Vitalik Non-giver of Ether
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@VitalikButerin
So I realized that the argument that "there's no value for ETH in ethereum as of today" is even wronger than I thought.
The reason is that as of today, abstraction is not even implemented in ethereum. There are clear efficiency advantages to using ETH as a means of paying for gas: it's already baked into the protocol, zero gas cost to pay for gas (so no "tax tax"), network protocol supports it...
It's not fair to rely on hypothetical future features to argue against something, and not admit *planned* future features as arguments in its favor.
Also, ETH is the only medium of exchange on ethereum where the gas cost of transactions is 21000, and not ~40000.
Abstraction would change this, but as I said, we have no active plans to do full abstraction.
Those aren’t hypothetical future features. I’m sure you know it’s not unheard of that mining pools get compensated out-of-band for including transactions in blocks
Oh sure, but that's still something extra that you have to do; it's not a default interface. Including a gas price into 4-8 bytes of transaction data that cost you nothing, on the other hand, is super-convenient.