update issuance page

[jmcook1186]

Description

updates ETH issuance page for post-merge world.

Related Issue

#7075
#7873

[gatsby-cloud]

✅ ethereum-org-website-dev deploy preview ready

• Deploy preview
• Build logs · 17m build time

[SebastianSupreme]

There's a typo in line 20 of your suggested text.
Change it to "approximately".

[wackerow]

I'm personally not sure about making such a large swing in the structure of this content and would love to hear what others think as well.
I know we're in a post-merge world, but this page is directly under upgrades/merge/issuance and titled How The Merge impacts ETH supply—I would advocate for us keeping more of a comparison to the numbers from PoW.

Just peeking at the ToC structure from before (right) to after (this PR, left), I worry we've lost some valuable content that helps break down actually how much changed from before the merge to now.

I guess in short, personally didn't see this being such a large overhaul, but maybe I'm just partial so would love to hear from others.

[wackerow]

Being a tldr section, my preference would be to keep some numbers for daily issuance under PoS available here, currently ~1700 ETH/day... I think it's helpful for people just looking for some simple numbers.

[jmcook1186]

idk I removed it implies the daily issuance is a fixed number - I find this to be misleading - its dependent upon N active validators and their performance. The original and your comment already vary by 100ETH/day.
I guess its ok with appropriate caveats, but I preferred the takeaway being a) issuance is variable, b) its about 1/10th what it was before merge.

[minimalsm]

The ideal scenario here would be live numbers. Maybe a big numbers component + Dune API could be used in the future to solve this? Three numbers: an average PoW issuance at some point close to The Merge (maybe the month leading up to it?), previous days' PoS issuance, and percentage reduction.

As much as I dislike seeing things written this way, the trade-off here might be something like: "The total issuance is approximately 90% smaller now than it was pre-merge (~1700ETH as of October 2022)."

What do you think @jmcook1186 @wackerow?

[jmcook1186]

fine by me

[minimalsm]

I know we're in a post-merge world, but this page is directly under upgrades/merge/issuance and titled How The Merge impacts ETH supply—I would advocate for us keeping more of a comparison to the numbers from PoW.

We'll probably move this page out of here (/merge/) eventually and under a broader category of Ethereum's monetary policy, but I'd be okay with re-adding some additional details.

Just peeking at the ToC structure from before (right) to after (this PR, left), I worry we've lost some valuable content that helps break down actually how much changed from before the merge to now.

I guess in short, personally didn't see this being such a large overhaul, but maybe I'm just partial so would love to hear from others.

Do you agree that the biggest value here was the comparison of the issuance/inflation numbers of pre/post-merge, or is it something else?

I.e. I don't think we need to explain details of how issuance worked (block fees, tips, etc), but I do see the value of keeping comparative numbers (inflation rate, daily issuance), at least for now. Not a strong take, but I'm picturing a short section (PoW vs PoS: A comparison in numbers) that throws out the numbers (could we use a table?) to give people a broad tl;dr overview—similar to what we had before, but concise and consolidated.

Other than that, I'm inclined to agree with Joseph's take here on making this page more focused on the here and now.

If you feel strongly otherwise (i.e. we should always explain how PoW issuance worked as a historical artefact), then maybe one option would be to break this into two pages (at some point):

1. Issuance on Ethereum (/issuance/) — concerned with ETH issuance today and how it affects the overall supply
2. Issuance under proof-of-work (/issuance/proof-of-work/) — concerned with how things used to be, and comparisons of the old and the new

[minimalsm]

Do we need this heading? If we've got rid of execution layer issuance then we no longer have a point of comparison 🤔

[wackerow]

I am not against updating this page to remove the comparisons to proof-of-work, but right now I we're kinda mixing the topics.

The current outline for this page is as follows:

# How The Merge impacts ETH supply
## Issuance
## Issuance estimates
## Further reading

..and is located at /upgrades/merge/issuance/

If we're going to remove most of the comparisons to PoW, then I think the title here is misleading and needs to be changed (along with the path).

I want to get this all updated and completed as well, but I think the current page (comparing the loose numbers surrounding a comparison of pre-merge and post-merge) is still helpful... and if we want to have a more focused page that does not compare to PoW, we can do that, but I think we should also try to expand the outline structure of the page a bit to provide some more details. I don't think removing details is a good approach here for the sake of simplicity.

@samajammin and others, curious your take on this.

[samajammin]

I agree with @wackerow's comment here:

I'm personally not sure about making such a large swing in the structure of this content and would love to hear what others think as well.
I know we're in a post-merge world, but this page is directly under upgrades/merge/issuance and titled How The Merge impacts ETH supply—I would advocate for us keeping more of a comparison to the numbers from PoW.

To me the goal of this page is to explain ETH issuance in the context of pre & post Merge, so explaining the before & after is useful here. I wouldn't delete most of the content you did in this PR @jmcook1186.

If we want to create a more general resouce on "ETH issuance" (which I think is a great idea!) then I would advocate for creating a subpage under ethereum.org/eth/ (e.g. ethereum.org/eth/issuance).

[veridelisi]

Could we add the following mathematical calculations?

There are (60/12)x60x24 = 7200 block per day

Each block targets 15x10^6 gas. 16 gwei is 16x10^-9 ether.
Therefore, the amount of ether burned each day at a 16 gwei gas price is
7200x16x(10^-9)x15x10^6 = around 1700 ETH.

thanks a**elowsson**

[wackerow]

Thanks for the suggestion @veridelisi!

The only adjustment I would make to this would be that we'd want to be solving for the $gwei$ amount based on the current ETH issuance per day (~1700), so we can re-write as such:

$$ 7200 blocks/day * 15(10^6) gas/block * Y gwei/gas * 1 ETH/ 10^9 gwei == 1700 ETH/day $$

Solving for $Y$:

$$ Y = (1700(10^9)) / (7200 * 15(10^6)) = (1700(10^3)/(7200 * 15)) = 15.74 gwei $$

Or $16 gwei$ when accounting for significant digits (only 2 here).

Another way to rearrange this last step would be to replace $1700$ with a variable, say $X$ that represents the daily ETH issuance, and to simplify the rest to:

$$ Y = (X(10^3)/(7200 * 15)) = X / 108 $$

or simply $f(X) = X/108$ where $X$ is daily ETH issuance.

So, for example, if $X$ (daily ETH issuance) rises to 1800 based on total ETH staked, $f(X)$ (gwei required to offset all of the issuance) would then be $17 gwei$ (using 2 significant digits)

---

Working on an update to this and will add a section about this.

[wackerow]

Just put up PR #8329 as a potential substitute for this PR, which leaves the page at its current path location of /upgrades/merge/issuance and intentionally keeps the comparison to pre-merge PoW for users to reference. Commented the same in the PR description, but I think we should table this PR for now and circle back in time to build out a new page nested under the /eth path for something that cuts out the pre-merge comparison and only focuses on the state of the network today/moving forward.

[corwintines]

Closing in favor of: #8329

@wackerow will create a new issue to capture some work from this.