Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

blog.cotten.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#61

Post by tptacek »

bouncycastle wrote: post #59
tptacek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're an ancap, this argument doesn't actually say anything; you can protect the proceeds of any crime from investigation and impoundment under the aegis of "electronic privacy". When people say "money laundering is a feature of dapps", it's pretty clear that they're referring to organized crime. If you are an ancap, more power to you, but it's useful to have arguments that are persuasive to the huge majority…

"Money laundering" is also when you conceal the source of funds that haven't been tainted by crime Everyone should have the right to privacy, electronic transactions are no different. Of course, you can use the good old "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" argument, which has already won over...

That's true, but when people say "Ethereum is used for money laundering", that's not what they mean, so it's not a useful argument. If it helps, just substitute "organized crime" for "money laundering". That's what people mean.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#62

Post by stale2002 »

tptacek wrote: post #57
bouncycastle wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Money laundering" is a dysphemism. The proper therm for it is "electronic privacy", or even just privacy.

Unless you're an ancap, this argument doesn't actually say anything; you can protect the proceeds of any crime from investigation and impoundment under the aegis of "electronic privacy". When people say "money laundering is a feature of dapps", it's pretty clear that they're referring to organized crime. If you are an ancap, more power to you, but it's useful to have arguments that are persuasive to the huge majority…

> under the aegis of "electronic privacy".

Regardless, that still doesn't mean the electronic privacy is the same as crime.

Or, would you be willing to hand over every bit of electronic information about you over to the government?

Oh, you don't want that? Well, what do you have to hide then?

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#63

Post by bouncycastle »

tptacek wrote: post #61
bouncycastle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Money laundering" is also when you conceal the source of funds that haven't been tainted by crime Everyone should have the right to privacy, electronic transactions are no different. Of course, you can use the good old "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" argument, which has already won over...

That's true, but when people say "Ethereum is used for money laundering", that's not what they mean, so it's not a useful argument. If it helps, just substitute "organized crime" for "money laundering". That's what people mean.

Ethereum doesn't offer any serious financial privacy (yet) so neither does your statement make any sense.

Privacy is important though, doesn't matter if it's financial or not.

In the future, should more serious privacy options come to Ethereum, then it's important that everyone should be entitled to use it, just like we are allowed to use end-to-end encryption today.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#64

Post by JackRabbitSlim »

dcolkitt wrote: post #5
majewsky wrote: post #3

> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?

I can't comment specifically on the details, but one consideration is that Ethereum's mining hash is designed to be ASIC resistant. Bitcoin is entirely mined by dedicated hardware that's incapable of doing anything other than mining Bitcoin. Ethereum is mostly mined by GPUs that can obviously be repurposed for other applications if need be. If the electricity cost for Ethereum mining gets too out of control, the mine…

Etheriums PoW algorithm isn't ASIC resistant, just largely unimplemented. Indeed a large reason NIST made Keccak SHA3 is that ASIC/FPGA acceleration is on par or even faster than SHA256 acceleration.

It may take a bit more ram and need a decent bus as a result which is why people mine on GPUs that have both. Rather than cheap ASICS that are cheap because they have neither. "Resistant" ain't the word to use.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#65

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #52

> Why? Because Ethereum isn’t just a store-of-value. The Ethereum network also contains smart contracts that execute native code on the blockchain. It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade…

[deleted]

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#66

Post by exdsq »

leppr wrote: post #46
Semaphor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the problems with current PoS systems? Not being glib, seriously interested as there are at least a few that implement some kind of Pos (for example dPoS with Ark)

Permissioned networks are a very much easier setting to design a consensus protocol for than public ones. Describing a consensus algorithm as "Proof of Stake" simply means it uses some kind of stake to secure its decisions, this doesn't say anything about the assumptions it starts from. Existing "PoS" blockchains don't have the same decentralization goals as Ethereum.

“Existing ‘PoS’ blockchains don't have the same decentralization goals as Ethereum.”

What makes you think this?

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#67

Post by nybble41 »

imtringued wrote: post #53
sp332 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the ASICs are used because they are more efficient. Forcing miners to use less efficient hardware is going to drive up the average energy per hash calculated.

You're completely ignoring the difficulty mechanism in Bitcoin. When everyone has a 1TH/s miner that consumes 1kWh and suddenly a 10TH/s miner that consumes 1kWh comes out everyone is going to switch to the new miner. Because Bitcoin guarantees that a block is mined every 10 minutes it has to make the calculation 10x harder than before. The end result? The energy consumption didn't change. What makes Bitcoin more ene…

Basically correct, except that it isn't the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum that matters, per se, but rather the value of the reward for each block relative to the amount of time required to mine it. For Bitcoin, ignoring transaction fees, the rate is 12.5 bitcoins per 10 minutes; for Ethereum it's 3 ETH per 15 seconds. If the price of 1 BTC is 70x the price of 1 ETH then you would break even expending about 7.3x over a given interval to mine 12.5 BTC vs. 1x to mine 120 ETH. If you spent 70x, however, you'd soon be bankrupt despite the higher BTC price, because you don't earn 70x the value.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#68

Post by grubles »

derefr wrote: post #52

> Why? Because Ethereum isn’t just a store-of-value. The Ethereum network also contains smart contracts that execute native code on the blockchain. It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade…

The other funny thing is the common misconception that Bitcoin does not have smart contracts. Bitcoin transactions are actually pretty programmable. You can have a coin be unspendable until a certain date, or have it require n cosigners to be spent, or have it become spendable only once a secret is revealed which matches a hash.

Bitcoin most definitely has smart contracts.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#69

Post by im3w1l »

Semaphor wrote: post #37
Analemma_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake is cryptocurrency's fusion power: perpetually "less than a year away"; it's the technology of the future and always will be.

What are the problems with current PoS systems? Not being glib, seriously interested as there are at least a few that implement some kind of Pos (for example dPoS with Ark)

From my understanding, the issue with PoS is that if a chain forks you can mine both sides without penalty. A consequence of this is that if someone wants to retroactively create a fork that starting from a block a few years ago, then people could do a few years worth of mining of this fork in an instant. And it wouldn't be possible to tell these two chains apart cryptographically. With PoW it would be computationally expensive to pull such a stunt.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#70

Post by im3w1l »

nybble41 wrote: post #67
imtringued wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're completely ignoring the difficulty mechanism in Bitcoin. When everyone has a 1TH/s miner that consumes 1kWh and suddenly a 10TH/s miner that consumes 1kWh comes out everyone is going to switch to the new miner. Because Bitcoin guarantees that a block is mined every 10 minutes it has to make the calculation 10x harder than before. The end result? The energy consumption didn't change. What makes Bitcoin more ene…

Basically correct, except that it isn't the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum that matters, per se, but rather the value of the reward for each block relative to the amount of time required to mine it. For Bitcoin, ignoring transaction fees, the rate is 12.5 bitcoins per 10 minutes; for Ethereum it's 3 ETH per 15 seconds. If the price of 1 BTC is 70x the price of 1 ETH then you would break even expending about 7.3x over a…

So energy usage should drop quite a bit after some difficulty increases?
Post reply on HN