So I've done some googling and I read that it was the cost of a transaction to take place between two addresses (please correct me if I'm wrong!). I'm currently mining off of nanopool and they have this warning on their help page:
"Do NOT use CONTRACT addresses for mining if it consumes more than 40000 gas." What are contract addresses exactly? How do I find out how much gas my address takes. also, this forum is a god send! thank you guys so much for all the helpful threads.
Hi! Ethereum network is a complicated thing, and maybe my explanation will not be totally correct. Maybe someone will want to correct me.
Compared to, lets say, Bitcoin, Ethereum is not simply a crypto-currency: it is a platform for what are called "smart contracts". The blockchain does not include simply the transaction history, but also these contracts. Contracts are like small pieces of software that live on the blockchain, and will act and do their purpose depending on future triggers that are added to the blockchain. For a mining node (not ourselves as miners, but the node of our pools), processing a transaction of ether between two accounts is trivial, but running these contracts can consume a lot of computing time. So nodes need to be compensated, and the way to do it is by paying a fee called "gas" which value in ether is variable with time. A transaction needs gas only for once (it will be validated just once), but a contract is going to be running for days, weeks or who knows, maybe the same contract needs to be running for 1000 years, and for that reason contracts need to be associated with specific ethereum wallets that need to be "recharged" over time by the developer of the smart contract if she/he wants to keep running it. That is a contract address. But as I said, maybe I am over-simplifying things.
Instead what we use are regular wallet addresses. So, unless you have opened your wallet in a weird place, you will be good, don't worry. Happy mining :-)
