Why does one gas number price computation, storage, and bandwidth the same across every chain?

The EVM uses a single integer to simultaneously price CPU cycles, storage access, and network bandwidth, treating them as fungible. A June 2026 empirical study of production EVM workloads found that Base spends 29% of gas on compute while Ethereum spends 34% on storage writes, with profiles diverging further on each new L2 rollout. When one resource is cheap relative to its real cost it becomes an attack vector: the history of EVM repricing is a series of emergency patches after attackers found underpriced operations. No current EIP proposes multi-dimensional metering at the execution layer. The EIP-1559 era reforms addressed fee markets without decomposing the underlying resource costs, so the mispricing problem was not fixed, only renegotiated.