Bitcoin surpassed 60,000 U.S. dollars, setting a record high.

Compared with Bitcoin's strong market, Ethereum is relatively weak. The reason is that with the increasing congestion of Ethereum's network, its high gas has become an obstacle for ordinary users to use Ethereum.

But this problem may be alleviated in the near future.

In the past period of time, the Ethereum community has been arguing about whether EIP-1559 will be implemented or not.

Finally, the Ethereum core developers meeting on March 5 confirmed that EIP-1559 was officially included in the Ethereum "London" hard fork upgrade in July. This proposal will replace the existing Ethereum fee policy.

The proposal was resisted and opposed by some miners.

However, the core developers of Ethereum seem to be ready to respond to the protests of miners. Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned that if miners threaten to carry out a 51% attack, Ethereum will switch to the PoS consensus mechanism as soon as possible.

A brief introduction to EIP-1559

In the past, when users transferred money on Ethereum, they needed to pay a gas fee to the miner on demand, and the miner could prioritize the transaction with high gas fee. After the implementation of EIP-1559, the gas handling fee will be sent to the network itself as a basic fee (basefee) for destruction, and users can also selectively pay an inclusion fee to the miners. The setting of the basic fee is also determined by the algorithm, the purpose is to make it easier for users to pay a reasonable fee.

EIP-1559 introduces 3 changes to the Ethereum protocol. The first is that when users send transactions, they must pay the basic fee according to Gas. This basic fee will be automatically adjusted according to the actual gas usage in the previous block. The basic fee itself is a price, and its adjustment goal is to make the actual gas usage tend to the content of this EIP-1559 proposal, which happens to be half of the block size of the protocol proposal. When the actual usage is higher than the target, it will be adjusted upwards, otherwise, it will be adjusted downwards. Second, the basic fee paid by the user will be burned and will not be given to anyone. The third point is that the user no longer specifies the gas fee when trading, but gives two parameters. The first is the upper limit of the unit price that he is willing to accept, and the second is the upper limit of the package fee for miners. This is EIP-1559 The main content.

In theory, this scheme may end Ethereum's soaring fees, but it will also cause miners to lose part of their income, which some miners groups oppose.

With the development of DeFi in the past few months, Gas fees have soared, and half of the income of Ethereum miners comes from Gas fees. Once EIP-1559 is implemented, it will directly affect the income of miners, and naturally it will not be liked by miners.

In the past few years, the price of Ethereum has been sluggish, and the ecology has not developed. Miners stick to it and maintain network security. Today, with the development of DeFi, the entire Ethereum ecosystem is thriving. In order to reduce Gas costs and reduce the interests of miners, miners with vested interests are naturally unwilling to accept it.

Therefore, some miners responded to the news, saying that they will redistribute their computing power to the mining pool Ethermine, which is opposed to EIP-1559, on April 1st for 51 hours.

At present, there are about a dozen mining pools that are opposed to EIP-1559, and no more than 10 are in favor of it. Most of them are opposed to it, and a few are neutral. As the leading mining pool of Ethereum, Yuchi firmly voted for EIP-1559, so why did Shenyu vote for it?

He thinks that miners should look at the development of this proposal from a slightly longer-term perspective. Will it be beneficial to the entire ecology? Now in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially from the perspective of experienced users who use DeFi, Ethereum has a very big fatal problem, that is, every transaction sent out is uncertain. I don’t know the current or guessed gas fee. Will drastic changes occur.

Many miners will give a higher-than-average gas fee in order to confirm their transaction faster, but then in a short period of time, the network changes quickly and the transaction is not confirmed. I believe that many DeFi players will encounter this situation and continue to accelerate transactions. If multiple transactions are initiated at the same time in this process, it is very likely to mess up, making DeFi fall into a kind of chaotic experience. With better performance, such as the exchange public chain BSC, the tps is very high, and the experience is very high. Silky.

The experience difference between the two is still very big. The experience on Ethereum is very bad. It even takes hours to wait for several transactions to be confirmed, which makes the development of the entire DeFi ecosystem very slow. This is one reason why many users have to move to other public chains. EIP-1559 essentially changes the experience, especially the experience of high-frequency users.

Second, EIP-1559 changed monetary policy. In the past, there was no upper limit on inflation, and now everyone’s expectations for the price of ETH can be raised, allowing ETH to truly capture the ecological value of Ethereum. These two points will greatly improve the Ethereum ecosystem.

In addition, EIP-1559 will charge a basic fee, which may change the current trading pattern of Ethereum. There are currently about one million transactions on Ethereum, which basically exhausts Ethereum resources. But when we analyze it carefully, there are a lot of them. About 100,000 transactions are arbitrage transactions. Apart from generating economic benefits for the sender, there is no particularly good value, but a waste of resources on the chain. After the implementation of EIP-1559, some specific arbitrage behavior standards are difficult to develop, especially arbitrage related to mining pools.

For many people who do not understand Ethereum, the most concerned question is: Will the opposition of miners with absolute computing power cause the split and fork of the Ethereum community and affect the stability of Ethereum?

Forking is a game process. The fork can be divided at will, anyone can. I saw a lot of fork coins in 2017, and everyone seems to be used to forks.

Whether or not it can develop its own ecosystem after the fork is a more critical issue, because an ecosystem has been forked from the old and carries many users and assets. If some users have differences, they will throw away their assets. The new ecology really grows up, and something that distinguishes other ecology is born. So it depends more on the developers and users of the ecology.

Miners only ensure the basic safety of the ecology. We think that most of the forks have not actually developed their own unique ecosystems, and there are not many applications, and even many miners do not support them. As a result, the computing power is very low. Under the same algorithm, it is easy to attack with a very low cost, and the security will not be basically guaranteed. Basically, it depends on whether the ecology after the fork is a positive cycle or a negative cycle. Most of what we see now is a negative cycle.

Vitalik once said in the community: "If the miners attack 51%, we will all move to POS as soon as possible." From the perspective of the development history of Ethereum, Vitalik and other developer groups have sufficient appeal and influence on Ethereum. It runs counter to it and is thankless. After ETC and ETH parted ways, the current development situation is obvious to all.

After the fork, the miner-led Ethereum is more valuable, or the developer's Ethereum is more valuable, the answer is self-evident, and the miners know this well.

For the group of miners who rely on the Ethereum ecology, they need a prosperous Ethereum, not a fragmented ecology.

It can be said with certainty that Ethereum will not fork, and miners cannot, don't want, or dare not fork.

The original intention of EIP-1559 is to alleviate the gas fee problem Vitalik himself admits that this effect is only short-term, and the real solution is to improve the scalability of Ethereum.

Ethereum 2.0 is focusing on high performance and solving the problem of expansion. Although the online stage is zero, there is still a long way to go before it is truly usable. At present, the expansion plan represented by Rollup is more feasible and valuable in the short term.

The CryptoKitties in 2017 blocked the entire Ethereum. This year there are a lot of DeFi protocols, and there are a large number of user groups on them. They began to look for some native applications on the blockchain, and even some cross-industry applications began to use blocks intensively. When chain technology is used, this performance problem must be solved. Our future imagination space and application scenarios that can be implemented will be greatly expanded, so the value of the entire industry will be improved.

When the gas and performance issues are resolved, the entire Ethereum ecosystem should be greatly developed. At that time, it is truly possible to realize the "ten thousand chains into one" situation, and the value of Ethereum will be greatly improved.

So hold your value currency, and you can also pay attention to the projects of Rollup and Layer2 related tracks.