161–170 of 347 posts
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You can always buy them out. But honestly, a 51% attack seems like a much less likely way for ethereum to fail compared to it just not living up to the hype.
A buyer requires a seller. Who's to say they would?
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incredible amounts of energy compared to the value this gives us Note that the value of ETH is higher than the value of the energy needed to mine it; that's why people mine. So is your complaint really about mispricing of energy (externalities) or about other people having different values than you?
Well, the price of ETH is higher than the price of the energy needed to mine it. The energy consumed has demonstrable value, but that's yet not true for ETH. As many people have said here, it's experimental. And of course, there's a fair bit of financial speculation going on. But as far as I know, it's generating no significant value on its own.
If a person is willing to spend money (for energy, or for buying crypto on an exchange), we can say crypto has "demonstrable value" for that person, no matter what they want to do with that crypto.
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Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.
That tends to happen in PoW actually. Example: Last year, Monero forked and changed the protocol by changing the PoW algorithm. Effectively shutting off a significant section of the miners. Miners had no defence - it was a major blow to them. Same thing happened in Sia. There's been discussion with changing the PoW of Bitcoin as well.
Whilst this is great for decentralization, I've read interesting arguments in favor of ASIC mining. People who buy ASICs are committed to a coin. This leads to a stable base of mining. Meanwhile, GPU miners tend to mine whatever is the most profitable at any given time. This leads to large fluctuations in mining rates.
The Ether switch to POS has some people worried, as it might free up a lot of GPU power, which might overwhelm other GPU based POW systems.
Then again, any argument regarding mining algorithms is filled by people who have biases to the tune of 100 000$ of hardware investments.
> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…
Quoting Vitalik: > If someone puts a gun to my head & tells me to write a hardfork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download & install the update & switch to that chain? I see few raised hands. This is called decentralization. Sure, the Ethereum Foundation has substantial influence in the sense that their proposed changes tend to be adop…
Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article. From the article we read " the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform. " Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to descr…
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There could be another reason why most people decided to follow the DAO fork: perhaps it's simply because they agreed with the actions taken by the Ethereum developers to return the money to the shareholders instead of leaving it to the thief? Or do you believe that users would have followed the developers even if they forked the chain to pocket all the money themselves?
I don't think there was a thief. Before the fork, the very point of Ethereum was that code is law and there is no need for human interpretation. The so-called thief merely noticed that the DAO code had a feature that allowed them to extract money from it, and they did.
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It's called a zkSNARK. One proves they performed any computation with a constant size proof of the result.
Constant size or constant time?
Generally, it is 'constant' w.r.t. the witness you are proving you know, and something like logarithmic w.r.t. the statement about that witness you are proving.
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> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mist…
And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.
The other thing to note is that decentralisation isn't just about ideology. If we forget finance and focus on data, a blockchain solution may in the future provide the ability for open federated data that is provably correct and can operated on transactionally.
Think flight availability: right now the majority of flight ticketing is controlled by Amadeus. A highly centralised, controlled and opaque service. Assuming _many_ technical problems were solved, a blockchain flight ticketing service could allow anyone to run a local node with real time availability that was guaranteed to be correct.
Even if this was run be a federation of providers, it would be a better solution than the current one.
In POW, the block time is a result of the difficulty, which relies on very low accuracy time-stamps for blocks. Yet, with POS it seems to me I can 'mine' a block at any given moment. Thus, what determines the 'block time' in POS?
If the 'block time' gets to be too fast, then the size of the blockchain is going to be quite large.
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Is Tezos not pure PoS?
Tezos uses delegated PoS, so no, I don't think it qualifies. D-PoS is sort of antithetical to the idea of decentralized blockchain due to a small number of nodes and very questionable process of node (witness) selection.
1. The number of nodes is not fixed.
2. The process for node selection is random, based on the amount staked. This happens continuously.
3. The D in DPoS is entirely optional. Anyone holding Tezos can directly participate by running a node. The only cost is the cost of a VPS.
The only real restriction* is a 10000 XTZ minimum for running a node. At current / ICO prices that's around $5k. While that's not cheap it's a lot more attractive than the CAPEX/OPEX of mining hardware.
Also, that $5k will grow by 5.5%++ per year, i.e., no depreciation of hardware and only a trivial amount of overhead.
Those not wanting to run a node (or with less than 10k XTZ) can delegate to a baker. There are a wealth of them available already.
*This restriction may be lowered in the future -- by way of on-chain voting (as opposed to a hard fork).