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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#81

Post by ve55 »

Bromskloss wrote: post #70
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Does Ethereum's existence hinge on Solidity? Isn't Solidity just a language that one can compile to the lower-level language actually built into Ethereum?

You could have other languages that compile code into EVM-executable opcodes, but Solidity is currently the language used by all major players in the Ethereum ecosystem for writing smart contracts. Although there's other options (or new options could be made), it's very unlikely that Solidity will be replaced by any of them any time soon.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#82

Post by viraptor »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #33
corford wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…

If you're buying stuff on darknet markets it's nice to be able to do it with freshly mined coins that don't have transaction histories associated with them.

Why does it matter? Once you do the transfer, why would anyone refuse to send you the goods? It's not like they can reverse the transaction - only send back the equivalent amount in the best case.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#83

Post by kmkemp »

corford wrote: post #47
alexktz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

£6 per card per day (1080ti) is quite appealing. 60p electricity costs. £48 per day minus £4.80 costs. Every day? For just leaving something switched on? It is quite appealing. I got my 1080ti's for £650 a pop. ROI is 108 days. That's why people, myself included, are doing it.

I still don't get it :( That's 108 days before you _start_ to make a profit and future returns are guaranteed to diminish as difficulty goes up. Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period. To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.

In the "invest in ETH" example, you're taking the appreciation of ETH into account, but in the case of mining crypto, you're ignoring it. Still, you're right in the overall point that just investing is more profitable. If you are going to gain value from the GPU, though, mining is a great way to make some extra cash.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#84

Post by nokcha »

xucheng wrote: post #60
runeks wrote: post #11

> Again, let’s design a simple smart contract. This time Alice wants to play a guessing game. Alice puts 5 Ether in her contract. That ETH goes to the person that guesses closest to the number she’s thinking of. Alice calls commit with the hash of the number, so she can’t change her mind. Anyone else can call guess to submit a guess. After 2 blocks Alice calls reveal to tell everyone what the number is. This scheme i…

> Alice’s commit transaction needs to specify some block height after which further guesses are ignored, and then publish the “reveal” message some (safe) number of blocks after this. I think this is unsafe as well. Noted that since everyone can verify the real answer, there is no point for Alice to reveal it. As a result, as soon as anyone submits the correct answer, the miners can cheat and replace the answer as th…

One solution is to formulate the contract so that guessers submit a hash of (guess, nonce). The contract records each submission. A few blocks after the submission deadline, Alice reveals the correct answer. Then submitters of correct guesses send another message to the contract with their nonce. The contract gives the reward to the person who submitted a correct guess the earliest.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#85

Post by mhluongo »

Bromskloss wrote: post #70
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Does Ethereum's existence hinge on Solidity? Isn't Solidity just a language that one can compile to the lower-level language actually built into Ethereum?

Yep, anyone interested in taking a crack can write a language that compiles down to the Low-level Lisp-like Language (LLL) intermediate lang.

There are a couple projects working on it (eg Viper), though many seems to prefer starting a new blockchain.

Edit: s/Serpent/Viper/

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#86

Post by zaat »

xucheng wrote: post #60
runeks wrote: post #11

> Again, let’s design a simple smart contract. This time Alice wants to play a guessing game. Alice puts 5 Ether in her contract. That ETH goes to the person that guesses closest to the number she’s thinking of. Alice calls commit with the hash of the number, so she can’t change her mind. Anyone else can call guess to submit a guess. After 2 blocks Alice calls reveal to tell everyone what the number is. This scheme i…

> Alice’s commit transaction needs to specify some block height after which further guesses are ignored, and then publish the “reveal” message some (safe) number of blocks after this. I think this is unsafe as well. Noted that since everyone can verify the real answer, there is no point for Alice to reveal it. As a result, as soon as anyone submits the correct answer, the miners can cheat and replace the answer as th…

You can solve that with additional step: 1. Alice send the challenge. 2. You submit the answered, encrypted. 3. After you verify that your answer was included in a block, you post the private key you used for the encrypted answer. 4. Profit

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#87

Post by bsenftner »

Can any explain how the economics of mining does not promote the creation of a miner monopoly, aka a "miner Amazon". Once a single entity controls mining, Game Over: the economy is owned.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#88

Post by corford »

kmkemp wrote: post #83
corford wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it :( That's 108 days before you _start_ to make a profit and future returns are guaranteed to diminish as difficulty goes up. Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period. To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.

In the "invest in ETH" example, you're taking the appreciation of ETH into account, but in the case of mining crypto, you're ignoring it. Still, you're right in the overall point that just investing is more profitable. If you are going to gain value from the GPU, though, mining is a great way to make some extra cash.

Sorry, I just assumed ETH was out of reach of personal mining now.

Sure, you could hold "shitcoins" that are currently easier to mine but that's a lot more risky than long term holding something like ETH, LTC, XMR (at least I think it is anyway).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#89

Post by 52-6F-62 »

Bromskloss wrote: post #70
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Does Ethereum's existence hinge on Solidity? Isn't Solidity just a language that one can compile to the lower-level language actually built into Ethereum?

Not explicitly. Currently, it's the most widest used language for interacting with the VM, but it's not the end development goal. I don't think the entire thing hinges on Solidity, though it's probably the most immediately accessible language. The hype driving the price up seems a bit premature, though.

There are a couple of other languages in development that might improve the ecosystem:

* Vyper https://github.com/ethereum/vyper

* Serpent https://github.com/ethereum/serpent

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#90

Post by gt_ »

bsenftner wrote: post #87

Can any explain how the economics of mining does not promote the creation of a miner monopoly, aka a "miner Amazon". Once a single entity controls mining, Game Over: the economy is owned.

Anyone with compatible equipment can mine on the network; no permission needed.
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