Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum (ETH) Strong Enough To Withstand Uncle Rates, Gas Generation Strong

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, posted the current uncle rate vs gas generation analysis on Twitter. He went on to claim that stale blocks per new block infused have come down by five times since inception.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1127919665601081344

On being asked by what could be the reason for the uncle rates coming down by AVA Labs Chief Emin Gün Sirer, Buterin stated that initial client improvements helped.

Interesting. Any idea what made the uncle rates go down? It could be good stuff, like better block propagation, or it could be a bad trend, like miner centralization.

/Cc @bloXrouteLabs

— Emin Gün Sirer🔺 (@el33th4xor) May 13, 2019

‘Uncles’ mean the blocks in the Proof-of-Work which become stale with time and are rejected by the main blockchain. However, the more number of uncles on the blockchain, the heavier it becomes and is more likely to breakdown.

On the other hand, ‘Gas’ is a fraction of one ETH token which Ethereum charges on every transaction on the network. This amount is used to pay miners who secure the transaction by building new blocks. The gas rate is based on the concept of Economics of Scarcity. While inventing Ethereum, Buterin designed the concept of ‘gas and gas economics’, to assure that the network does not waste energy on securing unnecessarily long transactions, which are nothing but uncles.

So simply, put the lesser the ratio of uncle rate per unit of gas, the better are the chances of a blockchain to not breakdown. In the beginning, the uncle rate was expectedly high, but over a substantial period of time, it has come down noticeably. The main reason behind this is the development which Ethereum has gone through since its inception.

Despite a devastating 2018, where the ETH token lost over 80% of its peak price in December 2017, the Ethereum platform performed well in terms of mass adoption and expansion of its developer base. The platform currently has over 2,000 DApps and more than 400,000 developers on its platform. Due to these numbers, the daily transaction volumes have grown considerably, allowing Ethereum to pay the miners enough to secure the transactions.