EthereumPoW Will Send Network Fees to a Multisig – Trustnodes

A proposed chain-split fork of ethereum, EthereumPoW, has committed a fundamental change to its network that will in effect make Proof of Work (PoW) mining semi-permissioned.

“ETHW Core has just released its initial version,” the project said with one of its main feature being a change to EIP1559 so that the base fee is sent “to a multi-sig wallet co-managed by miners and the community.”

This change has already been made on GitHub where they’ve added a MinerDAOAddress which points to a Gnosis safe multisig.

The address was funded three days ago by another address that received mining rewards. As it stands, that address effectively controls what happens to the network fees, which can amount to tens of millions of dollars a day for actual eth.

While they promise that this address with be co-managed by the ‘community,’ ordinary miners will still have to rely on this ‘community’ to not abuse their position by just keeping the fees for themselves.

Which is why no crypto has ever proposed a similar thing as far as we are aware, with this change very much striking at the heart of the definition of decentralization to the point one has to wonder whether it isn’t some sort of self-sabotage as the removal or change of EIP1559 is deeply unpopular with ethereans.

To the point that its removal makes it extremely difficult to be neutral on this fork as investors and the public effectively have no say on what will be a miners’ chain if they do go live with this change or remove the burning.

There are no other changes for the fork save for removing the difficulty bomb, adding a chain id, and they also want to lower difficulty.

Unlike in bitcoin where difficulty takes about two weeks to change, in eth difficulty changes by the block. The ETC chain-split in 2016 therefore left the difficulty unchanged as you need to mine just one block before it goes to normal.

But, this is the sort of change where it’s just the miners’ business, so no one cares. Unlike EIP1559 which is very much a governance matter as it affects all, and thus all stakeholders should have a say on it, rather than just miners.

As it happens, they did have such say when the burning was included in eth, now more than a year ago, with general consensus for this change.

To now unilaterally remove that, or go even more weird with multisig, may well be enough to make this fork not credible as it leaves no room to support it by being neutral.

That’s because miners shouldn’t have an overwhelming say on such things due to the obvious conflict of interest which includes them spamming the network to artificially inflate fees.

The EIP partially addresses that, while also striking the potentially right balance between paying for security and the need to not devalue the asset.

That’s in eth, in ethw they have to go some way towards reaching the right balance as they have to reduce issuance to 2,000 ethw a day from 13,000 ethw a day, in line with actual eth.

But these shenanigans with the EIP indicate they’re going in the opposite direction, which may well mean eth doesn’t get a proper fork despite this huge change to the network from known and trusted Proof of Work to the still technically experimental Prof of Stake which has been running for precisely zero days in a value transferring manner for eth, though other cryptos have utilized it for years.