gitcoinco
FAQ: Why do i Need eth/gas to use the system?
(request gas from our faucet here)
Why do i Need eth/gas to use the system?
Basic Answer
Gitcoin is an Ethereum-based product.
Gas is the payment that is sent to the ethereum node operators (also called miners), in exchange for execution of a smart contract. Paying miners on Ethereum (in ETH or in 1/10**18 of a ETH, also called a WEI) is not unlike how you pay your electric company for electricity (in KWH)
Gas / Gas Limit
gas / gas limit is how many cycles (think opcodes) your transaction will take.
your transaction might fail if you don’t pay a high enough gas limit. gitcoin should provide an adequate gas limit to most transactions, but report a bug if we dont!
Gas Price
gas price is how much ETH you’re willing to pay per cycle.
your transaction might take forever to get confirmed if you don’t choose a market viable gas price
See this article for choosing a gas price.
Advanced Answer
Gas is the internal pricing for running a transaction or contract in Ethereum. It's to decouple the unit of Ether (ETH) and its market value from the unit to measure computational use (gas). Thus, a miner can decide to increase or decrease the use of gas according to its needs, while if need be, the price of gas can be increased or decreased accordingly, avoiding a situation in which an increase in the price of ETH would cause the need to change all gas prices. This is also a response to the discussion in bitcoin about fees structure. ~ CryptoCompare
The gas system is not very different from the use of Kw for measuring electricity home use. One difference from actual energy market is that the originator of the transaction sets the price of gas, to which the miner can or not accept, this causes an emergence of a market around gas. You can see the evolution of the price of gas here: https://etherscan.io/charts/gasprice
See Also
- What values should I use for gas/gas price?
- See other FAQ questions here: https://gitcoin.co/about#faq
- Why isnt my tx clearing?
- gas limit is how many cycles (think opcodes) your transaction will take.
your transaction might fail if you don’t pay a high enough gas limit. gitcoin should provide an adequate gas limit to most transactions, but report a bug if we dont!
- gas price is how much ETH you’re willing to pay per cycle.
your transaction might take forever to get confirmed if you don’t choose a market viable gas price ( see https://ethgasstation.info/predictionTable.php for current gas metrics… also gitcoin scrapes ethgasstation to provide recommended gas prices to all transactions sufficient that they’ll confirm in < 5 minutes )
If I understood this right, the gas price is paid by us (that's why we need ETH in our wallets)?
Can it be taken from our rewards automatically when we complete our claims? It would be awesome, because there are places where it's difficult to buy other altcoins like ETH, other than bitcoin, and people may lose interest in bounties.
I hope I understood this right. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
If I understood this right, the gas price is paid by us (that's why we need ETH in our wallets)?
That's right.
Can it be taken from our rewards automatically when we complete our claims? It would be awesome, because there are places where it's difficult to buy other altcoins like ETH, other than bitcoin, and people may lose interest in bounties.
It's something that may be enabled in future Ethereum versions. I believe the 2nd Metropolis fork allows contracts to pay their own gas. But we'd need to consider the design considerations of how this opens up the system to sybil attacks. I worry that if users don't have to pay gas to claim an issue.. they'll just go around claiming any issue because it's cheap to do so and there is little downside to doing it.
Hmmm.
I would love to work on the cross-browser extension but I don't have a way of purchasing ETH without buying Bitcoin and paying ShapeShift a huge fee to exchange for some ETH.
What you recommend me doing?
are shapeshift fees that high? IIRC they were on the order of 0.5% - 1% worse than a market rate excahgne.
im happy to give you a little ETH to play with the system. DM me your ETH address
ive been thinking a lot about how we transition web2 users to web3. we get the questions “what is web3? what is ethereum and why do i need it?” a lot.
as a means of explaining some of these concepts in a way that doens’nt feel/read like documentation, :gitcoin: commissioned a short video to cover this subject.
here is a rough draft of the video. what does everyone think? https://youtu.be/HJPmmN2qTNc
this is quite neat
from https://blog.decenter.com/2018/11/05/how-does-gas-work-infographic/