Contradictions between miners and code farmers reappear: Will EIP1559 cause the Ethereum community to split?

胡安科技

特邀专栏作者

2021-01-19 17:40 (UTC+8)

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Choose a miner or trust a coder?

Ethereum is so strong today that mainstream crypto analysts believe it will remain strong until the end of the year. Contrary to this general consensus, Ethereum's upcoming 1559 improvement proposal EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) has recently sparked a lot of debate in the Ethereum community.

"The controversial EIP-1559 will optimize user experience, and in order to maintain network security, most of the transaction fees will be burned instead of miners. Do you agree with this proposal?" Bitfly, the parent company of Ethereum mining pool Ethermine, said on January 15 In the survey conducted on Twitter on the 1st, in addition to 17.9% of the people who eat melons, 61.5% of the voters expressed their opposition to the proposal, while only 20.6% of them were in favor.

The Ethereum mining pool Flexpool issued a more passionate article yesterday, officially announcing its opposition to the EIP-1559 proposal. In this call to action, Flexpool calls on the community to respect miners and stop speculation. And accused the Ethereum developers of their long-term indifference and disrespect to the miners: "Ethereum developers once said that the miners are 'animals', what else can we expect from them?"

According to Flexpool, the original existing Ethereum transaction fee mechanism implemented a fixed block size, which specified the maximum number of transactions that could be processed within a block. On-chain transactions are sent to miners, who decide which transactions to include in a block and which not to. This introduces the transaction fee auction mechanism; users bid on transaction fees to give their transaction priority over other transactions. Miners then choose the transaction with the highest transaction fee and include it in the new block.

After EIP-1559 is activated, the blocks will become larger, and the income of miners will also change: "The base fee (base fee) after EIP-1559 goes online can be explained in this way. The waiter's face burns the tip and laughs at him... The transaction fee is not saved; instead, it is burned (not paid to the miner but) after the fee is generated. Our miners do not support EIP-1559, The proposal is therefore opposed."

Although some people believe that EIP-1559 will be beneficial to the security of the Ethereum network and the value of the public chain (and therefore beneficial to miners), this proposal will undoubtedly reduce the income of miners at this stage. And under Bitfly’s EIP-1559 Twitter survey, many people also expressed sympathy for miners:

“If POS represents the end of miners’ income, then EIP-1559 is equivalent to beating a cancer patient hard.”

......

"...these expressions are full of prejudice, and you can add a picture: poor miners are starving and begging for bread."

After continuous fermentation, the Ethereum developer community seems to be touched. In the latest post, the developer of the proposal first emphasized that transaction fees only accounted for a small part of the miners’ income, and it is unclear what will happen after EIP-1559. How much the transaction fee will be burned, but still agree to make the following measures:

“1. Better document and communicate the impact of EIP-1559 on miners (this is the beginning);

2. Record miners' attitudes towards 1559 support/opposition, preferably with their relevant computing power, and share this information with core developers as part of the 1559-related decision-making process;

3. When deciding whether to launch 1559 on the mainnet, it is necessary to indicate to the community that objections have been considered, and if 1559 is still online, the reasons for the rejection (these objections) will be explained. "

Although it does not completely solve the problem of miners' income reduction, it at least shows that developers are beginning to pay attention to the contribution of miners. In fact, disputes between miners and developers are not uncommon in the POW public chain world. The conflict between miners and code farmers has caused community forks. There have been precedents for forking in the community. Before that, the miners represented by Bitmain forked the Bitcoin public chain, and then the ABC development team forked BCH. Miners and developers represented the blockchain. How to find the balance between the two most important groups in the community will become one of the most important problems before the difficult transition of Ethereum to 2.0.