Since October 15th, filecoin has been online for two months. With the joint efforts of all the miners, its effective computing power has also reached 1.5EIB, and the entire network has gradually grown. However, as the effective computing power increases and more As more and more miners join, the higher and higher gas fees have also become a major problem for miners. Next, let us understand what is the gas fee, why is it so high, and what solutions are there?
Gas fee was first proposed in Ethereum's EIP-1559 proposal. EIP-1559 is implemented by multiple people and may exist in multiple networks, which may be ETH1.0 or ETH2.0.
The reason why the Filecoin team implemented EIP-1559 in the Filecoin code and let it run in real time on the network and manage all our transactions is because the old model has a lot of problems, and Filecoin is especially suitable for very fast and requires rules. Rhythm enters certain types of transactions in the blockchain, so EIP-1559 is very attractive to Filecoin. This is why there is a gas fee.
Gas means fuel. It can be understood based on the fuel of the car. The car needs to burn gasoline. Gas is equivalent to the fuel of the blockchain. The miners need to submit the packaged data information and submit the proof to the chain, which consumes the computing and storage resources of the network. , So you need to pay for these consumed resources, this cost is called Gas fee.
Gas fees can be simply divided into basic fees and additional fees. The basic fee is the fee that needs to be paid for consuming resources, and the surcharge is the additional fee paid by the user according to the wishes. The amount of the surcharge is proportional to the priority of data packaging.
In addition to this, there is an excess fee. The excess fee is the difference between the actual cost and the prepaid fee. When the prepaid fee is not enough to deduct the burning gas, the excess fee will be incurred. If you want to continue to pack the data, you will not only need to pay the previous excess fee, but also The penalty is to be paid twice as much as the excess fee. Therefore, miners must accurately calculate the required fees so that they will not be punished and cause huge losses.
The reason for the high gas fee is that the gas fee depends on the performance, bandwidth and network capacity of the network. As more and more miners join the Filecoin network, the effective storage growth of the network becomes faster, and a large number of transaction messages occur, which causes network congestion and increases gas fees.
The same can be said of car driving. The network can be compared to a road. When there are more cars on the road, the speed of the car will decrease. At this time, the car will inevitably consume more gasoline, and the width of the road It is fixed. Similarly, if the data submitted in the network is less, the amount of messages processed is less and the gas fee is lower, and vice versa.
As time goes by, the remaining number of Fil decreases. In order to obtain the same income or higher income, miners must increase their computing power to increase the probability of block generation, which will cause the network to process more information. , Which eventually led to network congestion, and gas basic fees skyrocketed.
In EIP-1559, the basic gas cost is related to the network. At any given time, the basic cost will increase or decrease according to the network situation, so it allows these blocks to shrink by themselves. As far as the total gas is concerned, if there is a specific network Congestion, there are many transactions with funds higher than the basic fee, then more funds will enter the block, and the block will expand, which will cause an increase in the basic fee. So for the next block, increase the price threshold for entering the transaction.
Eventually, the size of these blocks will begin to shrink, the utilization rate will be less than 100%, and then the basic cost will drop, so Filecoin will become a more efficient market.
Regarding the problem of excessive gas, the government has been constantly exploring better ways to solve it. Lotus 1.2.0 version and lotus 1.3.0 version are updated to solve the excessive gas fee. On November 20, the lotus v1.2.0 version was officially updated, mainly to reduce the gas consumption when submitting the time and space certificate. After the update, it is true Decrease, but the effect is not obvious. Because the gas consumed for submitting the space-time proof is far less than the gas consumed by data packaging.
On December 17th, the official updated lotus v1.3.0 version, which is to avoid the basic cost of successful WindowPoSt message burning. In the Filecoin network, most of the gas basic fees are consumed, most of which are the P2 and C2 stages of the copy proof. The remaining messages contain other types of messages, such as windowpost.
Although windowpost messages are small, the usage rate is high. So this will also alleviate the problem of excessive gas fees. The official also proposes other solutions, such as expanding the sealed sector and expanding the original sector to 32GB, so that the packaging frequency will be reduced to reduce network congestion. In this case, the user's data must wait for the entire sector. Being filled with data can be encapsulated, which reduces the user experience, and in this way, the number of blocks will be reduced, and the revenue will be reduced. Therefore, it still takes time to improve network performance. Officials will also continue to optimize from proposals such as FIP-007, FIP-008, and FIP-009.
On December 17, Beijing time, Hu An, the founder of Protocol Labs, gave a speech on "EIP-1559 in Filecoin". Hu An said that they have been considering dividing gas into two independent channels, one is operational. At the control level, this is critical to the operation of the agreement.
The other is the data level, which is a new type of transaction joined by all parties. This will be a way to give priority access to certain types of transactions, which must appear within a specific time frame. Regarding this point, we can imagine that ambulances on highways pass on congested highways. The reason why ambulances can do this is not because they paid expensive fees, but their operation is very important.
Although the gas cost is very high now, we also believe that the official and community partners will gradually optimize the algorithm and performance optimization, and develop a more complete solution to make the gas consumption more reasonable. What's more, as the gas fee burns and the amount of Fil decreases, its future value will be higher, won't it?