What changes will the EIP 1559 improvement proposal bring to Ethereum?
The EIP 1559 improvement proposal was proposed by V God in 2019, and this proposal has always attracted much attention. At the same time, it was officially put into the Ethereum London hard fork upgrade in March this year, and it is expected to be deployed to the mainnet next month.
The reason why the EIP 1559 improvement proposal has attracted attention is that if this measure is implemented, it will completely change the current pricing of gas fees on Ethereum.
overview
overview
Ethereum's current"first price auction"The fee model is inefficient and an unnecessary cost to users. The EIP 1559 improvement proposal proposes a method to replace the original charging model with a mechanism to adjust the basic network fee based on network demand. The proposal creates better fee-price efficiencies, reducing the complexity of client software required to avoid unnecessarily high fees.
The charging model of "first price auction" is the current stage we are in. Every time we make a transaction, the miners will package and process the transaction with the highest bid according to the bids of all transactions, and wait in line for the lower bid. This leads to many transactions needing to wait for a long time before being processed, which is inefficient. If you want your transaction to be packaged first, you need to increase the gas fee.
Summary
Summary
There is a BASEFEE value in the protocol, which can be moved up or down by 1/8 in each block. Initially, miners adjusted this value to target an average gas consumption of 8 million. If gas consumption is high, increase BASEFEE, if gas consumption is low, decrease BASEFEE. A transaction sender specifies its fee by providing two values:
1） "premium"Value: The gas price is added to the BASEFEE price, which can be set to a fairly low value (eg, 1gwei) to compensate miners for interest rate risk, or to a high value to win competition in unexpected events . BASEFEE is burned and the premium goes to miners.
2） "upper limit"Value: Represents the maximum total amount the transaction sender is willing to pay.
The EIP 1559 improvement proposal introduces a new concept, the base fee (BASEFEE). The basic fee is the lowest price that users must pay, and the basic fee will be automatically adjusted according to the actual gas consumption of the previous block.
motivation
motivation
Ethereum currently uses a simple auction mechanism to price transaction fees, users send out transaction prices, miners select the transaction with the highest bid, and the selected transaction pays their specified bid. This leads to several serious sources of inefficiency:
1) The volatility of transaction fees does not match transaction costs: transaction fees on mature blockchains, due to sufficient usage, so the block is full, but this is often very unstable. On Ethereum, the minimum fee is usually around 2 gwei (10^9 gwei = 1 ETH), but it can sometimes go up to 20-50 gwei, and even once to over 200 gwei. This creates serious inefficiencies. Because when the gas price is 200 gwei, the cost to the network of accepting more transactions into a block is actually 100 times higher than when the gas price is 2 gwei. In both cases, 8 million gas is not the same as 8.02 million gas.
2) Unnecessary delays for users: Due to the hard gas limit per block, coupled with the natural fluctuations in transaction volume, transactions often have to wait several blocks to be included, which is socially unhelpful ; since there is no"slack off"Mechanism that allows one block to be larger and the next block to be smaller to meet the differing needs of each block, so that no one is clearly benefited.
3) Inefficiency of first-price auctions: In short the current approach, i.e. transaction senders publish transactions with fees, miners choose the transaction with the highest payment, and everyone pays their bid is very inefficient, so it requires Complex fee estimating algorithms, and even those don't work very well in the end, leading to frequent fee overpayments.
4) Blockchain instability without block rewards: In the long run, no currently issued blockchain (including Bitcoin and Zcash) intends to reward miners entirely by switching from transaction fees. Past results have shown that this may lead to many unstable factors, incentivizing mining to steal transaction fees"sister block", open up more powerful selfish mining attack vectors, etc. There are currently no good mitigations for this problem.
With the development of the ecology and the rapid increase in the number of participants, the gas fee of Ethereum has been criticized by users and dubbed the "noble chain". Cheap and close to the people. According to the data of QKL123, it can be seen that the total daily gas consumption of ETH has continued to rise over the years.
This data dimension reflects the sum of the Gas consumed by all operations on the chain every day, where Gas can be considered as a unit of computing resources, and users give their Gas Price for each unit of operation resources to compete with other bidders Get computing resources.
The selfish mining mentioned at the end of the original article is an attack on Bitcoin mining and incentives. A malicious miner who can carry out selfish mining has a computing power advantage. When he digs out a block, he chooses to keep it instead of publishing it. When he continues to dig out the second block, he announces the two blocks together. At this time You can get more mining rewards.
Selfish mining leads to chain bifurcation through the advantage of computing power. The purpose is to obtain more rewards and cause other honest miners to do useless work. Moreover, this attack will not destroy the trust consensus of the original blockchain, resulting in a drop in the currency price. fall.
tip"tip", to compensate miners (eg 0.5 gwei).
An important aspect of this upgrade fee system is that miners can only keep tips. BASEFEE is always burned (i.e. it is destroyed by the protocol). Burning is important because it prevents miners from manipulating fees in order to extract more from users. It also ensures that only ETH can be used to pay for Ethereum transactions, solidifying the economic value of ETH within the Ethereum platform.
In the improvement plan, the 50% utilization rate of the guaranteed block is maintained by increasing the network capacity. When the network capacity is greater than 50%, the basic fee will increase, and vice versa. But this increment is capped.
On the other hand, the improvement scheme introduces the concept of tip, the basic fee will be completely destroyed (burn), and the tip belongs to the miners. Users tip miners to incentivize them to process their own transactions. In this case, the miners’ income will change from the original block rewards and all gas fees to block rewards and tips, and the income will decrease, which is why many mining pools object.
The burning mechanism actually creates a kind of deflation for Ethereum, which will correspondingly push up the price of ETH in the short term. It seems that after the implementation of the improvement plan, if we want to achieve the ultimate goal of reducing the gas fee, we may have to wait for the solutions of 2.0 and layer2.
Improvement proposal English original text: https://learnblockchain.cn/docs/eips/eip-1559.html
