EIP to cap the ETH spend on gas in one TX

Primordial Soup
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Inspired by:

what is the sentiment here about an EIP that limits the amount of ETH spend on gas for one TX?

2 Likes
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I am very curious to read any suggestions on how such cap would be defined

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perhaps something conservative like:
if the gas price is more than 100x the maximum gas price from the last block

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Since it is a mistake done by the user, why Ethereum does not provide any payback/refund mechanism?

Because Ethereum is not a centrally controlled bank. It’s in Ethereum design (and I believe in everyone’s interest) that no central decision can revert a transaction. The miner can always decide to be nice and refund, but for the community to force him to refund would take a fork.

I believe that rather than questionning the protocol (Ethereum) you should consider questionning the wallet. What application sets the gas price to 0.1eth?

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this is not really what is discussed here - I agree refund is not an option - was an idea of the user - and I agree this is not a good idea.

I think it was not a wallet but a programming mistake. There where multiple transactions sending too much fee: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/as7ejb/reminder_be_careful_while_developing_someone_just
Also this account does not look like it was managed by a wallet - it looks like automatic actions.

So I think solving it on the protocol layer is a good option. Not by allowing reverts obviously - but by adding a cap to the ETH that can be spend for gas (as the title of this post).
I think this could improve the UX of Ethereum. This is not the first time this happened - and I think users of ethereum that stepped into this problem did not really like the experience :wink:

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PS: I think building on top of this EIP: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1559 would make thinks much easier.
So we do not need to care for the sliding window - we could just cap the premium

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Build this into the clients, not the protocol…

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I am not sure if a client was used in this case - might have just been a buggy script

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I’ve seen at least speculation that this was an on-purpose attempt at some kind of ETH laundering. Possible to not broadcast the transaction and just mine blocks yourself until you’re able to win one that includes it?

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What about having defined gwei rates? (Slower/Slow/Fast/Fastest) with each one costing a set amount of ethereum?

1 Like
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Something for clients to implement, not the protocol.