Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Gas fees don't materially change under Proof of Stake. It's a common misconception that The Merge reduces fees (it does not).

View on HN

So what is the point of high fees under proof of stake? Before it was to reward the miners. Who exactly is being rewarded high fees once it changes and for what purpose?

If the costs to run a validator are too expensive or need too many resources then you just end up promoting a centralized solution.

The point of fees isn't primarily to reward the miners. That's what the block reward is for. Under PoS validators will still get a block reward, although a lower one (90% less).

The fees are to mitigate spam attacks. You can only fit that many transactions in a block. Fees are bids to be included in a block. The higher the fee, the earlier your transaction gets included. Fees on Ethereum are high, because a lot of people want to use it.

To add: in addition to fees being used to thwart spam, EIP-1559 introduced a mechanism where these fees (not the block reward of course) are burned. One way to think of it is almost like a "stock buyback" from the Ethereum network: by reducing the supply, your ETH is worth more.

Thus, between EIP-1559 (burns base fees) and The Merge's move to Proof of Stake (a dramatically reduced block reward), there's very little net-new ETH being introduced into the system.

Check out: https://ultrasound.money

> If the costs to run a validator are too expensive or need too many resources then you just end up promoting a centralized solution.

If I recall correctly, the current number (32) was picked somewhat arbitrarily because, at least at the time, it was "enough" without being "too much" (in terms of incentives, skin in the game, and penalties for bad behavior).

I'd have to use a Googly device to find the price of Ether at the time when this decision was made, but I'm pretty sure it was a lot less than it was now. And once it'd been put into effect, it's difficult (e.g. unfair) to change it.

Longer-term, it likely won't remain so high, especially as the price of ETH appreciates. I believe I recall seeing discussions of changing this number in the future, but it's not the nearest-term priority.

For now, there are decent options around staking pools. Lido is the elephant in the room, but more and more people have been moving to Rocket Pool because it better promotes decentralization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com