August – Work Progress Report

Ethereum London Hardfork Effect

Ethereum’s network upgrade happened at Block 12,965,000 on August 5th. Ethereum Hardfork, no doubt, was the most important event of August, or even of the 2021 year. The controversial EIP-1559 was implemented that should have changed a lot in the Ethereum network. Did it really change? Let’s find out together and explore the EIP-1559 impact on the Ethereum network and the Ethereum miners.

First, we highly recommend you to read our post Ethereum London Hardfork – What Does EIP-1559 Change?

Ethereum Transaction Fees

Transaction fees were expected to fall down. This was one of the major hardfork goals. Unfortunately, this did not happen. We still see the gas price going to the moon. The last week, for instance, the gas price is rarely going below 50 gwei. We could observe it going as high as 100-200 gwei more often. Sometimes the transaction fees are literally astronomical.

• Could we say that EIP-1559 solved the problem of expensive transactions in the Ethereum network?
• No, it did not! Things are even worse now than before.

Ethereum Deflation, ETH Gets Burned

Starting from this August with almost every block in Ethereum Network some ETH coins are being burned. These coins before were included in miners’ rewards, now they just disappear from the network. According to Watch The Burn 362 715 ETH were created since the network upgrade and 156 740 ETH burned (almost one half of newly mined coins). So we could say that the emission of new ETH coins is now half as fast.

On one hand that is bad for the miners, as they get fewer rewards now. On the other hand, The Ethereum Foundation finally did something significant in recent times. The ETH investors are happy and the coin price goes up. Burned Ethereum causes coin deflation that could also help the coin price to grow. As you see ETH is now traded close to its all-time high price.

• Was EIP-1559 successful in terms of ETH Price?
• Most likely “Yes”!

Mining Pool Payment Model

Before “London” the mining pools were able to include in the blocks whatever transactions they wanted. 2Miners Ethereum mining pool was paying its miners without charging them any fees (We were paying the fees ourselves). All these transactions were included with the gas price of 1 gwei. After EIP-1559 that is not possible to do anymore. All transactions must be included only with the “market” gas price, not less. That means that the price of 1 transaction is now at least 50 times higher than before. Because of that, we have implemented the new payout model.

Now miners pay the transactions fees themselves when the payments from the pool are executed. They are able to choose the payout value though, not to spend too much on the network commissions. All the pool could do is to limit the fee setting the maximum gas price for each payment. In the beginning, we set the maximum gas price to 51 gwei so each payment doesn’t cost you more than $3. Ethereum network gas price was extremely high in recent days. The payouts were delayed. We always want to save your money and maintain the transaction price of about $3 but we were forced to increase the maximum gas price to 71 gwei. Now the payment costs $4.5 as maximum. However, we hope this is just temporary.

All the details could be found in New 2Miners Ethereum Pool Payout Model blog post.

• What has EIP-1559 changed?
• Now miners pay the transaction fees themselves ?

Ethereum Block Rewards

Before the fork, each block was bringing about 3 ETH to the pool on average. Now with ETH being burned the block rewards rarely go higher than 2.5 ETH. However, some exceptions to the rule still exist, which is good for miners. This month we have seen blocks as big as 28 ETH or 42 ETH.

The rewards of the miners are also quite high thanks to the MEV (Miner Extractable Value). This month we have seen MEV as high as 4 ETH per block or even 26 ETH per block. You could always check the MEV distribution on the Ethereum pool Blocks page.

• Are miners getting fewer rewards from ETH mining?
• Yes, they are, if we consider the rewards in ETH coins. However, if we check the USD rewards, they are still quite high, thanks to the recent ETH price spike.

Ethereum Pool New API and Statistics

2Miners Ethereum pool now has the detailed hashrate and share statistics. It is much easier now to identify the overclocking or internet connection problems.

The so-called reported hashrate is now also shown on the pool website. This is the hashrate you see in your mining software window. Please pay attention that not all the mining software sends these values to the pool. If you see this field empty that doesn’t mean that something doesn’t work properly, don’t worry. That just means that your mining software doesn’t send this data to the pool. Btw. all the ASIC devices are not sending reported hashrate to the pool.

The payout value was fixed to 0.05 ETH in the Ethereum pool before. Now every miner could set the payout threshold him- or herself. Any value could be chosen from as low as 0.005 ETH to 10 ETH. That could be done on the “Account Settings” tab of your statistics page. This action requires you to get your external IP address. This process could be tricky sometimes and we wrote a special post to help you How to Modify Payout Threshold on 2Miners Ethereum Pool: Detailed Guide

2Miners and 2CryptoCalc New Languages

2Miners Translation and Proofreading

We are fortunate to have such an awesome multinational community of miners on 2Miners.com. We have talked about this numerous times, but guys, this website is done thanks to your help and it wouldn’t exist without you. Thank you very much! You always support us in trouble and in joy. We really appreciate that and we always listen to your advice. Currently, we have more than 78 thousand miners in the pool. That is an amazing result.

This month we have fixed all the minor translation errors in many languages. We got 20 languages on 2Miners website. All the translations were done by professional translators (not google translate). Our miners have helped us to proofread the translations to many languages as well. We thank you all!

2CryptoCalc New Languages

Our mining calculator 2CryptoCalc.com is now available in Turkish and Spanish.

New Telegram Chats

We always had the international chat for English speakers. Finally, this month we added 2 new chats for local communities: Spanish and Turkish. These chats are not well organized yet. We are still searching for admins to help us to maintain them. As you know our chats are free of spam, advertising, “when moon” stupid talks etc.

Now we have these chats:

We welcome you to join at least one of them and participate in the pool life being a part of our amazing community.

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