"Is Ethereum broken?"

I wouldn't go that far, however I do believe there is a massive problem with the logic with how Ethereum miners are choosing which transactions to add to the blocks they mine. With the recent flood of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to the market, we have seen faulty transactions clogging the entire Ethereum network.

To really understand how we can improve the network, we first need to understand how miners prioritize which transactions to include in blocks.

If we check out the source code of go-ethereum/miner/worker.go, we can find this bit of code inside a function named commitNewWork:

    pending, err := self.eth.TxPool().Pending()
    if err != nil {
        log.Error("Failed to fetch pending transactions", "err", err)
        return
    }
>>  txs := types.NewTransactionsByPriceAndNonce(pending)
    work.commitTransactions(self.mux, txs, self.chain, self.coinbase)

    self.eth.TxPool().RemoveBatch(work.failedTxs)

This shows us that valid transactions will be chosen and sorted through a function named NewTransactionsByPriceAndNonce before being committed to the work (or, added to the block). In my personal opinion, we should go a step further and implement a function that would be able to read a set of "rules" from a smart contract and ensure only valid transactions will be added to the work. (It is trivial to determine if the destination address of a transaction is a smart contract.)

The process would involved standardizing a smart contract method that would return the max gas price, suggested gas limit, and an encrypted blob of whitelisted/owner addresses. Potentially even a subset of max gas price and suggested gas limit for whitelisted/owner addresses inside the encrypted blob because admins often need to be able to trigger certain actions in the smart contract.

If ICO contracts were REQUIRED to contain a "rules" method to be acknowledged by the miners, they would immediately comply. With a simple alteration, we would be able to properly ensure that ICOs did not have such a drastic effect on the Ethereum network as a whole.

At the same time of saving the network from congestion for users not even participating in ICOs, this would also potentially save millions of dollars of from being wasted on burned gas for useless transactions. We have to consider the massive impact that ripples through this ecosystem when it takes 10 hours to get a transaction to get listed as "pending" and not even go through. These issues extend to every single user of the network, to every single application relying on deposits/withdrawals, and any transaction carrying data.

Something has to be done!!!

I am hoping to inspire some discussion about the subject and, of course, I am willing to put my code where my mouth is!

TL:DR; Add a method to Ethereum miner code to check the validity of a transaction destined to a smart contract by first querying the smart contract for the "rules"

(If Ethereum's network is clogged, it affects the transfer of ERC20 tokens such as STEEM .. it is in your best interest to help get the word out so the Ethereum developers will help speed things along)