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- Its location
- Potential margin trading
- Lending
- Potential fiat to crypto trading
- Access to mining pools
- security
- Fees
Gas
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Gas is the internal pricing for running a transaction or contract in Ethereum, a measure of computational effort. The term Gas is simply the Ether cost you have to pay to get your Ethereum message or transaction executed as soon as possible. With Ethereum, there is a blocksize limit too – so you’re paying for premium space in the next block.
Trading
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Since computation is expensive (mind that it has to be done by every full node in the network), excessive consumption of gas needs to be discouraged. Therefore, each unit of gas must be paid for (in Ether) by the sender of the transaction that triggered the computation.
For example, something as simple as transferring DAO tokens from one address to another or casting a vote can reach fees between $0.05 - $0.1 to cover the computation gas.
Transaction gas limit
It is often not easy and in general even impossible to know in advance how much gas a transaction will need eventually. Therefore, transactions have a gas limit field to specify the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to buy. If the gas used exceeds this limit during execution, processing is stopped.
The transaction gas limit also protects full nodes from attackers, who could, without a gas limit, make them execute effective infinity loops
Block gas limit
Additionally, blocks, too, have a field called gas limit. It defines the maximum amount of gas all transactions in the whole block combined are allowed to consume. Similar to the maximum block size in Bitcoin (measured in bytes), its purpose is to keep block propagation and processing time low, thereby allowing for a sufficiently decentralized network.
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