Ethereum Gas: Cheaper than You Think
There has been a lot of talk about Ethereum having slow confirmations and expensive transaction costs.
Seeing a recent article from ETH Gas Station, I decided to test this for myself today. How low could I go before my transactions slowed down significantly or stopped being mined?
Default Gas Price
I sent myself a couple bucks worth of Ether to play with. The transaction fee cost a whopping $0.13 USD — definitely a bit expensive for sending myself two dollars.
Attempt 1
I dragged the transaction fee slider in Parity wallet all the way to the bottom and sent out 0.0001 ETH.
Gas Price: 0.0000000004681 Ether (0.4681 Gwei)
Transaction fee: 0.0000098301 Ether ($0.002941)
Not bad, three tenths of a penny. That’s a whole lot cheaper than accepting the default. It reached 50 confirmations within minutes.
Attempt 2
With the transaction slider being at the lowest point, I subverted it by typing in a lower Gas Price, and sent my next transaction:
Gas Price: 0.0000000002581 Ether (0.2581 Gwei)
Transaction Fee: 0.0000054201 Ether ($0.001619)
For a few seconds, it didn’t appear in etherscan.io and I thought — ok, maybe that’s why Parity set a lower recommended limit.. But then I refreshed the page, and saw the first confirmation come in, around the 35 second mark! It was being mined. By 2 minutes, I had 7 confirmations!
Attempt 3
Let’s get cheap. Set the gas price to 0.1 Gwei. What miner would accept that?
Gas Price: 0.0000000001 Ether (0.1 Gwei)
Transaction Fee: 0.0000021 Ether ($0.000627)
And like before, I had 6 or 7 confirmations within 2 minutes. That’s 1/16th of a penny to do a relatively quick transaction on Ethereum. Amazing!
Attempt 4 — Fail
I tried a few times to go cheaper...
Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to go much cheaper than a gas price of 100,000,000 Wei. At this point, nobody mined the transaction, and it never showed up on etherscan.
It appears that many miners are setting their “--gasprice” to 0.1 Shannon which means that transactions can still go through very cheaply on the Ethereum network thanks to these miners.
It was interesting to see that Ethereum is much faster and cheaper than expected, and transactions are not outrageously expensive for it being the #2 blockchain.
The average transaction is spending 200x the minimum amount required, and wallets could do a better job of estimating the lowest cost per transaction.
Experimenting with low Gas Prices makes complex smart contracts and Ethereum tokens inexpensive and very viable. I’m very excited to see how upcoming updates to Ethereum will lower the transaction costs even further!
