What is Ethereum Gas? Dead simple explanation

When you develop decentralized applications, you quickly stumbled upon this weird concept of “gas”. That’s very confusing for a lot of developers…

But it’s actually not that hard, if you ask the right questions.

In this article, I will explain gas with 6 super easy questions and answers.

1. What is Gas?

This is a transaction fee. You pay it every time you send a transaction to the Ethereum Blockchain. You only pay it when you want to modify data in the blockchain. If you just want to read data (view and pure functions in Solidity), there is no transaction fee and you don’t need to pay any gas.

2. Who pays for Gas?

The sender (signer) of an Ethereum transaction.

3. Who receive Gas?

The miner who will mine your transaction in a block. You don’t know who it is when you sign your transaction.

4. When Gas is paid?

It’s paid when a miner includes your transaction in a block. When you sign a transaction, it’s like a cheque. It’s an agreement from you to pay the gas fees to whoever mine your transaction. But gas is only paid if and when a transaction is mined in a block.

5. Where to buy Gas?

You can’t buy Gas. This is an abstract unit. Transaction fees are measured in Gas, but paid in Ether.

6. How gas is paid?

You just need to sign a transaction and send it to the Ethereum network. The Ethereum protocol will debit Ether from your address and pay the gas fee to he miner. You don’t need to do anything else.