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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

If you follow the Ethereum core developers on Twitter you can track the progress. Current status is (1) people have locked ~$30-40B worth of Ethereum into the proof of stake chain, money which can't be retrieved until the merge (2) the Ethereum team has a merged testnet running on which all the different client developer teams are participating. They're just hunting for edge case bugs now, too much money at stake to have anything go wrong with the merge.

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This is a part of crypto I do not fully grasp. How much power do the developers vs the miners have over the direction of the project?

What happens if the devs go crazy and decide to eg. Ban transactions smaller than $1M worth of coins in code.

Someone made the point the other day that miners might not fancy this PoS change because they’re heavily invested in equipment.

This is no different from PHP, Python, C++, Linux, etc.

There are many checks and balances to all successful open-source projects.

And when that fails you can always fork it.

Miners already put up a fuss over some of preparatory changes for PoS and definitely don't like having to give up mining. They're free to run a parallel Ethereum chain of their own (which has already happened, most prominently with Ethereum Classic - $ETC). Everyone will have parallel balances on both chains from the point of departure. The cultural weight is with the developers however and all of the popular apps will use the proof of stake chain instead of whatever forks emerge from grumpy miners.

But doesn’t this power dynamic - the fact that there is a miners committee somehow talking to a devs committee -beat the purpose of decentralization (no single decision-maker)?

Won’t this become politicized eventually and we’ll end up with a Central Bank-like structure? Imagine some elected dev going on CNBC to tell us they need to mint more coins.

You still need to make decisions in a decentralized system, I don't really see what alternative you're imagining that's even more decentralized than "start a parallel chain if you dislike it, let people vote with their feet". You can't really start a parallel USD to see if people like your monetary policy better.

And, obviously, this is political. Miners make a lot of money off the status quo, devs want to reduce the energy/environmental impact of their chain. Proof of stake takes away a moat that miners have built around their operation (now anyone with 32eth can be a validator). There's no way out of that conflict of interests without some degree of politics.

The miners have the actual power, but want to avoid a situation where they are directly fighting against Buterin and the developers, because that would cause a crisis and tank the value of ETH and hence their income going forward. A hard fork in this situation (developers update protocol with POS, miners keep using existing version) would start with the miners having the biggest chain by far, but the new POS chain would be followed by a large part of non-miners immediately, and grow from there over time, eventually becoming the largest chain.

So miners have to make a cost-benefit analysis as to how much control they can exercise while not causing a hard fork as well as what the consequences of causing a hard fork would be. Likely right now they're using accrued coins to prime their stake in PoS rather than directly working against it - delay helps them here.

Miners have some power in PoW chains. If a chain wants to move to PoS, miners have zero power. Ethereum's "The Merge" plan is a great example. EIP-1559 was meant to reduce miners' profits, and miners was not happy about the prospect. They've attempted to organize to demonstrate that they also have something to say in the discussion. Buterin has come out with a blogpost detailing how the chain can move to PoS way sooner than initially planned. Plan involves ways of making sure that miners can't do nothing to prevent the transition.

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