Ethereum Customer Paid $9,300 Fee for $120 Transaction

Thanks to its small-scale potential to build gambling dapps, Ethereum attracted early interest from gambling developers. Yet fees have tended to push up the blockchain, and a alarming recent case of a $9,300 fee on a single transaction is likely to scare away more companies.

The unfortunate target of the invoice was Reddit user ProudBitcoiner. He has clarified what happened in a report from Reddit.

“If you are curious what actually happened… Metamask didn’t populate the “Gas Limit” field with the correct amount in my previous transaction and that transaction failed, so I decided to change it manually in the next transaction (this one), but instead of typing 200000 in “Gas Limit” input field, I wrote it on the “Gas Price” input field, so I payed 200000 GWEI for this transaction and destroyed my life :/”

A Gas "limit" is the overall amount of Gas a user is able to pay per purchase, while the Gas price is the amount of Gwei that a user will spend on each Gas unit. Together, the limit and price combine to determine the payments per transaction on the Ethereum network and constantly adjust depending on demand and operation from the network. So the mystery.

The mistake has an apparent combination of user error and poor programming, because MetaMask's initial inability to fill a field was then exacerbated by the user's error inputting a quantity into the wrong field. But an implementation that was properly designed would have prevented the mess.

Many more specialized implementations haven't yet arrived, as big corporations don't see the scaling capabilities they need to develop a viable Ethereum project.

ProudBitcoiner hopes to recoup some of the funds expended by going back to the mining pool that handled the sale.

“I contacted Ethermine on Twitter, I contacted their CEO Peter Pratscher on Twitter, I made this post here, I sent an e-mail to [email protected] and I [am] out of ideas,”

-he says.

Although $9,300 is not the standard Ethereum cost, the average $1.07 price is still too expensive for any actual apps on the blockchain to be created. For usage of iGaming, where certain users bet less than $1.00 per turn, pay a $1 charge per contract, or the added expense of running an whole project outside the blockchain, is just not feasible.

Fortunately, as we heard from a recent iGaming NEXT ONLINE panel led by Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen, Bitcoin SV (BSV) already offers a superior blockchain for business and gambling applications in particular. Companies such as BitBoss are utilizing the massively scalable BSV to realize payments far below $0.01, thus constructing their whole project on the blockchain, total costs.