Mainnet Merge Announcement
blog.ethereum.org
blog.ethereum.org
Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.
edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this is a very small number of people and is mostly just the ethereum foundation.
edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers, not validators.
https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.
But what if most of the stakers collude to double spend tokens? My understanding is that there is an additional layer of validators that have the power to force them to give up their stake as a penalty. Hence "proof of stake". And that there are very few validators. And it's really just the ethereum foundation.
Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic enforcement in a network built around economic incentives. What if the altruistic slashers are simply paid money to turn off their nodes?
This model assumes that 1/n is honest. This is almost as safe as it gets.
[1] https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
> However, home stakers are advised not to run a slasher on personal hardware, as it is a tremendously resource-hungry process. Slasher is very heavy on database access and disk usage, and the slasher.db will quickly grow to 1TB or more when running on mainnet.
I’m pretty sure hardware costs will always be a rounding error compared to the $50k that “home stakers” need if they want to run their own validator.
There’s no one gate keeping your ability to become a slasher as long as you run a validator, and there’s no centralized entity deciding whether or not to slash someone’s stake.
The difference is that proof of work automatically tends to centralisation due to its economy of scale: it's cheaper to add one more miner to your pool if you already have a big mining operation, but staking 1 eth is always staking 1 eth.
Both PoS and PoW have the problem where you can buy out the majority if you have the power to do so.
If I have 100 GPUs and I buy one more can't I turn around and say "But buying one more GPU is just buying one more GPU"? Even if your point is that electricity bills are lower per additional GPU, surely humans discount the value of incremental money after some point so for those with lots of eth incremental eth isn't worth as much?
It’s the same price to add 1 eth when you own 100 eth as when you own 1 eth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
Start here.
“The threat of a 51% attack still exists on proof-of-stake as it does on proof-of-work, but it's even riskier for the attackers. A attacker would need 51% of the staked ETH (about $15,000,000,000 USD).”
The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests?
What happens if you try to send trillions of invalid transactions in any sensible chain?
The thing here is that the validators don't need to be honest when responding to a slasher report.
Also, how can there be a fee to trying to send an invalid transaction? Such a fee would have to be sent as part of a transaction, yes? Isn’t it just that someone spamming the network gets dropped from the gossip protocol stuff?
The rest is game theory. Dishonest validators win the game being dishonest if they are over 2/3 of the validator set. Then they can enforce their bad blocks into everyone else. Otherwise they get slashed or suffer other kind of penalties (inactivity leak if they manage to prevent the network from reaching consensus for a while).
So if you manage to bribe or buy 2/3 of the staked ETH then you can attack the network. There is of course a very significant economic cost to it. More interestingly at that point you are strongly aligned with the network itself as you represent a huge % of its value so you would be attacking yourself in a way. This is a notable difference with PoW where miners are not necessarily aligned in economic incentives with token-holders or users.
Perversely, since double-validation happens rarely, since it is expensive, the actual interface for slashing on e.g. BSC is not well-documented or user-friendly.
To whom? Who gets to decide to slash the funds?
I caught you cheating and can prove it. You don't give a shit and control 51% of the network. How do you get punished?
If you were following the current events on Ethereum, this question has just arisen in the last weeks when the US sanctioned the privacy oriented Tornado Cash contract.
It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you please stop with the concern trolling?
If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol, then that means you just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?
> Can you please stop with the concern trolling?
Can you please stop trying to claim a moral high ground for no reason?
Yes, it is wrong.
By the way, there is a bug bounty program. You can earn up to 1M USD per critical bug either in the protocol or its implementations.
If you control 20% of the network, the other 80% is following the rules and colluding against you. (Even another 20% that are double-validating themselves are incentivized to slash you)
The whole cryptocurrency thing feels like a bit of a metastable equilibrium, but nobody's figured out anything better. Arguably even government-controlled fiat money is not much better - if >50% of the population doesn't like the rules, they will change them - we may be seeing the beginning of this right now, with a lot of people getting dissatisfied with half their income going to the black hole known as "landlords" who own the rights to take your income without producing any value whatsoever.
It might just lead to everyone abandoning your cryptocurrency and using a different one. Since you had to have >50% of the cryptocurrency in order to conduct the attack, you did lose a substantial amount of real-world value (billions or trillions of $) when everyone else stopped using your cryptocurrency.
It's pretty much analogous to if a majority of PoW miners decide to "go their own way" and make a chain where nobody else is invited. What happens then?
9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders". (it could however be more [2])
Today it accounts for something like 59% (72m) of total supply (~120m). Make what you will of that.
1. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/initial-coin-offering-exp...
2. https://medium.com/@hasufly/ethereum-presale-dynamics-revisi...
> Today it accounts for something like 59% of total supply. Make what you will of that.
Can you help me understand what exactly this means? Ethereum's supply has grown since the presale, so if anything the 9.9% should have gotten smaller since then.
The total initial premine was 72m (~59% of today's supply).
I think someone more knowledgeable might provide a better breakdown of those funds, except that the article(s) linked covers it a lot better than my comment.
https://messari.io/asset/ethereum/profile/launch-and-initial...
Ethereum's crowdsale supply was 72 million ETH. Of that 60 million were sold for BTC in the crowdsale. 6 million was given to the Ethereum Foundation and 6 million to early contributors (overall 20% of what was sold was created as a pre-mine).
Now Ethereum's supply is ~122 million, so the miners produced 50 millions new ETH.
are both centralized, with the later being highly centralized. The move to PoS removes both of these centralized targets.
No, you just need money, 32 eth is only around $50000.
And there's a lot of people with sufficient money to stand up multiple validators. And validators can also initiate/vote on arbitrary slash requests (which costs them nothing, as I read it).
Shrinking the number of people with the financial means to contribute doesn’t seem like it’s going to result in decentralization.
The parallel with Bitcoin is quite strong. You can run a Bitcoin node without running a miner and verify the chain but you don't get rewarded. You can run an Ethereum node without staking and verify the chain but you don't get rewarded.
I am asking about the people with the power to declare that people who put up the stake were dishonest in their validations.
The key innovation in modern POS systems was figuring out how to do this, it is a solved problem.
In the near future the rules are made by the people with the most ETH
and soon after the most ETHs will be earned by the people who make the rules.
This process is how all changes to Bitcoin get rolled out.
> By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of the bitcoin mining pools signaled support
The majority of miners implementing new rules only has an effect on which rules the validating nodes will start enforcing if those nodes implemented them and allowed miners to signal when to start.
A big miner has the same voting power as you with the client running on an RPi.
The rest has to agree otherwise their stake is slashed.
This can't happen in bitcoin.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think the problem here is centralization and this can be more easily avoided in PoW (because of energy costs rising a lot if all miners go in one place) instead of PoS (there are no physical restraints, so in theory all staking pools could be in Switzerland).
So politically it's much harder to censor a more decentralized chain.
Why? I see this as an event that would skyrocket the price. It at the same time affirms commitment of the community to its stated values and decreases the supply greatly.
The first difficulty bomb was never set with the intention that this would be the move to PoS. It's a conscious choice to introduce regular hard forks in order to keep the protocol and network evolving.
It looks very likely that some percentage of node operators and miners will patch out the bomb this time, which will result in the PoW side of the fork staying alive. Which side of the chain retains monetary value in their tokens is up to social consensus. It will probably differ from protocol to protocol. So far industry and most major exchanges have been aligned with the rest of the Ethereum community here.
What you're saying is mostly correct but seems taken out of context. I've only ever seen people looking in from the outside have strong opinions on this particular point, not from the actual stakeholders involved.
$4k vs $128k
Literally the same numbers.
Stake pooling also eliminates one of the supposed benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency - you have to trust someone else with your currency.
If I have to give my currency to a third party who will then invest it for me, then why bother with decentralised cryptos at all?
>any operation on the network requires trust that the network will do what it agreed it will do.
If I were an Eth apologist, I would explain how the code that defines the network operations is fully open and inspectable, so no trust needed.
[1]: https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity
In that case, without any stakes, half of nodes will be locked to NIL, half - to a valid block.
