Oil: adding a second fuel source to the EVM (pre-EIP)

[dankrad]

@holiman

However, the reason I’m so optimistic about this scheme, is that it allows us to have the best of both worlds – with the caveat that yes, it adds complexities to the consensus engine in general. But it gives us so much more freedom to modify costs.

It’s not the complexities in the state machine that I worry about. It’s the added difficulty of onboarding new developers to this complexity – and having to explain to them that “there’s gas, which you can inspect, BUT THEN IT GETS MODIFIED, and then there’s oil, which you can’t inspect, but which actually counts”.
This is horrible. And there’s no way to abstract it away. That’s why I would prefer to make oil as simple as possible – ideally just counting bytes in the witness – and not make any additional adjustments to opcodes.