The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?
blog.ethereum.org
blog.ethereum.org
I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.
But there is a strong incentive to transition to PoS because it seems that the majority of stakeholders and participants in the Ethereum ecosystem agree with the upcoming switch to PoS.
It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
If any miner is dedicated to ethereum for some reason, I expect that they saved some of their block rewards to begin staking, and the smart ones are likely already staking on the beacon chain.
I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
> I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
I really hope so. It's just such a shame that board makers made mining specific boards without display outputs. What a waste for the secondary market.
If my understanding of the crypto economics is right, no. The token price drives the mining effort, not the other way around. People buy these tokens because other people are willing to trade at that price, not because of the mining power within. Having more hash power does nothing for me as an owner of a token. The auto-scaling of the difficulty level is there to make attacks more expensive as the token value increases, it maintains the cost/benefit balance out of whack for any attacker. Only difference is slightly longer block mining time. Overall, nothing a normal user would feel.
Some people claim the other way, but I think they simply misunderstand the incentives. There was news that the Kazakstan crackdown led to the Bitcoin slump at some point, but that is, IMO, wrong, and they mistook some other events as causation. (in the same period, the stock market was also down).
GPU mining will still be a thing, but there simply will not be enough value to go around and the mining will crater until profits will be sustainable again. Extra mining gear will be sold. I maintain my prediction, and am really willing to put money where my mouth is.
I checked whattomine a few days ago and compared the hash rates of each coin. To make it simpler to compare, I converted it into RTX3080 equivalents. With this measure the hash rate for Ethereum was equivalent to mining with a bit shy of 10 million RTX3080s.
Ethereum Classic, which is the second biggest coin listed on whattomine, had a hash rate equivalent to about 263000 RTX3080s. I.e. Ethereum has 37 times more miners than Classic, and if they all moved to Classic the revenue would be slashed to 1/38 of what it is now while everybody would incur the same costs as now.
Ravencoin is the second biggest mineable coin (Monero isn't profitable to mine even now, so it does not matter) and Ethereum is 83 times bigger than Ravencoin.
It turns out Ethereum is more than 16 times bigger than every other coin listed on whattomine combined.
The remaining fork seems to have considerably less activity now.
The current fork of eth is programmed to kill itself sometime next year. This means even if miners want to continue mining they must prepare and propogate their own forked software. There is no "do nothing" default option.
With this safeguard in place, to change the roadmap, they need to gain support of users at large, by getting them to actively switch to their fork, just as the roadmap supporters need to do.
Therefore, supporters of change and statis are on equal footing, ensuring that the system isn't biased toward stasis even when the roadmap calls for change.
To summarize, the difficulty bomb encodes the roadmap's plan to implement a change in the protocol, into the protocol, graduating the plan from having mere social consensus, which requires active participation to enforce, to having a technical one, which is autonomously enforced.
Hence: the very definition of a fork, that is some blocks seen as valid by some faction and seen as invalid by others.
The real mechanism is that all the major players can’t accept two forks and maintain sanity. For example, Circle will have to choose which chain has a $1 peg for their USDC reserves, and they will certainly choose the chain supported by the core devs and the one the rest of the major players are selecting as well.
That leaves the rebel chain in a very compromised position. With the peg being removed many defi protocols would be in an exploitable state. Removing all those abandoned and compromised services ends up with little reason for anyone to use the chain.
To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users.
Users will have funds on both chains, they can just wait it out.
Firstly emergent consensus is a big part of decentralized systems. Core providers convening on a decision and supporting it is perfectly healthy. That’s quite different than a CEO saying things will be X way and everyone just having to accept it.
Additionally, my point is that people WILL likely try to have a contentious chain (as is their right in a decentralized project), but due to the maturity of Ethereum the technical consequences are much more impactful than the BTC/BCH scenario.
More decentra-lies and Ethereum pumping each other's, VCs and investors bags.
There won't really be much reason for people to use 1.0 to execute smart contracts*. There really isn't much for miners to do besides eventually cashing out and becoming a validator. Eventually when "the merge happens" Eth 1.0 will be automatically converted to 2.0. This won't be for a few years (but PoS will launch this year)
*The 1.0 network supposedly uses 1000x times the energy of the 2.0 one to execute a smart contract and would obviously be more expensive to work with, so people will probably avoid using 1.0 as soon as possible. Less use means lower gas fees means lower payouts for miners, who already had payouts reduced by EIP 1559, and will likely have payouts reduced once more. So miners will see a slow death.
Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Anyone can fork the code at any time and keep mining. Many have. ETC and ELLA are a couple examples. Ethereum Genysys is a recent project in response to the PoS move.
ETH 2.0 was always just a series of upgrades. “The merge” which will end PoW mining is expected to go live between March 30th and June sometime at the latest. Code is expected to be complete in February sometime. Testing is well underway already.
