If true, this seems insane.
If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than being priced out of buying corn or wheat - there's not an infinite amount available for everyone to buy at whatever price they please.
They are services that are used to purchase products and services. Purchase decisions are made about these services in the same manner as purchase decisions about the end product, at least under the rational choice theory of economics.
At that point, nobody will go there anymore because it's too crowded.
The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange.
I don't consider Ether to be a currency, I consider it to be a commodity. The very fact that people bid the fee market up to high levels, despite the Ethereum network running constantly at its full capacity of a bit over one million transactions per day, is itself proof that the network is a medium of exchange that people choose to use.
> As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".
I don't believe that Ethereum is currently very useful for buying t-shirts or playing games. Most of the usage so far has been to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
> The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".
The good that Ethereum sells (service really) is the ability to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. If you don't derive value from that service, no one is forcing you to use it. Ethereum wasn't created to dethrone Visa as a payment network for t-shirt purchases at Walmart. It's fine if it isn't used for that.
My point remains that pricing a service based on supply and demand (in this case VM execution) is very much sane in an economic sense. When certain customers cease purchasing a service because the price is bid higher than the benefit those customers receive from it, that's market efficiency, not insanity.
If the VM's cap were lifted and it allowed anybody to use it for free, the demand for VM resources would quickly exceed the clients' ability to host the VM. The Ethereum VM would pin even the beefiest host's CPU at 100% and require each network participant to maintain petabytes of disk space.
The way Ethereum works, every client needs to execute every calculation that every other client wants to run on the VM. Every request to run code on the VM is basically an amplification attack against the network, which is why execution is strictly metered and charged for. It's a ballooning On^2 resource problem that is very much limited by the natural scarcity and limitations of the silicon it runs on.