One of the most important Ethereum upgrades is scheduled to happen next month - EIP 1559 (Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559) aims to address the current monstrously-high priced, and sluggishly slow transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

Currently, Ethereum transactions run on basically an auction system - the more you're willing to pay the sooner your transaction will be processed.  On a network with limited transaction capacity, and exploding popularity, it's no surprise fees broke $70 for the first time just weeks ago.

That's the standard model for most blockchains at the moment - and this new proposal throws it out entirely.

Once implemented, instead of going to whichever miner included your transaction in a block, the fee will go to the network itself, where a 'fair' base fee for all transactions will be set.

The base fee will change based on network congestion, however this pricing structure will be predictable, allowing wallets to automatically detect which tier the base fee is currently at - meaning this should be the end to any user having to adjust their own gas settings.

Removing the auction structure  means we should see a dramatic drop in transaction costs.

The auction structure also caused transactions to wait several blocks before being included, but will now go out on the first available block that can include it - which means we should see a dramatic drop in transaction time as well.

Support From Everyone... Except Miners...

To object is like saying "Even though you could get faster service, and pay less for it - we believe millions of people should continue to overpay for awful, sluggish transactions". But some miners as well as some of the the largest mining pools are apparently taking that stance.

Initially I thought 'of course the miners who are currently making a killing won't like it, but surely they know how ridiculous they would look if they officially took a public stance against it EIP 1559'.

But nope, turns out they REALLY loved squeezing every penny from Ethereum users over this last year. "We feel it is not right to support an initiative that proposes to pay our miners significantly less for the same work. No money is being saved on transactions; instead, it’s being paid then destroyed. Our miners don’t support EIP-1559 and thus are against it too." says mining pool Flexpool in a post on their blog.

It's Coming, Whether Miners Want It or Not...

With the only remaining option to stop it being a malicious attack by miners on the network, a scenerio which Ethereum developer Micah Zoltu warned against, saying "Any censorship attack by miners against the interest of users will almost certainly result in the core developers taking very aggressive action against miners. The most likely retaliation that the core devs could execute would be a rush to launch Proof of Stake, which would completely remove all miners/mining from Ethereum."

EIP 1559 is part of the package that will also implement the London hard fork, along with up to 5 other approved proposals. It goes live next month (July 2021) as long as things remain on track. 

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Author: Mark Pippen
London News Desk / Breaking Crypto News