Lesson 4 why is the gas price included on a transaction call

[santiagoziel]

The fields on a transaction call are shown to be

They are all rather logical as the information seems to be, the number of the transaction, how much are you willing to spend on gas, who are you sending the transaction to, what are you sending, and your credentials to perform the transaction.

They all make sense to me, except for the Gas Price field.

As I understand it, the gas price is automatically set based on the network usage when you send the transaction.
I see no reason as to why you would be able to specify it when making a transaction call:

The person making the call has 0 control over the gas price:

So, I think I’m misunderstanding something because I don’t think they would add a field to specify something you cant control

[krakxn]

Quoting directly from Ethereum docs:

A submitted transaction includes the following information: (These are the actual transaction fields - with definitions)

recipient – the receiving address (if an externally-owned account, the transaction will transfer value. If a contract account, the transaction will execute the contract code)
signature – the identifier of the sender. This is generated when the sender's private key signs the transaction and confirms the sender has authorized this transaction
value – amount of ETH to transfer from sender to recipient (in WEI, a denomination of ETH)
data – optional field to include arbitrary data
gasLimit – the maximum amount of gas units that can be consumed by the transaction. Units of gas represent computational steps
maxPriorityFeePerGas - the maximum amount of gas to be included as a tip to the miner
maxFeePerGas - the maximum amount of gas willing to be paid for the transaction (inclusive of baseFeePerGas and maxPriorityFeePerGas)

Hope this helps!

[santiagoziel]

Thank you, it helped a lot!

[krakxn]

All the best with the course!!

[alymurtazamemon]

@santiagoziel The miners will determine the price of gas at the time of transaction based on demand and supply, and as a transaction sender, it is own us how important is that transaction for us. The more the gasPrice we will be willing to pay as well as more gasLimit the more changes of our transaction to be mined by miners. It is on miners to select our transaction or not, that is the reason transactions also have maxPriority fee that is only for giving to miners so they should accept our transaction.

[santiagoziel]

Ooohh I see thank you!