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Comment by beachtaxidriver | Hacker News Reader

None. It didn't affect the number of miners.

That's like saying "my air conditioner doesn't affect the number of power plants in the city". It's only true for a very narrow view of cause-effect relationships.

The author paid Ethereum fees to run snake on the world's crappiest "global supercomputer" (as they like to call it). Those fees then support miners who consume energy and semiconductor resources that could have been spent on something more useful.

Yes, the gas fees support the miners directly. Of course, the miners are also financed via the block rewards; the cause-effect relationship is much more spurious there; individual transactors can only be considered responsible for that part of the energy output in so far as their actions cause an increase in the price of ETH, for example by causing ETH to be desirable.

Arguably, a sell-transaction of ETH could be energy-positive in that it causes downward-pressure on the ETH price.

This also means that buying ETH on an exchange can be considered as contributing to the energy consumption of the network.

The fees the miners earn are currently a small part of their revenue:

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereu...

> Arguably, a sell-transaction of ETH could be energy-positive in that it causes downward-pressure on the ETH price.

Interesting thought, but mining profit margins are rather thick right now in most parts of the world (because the supply of miners is a little inelastic--mining equipment doesn't just poof into existence as the price rises). So I don't think anyone is turning miners on or off in response to small movements in the price right now.

Also, if you bought and then sold that would seem like a wash. Or worse, since you temporarily raised the price and therefor incentivized mining for that time.

This is incorrect. Ethereum gas fees are burned, they don't go to miners.

Nah miners are still collecting part of the fee

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559

Yeah, my bad for being imprecise. The base fee is burned and you can pay a bribe for priority, but from a supply and demand perspective, does that affect miner supply? It's the same number of blocks and hashes and miners regardless of excess gas spent. I think it's more like you're not paying to play snake specifically, you're paying miners not to do what they were going to do anyway.

How could it not affect miner supply? The block reward directly affects how much equipment miners buy for the future, and if it fluctuates enough it can also affect how loaded they keep their existing equipment.

I'm probably wrong.

Driving up gas fees increases the number of miners who find it profitable to operate their rigs, no?

Yes but less than before (since eip1559 part of the fee is burned instead) so the relationship is sublinear.

I see, that's interesting!

I guess there's another causal chain, which is 'buying ETH to pay gas fees -> price of ETH goes up -> value of block reward to miners goes up -> more miners find it profitable to operate rigs'. I wonder how strong that effect is.

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