Back when the Byzantium Fork was getting a lot of hullabaloo, one of the big, selling points was that the revision and update of the Ethereum blockchain was going to be a reduction of gas fees. Up to that point gas fees had become so untenable that Ethereum was losing any value as a viable daily block chain for platform building and transactions. While it was still a playground for the rich, just like Bitcoin, only the whales were moving transactions in Ethereum and taking advantage of the benefits of base platforms for the average person.

Ethereum became pretty much a once-in-one-stop you bought on an exchange, and then you sat on it. Not only did you have to sit there and wait for your profit to reach a break even for what you paid for it, but you were also going to have to wait for it to increase even further to cover the gas fees to exchange it back out as well.

Fixes Were Promised Like Politicians

The last Ethereum Blockchain upgrade was supposed to solve all of these gas fee problems. It was supposed to shift Ethereum off of its original proof-of-work, which was an ongoing gold mine for Ethereum minors, and it was supposed to make the blockchain a working platform for everyday use. So where are we?

Part of the problem in the changes and gas fees was the fact that due to a crypto winter, everybody forgot about them when Bitcoin dropped to $16,000. Gas fees dropped just as hard. The once crazy charges went down tremendously; there was in fact moments when transactions were down to maybe $0.70 or less. Try to run a transfer today however, with Bitcoin back up and Ethereum following suit, and a typical transaction is $30 to $35 a transaction. A swap is even higher at anywhere from $40 to $60 a transaction. Gas fees have literally gone back to the way things were, begging the question what changed at all? The short answer is - nothing.

Supposedly, a recent Dencum Fork was supposed to provide an alternative with practically feeless transactions on Ethereum. This was 5 days ago. However, none of that has shifted over to the mainnet platform that most people are familiar with so in practice, it’s useless.

Alt-Coins Make a Lot More Sense Now

A number of folks critique why in the world there’s so many alt coins. They’re a bunch of garbage and who gives a darn, but the reality is alt-coins continue to provide utility for everyday payments and transactions. Where platforms like Ethereum become so unusable for the daily user, other platforms like Matic, Litecoin and Nano reign. They are are reliable, dependable, and most importantly, inexpensive. And for any platform that is going to posit itself as a replacement for fiat currency, the first bread-and-butter element that is needed is easy fluidity of transactions without any other type of resistance, like gas fees. Until Ethereum actually gets to a usable functional level like maybe it was during the crypto winter, it’s never going to be a platform for regular currency replacement. It’s simply just going to be a rich person’s playground.