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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#151

Post by giaour »

epistasis wrote: post #139
spookthesunset wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the language when the very premise of the project "code is law" was proven wrong. When the DAO was "hacked" by a "thief", rather than tell people "whelp, code is law and the code executed perfect" the mob (more accurately, those at the top of the etherium pyramid) decided to change history and roll back the blockchain. Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack",…

IMHO, "code is law" is a silly thing to aim for, and by ignoring that saying for the DAO incident proves that Ethereum is more valuable than it would be otherwise. The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system…

There are a number of reasons a court might throw out a contract, but one party having made an expensive mistake is not one of them. Edit: turns out this isn't true. TIL that a contract to which no reasonable or informed person would have agreed can be thrown out as "unconscionable."

And even if it were, why roll back the block chain to rectify the situation? In traditional accounting, wouldn't you need a ledger record of both the mistake and its correction?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#152

Post by alexktz »

Jack000 wrote: post #99
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.

> £6 per card which cryptocurrency is this? I'm only getting <£3/day mining ETH on my 1080ti..

I am using simplemining os to mine ALT coins (mostly equihash based) to miningpoolhub which auto exchanges to LTC for me. From there I send to coinbase -> gdax -> trade for either GBP or ETH depending on my mood!

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#153

Post by alexktz »

corford wrote: post #127
metamet wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes 3 months to make all of your initial investment back on mining ETH with a 1060, after electricity.

That's actually better than I would have imagined. What's the difficulty growth like with ETH these days? Or, what's a safe estimation of how many ETH a 1060 could mine before Casper lands?

3 months is longer than 108 days ;)

I don't mine ETH directly with Nvidia hardware though it is still profitable on AMD gear. I use whattomine.com to get a rough estimate of my daily earnings...

I mine to a pool called miningpoolhub which auto exchanges my shitcoins to LTC (or whatever I choose). From there I send to Coinbase -> GDAX -> Sell for ETH or FIAT. So far, since starting mining 1 month ago I have ROI'd 1.8 1080ti's already. Once they've paid themselves off the rest is pure profit and the best part, GPUs have intrinsic value beyond mining.

Also as per other commentors - coins I mined will appreciate too. If I buy ETH with FIAT (which I have also done btw) I am literally buying thin air. At least with GPUs I own a thing if the shit hits the proverbial!

- whattomine.com - https://goo.gl/94KHv4

- https://simplemining.net/

- https://miningpoolhub.com

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#154

Post by bigiain »

madeofpalk wrote: post #149
epistasis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, or 51% of stake if Ethereum ever switches to proof of stake. Ethereum runs by capitalistic power, not democratic power. I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it. Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the po…

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

And proof of stake is likely to be even worse. The people with the most money decide who gets richer and who doesn't. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#155

Post by bsenftner »

tinco wrote: post #122
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.

You are answering your own question. Suppose someone would invest billions in obtaining a mining rig that single handedly achieves 51% of the mining power of the network, then he effectively kills that network, and makes his investment worthless. There's a reason the valuations of Bitcoin and Ether waiver every time it seems a pool is coming close to 51% mining power, it's because everyone is scared of what happens w…

Suppose someone would invest billions in obtaining a mining rig that single handedly achieves 20%, or 30% or whatever% of the mining power of the network, then they effectively use that advantage to achieve manipulation of the network or manipulation of the economy via their monopoly/large-entity level oversight of the economy. As you point out, there is no incentive to kill the network, but quite a bit of incentive to manipulate the network. Via modern corporate shells, no doubt people/groups are already trying to achieve this, they do in any market.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#156

Post by jvdizz »

bigiain wrote: post #154
madeofpalk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

And proof of stake is likely to be even worse. The people with the most money decide who gets richer and who doesn't. What could possibly go wrong?

Not quite. The richest actually do the work to keep the system running. They need to stake their claim to the system to validate everyone else's trx. If is in their best interest not to mess up, otherwise they lose their stake in the system.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#157

Post by nradov »

giaour wrote: post #151
epistasis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, "code is law" is a silly thing to aim for, and by ignoring that saying for the DAO incident proves that Ethereum is more valuable than it would be otherwise. The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system…

There are a number of reasons a court might throw out a contract, but one party having made an expensive mistake is not one of them. Edit: turns out this isn't true. TIL that a contract to which no reasonable or informed person would have agreed can be thrown out as "unconscionable." And even if it were, why roll back the block chain to rectify the situation? In traditional accounting, wouldn't you need a ledger reco…

That's not necessarily how the US civil court system works. Courts will sometimes throw out or alter contracts if a good-faith mistake by one party produces a result that would violate the fundamental principle of equity. This is more likely if the result appears to violate the original intent of the contract.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#158

Post by JonasJSchreiber »

As someone who has a couple rigs mining 24/7 I would say he’s looking at the profitability of mining wrong. Personally I don't reinvest my mining profits in more mining equipment. There's a hard cap on how much amperage can be delivered to my house, and I have no interest in interfering with my daily appliances.

As far as when does it becomes profitable to play games with consensus? Never. Most miners mine using pools like suprnova, ethermine, and nanopool. I don't have control over whether we are appropriately confirming transactions or not, but it would be pretty unwise for my pool to start violating consensus.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#159

Post by elmar »

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…

"We have no idea what we are doing!" Karl Floersch - Ethereum Researcher

https://youtu.be/ycF0WFHY5kc?t=991

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#160

Post by fyi1183 »

theoh wrote: post #50
cjbprime wrote: post #42

Nice article! Here's another type of failure with its solution: * You want to register a domain name on the blockchain and associate it with your address, so you submit "register foo". * The miner sees it, and inserts an earlier transaction registering foo to them instead. Solution: * You register the hash of foo, which registers the plaintext encoded by that hash, then wait until the transaction is accepted publicly…

This is similar to the rainbow table attack on password hashes. The defense against that is to use a (public) salt when computing the hash. Maybe something similar will work here, though I'm not clear about the details of your notion of "just in time" hashing. The salt just prevents precomputation of hashes.

It would be better for the salt to be private (and revealed at the same time as the name), otherwise a miner could still try to guess at the name being reserved. Having a public salt only eliminates the possibility of precomputing many hashes, i.e. rainbow tables.
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