I Support EIP-1559 - The Daily Gwei #183
And you should too!
I suspect that all of you reading this are well aware of what EIP-1559 is but for those who aren’t it’s basically an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) to greatly improve how the Ethereum fee market mechanism works. Over the weekend, someone set up a website to track support for EIP-1559 and the website also enables people to signal their support on Twitter (which many in the community have already done).
This website actually comes in reaction to the original website that was set up to signal opposition to EIP-1559. You may be wondering, why would anyone want to reject this? Well because, put simply, EIP-1559 is a mechanism that will cut miner revenues because it introduces a fee burning mechanism to the protocol. Though it is very important to note here that the fee burning mechanism only burns a portion of the fees and miners will still receive fees based on network demand - for a full explanation of how this works you can head here. You can also check out this Google Sheet for a break down on how much EIP-1559 would cut miner revenues based on various circumstances.
Now, miners are of course an important part of the Ethereum ecosystem as they are key to keeping the network running. In return for this service, they are paid for their work by the network and are the only ones who make money from the network in this way - no other ecosystem stakeholder gets paid directly by the network. Because of this, they are what I consider to be “service providers” which quite literally means they exist to serve the network - the network does not exist to serve them. This is why many in the community are currently annoyed at certain miners for being against this proposal - they are already making a tonne of money from the block reward + fees and want to reject a major upgrade based on a relatively small “pay cut”.
On top of all of this, I’m also very confident that the miners that are “against” EIP-1559 are essentially bluffing and won’t be following through with any of their threats (such as splitting the network). Miners don’t choose what chain is considered “Ethereum” - the entire ecosystem set up around Ethereum does and that consists of developers, ecosystem spokes/projects (DeFi and everything else), centralized exchanges, community members, infrastructure providers and more. Sure, miners are part of the ecosystem too, but they will simply mine the chain that the rest of the ecosystem agrees on. Even if they tried to fork the network over this they would have to get their forked ETH listed on an exchange with liquidity or else they’d essentially be mining a dead chain (and losing a lot of money doing so).
So, in summary, I am calling the miners that are against this out on their bluff. I do not believe that they will do anything except begrudgingly accept EIP-1559 when it is slated to be included in a network upgrade and then simply continue mining the chain as they normally do. I think miners taking a relatively small pay cut (when they’re already making a killing) is worth it for the network benefits that EIP-1559 brings with it.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.