In case of stakes, byzantine proposer (it is only one node that is really byzantine, but it can control how network is split) can partition network according to a proportion of stakes, so that neither half gets prevalence.
The algorithm in the link you provided does nothing in that case. The only node that will be punished is a byzantine validator which does not care.
The system will be in no-progress-possible state indefinitely.
Inactivity leak is an emergency measure to restore liveness when the network stops finalizing blocks. It happens when >33% of validators are offline(WW3 scenario), major bug in widespread implementation, etc.
Your link explains that.
ETH2 is friendly to home stackers - you may lose some profit by being offline sometimes, and in the worst case minor penalties are applied.
EDIT: If you are interested in a much better description of what happens if you are offline, see this:
https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/penalties
Some points from the link:
- penalties =/= slashing
- If you are online > 42.5% of the sime - you are earning profits
In PoS you still have the staking tokens.
To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful snowball effect than mining and the gap between the wealthiest ETH participants and everyone else will increase faster under PoS.
Every holder who is staking is rewarded for staking, in proportion to their stake.
> To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful snowball effect than mining
No, because issuance under proof of stake is much lower than that under proof of work.
The point of validating is to secure the chain, not to get rich. The more validators that are active, the lower the per-validator rewards, reducing compounding effects.
Also you lock-up capital which has an opportunity cost and must competes with every other investable asset. As the barriers to entry staking are negligible (just acquiring a liquid staking derivative like rETH, for example) it means that everyone willing to stake will likely do so which drops the returns lower, which may push some stakers out as they see better investing opportunities. So staking is likely going to have thin margins in the future and will give a rate of return that is fairly priced given its risk adjusted returns.
Last I saw, ETH mining was about 33% profitable. With mining rewards ten times higher than staking rewards, that means miners take home about three times more on their investment than stakers.
> but now it is just managed by the big holders
To have any influence during the proof of work days you needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions.
With PoS, the big players control the small players. If the minority doesn't play along, their funds will be slashed by the procotol. If 66% of validators censor you, your transaction will never be finalized.
With PoW, the big players cannot coerce the small players in any way. Everyone independently controls their own blocks. If 66% of miners censor you, your transaction will merely take 3x as long to be confirmed.
If <50% of miners want to censor you, they can make it take longer for your transactions to be processed. If it's >50% (or thereabouts) they can prevent your transactions from every getting confirmed. Sure, the 34% could collude until they happen to produce 6 blocks in a row, but each individual member of that group would make more money by going along with the censorship and not being censored themselves.
I believe it's similar with PoS, but with somewhat different incentive magnitudes.
If 66% of miners censor their own blocks to comply with OFAC, then eventually the transaction will get in.
If 66% of miners not only censor their own blocks, but also collude to continually reorg the chain, then obviously all bets are off, the project has failed, and the exchange rate is headed to 0.
I think the former is infinitely more likely than the latter.
Is it though? If crypto ever becomes a common currency people will still want to transact in it regardless of corruption/collusion among miners. Most are not going to stop using it for ideological reasons like "miners are altering the chain" unless it negatively impacts their own transactions.
I believe the point is that there’s no prerequisite that all miners are independent, and will definitely collude. PoW or PoS this is the case, as blockchains cannot prevent IRL agreements.
This is false. If miners controlling 66% of hash power decide to censor you, they can ignore any blocks produced by the minority who include your transaction.
Legitimate question because I don't know.
When I'm mining eth on my GPU while part of a mining pool, my understanding is that my GPU is racing to try and find the hash that works to start the next block. If I find it, I then am able to put transactions into the block and cap it off, but the reward doesn't go to me because I was part of a pool, so the pool shares the reward with everyone involved.
Are you saying I only find the answer to the block but the pool itself stuffs the block with transactions?
Though it's entirely possible that mining pools dictate which transactions get sent to their miners for them to try mining.
> and if you try to validate and not censor, you will get your staked coins taken from you by the protocol (as opposed to PoW, where you just fail to get your block in the chain)
Is outright false. It is the same as PoW. You choose what transactions you include in your block. So some people may choose to not include some transactions (Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash). But there is no mechanism that slashes your staked coins because the other validators didn't like what transactions you included. At most your block will not get attested. Slashing can only happen for other reasons (proposing twice, attesting twice, attesting something that surrounds something else).
PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that slashes their stake. In PoW if 51% of miners are malicious there's nothing you can do, you can't slash their hardware.
So, your transaction will be confirmed in the next block mined by one of the other 49% of miners. Big whoop.
At any point there is still a 49% chance the next block will be mined by a good guy.
If the bad guys decide not to accept the good guys' blocks, then they are hard forking Bitcoin and will end up just like Bitcoin Cash: irrelevant.
This is the exact problem PoW was designed to solve, and it works very well, which is why a 51% attack has never succeeded or even been attempted against Bitcoin, and never will.
The 51% attack is not some made up thing.
The only way they can maintain that chain is by a hard fork.
So after a time, they are behind and have to jump to the other chain and ignore their own old blocks. Something like this graph:
Censored blocks: -
Uncensored Fork blocks: \
Uncensored Normal blocks: *
Censored: *--------------------------
Uncensored: \** \* \*** \** \*It doesn't matter if it's a 90% attack. The minority miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's blocks. So it is not 66% vs. 33%, or 90% vs. 10%; it is 60% vs. 100% and 90% vs. 100%.
All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the majority's more restrictive chain.
They can use the majority blocks at the cost of discarding their earlier blocks. Every time they accept a block from the majority, they undo all the work they had done earlier.
> All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the majority's more restrictive chain.
All it takes then is for the majority to mine three blocks in a row. The probability is always on their side.
If that's what it comes down to (and there is reason to believe it won't), I imagine sanction addresses will still transact, just with higher latency and at higher cost than others.
Assuming enough hash rate and the exchanges (and the users) agree to ignore the "sactioned" transactions, then they will never be in the main chain, not even slowly.
Also just noting that while the conversation here is about Ethereum, you are describing the fork rules of Bitcoin. Next month the concept "hash rate" won't exist on ETH mainnet (potentially depending on who you ask; looks like there might be an ETC2).
1) The hash of the old block.
2) The new transactions.
3) A number that must be bruteforced until you get a hash of all the block with a lot of zeros.
If you try to copy one block in the other chain/fork, then the hash of the previos block is invalid. If you change just that part of the block, you must bruteforce a new number until you get a new hash of all the block with a lot of zeros, that has the same cost of creating a new block from scratch.
You can copy the info of the transactions from one chain to the other, but you must create a new block to put them. You can't just copy the block.
Okay, I think I see now where I was separately wrong and partially wrong in the previous comments. When I said there's a huge monetary upside to a 51% attack, that's wrong. There's not really any upside to speak of, especially considering the huge amount of computing resources you would need to do it.
So it's not surprising it hasn't been tried yet, and that's not a proof that it's a canard as I said before (but it's not a proof of the opposite, either). Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. So I'll concede and leave that point alone. I was wrong.
---
Now, when I said that the 49% can still use the 51%'s blocks, that's not entirely correct. It's correct only until the blockchain splits, then it's not correct. So my position wasn't entirely correct, but it still has value to this discussion. Let me illustrate with a randomly-generated timeline.
Let's make it easy and say 66% are censoring miners, and 33% are non-censoring miners.
We haven't discussed this yet, but let's also assume that the exchanges and non-mining users reflect this proportion. This is an unfounded assumption. But I'm steelmanning.
The 33% are in miner pool 1, and the 66% are in miner pool 2 and 3. The dots represent 5-minute intervals. Just like in Bitcoin, a block is mined roughly once every 20 minutes. Observe the moment at "X".
..3..........2...X1.3......1...1..........2......2..
100% 3--2
Now, observe the point at X:
..3..........2....1X3......1...1.......X..2......2..
66% 3--2
33% 3--2--1
But how can that be possible if the 66% has more hashpower?
Observe the point at X:
..3..........2....1.3X.....1...1..........2......2..
