I feel like I'm probably missing something basic but I'd love to understand what it is anyways.
The block reward for Ethereum is 2.91 in WTM. The commonly accepted value is 3, but I can see where 2.91 is from because there's a chance to mine the uncle and get the lowered reward. However, those two things combined undervalues the block reward, no? By all accounts, the inclusion of uncle rewards should NOT be considered a penalty - and the reason this isn't properly accounted for is because the block time with or without uncles is the same. What 2.91 really is is 'what is the average reward given that you mine a block or uncle?'. But that figure can't be simply multiplied into the block time.
Working at it from another way, BitInfoCharts -
https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ - has a breakdown of the block reward and the rewards over a 24h period. I can't say for sure that these are accurate, but there's a discrepancy of ~7k ETH between 2.91 or 3 * 86400 / block time (16-17k) and the 24h reward listed (23.5k at time of writing). 2400 of that is from fees (which are proving to be not insignificant), but then another 5k are from uncles. Because of this, the average block reward is in excess of 4. It makes sense to use this number (or the 24hr reward number), because we're looking to figure how much a certain hashrate is entitled to of all the eth rewarded given the network hashrate in a continuous function.
What am I missing?
