Flexpool announces its position against EIP-1559. Here’s why.
TL;DR
EIP-1559 is a proposal initially designed to reduce Ethereum’s transaction fees. Later, it shifted to proposing that transaction fees be destroyed instead of paid to miners.
What is EIP-1559?
Ethereum Improvement Proposal #1559 (EIP-1559) was initially designed to reduce Ethereum’s high transaction fees, but at the end of the day, they end up just burning all transaction fees instead of giving them to honest miners.
Nothing new. Just a yet another move towards whales securing their bags.
Ethereum Developers are highly anticipated to launch EIP-1559. “Everything is pretty much finalized” — they say, but one thing is missing. That thing is the Mining Community Support.
How the transaction fee market currently works?
Ethereum inherited the traditional fee market, firstly implemented by Bitcoin. It implements a fixed block size, which specifies the maximum amount of transactions that can be processed within one block. In order to have users’ transactions included, they send all their transactions to miners, and they decide what transactions to include in their blocks and what to not. This introduces transaction fee auction; users are bidding on the transaction fee to get their transaction prioritized over others. Miners choose transactions with the highest transaction fees and include them in the new block.
How will the transaction fee market work after EIP-1559?
Essentially, it won’t change for ETH buyers/sellers. After EIP-1559, all transaction fees would be constant (base fee), and they won’t change; however, block sizes will. Increasing block sizes sounds like the easiest yet the most effective way to increase blockchain’s “bandwidth,” but is this considered secure?
Scalability wants bigger blocks, but security wants them as small as possible. Smaller block sizes mean fewer transactions to process per second, which means that running a full node becomes easier. Original fee market traded scalability for the security, and this is reasonable — EIP-1559 changes everything. With the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 release, Ethereum Developers (Community) are looking for a quick and easy fix for the scalability problem — a quick workaround that requires the least effort.
Besides introducing security holes, what happens with the fee?
Well. It gets destroyed. What else should have we expected from Ethereum Developers? From developers who are known to refer to miners as animals.
EIP-1559 base fee can be explained as:
Instead of giving the waiter a tip, you just burn it in front of him while laughing at him.
Seriously, it is not funny.
Miners decide if they will adopt the new hardfork. Can we just reject it?
As the picture above says. Ethereum Foundation (known as EF) is pushing for 1559. They have good friends — large mining pools who represent the majority of the hashrate. Unfortunately, these pools are using the hashpower given to them by their miners to represent them in supporting 1559. By controlling 51% of the network, big pools can implement changes without the consent of miners. By mining on these pools, you are giving them your vote without your consent.
At Flexpool, we feel it is not right to support an initiative that proposes to pay our miners significantly less for the same work. No money is being saved on transactions; instead, it’s being paid then destroyed. Our miners don’t support EIP-1559 and thus are against it too.
Keep in mind that we need your help. We need to defeat the big mining pools (Sparkpool, Ethermine, etc.) who are pushing a proposal that hurts their miners. Don’t be a slave to your mining pool. Blacklist pools that support robbing their miners just so that they can inflate the price of eth for rich speculators. Call on the pool you mine to publicly stand against 1559.
Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to share this article with others. Miners need to work together to stop us from being exploited. #minersunite