66% 3--2--3
33% 3--2--1
One should question at this point what's going on in the mempool here? One can assume the 66% censoring miners are not transmitting the censored transactions to the mempool. But how many censored transactions are we talking about? How much of a fee is each side collecting? Is this still in the coinbase reward era or after? Are the 33% smart enough to route around the 66%? Or punish them by kicking them off the mempool? Not sure. All of these variables can mitigate this attack. But I will not explore that now.
Although there are now two rival chains, for simplicity's sake, lets just assume the same timeline holds, and remove each of the two side's blocks from the other's chain starting from at the time of the fork.
66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2..
33% ..3..........2....1........1...1....................
66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2.X
33% ..3..........2....1........1...1...................X
66% 3--2--3--2--2
33% 3--2--1--1--1
One should wonder even more, what is going on in the mempool and ~$250B Bitcoin economy during this time?
In this example, only two blocks by the 33% are mined consecutively. What about 3 or 4? Could it be days before the 66% overtakes the 33%? I think it's possible.
On the other hand, the mining of consecutive blocks by the 66% does not create a contention between the two sides. So all miners are unified until the 33% gain an advantage. This is my point.
From the POV of the censored Bitcoin transactions, the 66% will succeed in censoring them until the issue is resolved. But I don't think you can say that the 66% have control of the network at this point. They've only succeeded in disrupting the network until more non-censoring miners come online, or something else happens.
Consider also that the attacker has to either possess 66% of all computing power devoted to Bitcoin in the known universe OR an incentive more attractive than the BTC block incentive for the operators of 66% of miners. Even for 51%, that's an impressive achievement.
It's a very interesting scenario but I still say it does not constitute a credible threat to Bitcoin. More of a thought experiment.
66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2.X
33% ..3..........2....1........1...1...................X
The problem is that 2 and 3 will produce the double of blocks. For e while 1 may tie or get ahead, but after 30 blocks the the 23 fork will almost always be like 10 blocks ahead of the only 1 fork.
Ignoring most of the . to make the graph shorter
66% 3213...223.3223..23.23.323..3.2223
33% 321.11....1....11..1..1...11.1....
66% 32132233223232332332223
33% 3211111111111
A) Give up and start mining censored blocks
B) Start a new fork, from the current 2-3 chain with many censored blocks
C) Declare that they are a fork and convince the exchanges to give them a new moniker, like ETC of BXC
D) Convince the exchanges that they are the real chain in spite they are shorter, and convince the exchanges to give the other chain a new moniker.
Let's say that MiningPoolA controls 51% of hashpower, and MiningPoolB controls 49%. MiningPoolA is refusing to mine transactions from/to some wallet W.
Time T1:
MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W)
MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) still in progress
Any client will accept the chain with Block1 (no transactions from/to W)
Time T2 - if MiningPoolB tries to compete
MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W)
MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) -- Block2' (parent=Block1') still in progress
Any client will accept the chain with Block1 (no transactions from/to W), and MiningPoolB will never be able to catch up
Time T2 - if MiningPoolB decides to accept MiningPoolA's chain, but add the transaction in the second block:
MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W)
MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2' (parent=Block1, adds transaction W receives 1BTC) still in progress
Any client will accept the chain with Block1 (no transactions from/to W), and MiningPoolB will never be able to catch up
The 51% chain is mined with 51% of the total mining power, while the 49% chain will contain 100% of the mining power (as the 49% miners are more than happy to build off the 51% chain, while the 51% miners will only building off the chain without the censored transactions).
They are correct in asserting that a 51% attack to censor transaction is largely just a nuisance to the users and that all transactions should eventually end up on the longest chain (the 49%).
Each miner takes a bunch of transactions and chooses a previous block B1 to build on, then starts hashing. If some other minerB advertises a new block B2 based on B1 that includes different transactions before minerA, then minerA can throw away all the work it did, and start from scratch on B3 based on B2. But minerB will probably already be working on its own B3 - and has every chance to win again.
I will not go into depth here but it's a commonly held view that this changes under PoS. Just flying by so hopefully sources are easily located
The only way 51% of miners can fork the blockchain and actually overtake the other 49% with more restrictive rules is if they have a hidden nuclear reactor dedicated to mining Bitcoin that produces hashpower equal or more than 49% of the network and they flip it on at the moment they fork.
Again, it doesn't matter how many people are convinced a 51% attack is possible on Bitcoin. It's never even been tried once. So the burden of proof is on you all. I'm just trying to help explain why this concept has never been proven.
If the 51% can ignore the blocks from the 49%, then why does it matter what the 49% is doing?
Occasionally the 49% will be able to mine a block and temporarily create the longest chain, but the 51% can always just ignore that block and continue mining off of the one before it - eventually their chain will be the longest and the block(s) from the 49% will be lost.
Really this isn't theoretical, it happens all the time by accident when two blocks get mined off of the same previous block. When that happens one of the two blocks gets lost, and the only difference with this scenario is that the 51% have enough hash power to ensure that their blocks are the ones that always (eventually) win and the 49% blocks are always lost.
The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining population.
It's not that simple. That block from the 49% will be ignored by the 51% (since it contains "banned" transactions), which will continue the chain on the previous block (the "51% chain". Now the 49% has two options. If they continue to build the chain on top of that 49% block (the "49% chain"), after a while the 51% chain will be longer (because that side has the most hash power). The other option is to build again on top of the 51% chain, as you suggested (and AFAIK that's what unmodified Bitcoin software will do after a while); but to do that, they have to discard that block they had included earlier (since it's not in the 51% chain).
That is: yes, the 49% can include "banned" transactions, but that inclusion will be undone later. They can include these transactions again, but that inclusion will be undone again. They can never get far enough for these blocks with the "banned" transactions to be permanent.
> Again, a 51% attack has never even been attempted on the Bitcoin network despite huge potential monetary upside if it succeeds.
First, this is not the "traditional" 51% attack, which involves mining an alternative longer chain in secret. Second, the most a 51% attack can do is double spend coins (or prevent them from being spent); converting that into real money requires spending the coin twice (for instance, sending coins to an exchange, withdrawing the resulting money, and then undoing the sending to the exchange so the attacker keeps the coins), and the monetary upside isn't that big in most scenarios. Third, the cost for doing that is not as small as you're thinking (start with the cost to obtain enough miners to have 51% of the hash power), which is why it hasn't AFAIK been attempted on Bitcoin (but AFAIK, it has been attempted on less popular networks which have small total hash power). And if you fail the attack, you have wasted all that cost.
As soon as the chain diverges, they are seperate chains.
Yes, if you have a minority of the hashpower, you can hardfork yourself off the main chain, and continue to follow your smaller chain, regardless.
But you don't get a longer chain than the main one. So you'd continuously be behind, and would not get the work of the main chain, and likely most exchanges would not accept your smaller fork coin, and you would end up like bitcoin cash.
They can also prevent you from getting your transaction in ever. The 49% cannot prevent this because they cannot make a longer chain, that is the entire point of proof-of-work.
What you do is this:
- spend btc with a transaction and get it included in the chain.
- start mining blocks starting from before your transaction in secret
- include a trnasaction to a different address in the secret chain
- broadcast the secret chain once it's longer than the "official" one
- since your chain is longer, your chain is now the official one. All the transactions in the other chain are now discarded
Here an attacker controlling 51% of mining power decides to not play by the rules; we are considering what that means for everybody else. For Bitcoin it means they can block transactions forever, and they can double-spend.
Obviously if the attacker plays by the rules there is no attack.
The Bitcoin blockchain constantly "forks" for the latest 1-2 blocks. If you sell your car for BTC and hand over the car the moment you see the latest block contains the transaction where the BTC enters your wallet, you may see 1h later that the longest chain does NOT contain your transaction, and in fact your transaction is now invalid, because the buyer wallet has sent all the money somewhere else.
This only proves that ether is already too centralized.
FWIW. I used to mine eth on a small scale so I am obviously biased.
Basically, concentration of power means that eth will quickly become everything the banks are.. only worse ( because with banks you at least have some regulation to back you up ):P
Like 4 pools control 51% of the hashrate so they already can easily bully solo-miners.
>So some people may choose to not include some transactions (Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash). But there is no mechanism that slashes your staked coins because the other validators didn't like what transactions you included.
>PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that slashes their stake.
If a group of validators don't agree with your particular arrangement of transactions in the block, they can engineer a "social fork" that slashes your stake.
But you can reach a social consensus (i.e. outside the protocol) and decide to slash the censors. At that point there would be effectively two different chains, the censored one and an uncensored one. The worth of each chain would be decided by market dynamics.
It's absolutely terrible. Wasn't the goal to create digital money no one can control? I might as well use the US dollar then.
Why would I want to be on their fork? They can have their censored fork, but they can't do anything to anymore who doesn't want to be a part of it.
Stick a fork in it. Ethereum is done.
With that degree of centralization, might as well just run a database and call it a day.
Are you talking about lack of ideological purity of Ethermine?
Yes, and the fact that everyone in the Ethereum community has largely glossed this over in their enthusiasm for the "merge" and what it will do the price of their assets.
Cryptocurrencies that embrace the centralization and censorship of fiat currencies are completely unnecessary and have no real utility. Tornado Cash and Ethermine should have been a line in the sand, a hard boundary for what's acceptable and what's not.
But the fact that no one even cares tells me that the community will be happy to accept even more censorship as long as their bags keep going up. Pathetic, really.
As for TC - who is rolling over? While some US based businesses are complying, protocol builders are saying that they will fight tooth and nail.
There will always be a miner (or validator in PoS) that will be willing to take Tornado Cash fees.
There is only one Bitcoin, and it's basically the chain the most clients are following. If you decide to follow another chain, you have created a new "coin", but Bitcoin is unaffected.
IMO - this behavior is a blip. As soon as it becomes clear that “censorship” isn’t effective, it will become less popular for validators to do it at all.
Is that how you evaluate technologies? By their marketcap?
With the old system, miners could try to sabotage our fork if most hashing power were to be on the censored fork. With this update, that would not be possible as the censors would lose their money on the non-censored fork and therefore be unable to stake. The relative power of the forks no longer matter as they cannot attack each other anymore.
Ethereum is becoming more decentralized and permissionless as a result of this change.
I explained in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532604
As for how that theory will interact with reality, who knows.
The sort of software update I'm imagining is one which just zeroes the holdings of the government wallet(s), and continues the chain from just before they launched their attack.
If there's one group that the government care more about the finances of than taxpayers, it's companies. Destroying the wealth of these companies in their jurisdiction is an attack that can only be performed once, and provides no long term benefit, except for people outside their jurisdiction.
The submission you're describing requires a cryptographic proof of that validator submitting two or more existing invalid blocks that they signed. You can't just falsify that without their private keys, so what you're suggesting is not possible.
At the very least, for an individual actor, it would be much more expensive to acquire 33% of all ETH than it would be to acquire 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate
A common misconception here is that slashing happens based on what transactions you include or not. False. Slashing happens because of things such as proposing or attesting twice.
The only question then is how indirect these sanctions can be. The node might not be allowed to validate a block with banned transactions, but what about the next block, which does not include these blocked transactions, only a pointer to a block with these banned transactions? What about the second next block, which has only a pointer to a block with a pointer to a block with these banned transactions? How many blocks until the link is tenuous enough that the validators under USA jurisdiction could validate again without fear?
Suppose Tony texts Paulie and tells him to wack a guy. That's illegal, unprotected speech, because it directly leads to imminent lawless action. Similarly the wallet owner who signs and broadcasts an Ethereum transaction to send money to North Korea would bass the Brandenburg test because it obviously leads to imminent lawless action.
The validator who builds the block that includes an illegal transaction is an interesting question. On the one hand by building the block, one could argue that they're instrumental in putting carrying out the illegal transaction. OTOH one might argue that if the transaction is in the network (and priced appropriately) it almost certainly will get included on-chain eventually. Therefore the validator might argue that it's activity doesn't create any imminent lawless activity, because the transaction being in the mempool is already fait accompli. The validator is more like the reporter writing about a crime in the newspaper.
But what I'm nearly certain of is that building on top of a chain with a previously finalized illegal transaction is okay. It's certainly not illegal to talk about a crime that's already happened. The further a block gets away from the initial block, then the less imminent the illegal action becomes. SCOTUS has historically held a very high standard for Brandenburg, which is why it's not even illegal to advocate for genocide or the violent overthrow of the American government.
I have no reason to doubt that your credentials as a constitutional lawyer are impeccable.
> The further a block gets away from the initial block, then the less imminent the illegal action becomes.
This very plausible legal theory inspires incredible confidence.
Who is everyone? Because obviously it can't include the people who just colluded to deceive the network.
Also do they prove before or after slashing?
- If you detect some wrongdoing, like somebody attesting twice, you can get a reward for whistleblowing (free money!)
- However to claim this reward, you have to include it in a block. Therefore if everybody is aware of this wrongdoing, the next block will get the rewards for slashing/whistleblowing.
- Therefore it's economically advantageous to keep this info to yourself, until you get to propose a block, and only then slash and get the rewards.
- There are also what are called altruistic whistleblowers, that as soon as they find wrongdoing, they'll broadcast it (instead of keeping it to themselves) so next block proposer will slash the wrongdoer. These kind of whistleblowers will most likely be run by the Ethereum Foundation
- In practice even if there were no altruistic whistleblowers, it wouldn't really matter because the same software that validators run can also detect wrongdoing, so in practice even with no altruistic whistleblowers, the next block is almost guaranteed to slash the wrongdoer anyway (free money!).
there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.
Docs from one of the validator clients: https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
In this context, what it means is that a person posted conflicting validation messages on different parts of the network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a reward, and the offending validator gets slashed.
(There are also other ways you can get slashed, read the POS documentation if you want to learn the details) All methods of slashing are fully decentralized.
edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M. You say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it wasn't a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get x% of validators to agree with you.
As far as I can tell, you cannot get slashed for your vote on a slash. So lying is ok.
You are basically stating that slashing is impossible in certain conditions because network is not censorship resistant.
There is one avenue where network can censor. It is a 51% coalition that orphans blocks that contains slashing txes. This coalition is dealt with UASF (user activated soft fork), since this type of behavior goes against core principals of the network and convincing people to do it will be really easy.
Validators are run by people who fully control if a transaction is valid or not. You either need a ton of GPUs (currently) or a ton of money to have tangible influence over translations.
This isn't even a hypothetical, there's a few massive wallets that are hoarding a ton of eth that will be given more power from the POS transition.
We're relying on "the goodness of their hearts" validator operators and crossing our fingers validators run the same software with the same rules.
Even if you call out sketchy transactions that are close to 50/50 consensus, nothing will happen unless a ton of people have a ton of money on the line like the DAO split.
We need more discussion on how incentives of each party should be to give the most stable network possible.
It's not as if they're automatically given more power. Such hoards of ETH would need to be deposited in units of 32 ETH to activate unique validators. You could have a large number of validators that are actually a single computer program participating in the Beacon chain, but that doesn't make too much difference.
At the bottom layer, we're talking about the application of an open p2p protocol on the Internet. People can and will analyze the traffic for that protocol, and it will be possible to identify rough shapes and sizes of players in the network. And such analyses won't be long in coming to public blog posts, etc. following the Merge.
If decentralization in the network seems at risk, there will be efforts to remedy the situation. Whether they can succeed is another question.
That's not how this works at all.
Slashing happens under a very specific circumstance: a staker submits contradictory messages. Those circumstances are testable with built-in code that's part of the protocol. To get someone slashed, you send a transaction including their contradictory signed messages. When your transaction is included in a block, the staker gets slashed by the protocol rules hardcoded in all the consensus clients.
The only other thing that can cause a staker to lose stake is the "inactivity leak," where an active staking node doesn't send the messages they're supposed to send. That's completely automatic.
That's not what slashing is supposed to be used for, but if that situation happened again, Ethereum would fork again, just as last time when Ethereum classic didn't agree to freeze the Ether from the DAO hack. PoS makes it a little easier to fork (which is good imo), but doesn't change anything fundamental. Everyone still needs to be in complete agreement about the rules and history for Ethereum to work.
