This is to track key posts and threads in this community-wide discussion.
The emergence of consensus on an early merge is happening within the greater context of three major discussions: changes to Eth2 Roadmap emerging in Fall 2020, objections to EIP-1559, and environmental concerns about NFTs on Eth1.
A rollup-centric ethereum roadmap - EthMagicians post by Vitalik Buterin
The eth2 roadmap offers scalability, and the earlier phases of eth2 are approaching quickly, but base-layer scalability for applications is only coming as the last major phase of eth2, which is still years away. In a further twist of irony, eth2’s usability as a data availability layer for rollups comes in phase 1, long before eth2 becomes usable for “traditional” layer-1 applications. These facts taken together lead to a particular conclusion: the Ethereum ecosystem is likely to be all-in on rollups (plus some plasma and channels) as a scaling strategy for the near and mid-term future.
The State of Eth2, Jan 2021 - Jan 1, 2021 EF Blog post by Danny Ryan
These designations – eth1 / eth2 – imply a false sequentiality. They imply that eth1 will be deprecated in favor of eth2, that one is being left behind for the other. Instead, the terms actually represent different layers of the stack.
hy the Merge Should Be Prioritized Over Data Sharding - Mar 5, 2021 reddit post by Always_Question
- Rollup tech buys us time
- Having the Merge at the ready provides a fallback for the community should a cartel of miners collude to neutralize the positive effects of EIP 1559
- The Merge brings immediate liquidity to POS stakers who have tied up their ETH
- The Merge is technically less complex than Data Sharding
Danny Ryan: I generally agree
Vitalik Buterin: Me too
Communications from the mining community against EIP-1559:
Jan 19, 2021 Tweet by Bitly / Ethermine
Block rewards have decreased from 5ETH down to 2ETH over the past years, however, the closer we get to a transition to Ethereum 2.0 the riskier such changes become because there is less at stake for miners.
Feb 5, 2021 Tweet by SparkPool
EIP 1559 burning tx fee is wealth redistribution, from miner to holder. That’s why so many people support it. They think less ether, higher price, so they will be richer. Right? According to this logic, why not burn hacker’s ether, why not burn short-seller’s ether?
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Hash-power protest
Mar 7, 2021 Tweet by Red Panda Mining
For educational purposes, let's collectively move our hash to http://ethermine.org April 1st for 51 hours.
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Post-EIP-1559 proposals
EIP 3368 - Block Reward Increase /w Decay for next two years" - EthMagicians discussion
EIP-3368 - Increase block rewards to 3 ETH with 2 Year Decay to 1 ETH Scheduled - EIP submitted on Mar 12, 2021
A sudden drop in PoW mining rewards could result in a sudden precipitous decrease in mining profitability that may drive miners to auction off their hashrate to the highest bidder while they figure out what to do with their now "worthless" hardware. If enough hashrate is auctioned off in this way at the same time, an attacker will be able to rent a large amount of hashing power for a short period of time at relatively low cost vs. reward and potentially attack the network. By setting the block reward to X (where X is enough to offset the sudden profitability decrease) and then decreasing it over time to Y (where Y is a number below the sudden profitability decrease), we both avoid introducing long term inflation while at the same time spreading out the rate that individual miners cross into a transitional range.
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Mar 9, 2021 Tweet by Daniel Irizarri
Talking about the harsh environmental costs of crypto and NFT minting/trading it's hard to visualize why that is or what that looks like.
now, look at this fucking monstrosity hauling more power than nearby towns and tell me this is what you want for the future.
Mar 12, 2021 Tweet by Simon Stålenhag
I don't think there's anything wrong with artists getting super rich, but I do despise the idea of art trade and the speculation, money laundering and tax evasion that comes with it. NFT is great for all that too, but has the added bonus of being super bad for the environment.
Quick merge via fork choice change - Note by Vitalik Buterin
reddit discussion about "Quick merge"
So Vitalik does seem committed to speeding up POS merge.
Makes sense. Ethereum development is getting hit by environmentally concerned media on one side and by miners themselves on the other. The merge deals with both.
I don't think he is speeding it up, he just offers quick fixes if resistance to PoS or EIP1559 result in a miner attack. Basically saying if miners try to increase their profits by delaying/canceling the improvements planned, we can kick them out a lot sooner, making them lose the fees they would have generated (~4 months until EIP1559 and maybe ~10 months until the merge on a normal schedule).
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Finalized no. 23 - the Ethereum consensus-layer - EF Blog post by Danny Ryan
Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack - blog post by James Baker, Status
When PoW miners think it is a good idea to take a "show of force" approach - reddit discussion
And ..... now you aren’t needed at all. You greedy bastards
Ethereum Miners Protesting EIP-1559 Has Accelerated Upgrade to ETH 2.0 🏃♂️ - reddit discussion
It had accelerated nothing, problem is just bigger.
No hate, that’s a realistic take. The title kind of implies that the core devs haven’t been pushing towards PoS for many years - which, as someone who has followed the project since 2017 knows is false. Also if you read the article there is no demonstration of causality between miners being upset and an acceleration of the roadmap. Such hype only serves to let people down. Come back to this post in a year and see how well it aged.
With discussions of prioritising merging ETH 1.0 into ETH 2.0 PoS rather than prioritising sharding, what are the potential timelines? - reddit discussion
Unfortunately we're now in full-on hash war blustering mode so you can no longer trust anything anyone says.
Edmund Edgar: I don't think anyone ever made promises about giving miners time to transition. Previously it sounded like it would be technically ambitious to get it done this year but maybe just possible. Then the other day /u/vbuterin dropped a simpler design that could be done faster, with the implication that if the miners fucked around over EIP1559 they'd quickly be fired. I've long been baffled that we're bathing in drama fighting predictable opposition from the miners over 1559 rather than just getting on with the merge so it doesn't matter what the miners think, but hopefully somebody involved knows what they're doing.
Vitalik Buterin: The simpler design wasn't something that we knew about but decided not to do until now we decided we do want to do it. Rather, we (Danny and myself) literally came up with the simpler design within the last week. Sometimes even simple ideas really are very hard to come up with but then when you get pulled into a different mindset a new idea suddenly becomes very clear and obvious; such things happen in protocol research all the time. As another example, theoretically nothing was stopping us from converging on optimistic rollups back in 2016, as all the ideas (shadow chains, stateless clients) were already there at the time.
EIP 3368 - Block Reward Increase /w Decay for next two years - EthMagicians discussion, Mar 14, 2021 comment by Jimmy Thommes
... Now that I’ve addressed many of the ad hominem or general attacks against miners, I hope I can address the miner concerns as they relate to ETH which are as follows:
- The change in rewards is too stark, too quickly. ...
- The risk for 51% attack is real, and Ethereum has a lot of enemies right now. ...
- Raising the BR to 3 and tapering is still in line with minimum viable issuance policy (MVP). ...
- ... It is absolutely dangerous to rush a massive security consensus change on the 2nd largest blockchain in the world because of political reasons. ...
Rayonism is a scaling project around the ETH Global Scaling Hackathon happening from Apr 16 - May 14, 2021