tycoon
2 min readJan 20, 2021

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Dear Flexpool. The article, that you published about announcing your position against EIP1559, is incorrect.

First, it is false that EIP1559 throws away the fee market.

EIP1559 retains the current gas fee market in the form of "tips". So there will be a base fee, plus tips. The tips have no limit, and if users need a transaction processed first, they can add a bigger tip. Tips could be larger than the base fee, especially when there's an auction between a number of players for the transaction.

Second, EIP1559 caps the block to 20 million gas, which is still below the current limit of about 12m gas. So, EIP 1559 does not change any capacity or improve / decrease scalability.

Third, it seems like your knowledge of how mining works on Ethereum is lacking.

You're incorrect the original fee market trades off scalability of bigger blocks. If you knew a bit more about how Ethereum mining works, you would know that ETH's PoW algorithm also mines what's known as "uncle blocks", which is the the main incentive driver to keep the block size below a certain threshold. (In a nutshell, blocks cannot grow bigger than a certain amount because if they do, other miners will be getting rewards who mine the smaller blocks) See https://ethgasstation.info/blog/ethereum-uncle-rate/

Please also read the EIP1559 FAQ which also explains why the current gas fee market is inefficient https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/BkSQmQTS8

UPDATE: The EIP1559 spec has now been changed and it does NOT cap the block gas limit anymore, leaving the limit to be voted on by the miners. So both the article and my comment is out of date.

Anyway, if EIP1559 is enabled, I will only be sending my transactions with fat tips for the miners only on the EIP1559 enabled chain. The miners will have to mine them if they want the tip. Miners chase profits, I know they will be there to get my tip. I have already sent thousands of $$$ to them in fees in the last 12 months, and I will continue to send tips, but only on the EIP1559 enabled chain. See you guys there.

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