I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you to.
Ad hominem is "you are wrong because you (fill in the blank)". It is not "go read the articles given to you".
"You are wrong because you are an idiot" is ad hominem.
"You are wrong" is denial.
"You are an idiot" is insult.
It's easy enough not to reply. No need to get an attitude about it.
> Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps?
> Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.
I know Cunningham's Law is a valid discussion strategy, but the topics of cryptocurrency on HN already tends to attract enough flamewars and misinformation as it is.
There's nothing here that was done in bad faith and I should not need to defend myself for asking a question in a tech forum. Assuming I'm not asking in good faith is bad faith.
The reason I asked was a description pasted a short while ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535409
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535912
Which included this line:
> Slashing is not meant to profitable, and the whistleblower reward is quite small. We don't need a million slashers, in fact, we could operate with just one... expect the Eth Foundation to run them, among other large players who can spare the resources.
Which sure sounds like a decentralized process that is ultimately just centralized around the ETH foundation at the end of the day.
Honestly I've learned a lot from the responses here. And I think people who assumed I was doing anything other than just asking questions because the idea I was asking about offended them are asshole. So yeah. Go pound sand.
The validators need to be decentralized (i.e. prevent "harmful collusion"), but the slashers don't need to be in the same way (as long as the validators are).
It is not the case that only the ETH foundation can slash, which was the crux of my original question.
The fundamental misunderstanding people seem to be having is that slashers show objective proof of bad events. That's accurate. But validators are still free to agree or disagree with that objective proof of bad events. If you can create a means to prevent consensus on slashing for your overtly malicious behavior, your stake is only at risk if the entire community agrees to fork, which is probable for huge malicious behaviors but I'm not convinced is true for smaller things or circumstances where large actors have a vested interest in preferring the original chain.
[0] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
[1] No clue if this has a different name in Ethereum
1. Every full node is part of this dark forest, maintains its own mempool, and gossips the mempool to others. You do not have to be a validator or miner to run a full node; just run an Ethereum client.
2. There are indirect economic incentives to 'watch the watchmen': a slashable staking violation that doesn't get slashed breaks the Ethereum security model, and is expected to be an extremely rare event (if it ever happens). With a network that has a market cap in the hundreds of billions; someone is watching and it only takes one to sound the horn.
I do agree that there probably will be altruistic validators in some cases, but the economic incentives work against them. The history of cryptocurrency has trended towards doing the minimum amount of validation work that satisfies network consensus[0]. It's entirely possible that the market just shrugs its shoulders and says that a violation of the Ethereum security model just isn't actually that bad. Consider the relative lack of concern over MEV[1] and automated arbitrage bots, and the fact that the valuation of the coin is entirely unconnected to any security issues it may or may not have. It may just wind up being the case that the network just... tolerates a handful of people getting screwed.
[0] For example, Bitcoin miners accept new blocks by literally joining other mining pools purely to steal their previous block hash. It's significantly faster than waiting for a full 4MB block to get P2P gossiped around the world, but the downside is that you can't actually validate any of the data in that block. This effectively means that miners aren't full nodes anymore, and the result has been several long chainsplits and reorgs whenever a softfork occurs.
[1] Miner Extractable Value
Following this logic, stakers themselves are incentivized to just run the software to submit a slashing tx themselves (free money), at which point just having stakers running slashing software is sufficient. And if they aren't someone else will submit it to the mempool.
Does it matter who does the slashing, as long as the incentive is enough to motivate doing it?
Ok, let me try ELI5ing it.
Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what. Everyone trusts the lists. But what if someone decide to change the list so that it says they own someone else's stuff? Proof of Stake says that if someone wants to change the list - say, if someone traded something on the list to someone else - the page they add to the list also has to have some of their money taped to it. If that change turned out to be fraudulent, someone else can tattle on them, and then that someone gets the money taped to the list instead. So if you want to make sure you're reading from a not-fraudulent list, just check for the money taped to the page.
This all continues fine for a while. There's a bunch of people who maintain the list, all of whom have their own money taped to different pages of it.
One day, someone tries adding a fake transaction to the list. You, of course, notice it and tattle on them. Except in order to claim the funds taped to the list, someone else has to... add a note to the list saying you own them. And there's no reason why they can't just write down that they tattled instead of you, because the only proof that you were the one who tattled is getting it onto the list that you have to tape money to in order to add to. So the only people who have a reason to make sure the list is valid are the same people who are updating the list in the first place. Everyone else can tattle but they don't get paid for doing so, which was the the thing keeping the system secure.
As an interesting aside, this is essentially how the economy of the Yap islands in Micronesia worked until the 20th century, with large stones from another island changing 'ownership', while being left in place (because it was too hard to move them)[1].
Except it was an oral history instead of a published list!
It reminds me of the technique to remembering a book where you read one word at a time and repeat it out loud, repeating each segment + 1 in a loop. It’s quite trivial to remember every single word when doing that.
EDIT: Clarification - once a slasher posts the violation, who removes the ether?
In other words, the blockchain; in the same way that it's not _miners_ / stakers who process transactions on bitcoin or ethereum ; miners / stakers only decide _ordering_ but everyone who runs an Ethereum client is processing and verifying every transaction; the same way your browser checks a TLS certificate.
Thanks for your answer!
The value in a staking account is calculated on the blockchain as "amount staked minus slashing penalties", and this violation is automatically recorded as a slashing penalty, so the answer is "everybody"
There is no such thing as "separate slashers", and there is no such thing as distinct classes of validators. Whoever told you that is spreading baseless FUD.
As soon as mining pools appeared, and now even more with proof-of-stake, we are back with a few parties being the trusted validators. The fact that they get their powers from on-chain tokens rather than community decision... is it really a good thing?
What a time to be alive :)
Whether the project dies or continues forward the innovation coming from the space is pretty amazing.
Slashing is part of the protocol and to slash somebody you have to prove it to the protocol that they broke rules of slashing. One of the rules is that you can't create two different blocks in the same slot (block number) i.e. you can't deliberately fork.
There is a designated place in the block of the beacon chain where you can put signatures of the different blocks in the same slot as a proof and nodes will slash validator that produced that signatures (update his balance). Anyone can find these signatures, and block proposers of the new blocks will include them into the chain.
Not true. In your defence, I also only learned this today.
https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher https://lighthouse-book.sigmaprime.io/slasher.html
Anyone can be a slasher, just as anyone can be a staker (as long as you have 32 Ether).
It’s just the specifics of how this works - slashing is part of the protocol in the sense that I described: when you are chosen to create a new block and you have proof that someone violated the rules then you include this proof in your proposed block and update balance. Any validator can do it including the smallest of home stakers.
More details here. https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...
Here we have slashing fields in the block body where you insert your proofs of slashable offense. There are functions with a “slash” in the name that describes precise state transition.
The hard part of slashing is finding these proofs because you have to do more work than necessary to detect slashing and produce proofs - that’s what this software does. It’s more expensive to run a slasher but you need only one and it does not matter who runs it, anyone can run it. The link that you sent says that this slasher broadcasts proofs by default - that way anyone can include it.
This is why they are limiting the number of validators.
There are currently over 400,000 full-fledged validators. The maximum supported number of validators is the number of ETH divided by 32, or about 3.75 million. Scaling is the reason the limit wasn't made even higher, by lowering the ETH per validator.
And there is no upper limit on the number of slashers.
no, that's right. It's now a chain where you make money (fresh coins) by a procedure controlled by the Ethereum Foundation.
What happens if something goes fatally wrong? The EF will step in and fix it.
This has (for a few years now) raised serious questions as to whether the new network will constitute an offering of securities - EF sets rules to run a validator and get paid in ETH.
The question being asked is also a harder one to answer than just explaining PoS. Similar to a PoW scheme where only one or two people control all of the hashing power, it could be decentralized in theory but not actually in practice, and it doesn't seem like there are any super hard numbers on this aspect.
All of this works via code and no human intervention is needed.
I assume Ethereum has something similar, as there isn’t much gain in restricting those who are allowed to submit a proof that a node/validator is up to no good.
* Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge,
must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade.
After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon
hitting a specific Total Difficulty value.
* The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain –
11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022.
* The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is
58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
* Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators
will shut down on September 6, 2022.While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would largely just interact with an application without needing to know any of this.
https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-payme...
Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up jargon? That's the issue that I see here.
Members of the Ethereum Foundation have been critical of Ethereum and called out overzealousness in the past, warning that the price might not be rational.
One absolutely obnoxious practice is how they all make their own fancy names for millicoins microcoins, etc.
I’m curious about the prices though like don’t expect anything firesale-y
The mining cards experience less stress and wear compared to gaming.
First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.)
Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!
How long until BTC follows suit?
If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether.
But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready to have, yet.
[0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-wit...
Heat causes chips and other components to degrade, so not everyone runs their miners at maximum output all the time.
> Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner will sell below this value due to not breaking even on electricity.
It does not work like that. If you need to pay your bills you will sell BTC for whatever price it is right now. Unless you want to long BTC, but that's a different story.
You have causation reversed here. It is not that bitcoin would not sell/be worth less than the amount to mine it.
Instead, it is that it wouldn't be mined if it were worth less than the cost to mine it.
At which point, miners would drop out, and the cost to mine it would reduce, as the difficulty goes down.
And this is by design, as the only way to mint a new bitcoin is to throw away computational power (ie energy -> money). And the amount of power needing to be wasted is constantly adjusted by the network (it's targeting a certain amount of blocks / hour, adjusting the difficulty of the sha bruteforce, compensating for technological improvement).
Now, to create a bitcoin you need to mine a block (solving the bruteforce), inherently requiring a set (on average) amount of real world value (mostly energy) to be irrevocably wasted. For the miners to recoup those losses, they MUST sell the bitcoin they just created for at least their lost value. Which in turn, guarantee the minimum value of each bitcoin.
And with this system, the minimum value of each bitcoin is inversely equal to the amount of value "wasted".
I wonder if there's a graph anywhere showing the value of 1 BTC in kWh.
Claiming that PoW cost gives BTC its value is bonkers.
So if BTC uses an Argentina's worth of energy now, if the value of BTC grew 10X it would have to use on the order of 10 Argentina's worth of electricity. Obviously, that is not sustainable, and it ensures BTC can never grow in value too much if it sticks with PoW.
Perhaps if a 51% attack let you fully steal coins yes. But there are only specific things a 51% attacker can do, and even attempting to pull off the attack has game-theoretic impact on the price if Bitcoin.
The more practical attacks are greedy miner type attacks which just boost a large miners win rate.
The 51%-esque chain rewriting, double-spending and transaction censorship stuff is a different story.
What you can definitely say is that economically the profitability of the block reward and transaction fees will drive new entrants into mining. As BTC price increases the willingness to spend more on mining (wasting electricity) increases. But the block reward also halves now and then to reduce the value of new blocks and prevent the waste from getting absurdly out of hand.
I’m confused. Why must this be the case and how would it lead to a 51% attack if it were not?
I know the difficult goes up when the price goes up because more people are able to mine profitably and the system will automatically scale the difficulty to maintain the 1 block per 10 minutes rate, but I don’t understand what the difficultly being proportional to value has to do with 51% attacks being feasible.
2. First of all, this means that (eventually) the amount of electricity spent on mining is proportional to the total rewards earned (again, block rewards PLUS fees). So if the value of BTC goes up, it's a classic arbitrage play - miners would spend more electricity to win the more valuable rewards. Of course, everyone with the capacity would do this, until the difficulty level is set at a higher level.
3. Similarly, the value to be gained from a nefarious mining attack is proportional to the total value of BTC, so the difficulty must increase to keep a 51% from being feasible.
The fact that electricity spend absolutely must be proportional (over time, there can be short term imbalances before they are arbitraged away) to total value of the coins in a PoW system is a fundamental, undeniable fact. It is simply how PoW works. Yet I still am amazed how many BTC fan boys try to wave this away.
This doesn't limit the potential growth of Bitcoin, it only puts an upper bound on the security per block.
the process generally creates some CO2, rerouting that energy on flare gas sites into power for miners, but thats much less worse than methane, and we can’t let a sustainability goal of perfect be the enemy of good
You can bridge bitcoin to another chain with faster finality, smart contracts, and environmental consensus.
But at the end if the day there will still be a huge amount of people who will never deviate from the core ideology.
The idea behind PoW was to decentralize proofs by allowing anyone to participate. This is a valuable property in a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin's implementation utterly failed in that regard. There are better projects out there, like Monero, but Bitcoin just refuses to die.
The energy consumption has always been a red herring. Everything consumes energy. Humanity's goal is to optimise energy generation and make it as green as possible, not reduce total energy usage to zero. That's just an idiotic proposition. The problem has never been "Bitcoin draws too much power", the problem is "we need more energy generation, and cheaper, and possibly not from fossil fuels."
But it certainly doesn't fit on a slogan.
Imagine governments putting a tax on fossil fuels. Bam! coal and petrol cheap energy is non-viable anymore, you'll see Bitcoin miners building solar and wind plants to power their operation. And along with them the rest of the world.
It's easier for politicians and keyboard warriors to blame climate change on Bitcoin than actually moving to a greener world by making fossil fuels unprofitable.
The extra consumption angle doesn't make any sense for an ultra technologic world, that only 1/4th of the world populace has access. Bitcoin or not, energy usage will be ramping up, especially if we want to create a fairer world. The only way to reduce energy usage is to stop being a technological civilisation, or give access to electricity to fewer and fewer people.
It's a really high cost to pay, but in theory (assuming that the mix that is run is actually diverse) can protect against implementation bugs. In the browser world It'd be like running two different browser engines and only displaying DOMs that are consistent with both engines, or JS engine or final render etc.
I would have loved to contribute to client diversity but my experience with non-geth and non-prysm clients has been so bad I did what it looks like everyone else does - throw my hands up and jump on the bandwagon of what seems to actually work.
It will be interesting to see what these numbers look like when the merge actually happens...
I believe just today the next release was published, fixing the bug in the previous one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581419
As noted there prysm, geth, etc have had their first merge-ready releases less than 48 hours ago (with one "oops" already) I (for one) will be waiting for what I'm sure will be more bugs to shake out in the next several days.
Right now deciding what transactions go into a block (which includes manufacturing your own transactions that yield riskless profit (called MEV)) is tightly bound to running geth. Flash bots is working on ways to decouple that so there is increased specialization and allows for flexibility in which client you run.
There seem to be only 3rd-party and seemingly commercial entities developing the "consensus" client which is needed to use the PoS network?
As a user it would be rather "meh" to not have an official client to rely on :|
See:
"Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172
TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities.
https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion
I didn't manage to run it on mine, as it segfaults, but I've heard of people running it fine on an old 1060 (which I have too).
However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are generally AMD or integrated gpus.
Getting VR to work was tiresome, so now I don't want to even start before I see someone else succeeded.
Also crazy idea but could it be related to open source / proprietary driver differences? I haven't done nvidia on Linux in a long time so I don't know if that's in a more reasonable place yet.
It's so odd, it just dies outright. Maybe it is a CPU error, as you say, I think I'll investigate there.
https://reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/wvr23n/d_how_t...
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.
"Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172
TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities.
afaik, all clients are open source projects. And many are being funded by gitcoin grants now(crowdsourcing)
If they deliver a usable product that doesn't prevent anyone else from also doing so and thus achieving decentralization.
But it would mean that they actually do their job for the billion they were given.
[0] Calculated with today's Ether price, based on: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...
If you're interested in the real progress, there's a helpful live timer tracking the countdown to that trigger & current switchover time estimates here: https://wenmerge.com/
With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature.
If your home RasPi validator drops you don't lose much. If 25% of users stake on coinbase and _they_ go down the penalties are much higher.
So there's an incentive to validate on your own hardware/connection.
It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. So far the distribution isn't so bad: https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
Once withdraws are enabled this landscape may change. There is a lot more work that needs to be done to improve decentralized staking pools, if they continue to expand they can consume large percentage of the total staked Eth with less concern than centralized staking services like Coinbase.