Everyone doesn't have to agree, just the exchanges. If the rebel chain isn't listed on exchanges then it's effectively worth zero and it will wither away.
Unless the value never really was tied to the energy use in the first place, which isn't a great story for folks who want to treat the coins as anything other than speculative assets.
Everyone doesn't have to agree. There will be miners that attempt a fork to keep their position. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how this stuff is supposed to work. But the fact that PoS has been on the roadmap since the beginning takes away legitimacy from any claim that the PoS transition is illegitimate. The fact that Ethereum Classic exists and is a PoW version of ethereum and intends to stay that way will take that even further. There will probably continue to be forks of ethereum, just like there have always been. Anyone can fork an open source codebase and maintain it, anyone can use the software to spin up a consensus network, anyone can use prior state as a starting point. Chain forks are a social thing not a technical thing, game theory not withstanding, that's how nakamoto consensus and FOSS is supposed to work.
It's the community - people who decide which "fork" to follow.
Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
"Decentralization" in crypto is a myth.
That economic activity consists of all the smart contract/web3/whatever you want to call startups that are currently building solutions based on the main Ethereum network and the investors/traders/opportunists backing them by speculating on the value of their coins/NFTs/etc or the value of their solutions.
Most of those companies will probably benefit from the improved scalability and reduced cost associated with POS; or even require it to be viable at all. At least I would expect this to be true for the ones with some ambition to actually deliver working products; which are probably also the ones with the most investor backing. Of course, many more serious applications switched to alternate blockchains because of the scaling issues with POW might now consider switching back. And additionally, improved scale associated with POS might bring some new companies with investors as well. So, I would advice people to just follow the money when speculating on the future value of any fork.
I suspect that won't stop anyone from creating that fork and you should actually anticipate multiple parties doing this and claiming to be the one true fork with varying degrees of credibility to trick people into buying some of their forked ETH. That's just how pump and dumps work and there are plenty of opportunists active to make that happen. And of course a fork means there are plenty of people not interested in the fork that would end up selling their forked eth so they can buy some more actual eth. Lots of people selling and not a lot of people with a good reason to buy means forked eth is not going to be worth a lot. Miners are going to run whatever has the highest yield. That probably is not going to be a forked Ethereum. Probably it's more lucrative to switch to some other POW blockchain (doge, bitcoin, etc.) if you have any serious amount of hardware.
Disclaimer: I don't hold any Eth and am not really into crypto investing. Ironically, that makes me a more reliable source of information because I have no stake in this game.
As many mentioned here, you need to disable the Difficulty Bomb. But it is not the bigger problem actually, maybe it's even the simplest one.
What you also need:
- Organized community. I.e., some places to communicate. That's not easy. And be aware of ETH-maximalists that will come to trash it.
- Wallet that works out of the box. Not that Metamask, which is the most popular wallet in ETH, will never agree to support fork like it never agreed to support ETC.
- Block Explorer. People need to see their balance, check transaction status, exchanges need to point to that explorer as proof, etc.
- Miners would risk losing all their money if the chain eventually fails. Most miners are not so invested.
- Replay Protections to separate balances in forks. That's not easy. I mean, we have EIP-155, which was proposed by Ethereum Foundation, but it ensures that EIP-155 kind of replay protection would hurt forks because all of the software would need to be fixed for it. I.e., it's not a solution "out of the box", not user friendly.
- Exchanges. Maybe not so hard now. But without proper Replay Protection in place, some exchanges would lose their funds and would actively fight new forks to avoid liability.
- Public API endpoint. Like Infura. Because nobody runs its own node.
My claim was that the lower ongoing expense of staking is compensated by lower rewards, so that both systems have similar profit for similar capital outlay. In setups where mining expense is almost zero, the higher rewards of mining give it much more seignorage than proof of stake.
4,300 or so FDIC insured banks.
But um I'm not sure it's so different from Ethereum, where a mining node must implement the protocol or else be unable to participate.
But you do need permission, which is implicitly conferred by following the protocol. It's really quite similar to traditional banks, it's just that the protocol is digital/mathematical rather than legal.
What it sounds like you are suggesting is that cryptocurrencies should be equitable: everyone should have the same rights to own part of the blockchain. This isn't necessary for a decentralized, trustless, distributed transaction ledger, nor is it likely ideal. What would be the value or utility of a ledger which absolutely anyone could add to at anytime for any reason? You would need to solve 2 problems: 1) distributing the tokens fairly and evenly among every person living and yet to live, and 2) distributing henceforth unfathomably performant supercomputers to all of these token-holders-jus-sanguinis. Any analysis of either of these would very quickly approach insurmountable problems.
There are fundamental constraints to computers and computer networks that have to be addressed in order for these technologies to exist. They preclude any sort of utopian currency of heaven where everyone wins, just by the nature of our physical universe and today's understanding of computation.
