Hello everyone I hope you are getting fun reading my posts.
Today I found myself digging into a proposal on ETH blockchain, so here's the deal, ETH developers want to reduce gas fees, this means that the block reward for miners would be less, so miners answer this proposal threatening a 51% attack. This is basically EIP 1559.
For the ones who don't know a 51% attack on a Proof of Work blockchain is when a group of people come together and have more than 50% of all hashrate (mining power) of the network. Why this is bad? It is bad because if it's achived and not stopped, this people can mess with the blockchain, like rewinding blocks and creating a new ledger which means that every transaction made on that time would be erased from the blockchain, if the attack is completed. This is almost impossible to do on a big decentralized blockchain and this is one of the reasons decentralization is so important.
Back to the proposal, Dapp developers on the ETH blockchain are getting screwed by this huge fees and in my opinion they are completely right. I never used ETH for this same reason, high fees that only benefit who has a lot of cash to spend, you are not going to stake 100 dollars and pay 30 in fees. Now if you have 1000 dollars to stake, 30 in fees is nothing. This seems like a good proposal and one that would definitely benefit ETH and maybe get more people on the blockchain.
What is the problem here?
Greedy miners don't want this to happen because when they mine a block of ETH they will receive much less than now. So they made an ultimatum, if the proposal goes ahead they will join and do a 51% attack on the network, which if successfull would hurt ETH big time, maybe in a way that would not ever recover, if the attack is 100% completed. They are not thinking correctly, ETH is so decentralized and secure that they had to have a huge adoption from people, which is almost impossible, so the probability of this to happen and succeed is almost zero.
This is unacceptable from the miners because they are getting paid to secure a network not to destroy it, if they don't like it they can leave, the majority of the community wants this and the majority of people wants to be able to participate on ETH too, so don't be this greedy, if you are just mining for the dollars nobody is going to miss you.
ETH is going in a way that only rich people can participate, is this what blockchain is all about? No of course not, cryptocurrencies were made for financial fairness not to benefit a elite. If you want a coin that favoures an elite you just have to choose any of the fiat currencies.
I'm ending with an appeal to ETH miners to remember the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies and not to be affected from greed.
Best Regards,
Cryptopeach