One of the big problems with Tezos is that the governance is tied to the stake. This means in practice most users will not have much of a say in governance because the largest stakers will consume most of the votes. The only thing that has stopped this so far is that large CEX stakers are voting Pass, but this act of goodwill may not always be the case in the future.
Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease.
You don't have to create anything of lasting value. Just time the market and you can make wild money without doing any real work.
Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year. You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that to work.
2. This is assuming 1 ETH = $1650. If the Ethereum price doubles (but still under the ATH), you'd be at $36k a year; not enough for Cali or NYC (perhaps if you own your home?) but certainly fine for cheaper COL states.
At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc.
But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is extremely unlikely to happen.
Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions of dollars worth of money.
I await to see what happens next.
But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.
All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of Super Bowl commercials about “crypto”, and their cousin who spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his parents money investing in a thing called “Bitcoin” last year.
And I really suspect that Ethereum will win the race anyway. At least until something really juicy appears (like private contracts, chain-managed secrets, etc).
Just saying :)
I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying amounts of electricity and hardware, but that is about as positive as I can be about this news.
I know precisely that I see the same old arguments against crypto time after time, but somehow despite all of these scams, carnage, etc. it still refuses to die somehow.
Maybe companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe, Monegram, and even the regulators want it to succeed? If not, they would have banned all the exchanges, coins, and removed all wallets off of the apps stores a long time ago.
So I'm afraid that it is here to stay, with some survivors existing for a long time under certain compliance requirements and other crypto projects withering away.
The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the reduced cost of debt, which naturally favors the wealthiest, which reflects in the price of what wealthy people buy when they have too much money (scarce assets).
The base concept of cryptocurrency is enabling free market economies by bypassing government regulation, and at least in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, regulating inflation by setting it in code, instead of being opaquely decided by a few wealthy people (some of them convicted of insider-trading[1]). Those two things tend to favor bottom-up wealth creation, rather than the trickle-down model fiat currencies encourage. That's a wealth decentralization force, not centralization like you claim.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-timeline-of-the-federal-res...
In principle, inflationary currencies have a force pushing away from wealth centralization, while deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it, which is why everyone who thinks they'll have the centralized wealth likes deflationary currencies.
That depends entirely where the new money gets injected. If it gets injected at the top, like with our current fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth-decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1]
Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least mitigated.
[1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the-cantillo...
While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.
That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it?
> Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.
This is not a problem if the reward distribution is proportional to the investment from miners, which happens when the mining competition has low or inverse economies of scale, and a low barrier to entry.
In PoW and Bitcoin especially, the economies of scale are huge. "Industrial" miners are greatly more profitable than home miners, and ASICs require an upfront investment which comes with risk that smaller operations might not want to take. The result of this high barrier to entry and economies of scale are empirically verifiable by looking at the hash rate from block wins.
A correctly designed PoS system almost completely removes economies of scale (notice I said correctly designed, because many other PoS cryptocurrencies actually explicitly favor larger stakes), but might add some artificial barrier to entry, like Ethereum's 32 ETH minimum. The wealth centralization effect is also amplified in PoS by how directly acquiring the scarce resource required to participate in the competition influences the value of existing stakers' investment.
In Proof of Space consensus protocols (PoST) [1], the scarce resource is storage space. This can have minimal or even inverse economies of scales relative to money invested, as the running costs become almost as minimal as a PoS operation. And since the quality of the storage material is also irrelevant, what matters most is the cost per Tb of acquisition of storage space. The best savings are done on second hand drives, which makes investment in free time rather than money the profit differentiator. The free time to wealth ratio scales inversely, so smaller PoST miners can have a proportional advantage over larger ones. This decentralization effect is empirically verifiable with how much more individual mining nodes the biggest PoST cryptocurrency Chia currently has than Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the comparatively very low absolute amount of rewards its consensus delivers to its miners.
[1]: full name: Proof of Space and Time, with Time referring to a competition required to get reliable timestamps on the blockchain happening in parallel to the competition over Space.
Where did I say it was the only problem? Why are you strawmaning my comment with such anger?
> ands acting as if solving this one problem should silence all dissenters lest they be considered unserious is disingenuous.
Another strawman and this rhetoric sounds like defeat and denial and my point was (if you've properly read my comment instead of misconstruing it) as soon as it moves to proof-of-stake, there will be no argument on the environmental issues in Ethereum, which was regularly parroted by the critics.
> Look at the comments for literally any popular article about crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one and you'll probably find plenty.
Look at what? I see no comments about the environmental issues in Ethereum anymore, which proves my point. I already recognise that there are scams, ponzis, etc happening in Ethereum which the regulators will step in and crackdown on them anyway.
> I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying amounts of electricity and hardware
Exactly. All the fraud and scams are visible on a public blockchain which is easily traceable for everyone including the SEC, CFTC and the FBI to see.
Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in PoW-based blockchains. Maybe we just run in different circles, but the main criticism I see of PoS is that it doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other externalities more clearly.
I was totally and exactly clear about what I meant about "Inventing new problems" after Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake.
One can move to proof-of-stake, reduce or eliminate the significant environmental issues in their chains whilst also increase centralization which is another major valid criticism brought up after the upgrade to PoS widely discussed here. Like I said before, I don't see anyone here discussing how Ethereum moving to PoS is worse for the environment than PoW and I consider the environmental issues of Ethereum brought up by many critics answered and it will no longer be an issue.
You can still be anti-crypto and welcome this [0] (or not) and still criticise it on the centralization, scams and ponzi enablement and alledged limited use cases etc. But not for the environmental issues, or 'burning up the planet', etc on Ethereum.
> Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in PoW-based blockchains.
I did not make that claim.
> the main criticism I see of PoS is that it doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other externalities more clearly.
Right, unfortunately Ethereum or the wider crypto ecosystem in general isn't going to go away that easily. But I know it certainly will be more regulated with a few surviving blockchains.
I'm sure the lifespan of used GPUs is reduced, but it's hard to say by how much. There's probably a lot of variability due to chip yield and operating conditions (especially temperature and ESD safety). But if I could get one at half off, I'd probably take that chance.
I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards and with running them at a constant rate, they won’t undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down each time it gets used.
I sure hope those people bought mining GPUs/put their money where their mouth is.
The next most valuable proof of work coin at <1% of the total market value is dogecoin, and that's already long been using ASIC miners like bitcoin.
Unless Ethereum miners forcibly maintain a PoW fork or try to pump up Ethereum Classic back into the spotlight, GPU mining might finally be effectively dead.
As many people have said for years, there's only room on this planet for one proof of work chain, and it's bitcoin. All other use cases with be proof of stake, or sidechains and layer twos of some base chain.
It would have been nice if they had at least moved to purpose made ASICs, like bitcoin had the decency to do.
But yeah, 32 ETH at the time of the Beacon chain starting was only a few thousand dollars
My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto, and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would effectively destroy it.
(my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant)
Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large corporation of the interests or a nation-state, but on the genuine belief in the soundness of an idea and a willingness to work together to change the world.
"The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. "
They've simulated the switchover dozens of times on a diverse set of networks, including development ("shadow") forks of the main network itself.
As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for 9/6 this gives the approximately 4500 Ethereum nodes (of which 3381 are geth)[0] 10 days to update...
It also doesn't help that they botched the prior release (two days ago) of the geth client that had a nasty corruption issue that requires a little more than the update warning footnote in this release to fix[1]. Many people who deployed 1.10.22 are re-syncing from (almost) scratch.
Even if you followed Prysm and the other Beacon implementations the deployment and configuration changes required are non-trivial[2] and again, the v3 release referenced in this announcement was only released two days ago!
As someone who runs Ethereum nodes I'm a little gun shy at this point deploying new releases of this stack, especially given how things have gone the past two days. Even with our relatively trivial application this gives little time for any testing or assurance process.
It's amazing to me given the stakes (value of the Ethereum chain) and complexity (huge) node operators are essentially in the position of waiting until mere days (or hours) to upgrade their nodes and as noted - there are thousands of us around the world.
