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Comment by ypeterholmes | Hacker News Reader

Important paper here because almost all the next gen blockchains will be using POS. Ethereum is trying to switch mid-flight (yikes) but others like Cardano have incorporated it foundationally.

If you're a no-coiner or Bitcoin maximalist, none of this really matters. But if you accept the premise that the future of financial infrastructure is moving towards decentralized, blockchain based systems, then a secure, scalable, performant, and energy efficient approach like this is pretty darn awesome.

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Ethereum's PoS is a completely new chain that's currently running in parallel. After watching it run in production for about a year they'll merge in the old chain.

What is running in parallel is just a heartbeat chain that doesn't do anything of what ETH1 does (no EVM).

It will be much longer than a year. 2-3, at best.

Yes but what's running now is the hard part. Fundamentally, once you have reliable consensus, the data you reach consensus on is just an extra hash in each block.

There's software engineering to merge the client software, but from a research perspective it's not a big deal at all.

The hard part? Oh god no. Not even close. Have you seen V's roadmap? [0]

One major hard part, imho, is the zkSNARKs. Nobody is talking about the fact that they are hardware dependent because they are so computationally expensive. My guess right now is that we're going to need (or they will get developed some how)... ASIC's. Talk about kicking the puck down the road.

The other hard part is that this is a decentralized development project managed by humans. What happens when someone wants to flip the switch on billions of value? The ProgPoW debate proved how contentious decisions turn into a total clusterf*ck. You want to trust your funds to that?

Finally, the best one. There is insane pressure to rush eth2 out now that billions of value is locked up. 737 max levels of pressure.

I love ETH and ETH2. More than anything I want to see it happen. I'm just in the camp that we should have worked on ETH 1.5 first.

[0] https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540...

Yes I've seen the roadmap. Pay attention to the arrows; there are just two items before the merge, both partly complete. Neither involves zksnarks, which are only mentioned in the roadmap under "advanced research," which is meant to follow the full ETH2 rollout. (However, zksnark-based layer-2 systems are in production already.)

I'm not worried about the social aspects at all, but in the context of an Ouroboros discussion I don't really want to get into a broad Ethereum debate.

> Ethereum is trying to switch mid-flight (yikes) but others like Cardano have incorporated it foundationally.

Why yikes? If its a legacy transition, with a flight plan and testing, then it should be fine.

Well, as one example, what happens to all the miners and their infrastructure? Seems like they get hung out to dry.

Second, the technical complexity involved seems challenging. I'm not a dev, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but making substantial core changes on a live, decentralized system running all sort of layer two infrastructure seems really dicey.

As a very large GPU miner, I'm excited for ETH2. The hardware investment can be sold off, used for other chains (with ETH1 gone, another chain will take its place as the dominant GPU chain), there is also all the upcoming fields of ai/ml/rendering/gaming and other computationally intensive workloads.

This is really the beauty of ethash being asic resistant and gpu friendly. I have so much computational power built up, that someone will always be available to buy it. It isn't e-waste. We already run on older generation GPU's because they are higher ROI, which proves that they have useful life, even as they age.

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