Gas costs for even a simple contract deployment are astronomical. If I spin up my own node and connect directly to it can I deploy on that node and avoid the gas fees?
1 Answers
Can I avoid gas fees by running my own Ethereum node?
Simple answer: No.
A node accepts the transaction, stores it in its mempool, and relays it to other nodes so that they can also store it in their mempool. There's nothing related to gas costs at this point.
Theoretically you could deploy a contract for "free" by running your own miner. But that's impossible without professional hardware costing very large amounts - many times more expensive than what you'd save on the gas fees.
However, in a block that you mined, you could include a transaction deploying a contract with 0 gas price. This sometimes happens - miners do occasionally put their own 0-priced transactions in their own blocks. But apart from that, no miner would accept your transaction with 0 gas price (or any transaction priced lower than the current market rate), as that wouldn't be profitable for them.
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