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0 pointsCyberdog4y ago0 comments

Agreed. It's so powerful but always so complex and confusing and there's just way too many footguns like this.

"Gas" is one of those concepts where I have to relearn what it is every time I read about it but never can retain it for very long. (See also Big O notation.)

Say what you will about the primitiveness of Bitcoin and other early coins but at least they're quite a bit more comprehensible.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

Traubenfuchs4y ago· 2 in thread

> gas

Isn‘t that just the fee for transfering cryptocoins from one wallet to another?

And you can decide on how much it is for your transfers, but if it‘s too low, your transfer will take a long time, up to „infinity/never“.

posterboy4y ago

Gas is the reward for servers in tthe distributed system when they are (taking part in?) executing the smart contract, so that a buggy infinite loop would run out of gas soon.

With 500k$ this smart contract will be able to run for a while.

jazzyjackson4y ago

smart contracts rack up fees for every machine instruction

if your gas doesnt cover the runtime of the contract, the process rolls back all transactions and eats the fee. so you have to overshoot and get refunded the difference.

always seemed like a nonstarter to me, that the computer cant tell me how much gas it needs (see: halting problem)

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