Ethereum new big number not a base 16 number

You're referring to the recent change in Ethereum's gas pricing mechanism!

In a recent update, Ethereum introduced a new gas pricing mechanism that uses a "big number" instead of a base 16 (hexadecimal) number to represent gas prices. This change was implemented to improve the scalability and usability of the Ethereum network.

Prior to this update, gas prices were represented as a hexadecimal number, which was limited to 64 bits (0x00000000000000000000000000000000 to 0xffffffffffffffffffffffff). This meant that gas prices could only go up to 2^64 - 1, which is approximately 1.84 x 10^19.

The new gas pricing mechanism uses a "big number" representation, which is a 256-bit integer that can represent much larger values. This allows for a much larger range of gas prices, making it possible to support more complex and resource-intensive smart contracts.

The new gas pricing mechanism is based on the "Gwei" unit, which is a smaller unit of Ether (ETH) that is used to represent gas prices. The Gwei unit is equivalent to 0.000000001 ETH, and it is used to calculate the gas price in a more granular and precise way.

The benefits of this change include:

  1. Improved scalability: The new gas pricing mechanism allows for more complex and resource-intensive smart contracts, which can improve the overall scalability of the Ethereum network.
  2. Increased precision: The use of a big number representation allows for more precise gas pricing, which can reduce the risk of gas price fluctuations and improve the overall user experience.
  3. Better support for decentralized applications (dApps): The new gas pricing mechanism can support more complex and resource-intensive dApps, which can improve the overall usability and adoption of the Ethereum network.

Overall, the change to the gas pricing mechanism is an important step towards improving the scalability and usability of the Ethereum network, and it is expected to have a positive impact on the overall development and adoption of decentralized applications.