior to the current one-dimensional gas model? Could an optimally designed bound fee market essentially become a new form of one-dimensional pricing?