New Ethereum Fee Model Has Some Miners Crying Foul

Oct 8, 2020 at 19:30 UTCUpdated Oct 8, 2020 at 20:51 UTC.Ethereum miners are signaling their disapproval of a technical proposal advocated by top Ethereum developers, a new survey shows.

Eight of the nine mining projects partaking in a community survey on Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 had a negative impression of the proposal, with seven of the nine saying they would refuse to implement the EIP if it were included in a future hard fork.

First proposed in 2018 by Vitalik Buterin, among others, EIP 1559 is expected to make the blockchain's fee market more predictable and relieve congestion.

Miners would still garner profits under the new model, but they would be restricted compared to the current setup as the BASEFEE would be burnt to the network.

Ethereum miners have the most to lose from the proposal becoming the new standard because transaction fees would be limited to a smaller range.

BitFly's Ethermine is the second-largest Ethereum mining pool by hashrate, according to Etherscan.

Conversely, the largest Ethereum mining pool, Sparkpool, is in favor of the change, according to statements made to CoinDesk in June.

As of now, Ethereum developers are still kicking the tires on the EIP. They will not include it until after the Berlin hard fork, which has yet to be scheduled for execution after it was postponed in June.Moreover, the survey and EIP 1559 developer call Thursday morning raised separate concerns over the EIP itself.

While miners are worried about their pocketbooks, decentralized applications worry about implementing the EIP, its effectiveness and changes to developer tooling.

Some Ethereum clients such as Nethermind and Besu have begun implementing the EIP on testnets.