Miners don’t want to, dare not, and cannot fork Ethereum

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Editor | Hao Fangzhou

Produced by | Odaily Planet Daily

Over the past few months, the Ethereum community has been arguing about whether EIP-1559 should be implemented.

Finally, the Ethereum core developer meeting on March 5 confirmed that EIP-1559 would be officially included in the Ethereum "London" hard fork upgrade in July. However, the proposal was still resisted and opposed by some miners.

Recently, a Twitter user named "Red Panda Mining" launched a campaign, calling on miners who oppose EIP-1559 to switch their computing power to the opposition mining pool and assert their sovereignty.

“For educational purposes, on April 1st let’s collectively move our hashrate to http://ethermine.org for a period of 51 hours.”

According to statistics from the Stopeip1559 website, 12 large and small mining pools, including Spark, Ethermine, Flexpool, etc., currently oppose the implementation of EIP-1559, accounting for more than 60% of the total computing power, as shown below:

Therefore, many people are worried that the concentration of computing power may lead to double-spending attacks and affect network security .

In a live broadcast on March 9, the popular YouTube celebrity “Bits Be Trippin” responded that the gathering of computing power was just a benevolent “show of force” and said that miners had no motivation to launch network attacks.

Although the current computing power demonstration is not very vigorous, it also reflects the miners' urgent desire to make their voices heard.

Why are the miners objecting?

Let me briefly introduce EIP-1559.

In the past, when users transferred money on Ethereum, they had to pay a gas fee to miners on demand, and miners could prioritize transactions with high gas fees. After the implementation of EIP-1559, the gas fee will be sent to the network itself as a base fee (basefee) for destruction, and users can also selectively pay a tip (inclusion fee) to miners. The setting of the base fee is also determined by the algorithm, with the aim of making it easier for users to pay reasonable fees.

Therefore, the proposal has won the support of users and developers. According to statistics from Ethereum developer Tim Beiko, the top applications on Ethereum: 1inch , Aave , Balancer , Curve , MakerDAO , Sushiswap , etc., most of them support the implementation of EIP-1559.

But the miners are not enthusiastic about this proposal.

With the development of DeFi in the past few months, gas fees have soared, and half of Ethereum miners’ income comes from gas fees. Once EIP-1559 is implemented, it will directly affect miners’ income and will naturally be unpopular among miners.

The impact on income is one thing, but more importantly, miners feel that they have become part of the ecosystem that has been abandoned.

In the past few years, the price of Ethereum was low and the ecosystem did not develop. Miners held on to maintain network security. Now, with the development of DeFi, the entire Ethereum ecosystem is thriving. It is naturally unacceptable to reduce the benefits of miners in order to reduce gas fees. Moreover, EIP-1599 was previously implemented in Filecoin for a period of time, but the effect was not good, which made miners even more angry.

As a result, miners represented by Spark Pool have spoken out against the implementation of EIP-1559. Although it cannot change the final result, it is still necessary to make the voices of miners heard by the Ethereum community.

“Perhaps the achievers of Ethereum’s current ecosystem are developers and users, and it is a chain where ecology is king, but the voices of miners cannot be ignored,” said Qiu Xiaodong, business director of Spark Mining Pool.

Will Ethereum fork?

For many people who don’t know much about Ethereum, the most concerning issue is: Will the opposition of miners who control absolute computing power cause the Ethereum community to split and fork, affecting the stability of Ethereum?

It is safe to say that Ethereum will not fork. Miners cannot, do not want to, and dare not fork.

As mentioned before, opposing EIP-1559 is just a need to speak out, not to fork Ethereum. From the current point of view, even the Spark Mining Pool, which ranks first in computing power, has not proposed a fork. Moreover, Spark has repeatedly emphasized that it will never cause a split in the community.

From the development history of Ethereum, V God and other developer groups have enough appeal and influence on Ethereum. Going against it is a thankless task. After ETC and ETH parted ways, the current development situation is obvious to all. Is the Ethereum dominated by miners after the fork more valuable, or the Ethereum where developers are located more valuable? The answer is self-evident.

And, more importantly, the developers also imposed restrictions on miners.

On the one hand, the developers also included the "difficulty bomb delay" in this hard fork upgrade. If miners do not upgrade (do not implement EIP-1559), the difficulty bomb will explode, the "Ice Age" will come, the mining difficulty of the Ethereum network will increase sharply, and there will be no mines to mine on the old chain in the near future. This ensures that miners must accept this upgrade.

On the other hand, if miners fork Ethereum, Ethereum will immediately switch to POS. Vitalik once said in the community: "If miners attack 51%, we will all move to POS as soon as possible."

The original intention of EIP-1559 was to alleviate the gas fee problem, but Vitalik himself admitted that this effect is only short-term, and the real solution lies in improving the scalability of Ethereum.

Ethereum 2.0 focuses on high performance and solves the problem of expansion. Although it has been launched in Phase 0, it is still a long way from being truly usable. At present, expansion solutions represented by Rollup are more feasible and valuable in the short term.

Original article, author: Qin Xiaofeng. For reprint/content cooperation/seeking coverage, please contact [email protected]; illegal reprinting will be subject to legal prosecution.