A group of Ethereum miners intend to combine computing power to demonstrate their capabilities and oppose EIP-1559.
The Ethereum EIP-1559 improvement proposal is to change the fee model. After its activation, the network will dynamically determine the amount of fees paid by users and burn most of them. About half of miners’ current earnings come from commissions, so many of them oppose the proposal. However, the developers have already approved it for inclusion in the July hard fork.
Opponents of the proposal have planned a protest action. To do this, “for educational purposes” on April 1 at 51 o’clock they are going to direct their computing power to the Ethermine pool, which opposes EIP-1559. If they manage to collect more than 51% of the hash rate, this will mean that, if they want, they can manage the network without taking into account the opinions of users and developers.
“This is a demonstration of the power and ability of miners to coordinate actions,” says Michael Carter, author of the video blog about mining Bits Be Trippin. – Call to arms / show of forces will take place on April 1st. We’ll see how many home and midsize miners send a 51 hour hashrate to Ethermine to demonstrate the coordinated movement of computing power that has been ignored by leading developers until now. ”
At the same time, other miners do not share the position of their colleagues and admit the option of a DDoS attack on Ethermine, if the share of its computing power begins to approach 51%. Something similar happened with the GHash.io pool, which in 2014 for a short time collected 51% of the computing power of bitcoin, but fell victim to a DDoS attack and gradually lost most of the hashrate. At the same time, GHash naturally attracted miners without announcing plans to use this computing power to influence, and subsequently limited its share in the hashrate itself. It is possible that Bitcoin miners will also stand up to protect the Ethereum network, since the events around the second largest cryptocurrency cannot but affect the wider ecosystem.
“This is a demonstration that diverging incentives can lead to a potential attacker raising a price question by leasing large amounts of free computing power and creating the risk of re-wasting or reorganizing blocks,” adds Carter.
As an alternative “show of strength” option, miners are offered to do something more constructive, for example, increase the gas limit per block to increase its capacity, which the developers oppose.
The miners’ position does not find support in the wider community also because the implementation of EIP-1559 will be a positive development for ether in terms of price. This is consistent with the interests of most users and investors not receiving cryptocurrency as a block reward.
“If the demand for Ethereum is high enough, in fact, more ETH will be destroyed than created,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a recent podcast. “I sometimes joke about that: if bitcoin, with its limited supply, is a hard currency, will the declining supply make us an ultra-hard currency?”
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