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Comment by noxer | Hacker News Reader

Its been years since competing blockchains projects added fee limits at least in the front ends if the protocol cant allow it so that this does not happen. It happened many times on ETH and it will happen again because the devs simply dont care.

BTW the money laundering idea is complete nonsense. You dont do that by making large transactions so that mainstream media writes about it and investigations are triggered. This is just the usual HN crypto bias that seeks for confirmation that everything cryoto is illegitimate.

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Various Ethereum wallets warn you about excessive fees, and even set reasonable defaults (especially post 1559). Even if they didn’t, Ethereum devs aren’t the same as Ethereum wallet devs and each group has their own opinions about how to handle fees and UX. It’s disingenuous to say that “Ethereum devs don’t care” about any specific issue and you should be more specific about who you’re criticizing.

It’s unlikely that Bitfinex was using a consumer-faci by wallet and they could easily build those checks into their systems.

I mean the devs of the network ofc they are the only one who could completely stop this. UI/wallet devs can only partially because people dont need to use an UI and can still use old software too.

They very obviously dont care because the problem is know since years and the sum of accidental fees could probably pay google whole software dev personnel to write 1000 different possible fixes but nothing was ever done about it.

How do you solve it at the protocol level? Let's say I set a gas price of 0.00000004 eth. Is that too much or too little? If you try to enforce the price to be within some range of the average of past n transactions it could:

1. make transactions that were valid at the time of creation suddenly invalid if the average moves, which is frustrating to all parties

2. not able to respond to rapid changes in demand

3. overcomplicate validation/consensus

Most other projects implemented a hard coded (can be changed with software update) upper limit that is outside of real use. This means people can still set way to higher fees by accident but not accidentally loose millions.

There might be better ways but clearly doing nothing at all is worse.

And yes, I know ETH is in a uniquely bad situation on this because the range of legitimate fees is enormous.

There isn't one front end for ETH, there are many. They probably rolled their own here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28680430

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