With PoS, the pay for miners is planned to be cut from 3 eth all the way down to 0, and that's great that Ethereum will become more efficient in that it no longer needs so much compute time spent on it. Ethereum will switch to needing stakers to provide a service to it that they're paid for, but if people designing Ethereum knew a way to not require that while still staying decentralized, then that would also be a great upgrade.
I think it's fair that if you've purchased specialized mining equipment, you expect the ROI you were promised. Doesn't seem strange.
> Ethereum functions on proof-of-work and needs some people to sell their compute time and electricity
So compensation for work. If not 'workers', you could call them 'investors', or perhaps 'sole traders', or 'merchants', not sure what the best analogy would be. To be fair, I don't necessarily put them in the same class as people making socks in a sweat shop on slave wage. The down-trodden Ethereum miner is not someone I lose sleep about.
ROI was never promised. Ethereum has always had a "Minimum Necessary Issuance" policy. Keeping issuance constant would be deviation from the policy, reducing it when possible is in line with the policy. From the docs:
> Ethereum's Monetary Policy is defined by the rewards that are paid out by the protocol at any given time. Ethereum's current yearly network issuance is approximately 4.5% with 2 Ether per block and an additional 1.75 Ether per uncle block (plus fees) being rewarded to miners.
> Ethereum does not have a fixed supply because a fixed supply would also require a fixed security budget for the Ethereum network. Rather than arbitrarily fix Ethereum's security, Ethereum's monetary policy is best described as "minimum issuance to secure the network".
> Ethereum has had a history of reducing issuance to these estimated minimums and the network has never increased issuance. The move to proof-of-stake is also part of Ethereum's effort to reduce issuance to minimum amounts without sacrificing security.
* It uses GPUs.
* ROI in terms of ethereum is basically irrelevant. Real ROI depends on the bouncy crazy chart.
* Was there not enough warning before the changes?
Many miners buy purpose built servers for crypto mining.
> Was there not enough warning before the changes?
That's the main plaint of the article, and reiterated multiple times. The article claims that the prices was dropped with 2 of the forks, each time it was promised (including at the very beginning) that changes would never be made. Each fork seemed to be of gain to the people who were part of the ICO, but at an income loss to miners. There were several broken promises of no further forks.
I didn't ask whether promises were eventually broken, I asked how long the warning was.
Also if we talk about the promises, I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
> I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
That's a fair point
The "code is law" is not some universal absolute. Blockchains have always been forkable. But a chain can't have a contentious fork without a cost and it becomes costlier and riskier to do later in a chain's life.
Using the original article author's analogy, the "working class" are adding their own percentage to the retail price and taking those profits home.
They typically don't have the on-chain analysis or skill to reorder the transactions in the highest extractable way, so people bid for these opportunities through side channels they signal the miner to do (off-chain) based on the mempool (backlog) of transactions. Miners profit from this activity and in some cases these profits exceed the 2ETH per block issuance. The class analogy is strained and doesn't fit at all. These are only possible because Ethereum has a rich application layer (and if anyone is 'working class' it's the users, devs and dapps on the chain). But these profits more than made up for any offset in EIP1559 losses.
Miners don't earn 40% less, they earn 180000% more than back then. Of course not individual miners, but as a "working class".
Miners are free not to upgrade every time a new protocol version is proposed. Why do they upgrade then? If consensus was established around the older set of rules, that would be it. But instead there's consensus around the newer rules. And that's simply because miners individually decide that the newer rules are better, for whatever reason.
> This time the working class has their pay reduced from 4 Eth to 3 Eth per block, a 25% pay cut. Miners now earn 40% less per block than at the time of the community’s constitution, which promised that code was law, and which the ruling class later said they would break only once, for what was an especially good reason. But the code is law promise has now been broken so many times people expect it to occur at regular intervals and even worry that “progress” is slowing down if there aren’t frequent enough hard forks (to break that promise yet again).