IMO this is yet another indication that the real issue with regard to decentralization of blockchain solutions is the fact that (as pointed out by Moxie and others) the vast majority of the real users and platforms of Ethereum interact with the chain via a handful of centralized node providers (Alchemy, Infura, etc). Who can blame them given what a mess this is?
I'm also not picking on Ethereum specifically, the same things could be said about most of the other chains and implementations I've interacted with. Given the hype, promise, age, and value in the blockchain ecosystem the software itself makes Apache circa 1996 look like mature, rock solid software.
BTW, the Ethereum Foundation alone holds approximately $1.6B in assets[3] and investors have poured tens of billions of dollars in this ecosystem. IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right.
[0] - https://ethernodes.org/
[1] - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases
[2] - https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge
[3] - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...
If anything, this just shows how complex the system is. Distributed systems are hard to write.
The recent Geth 1.10.22 bug only occurs on shutdown- an edge case I imagine they will be testing from now on.
At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the internet:
Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting a few years after the release of the web.
I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users interacting with and depending on it everyday.
All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile, etc.
The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet.
Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of complexity and effort that went into making the modern web fairly solid.
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google...
I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc.
I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was skipping trips to the library for homework by 1998 (at the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and client software, etc) were already vastly more mature than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best) to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough - 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0].
I don't know about you but I don't remember a single instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet.
I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked. Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of miles and countless components of physical infrastructure that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of people by 2000?
The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still worked. It was slow because it turns out literally digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long process.
Yeah, I get that the website google.com was around in 1998. I was around then, too, and used it too. But behind the scenes of that deceptively simple looking frontend, is a mass of data centers and a multi-million line code base that was (and indeed, still is) being updated and maintained by thousands of engineers to prevent it from falling apart or being abused by SEO maximizers to the point of being unusable.
If it's so simple, please try to re-create it. It shouldn't take you too long. Just a wave of your hand.
> if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet.
Plenty of back-end servers with zero day exploits have to be patched all the time. Other incidents happen all the time behind the scenes that engineers are forced to fix on short notice to keep a massive service operational. I'm guessing you've never worked on call as a dev ops engineer.
Ethereum works. It has 100% uptime since 2015. That's impressive. Not even Google can claim that.
Are you claiming Google had millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers in 1998? It certainly didn't - as best I can tell from history it had less than five people in the entire company at that point.
My point is Google went from research paper to you and I using it in two years with a few hundred thousand dollars. For the record - I couldn't do this today let alone then and I don't know where you got the implication I said I could?
Yes, over 25 years later it does roughly six billion searches per day and is what you describe. 500 hours of content are uploaded per minute to YouTube alone.
I also didn't say Google was simple - actually the opposite. Again, point is a tiny number of people with an accompanying tiny amount of investment (relative to almost anything in blockchain today) did something very hard and had it in the hands of you and I in two years.
Back to my original point, Ethereum is seven years in with an army of people (808 contributors to geth alone) and billions of dollars. Yet, as this merge has shown so far the implementation is fundamentally still a mess.
I'm trying to make some comparisons between the early (10 or so) years of the web and blockchain. We don't have 30 years of blockchain to look back on so I have no idea why you insist on bringing the state of Google in 2022 to the discussion as it has no relevance whatsoever.
but alot of us run custom clients and know there is major room for improvement, with Go-Ethereum being the worst one
this doesn't address what you need to do for the merge
but definitely look into node software thats not written in Go. The rust ones are 10x faster and use 90% less time and space to sync (an archive node) than Go-Ethereum
writing node software doesnt make money so its neglected
Have any pointers? I've looked around plenty and all of the non-go clients I've tried (for mainnet and beacon) have had pretty serious issues - wrong/invalid data, missing blocks, various other weird edge cases, stability, etc.
It definitely is neglected. Alchemy isn't worth $10B because they're just running geth... It's a vicious circle - node software sucks so anyone serious that needs things to "just work" uses a commercial node provider. Result is less emphasis, testing, investment, engineering, etc put into the available open source implementations.
contribute code to projects like Akula and Silkworm
continue raising awareness about shitty open source node software underpinning all of this
Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total Difficulty value.
The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain – 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022.
The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.
[/quote]
Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards.
So, not quite deflationary but pretty close. If Ethereum network usage picks up again like it did in 2021, Ethereum will experience long stretches of time where it is deflationary.
PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year, which can be offset with burn rate, but it is at 0.5% now.
The site projects that in 200 years, burn and issuance will be at equilibrium.
PoS issuance is 4.6%/year per staked ETH.
Only 14M of the total 120M ETH are staked right now, making the real issuance only 0.5%/year when taken as a percentage of total ETH supply.
Subtract the 0.5% burn rate from that 0.5% real issuance rate (with rounding errors), and that's how you get Ethereum's current situation of being "pretty close" to deflationary.
Will gas fees burn or go to stakers?
EIP-1559 is the Ethereum patch that introduced the fee burn in Aug 2021.
It's a bit complex, but basically speaking, the higher demand is for the network, the more expensive transactions become and the more ETH gets burned.
The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 - Aug 2022 (387 comments)
Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won’t fix other problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44 comments)
“The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15 comments)
The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 - Aug 2022 (175 comments)
Ethereum merge on schedule after successful Goerli test merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)
Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 - Aug 2022 (310 comments)
Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 - July 2022 (35 comments)
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 - July 2022 (326 comments)
Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 - June 2022 (23 comments)
Why Proof of Stake? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 - Nov 2020 (35 comments)
Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 - Jan 2019 (11 comments)
Proof of Stake or Proof of Work, What's the Difference? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 - Nov 2018 (107 comments)
Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake Testnet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 - Dec 2017 (199 comments)
Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 - Aug 2017 (120 comments)
Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 - Nov 2016 (77 comments)
Long Read: Alternatives for Proof of Work, Part 1: Proof of Stake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 - Aug 2015 (3 comments)
Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help secure the chain at a (relatively low) cost compared to PoW chains, and having an efficient and secure blockchain opens up other opportunities for profit.
In my case, I am less interested in speculating with tokens and I am more interested in seeing a blockchain that can be an actual alternative for cross-border payments. I feel like by becoming a staker (and by working in projects that leverage layer-2 scaling networks [0]) I am contributing to that becoming a reality with a (relatively) low opportunity cost.
[0]: https://hub20.io
$53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
And for those that are joining now, but worry that the investment would be too big, consider the possibility of pooling resources with other people and stake using your own node. This is one the things that I would like to do next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool together resources with their friends and to manage their validators...
> so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
Guarantee? No, of course not.
2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for myself, and I believe that there are others like me.
[0]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361
I really liked Cardano, until I started trying to learn more about it and develop for it.
It's way behind Ethereum in developer experience. The way funds are shuffled around between addresses for a wallet also makes it much harder to reason about (even though in theory the UTXO model is better than account-based for parallel processing of transactions). In actuality, I don't think it's more scalable than Ethereum, and the scaling solutions they're working on (which are years out IMO) are L2s, like with Ethereum.
The tooling is also way behind Ethereum, and running a full wallet is incredibly resource-intensive.
I'm still staking a lot of Cardano, but I think it's unlikely it will overtake Ethereum in value at this point.
Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as many alternatives.
The number of validators probably won’t grow beyond a couple million because the earnings/rewards per validator shrink as the total number of active validators grows. The effective APR is already down to ~4%.
There has been a sustained effort over the last 2+ years to make this happen:
- thousands of commits in many public Git repositories, mostly on GitHub
- cross-team calls (for a variety of teams external to the Ethereum Foundation, though having received grants from the same) with recordings, transcripts, and minutes that are accessible to the public
- a series of testnet "merges" leading up to the OP that stretch back over recent months
I'm asking a genuine question. Yes, I realize it's taken time to make it happen and far longer than originally estimated, but it's not like the announcement popped out of nowhere.
What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will become to Ripple post-merge. Yes Ripple doesn't have anywhere near the fancy contract capabilities of Ethereum, nor does it have the concept of validators posting collateral or getting rewards. But in terms of where the power resides and the existence of major chokepoints, they're both very similar.
Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in 2015?