One positive consequence of all the recent detailed thinking about transaction formats - not just 8141, also "future of state" discussions eg. UTXOs, PBT, keyed nonces, and also recursive STARK mempool - is that we have a much more explicit understanding of how transactions have "actions" and "dependencies", and we can engineer around optimizing the two separately. An action is an effect that a transaction has. A dependency is a fact about the transaction and/or the state that must be true for the transaction to be valid. eg. a signature is a dependency, a Merkle proof of a UTXO is a dependency, a ZK-SNARK (or STARK) is a dependency, a call that sends ETH is an action Dependencies can be processed in parallel. Dependencies that involve state can be reasoned about by a mempool, especially if the specific state accessed is statically declared. Dependencies that are pure (no state calling allowed) can be processed once at the mempool layer and never need to be processed again - and potentially even replaced with a STARK verifying them, allowing not just execution but also data to be elided. In principle, dependencies and actions can all be expressed as calls (if needed, calls to precompiles). This would make the transaction format itself very bare-bones and minimalist (a list of calls, flags for the type of each call eg. dependencies would be static or pure calls, and origin, nonce, etc) and allows maximum cross-compatibility even if different EVM chains have different features. In 2015-era Ethereum, thinking explicitly about these differences was not very important: execution was execution, there were few enough transactions that we could process them all serially, and single-key ECDSA accounts were good enough for everyone. Ethereum's current scaling strategy, however, requires moving beyond that paradigm. Ethereum is beloved by many developers because the execution and state model is so dynamic and flexible. But dynamic and flexible is not friendly to scaling. Fortunately, >90% of Ethereum's activity by volume does not require anything dynamic and flexible. So, we require contracts, accounts and transactions to more explicitly specify what is dynamic and flexible and what is more statically-analyzable but more restrictive, and more statically-analyzable things get the lowest gas cost and thus scale the most. Effectively, learning from the best of both the 2015-era Ethereum model and a more Bitcoin-like model (reminder: Bitcoin has had what I call account abstraction since the beginning), and making a mixture of both (really, the full spectrum between both) available, with gas costs appropriate for the level of scale involved. New state types, the recursive STARK mempool, keyed nonces, etc all go in this direction. This all relates to transaction types, because a general-purpose transaction type is a very natural interface layer on top of which all of this can be implemented, and the current thinking around the EIP-8141 transaction type is going in this exact direction that is friendly to these kinds of future generalizations. So in that sense, 8141 done well is not just a culmination of 10 years of account abstraction work, it's also preparation for the next few years of responsible decentralization-friendly hyper-scaling.

Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail. But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already. This includes the following: * Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride. * An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit. * A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment. * An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation) * A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving * A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins) * A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term. Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.