Concentration of ownership means a few entities own most of the ETH. Up to a point (where one entity owns all the ETH, and therfore ETHUSD goes to zero), who cares, as long as there are still enough token in circulation to conduct business?
Decentralization OTOH means that no one can prevent me from executing a transaction on the chain.
With POW, these two things are basically unrelated: concentration can be arbitrarily high, I can still transact.
However, IIUC, with the aptly named POS, concentration of ownership brings concentration of voting power and therefore large holders become theoretically capable of censoring transactions ... not great.
And I don't believe there is any mechanism in place to prevent ownership - and therefore voting power - to reach arbitrarily large levels.
Which, yes, this seems like it would help decrease confusion. But good lord, the blockchain infosphere is an aggressively adversarial one!
It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...)
But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.
For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.
In the even older days, before the Linux kernel started probing hardware in parallel to speed up the boot process, this wouldn't vary depending on timing; for a given kernel version, the order would always be the same. Of course, the order could change when you updated your kernel, either because it had a new driver which was probed earlier, or because the probing order for the PCI bus changed to the opposite order (IIRC, that actually did happen). And of course, having the network drivers as kernel modules makes it much harder to preserve a deterministic probing order; but back in these days, it was much more common to carefully customize each machine's kernel to have as built-in drivers precisely the set corresponding to the hardware present on a given machine or fleet of machines, carrying that customization over for each new kernel release ("make oldconfig"); kernel modules would be relegated to things like filesystems which you might need only once in a while, and they would be unloaded when no longer in use (memory was precious).
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Predictabl...
On systems that historically have not used this, it was possible for devices to be non-deterministically assigned to eth0, wlan0, etc. -- and while you could say "just pick a guaranteed order", that violates the principle of least surprise. Predictable device naming is the same, everywhere, on the same hardware.
You can still set aliases if you're more comfortable with that, but this is a really sane default.
We don't all have fleets of machines, of course, and systemd has functionality for disambiguation in a single-system environment where interfaces might appear and disappear sometimes. udev also has a mode where the interface is automatically named after its MAC rather than its physical location. It's not on by default on any Linux distro I know of, but it's just a flag IIRC.
But don't worry - those of such a soberly considered persuasion can just use the configuration management they've definitely built and that necessitates such assumptions as "there's always an eth0" to bring it back.
If you only have one: en-tab.
Funny you should say that, because on one of my computers, the NIC's "predictable" name is just "p1p1" for some reason.
If you only have one NIC at all, 'tab' will do it too. ;)
But also, like, if you have a weirdo computer, you can also fix the weirdo and keep on trucking.
ls -d /sys/class/net/en*|head -1The title of the post is literally "The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?"
I get what's happening, my question was about the success of the renaming process.
I think some people will still use the phrase ETH2 until the Merge this summer, since it's been around for a while. But then I suspect it will fade away after the Merge. And the next big upgrade after that is Sharding, which is easy enough to say and describe by itself.
If you were to not use a CEX, your ETH would be gone until the upgrade is finished, so exchanges make that a bit less harsh with their eth2 tokens and allow you to still do stuff with it
Yeah but said bomb just got reset every time...
*No, I'm not putting in any money that I can't afford to lose, what are you, crazy? :)
I'm 99% sure that any features being built on top of blockchains are features designed to impress and confuse people that don't realize that it's a scam.
And this is coming from a very pro-crypto person, non-btc maxi etc, type of person.
Looks like the rewards and fees go back to stakers. Sure, there's a big quiet wallet, but that's nearly all of them.
- What have they changed to keep fees lower? Is it just a factor of fewer users (Ethereum's gas fees are a result of the adoption of Ethereum, essentially it's a victim of its own success)
- Is it remaining proof of work? Will it also eventually need to transition to PoS if and when it reaches Ethereum-level popularity / congestion?
- Is it implementing sharding?
- How will it compete with Ethereum's fairly significant decentralisation? (one of the aspects of Ethereum that makes it an unlikely target of the SEC)
Fundamentally, how intimately do Pulsechain's developers understand Ethereum in order to make a better version?
(I've heard the 'scam' and Hex used together frequently, although admittedly that's on Reddit and Youtube, and in the cryptocurrency-sphere pretty much every project gets used together frequently with the word 'scam' - to such an extent that "assume scam" is probably sage advice).
FWIW, I'm strongly convinced that Richard Heart is not a scammer, inasmuch as I do believe his intent is not to make himself rich (which I believe he already is) but to "make the best cryptocurrency." Whether it works or ends up that way is, of course, another story. Dogecoin being perhaps the best example of "what the creator wants might not matter."
(Compare to Elon Musk, who is obviously screwing around with crypto to make himself richer.)
Lower gas fees will come some scaling changes, not consensus changes. Layer 2 and sharding.
Sorry new to crypto.
Can someone please let me know ?