Ethereum Core developers respond to miners’ demand to increase rewards

• To prevent a drop in hash rate, Ethereum (ETH) miner Michael Carter aka “Bitsbetrippin” asked to increase the block reward to 3 ETH.
• Vitalik Buterin published a minimum specification for EIP-1559 implementation.

Ethereum Core developers discussed the ongoing controversial improvement proposal (EIP) 1559 during a call on March 19. The EIP is scheduled to be introduced with the London hard fork in July and will have a massive negative impact on the revenue of miners. Estimates are that they will lose over 30% of their rewards.

EIP-1559 will change Ethereum’s fee model by introducing a base fee that will be burned and another so-called “tipping” fee that miners will receive. In the fight against the implementation of EIP-1559, various miners have threatened a “show of force,” as part of which they plan to redirect their hash power to the Ethermine mining pool for 51 hours on April 1.

Developer Tim Beiko has now highlighted the key statements on this issue from the call in a series of tweets. On the call, proposals for complementary improvements to 1559 were discussed. One of these was EIP-3368, submitted by miner Michael Carter owner of the BitsBeTrippin YouTube channel. His proposal calls for increasing the block reward to 3 ETH when EIP-1559 is deployed and reducing it over a 2-year period until it reaches 1 ETH.

During the call, Carter claimed to be against the show of force that certain miners will make and, according to Beiko, he “apologized for the disruption this has caused.” On the proposal, the miner explained that it would be a way to maintain the hash rate, should ETH’s price drop.

With their profits already expected to be reduced by the change in the fee model, a drop in ETH’s price could hit miners’ profits much harder. However, the developers agreed not to introduce EIP-3368 with London and to monitor the situation. Danny Ryan, ETH2 coordinator, noted the following:

(…) modifying issuance can have high unintened consenquences. It is not a given that if the ETHUSD value of the block reward becomes too low at 2ETH/block, raising the ETH/block will raise the ETHUSD value of the reward: it could backfire.

Vitalik Buterin contributes to accelerate introduction of EIP-1559

Other proposals were discussed during the call (EIP-3322, 3403, 3198) and most have been postponed for possible later introduction. On EIP-3368, Carter’s proposal, the developers added:

(…) if something goes wrong with 1559, we can assess exactly what the problem is, and the potential solutions, when that happens. This is one potential avenue, but we haven’t committed to it.

Meanwhile, Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin has also released a set of minimum specifications to speed up the process. Beiko reported:

In parallel, the desire from the community to see the merge happen ASAP has been growing, and @VitalikButerin has released a new, more minimal, merge spec, which could make it happen sooner. And, while the spec is simpler, it still does require a large amount of work from Eth1 clients. This prompted the proposal to have Eth1 teams focus exclusively on the Merge post-London.