Ethereum miners who disagree with the implementation of EIP-1559 will unite for a “show of power” and will direct their power to the Ethermine pool on April 1.
Ethereum developers made the decision last week to include EIP-1559 in the London hard fork scheduled for July. EIP-1559 implies burning ETH when paying commissions. This will significantly reduce the ever-increasing transaction fees, but will affect the income of miners. Some analysts suggest that miners will lose up to 50% of their profits.
To express their disagreement with the proposal, some of the Ethereum miners are planning to team up for a 51-hour “show of power” on April 1. The miners intend to send the hashrate to the Ethermine pool, which opposes EIP 1559, for 51 hours. The miners hope to involve more than 51% of the network hashrate in this action.
For educational purposes, let’s collectively move our hash to https://t.co/6osh2Op6yl April 1st for 51 hours. @etherchain_org @BitsBeTrippin @SonOfATech @maxvoltage @SavageMine @VoskCoin @Nemisist2 @notyournormalm1 @BrandonCoin1 @GuntisVitolins #eip1559 #stopeip1559 #Ethereum
— Red Panda Mining (@RedPandaMining) March 7, 2021
If successful, the pool will have sufficient hashing power to one-way commit or revert changes to the network protocol. At least unless the rest of the community switches to another blockchain branch in the event of a hard fork. The support of this initiative by large miners is still unknown, but among miners, many openly express dissatisfaction with the drop in revenue due to the burning of transaction fees.
On air on March 9, YouTube columnist Bits Be Trippin discussed the planned hashing power redirection, describing the proposed move as a “benevolent show of power”:
“The goal is not to attack the network, but to show that the use of force is possible,” he said.
Bits Be Trippin noted that Ethermine will not use hashing power to attack the network, as it “has no incentive” to do so.
In addition to lower fees, EIP 1559 could lead to a reduction in the supply of Ether. In the podcast The Tim Ferriss Show this week, Ethereum co-founder and co-creator of EIP-1559 Vitalik Buterin emphasized that the mechanism of “burning” ETH can lead to an excess of the rate of destruction of ethers over their creation, which will create a bullish momentum for ETH:
“If the demand to use ETH is high enough, there will actually be more ETH burned than it is created.”
In January, mining pools have already expressed dissatisfaction with EIP-1559. Then eight mining pools, controlling about 30% of Ethereum’s hashing power, teamed up against EIP-1559.
