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Comment by BaseballPhysics | Hacker News Reader

I confess deep ignorance, here, but: Why would miners go along with this switch, given it's going to eliminate their profits? Why wouldn't they just fork the chain and continue to run a PoW version? What would force people to switch to the new PoS version?

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Ultimately it would be the community deciding to value the PoS fork as "real Ethereum". Something similar happened with ETH and Ethereum Classic, where classic is the unforked version that nobody cares about. A PoW fork will almost certainly exist, but that doesn't mean anyone has to use it and indeed some major players like Chainlink have already announced that they will not support a PoW fork

The market cap of ethereum classic is $6B with $2B in daily transactions. [0]

Not as big as “real ethereum” but I wouldn’t say no one cares.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-classic/

ETC has been pumped lately by former eth miners. I know because I've participated in this scam as a miner. ETC is one of the more volatile top 50 "coins" or "cypto", constantly being pumped and dumped, there is nothing actively being "developed" for it and there never will be. Just read the associated forums if you don't believe me, it's a pump and dump. Simple as.

Yes I've profited and no I won't give it to charity.

My opinion will never change, it's all a scam for pump and dumps schemes. There will never be a killer app attached to crypto. NEVER.

I've only lost a few hundred dollars in crypto, so my knowledge is limited :P, but if fees went below 1.29%, it would be cheaper than Visa merchant fees. Plus, they usually have some POS equipment fee. If the fees reduced enough to "make sense" for merchants, would that be good enough? Is this even possible? Or would Visa and the like adjust their fees to stay competitive?

Market cap doesn't mean anything when it comes to cryptocurrency, especially when it comes to shitcoins.

33% of the market cap changing hands each day sounds incredibly high. How does that happen?

Morons buy, miners sell.

Wash trading.

Classic is the one that didn't rollback transactions after the DAO scam right?

To be pedantic - mainnet Ethereum didn't 'roll-back' those hack transactions either. They are still there on etherscan if you want to look for them. The DAO hard fork introduced an unsigned transaction that moved the hacker's funds to a refund to a refund contract.

I found about this fairly recently. You seem knowledgeable about the topic. Can I ask you how did the community react to this/what do they think of this episode today? Because having full control over the coins is one of the big reasons why proponents are against regular banks and state-issued currency, yet here there was a clear breach of that control.

The developers don't have full control like that. They were only able to execute TheDAO hard fork because the community was very small at the time and was reasonably united behind the developers in carrying it out. It was something of a unicorn of circumstances that it was even possible because the funds were still locked up for a period of time and the hacker couldn't sell them, which meant there was only a single loser in the fork (the hacker), and a large community of winners or people who weren't directly effected either way. I personally think the refund stage of things should not have happened and the funds should have been burned instead, simply as a means to make sure the investors learned that risks of interacting with ethereum contracts were still very real. But that said I wasn't involved in crypto at all then, so, what do I know...

There was a huge debate over it, and in the end everybody got to run whichever version of the protocol they preferred. Both chains still exist today, but most of the ecosystem went with the one that made the change, so that one accumulated a lot more value.

>but most of the ecosystem went with the one that made the change

with the one they were told to by the de facto authority of the Ethereum world, FTFY

Correct.

The only fork that matters is the one Jeremy Allaire and Paolo Ardoino back.

There will be forks, but only the PoS one will have stablecoins with actual backing (e.g. any value at all): https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-p...

justin sun has said his "stable" coin usdd will support the pow fork

This made me chuckle. How anyone thinks Sun has any interest in anything besides enriching himself is delusional. Pro pump and dumper, thats all. He is an artist at the top of his game, I'll give him that!

USDD has a market cap of $745 million. By comparison, USDC is at $54 billion, USDT is $67 billion, and both are only supporting PoS.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-confi...

What an ass

I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc., wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value, similar to Ethereum Classic.

The world has changed a lot since then.

If the crypto crash has demonstrated anything, it's that there's an enormously incestuous relationship between these organizations. We have exchanges running mining operations, market participants investing in crypto mining companies, etc.

A massive economic implosion in the mining community is going to have knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem, and I can imagine market participants not wanting that to happen.

In the end I suspect you're right, but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving the status quo, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that a major PoW-based fork won't live on and divide the ecosystem.

> but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving the status quo

I also am sure the miners will keep the PoW based chain alive. But I have trouble finding reasons why users, developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain in the long term.

Another reason that I’ve seen brought up is that miners aren’t so coordinated. Somebody will have to actually fork the code, remove the difficulty bomb, change the magic parameters to not interfere with the PoS P2P network, etc. Then they have to get enough miners on board to use that particular fork. I think it’s a weak argument, but so far I haven’t seen any coordinated effort to continue mining after the Merge, so it could be a factor.

I think it boils down to a coordination/signalling problem again. Miners want to mine on the fork that they expect to succeed, but it will only succeed if it gets listed on exchanges, exchanges will only list it after it gains serious adoption, but it will only get serious adoption if miners agree on a fork, etc.

A historical example of this is SegWit2x in Bitcoin. It was originally proposed as a protocol upgrade, seemed to gain broad support, but miners and exchanges weren’t universally signalling that they would adopt it, and in the end everybody chickened out, and the change failed to be adopted.

> But I have trouble finding reasons why users, developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain in the long term.

I explained why: Cross-investment within the ecosystem.

If, I dunno, say Coinbase has a large investment in a mining operation (and I'm completely making this up, to be clear), they're not gonna want a move to PoS because it'll destroy that investment.

We know for a fact that there's a ton of this type of cross-investment in the ecosystem, as evidenced by the ripple effects from the collapse of organizations like 3AC. It's not at all unreasonable to conclude that similar relationships could create incentives to keep the miners solvent.

Fwiw, Coinbase and Kraken both hold large amounts of staked ETH for their customers, and skim off a percentage of the staking rewards. They won't be able to access those profits until about six months after the merge. So they both have an interest in the PoS chain doing well.

Anyone in the community who's been paying attention has been well aware that staking was coming. The staking network has been running in parallel since December 2020, and about 12% of the current supply of ETH is deposited on it.

From a user perspective it doesn't matter all that much whether it's PoW or PoS, right? I see equally little reason for a user to choose the PoS chain over the PoW one.

Usability is a little better on the PoS chain. Blocks come out every 12 seconds, instead of randomly with just an average time of 13 seconds.

The PoS chain takes less than a minute to converge to a state where it's very unlikely for your transaction to revert, and in 12 minutes your transaction is finalized, meaning it can't revert without destroying a large percentage of staked ETH.

PoS ETH will have the researcher and dev community building on top of it for another decade or so. There's a long list of further improvements in the roadmap, including major increases in scalability.

Most of the ecosystem is moving to PoS. The popular rollups will be connected to the PoS chain, not to PoW. Major stablecoins backed by off-chain assets have already said they'll be backing the PoS chain, not PoW. Etc.

You're right, if users disregard the difference in energy consumption there is little reason for them to choose the PoS chain over the PoW one. For devs and businesses the PoS one seems to matter though, I think it is likely the activity and innovation will be there in the end.

Also a user would have to make an effort to keep using the PoW one AFAIK.

They almost certainly will, as has happened before (see Ethereum classic) but the Ethereum foundation and thus most of the users will continue on to the proof of stake chain.

Nothing forces people to follow any set of consensus rules. There will be a fork that continues on with PoW, but most users will choose to follow PoS because that's where all the business and developer support is.

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