The vast majority of Ethereum miners are unlikely to protest EIP-1559, a proposed change to Ethereum’s ‘crazy high’ fee market that would potentially cut a fair share of miners’ revenue, according to popular crypto analyst Hasu and Georgios Konstantopoulos, Research Partner at Paradigm, a cryptoasset investment firm.
EIP-1559 is an Ethereum improvement proposal by ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin that was first proposed in April 2019. It is supposed to change the rules of how Ethereum users bid for block space in order to get their transactions confirmed. It comes with a new set of rules that are relatively simple but would mean significant changes for users, miners, wallet providers, as well as the overall security of the Ethereum blockchain.
Four main improvements proposed by EIP-1559, as outlined in the Analysis of EIP-1559, are:
All transactions pay the same fee rate. One of the biggest problems with first-price auctions currently used by Bitcoin and Ethereum is fee estimation. EIP-1559 seeks to improve it by making all transactions pay the same rate as much as possible instead of making individual bids, which would hopefully lead to lower fees and more precise fee estimation.
Block size slack mechanism. Demand for block space often varies, making miners validate both half-full and highly congested blocks. EIP-1559 slack mechanism would allow some blocks to be larger while other blocks would be smaller. As such, the longer-term average blocksize limit would still be enforced, even though there would be short-term variation between individual blocks.
Security improvements. EIP-1559 seeks to make the Ethereum blockchain security less reliant on user transaction fees by burning them and instead incentivizing miners with a more reliable perpetual block subsidy.
Preventing economic abstraction. EIP-1559 will also enforce that transactions burn a specific amount of ETH so that other tokens don’t threaten the reserve status and monetary premium of the native token.
As reported, some miners are unhappy with the proposed changes and have started rallying against the proposal under the hashtag #StopEIP1559.
One of the leading mining pools opposing the proposal, Flexpool, has even launched a website to keep track of Ethereum mining pools that stand against the proposal. According to some of the pool’s latest tweets, their faction stands against burning transaction fees instead of giving them to ‘’honest miners who invested their savings into the Ethereum security.’’