Comment: It is impossible for miners to fork Ethereum

Wu Shuo Author | Winter Soldier

Editor of this issue | Colin Wu

On February 26, Spark Pool publicly opposed Ethereum's EIP-1559 upgrade (predicted to be activated in July, miners' income will be reduced by about 30%), while F2Pool publicly expressed its support. The two sides confronted each other and attracted widespread attention. Miners have no voting rights on the developers' decisions and can only use forks or 51% attacks to oppose, which has caused some concerns about Ethereum forks. Here I would like to express some of my personal opinions.

1. Will the EIP-1559 controversy lead to a fork in Ethereum in the future?

If the current situation of extremely high gas fees cannot be alleviated, EIP-1559 is imperative and no new forked chains will appear. The reasons are as follows:

First of all, the real decision-makers in the Ethereum community have always been the core development team and ecosystem developers, not the miners. If the core development team wants to promote it, the miners are powerless to stop it. The current high handling fees of miners actually come from the activeness and success of the DeFi development community.

When many people hear about the disagreements in the Ethereum community, they first think of the DAO fork in the early years of Ethereum. It is true that Ethereum was not mature at that time, but the subsequent development of ETC has made it clear who is the indispensable soul of Ethereum, so now few people dare to mention the ETH fork.

In recent years, Ethereum has also experienced a community controversy that is very similar to EIP-1559, namely EIP-1057: ProgPow algorithm change (enhancing GPU capabilities to fight ASICs).

In 2019, the Ethereum community held 2-3 community votes for ProgPOW, one of which was a special miner vote. The results showed that more than 90% of voters supported ProgPOW, and almost all mining pools supported ProgPOW. The Ethereum community also raised 50,000 Dai to conduct a code audit of ProgPOW, and is even preparing to include ProgPOW in the Berlin fork.

As a result, in early 2020, the DeFi community suddenly opposed the algorithm change, EIP-1057 was aborted, and no miners proposed a fork. This time, the core development team and the DeFi community strongly supported EIP-1559, but some miners "voted against" and their strength was even weaker than the last ProgPOW, so it is highly likely that they will not be able to prevent EIP-1559 from passing.

Secondly, even if some miners force a fork, it would be an extremely stupid fork. The purpose of the fork was to prevent EIP-1559 and continue to maintain high transaction fee rewards. But the transaction fee comes from the Defi ecosystem. The newly forked chain obviously cannot retain Defi. Where does the transaction fee reward come from? Moreover, there is already a ready-made Ethereum Classic ETC that can only mine and has no ecosystem. If you don’t like EIP-1559, you can go to mine ETC. What’s the point of forcing Ethereum again? (But there is a greater possibility of forking after POS is fully implemented)

2. Spark Mining Pool already accounts for 33% of the computing power of the entire ETH network. If an allied force with 18% is added, will the pressure be successful?

No. The economic incentive mechanism of blockchain determines that the chain with higher computing power is always the one with higher value. Once the fork occurs, there is no doubt that ETH where Vitalik is located will be the high-value chain, which means that most of the computing power will continue to mine ETH instead of the new chain. Spark is just a mining pool and has no power to decide which chain to mine on behalf of miners. If Spark insists on only supporting the mining of new chains, the computing power will be transferred to other mining pools that support EIP-1559, and the so-called dominant position of the mining pool with 33% computing power in the entire network will no longer exist.

3. After the fork, the fee income obtained by implementing or not implementing EIP-1559 may be the same, so miners have every reason to fork. And there is a core view that the machine gun pool that appears after the fork will cause the risk of ETH's computing power fluctuations.

Without considering block rewards, the fee income of the two may indeed be the same. However, block rewards are not a negligible factor. There will inevitably be a huge difference in the price of ETH and the new chain (refer to BCH/BCHA, ETH/ETC), so the mining income of the two will not be equal, and miners will not have a high motivation to fork. Even if a fork does occur, the impact of the forked machine gun pool on the ETH computing power will be very limited. The machine gun pool mechanism of BTC/BCH/BSV has been implemented for many years, and I have never heard that the BTC chain with the highest computing power has been troubled by the machine gun pool. (Picture from coinspeaker)

Views from all parties regarding EIP-1559:

The reason why Spark Mining Pool opposes this is that it is a redistribution of wealth from miners to holders, which is a "robbery" of miners.

F2Pool: EIP-1559 can bring a better user experience and make gas fees more predictable. The community should unite to support developers, and the discontinuation of EIP-1559 will reduce the price of Ethereum.

V God: The greater significance of EIP-1559 is that almost every transaction can be confirmed within 1-2 blocks. If some miners leave, new ones can come. If miners attack by 51%, we will all move to POS as soon as possible.

Zhibiao Pan of Biyin: POW miners have a low status in the ETH ecosystem. 1559 can be said to be "not very harmful but extremely insulting" to ETH miners. The prosperity of any coin is mainly due to developers and the community. But 1559 still cannot solve the congestion problem.