Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees as well as other inefficiencies. EIP-1559 is a recent, improved proposal that introduces a number of innovative features such as a dynamically adaptive base fee that is burned, instead of being paid to the miners. Despite intense interest in understanding its properties, several basic questions such as whether and under what conditions does this protocol self-stabilize have remained elusive thus far. We perform a thorough analysis of the resulting fee market dynamic mechanism via a combination of tools from game theory and dynamical systems. We start by providing bounds on the step-size of the base fee update rule that suffice for global convergence to equilibrium via Lyapunov arguments. In the negative direction, we show that for larger step-sizes instability and even formally chaotic behavior are possible under a wide range of settings. We complement these qualitative results with quantitative bounds on the resulting range of base fees. We conclude our analysis with a thorough experimental case study that corroborates our theoretical findings.

中文翻译：

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EIP-1559以太坊收费市场的动态分析

参与无许可的区块链会导致对系统资源的竞争，这需要通过费用加以控制。以太坊当前的收费机制是通过一次价格拍卖来实现的，这会导致不可预测的费用以及其他效率低下的情况。EIP-1559是一项经过改进的最新提案，引入了许多创新功能，例如动态适应的基本费用，这些费用被烧掉而不是支付给矿工。尽管人们对理解其性质非常感兴趣，但到目前为止，该协议是否能够稳定以及在什么条件下能够自我稳定等几个基本问​​题仍然难以捉摸。我们通过博弈论和动态系统的工具相结合，对由此产生的收费市场动态机制进行了全面的分析。我们首先提供基本费用更新规则的步长范围的界限，该界限足以通过Lyapunov参数使全球收敛到均衡。在负方向上，我们表明，对于较大的步长，在较大的设置范围内，可能会出现不稳定甚至均匀的混沌行为。我们将这些定性结果与基本费用的结果范围之间的定量界限相补充。我们以一个详尽的实验案例研究来结束我们的分析，该案例证实了我们的理论发现。