“The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history | Hacker News Reader

“The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history

arstechnica.com

33 pointsbpierre15 comments

> "one coin, one vote."

who has the gold makes the rules.

Suppose we all agree that "One citizen, one vote" is better and ought to be implemented.

"One coin, one vote" is relatively easy to implement, since the blockchain intrinsically knows how many coins each address has.

To implement "One citizen, one vote" you need to know who's a unique citizen. How do you code that into a blockchain? [1]

[1] The usual approach is an oracle, where you just say "Organization X issues every person a cryptographically signed certificate, and Organization X pinky promises to issue exactly one certificate to each individual person." This completely centralizes the governance into Organization X, since there's no technical means to check or enforce the pinky promise.

You can't. It's the oracle problem. These systems are doomed to be oligarchies.

The approach that is taken by Proof of Humanity (and by extension Kleros Court) is to have an adversarial process where anyone can claim to be a unique human & submit evidence, which can then be vouched or challenged by anyone else registered in the system. A challenge is adjudicated by a "jury" of other registered users. There's an economic component as well: you must make a deposit to create a profile or promote a challenge, which you lose if you lose the adjudication. There's even an ERC standard process for adjudication, ERC 792. Surely not foolproof, but more consistent with the distributed ideals than an oracle.

https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer/

I appreciate that you honestly tried to answer this question, but it's not a viable solution.

There would be no way to detect duplicate humans in the system. You also wouldn't be able to prevent someone farming other people's "identity" in 3rd world countries to effectively "buy" their vote.

It's better than bitcoin's "one asic clock cycle - one vote".

The people who direct the system are those who have the most invested in it.

It's like having shares in a company.

If you don't like it, you can use a different coin. There's no monopoly on crypto.

Second biggest. Rolling back a supposedly "immutable" blockchain beats that by a million

You can go use Ethereum classic mate, it has always been a choice

If the majority of the network agrees to roll something back, that's a feature, not a bug.

Proof-of-stake is like AI and fusion power: always around the corner, but never arrives. Vaporware. The etherium devs have repeatedly set cutover dates, then pushed it back for years. Do they uncover more issues and corner cases that they have to deal with each time, or are they simply uncomfortable with a change of this magnitude?

maybe you should read the article before embarrassing yourself?

Bet on your belief; you could make a lot of money: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

Not really "a lot" it seems. If you look at the price for "No merge by January 1st" it shows $0.03, which seems promising, but you can only buy like $3 worth of contracts at that price. If you try to buy $1000 worth, your average price shoots up to $0.52! Not sure if this is just a particularly thin market, or whether there's not actually a deep well on confidence that the merge is coming soon, or what.

It's just an extremely thin market I believe. The October one seems a bit better, you can throw a couple hundred at reasonable prices.

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