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Ethereum 2.0 launches

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#361

Post by downandout »

nootropicat wrote: post #253
konschubert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are n…

Define 'kill'. ETC has been 51% attacked multiple times and it still exists. It's very possible some people are going to mine btc on their personal hardware even in 2100. The only caveat is the difficulty adjustment algorithm, as it's potentially possible for btc to become stuck at an extremely high difficulty. For 'kill' as in 'stops being big and important' I think it's going to happen relatively soon, mostly agree…

Bitcoin might fall into obsolescence, but it won’t be because it is mined. It simply isn’t as useful as ETH. I firmly believe that DeFi, which is based upon ETH’s smart contracts and distributed EVM concept, is the future of the finance and investing universe, even with its many issues today.

Flash loans/minting, for example, have turned the markets into the ultimate meritocracy. Anyone - rich or poor - can access up to hundreds of millions of dollars instantly to execute any profitable transaction, no human review or approval necessary. Liquidity pools, introduced by Uniswap, solved many of the problems and risks associated with holding thinly traded assets. Smart contracts have enabled any new project’s tokens to instantly have real value, because in most cases new tokens can only be released to the market by locking ETH into the contract in exchange for the new tokens.

These innovations, along with those that are coming, enable a shockingly large number of new opportunities in the finance world to a much larger audience than ever before. It might be a few years before security, market manipulation protections, etc. are mature enough for mass adoption. But the opportunities that DeFi enables will drive demand for ETH, in a way that today’s Bitcoin simply cannot.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#362

Post by tylersmith »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #357
konschubert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are n…

> Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin [..] > Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. > Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. This is just wrong. If the award available to miners decreases due to lack of inflation they will use less power…

You're just explaining the steps of the parent's scenario. The chain must keep accumulating work faster than any adversary could keep up with or everyone's money is at risk because the state never fully finalizes.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#363

Post by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 »

nootropicat wrote: post #164
noneeeed wrote: post #6

Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always seemed the most interesting.

Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with rollups) allows for a truly global scale platform - over 100k TPS, potentially 1M, while still running on normal computers in people's homes. PoS is a requirement for sharding, as dividing security under PoW would make each shard too easy to attack. Last but not…

> PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW

Uh, why do you say that?

The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW:

The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fake that.

Well, you can compute two (or more) blocks in parallel, but then you'll spend half of your available CPU (or ASIC nowadays) cycles on each block, thus cutting your speed in half. So the non-malicious competitors on the network will produce more blocks meanwhile because they're not splitting their computation power, and thus your fake blocks will get invalidated because they're on the shorter chain.

With PoS on the other hand you can create as many fake blocks as you want and spam them to the network. The only security is the hope that the random network topology arbitrarily results in the double-spending blocks arriving at the targets under attack after the other blocks arrive.

But if you run thousands of nodes on the cloud and thus have better network connectivity than the victims you can make your double-spend blocks arrive first at the victims.

So:

- PoW: Relies on physical limits, you need to have physical hardware and physical energy to conduct an attack.

- PoS: Relies on the network connectivity of the attacker being hopefully worse than the connectivity of the non-malicious network. Who can guarantee that? Nobody.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#364

Post by bhaak »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #331
bhaak wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it would be (technologically) hard for Bitcoin to transition to a PoS (disregarding that we don't have yet conclusive proof if any PoS model actually works long time). Ethereum is built to a spec. That's why the different client developers had to coordinate their work. This is not the case with Bitcoin. There, the official client is the de-facto spec you have to comply with if you develop another clie…

Its a social task they already failed with the segwit fiasco. PoS would probably be worse

What do you mean "failed"? Segwit was activated. After lots of infighting and after a hard fork for a new chain occurred but it activated on the chain that has the bigger hashrate as of today.

If the Bitcoin developers would push for a POS hard fork I would expect the chain to split into a POS and POW version but which version would become the canonical Bitcoin would be up for debate.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#365

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #341
PycptN2MH wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is deceptive to say 'I don't understand' when what you mean is 'I disagree.' Your central argument is: 'You offer a service to everyone. I already have that service. Therefore you are not creating value'

It's pointless to engage this person. They are not operating in good faith.

I disagree- I have many of the same questions this person is asking. And like them, I haven't seen answers that really address the questions.

To add another voice: I "get" Bitcoin- I've owned some myself since 2014. I have never been able to "get" Ethereum. Its proponents always talk about "smart contracts" and the like, and how powerful the language is and all of that. Can you provide a real-world, actual example of how this has been used? Something to help it "click" for me?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#366

Post by andrewla »

dmihal wrote: post #279
shireboy wrote: post #3

Can someone ELI5 for current ETH holders? Will it split like Etherium Classic?

Short answer: no, there's only one Ethereum and one ETH asset Long answer: The beacon chain _will_ run in parallel until the two chains are merged. Until that time, ETH in the Beacon Chain isn't transferable, so effectively not a separate asset. However, exchanges are offering Eth2 staking derivatives which they're branding as "ETH2". But it should be remembered that this is a derivative, not a separate M0 asset.

Well, the expectation is that compliant clients will only respect transactions on Eth2 at some point and will no longer consider new blocks on Eth1 valid.

At any point in time, of course, any node or set of nodes can declare a fork in the chain to be invalid and reorganize on another chain. That's what happened with Ethereum Classic and it could happen again. I think less likely unless there's a vulnerability discovered in Eth2, though.

Also less likely because in some ways the Ethereum Classic incident helped cement Ethereum's place by scaring off all the ideologues and keeping the participants who were more pragmatic.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#367

Post by siraben »

Having worked with Ethereum, especially the low level bytecode, one of the changes I'm most excited for that I don't see mentioned a lot is the addition of eWASM support for nodes. There's many problems with the two dominant smart contract languages Solidity and Vyper, for instance bloated codegen that had to be patched otherwise complex contracts size could not be deployed[0], or more theoretical concerns such as soundness, semantics and correctness. Part of the problem is because of no coherent shared intermediate representation and developers writing backends from scratch, and lots of reinventing of the wheel[1]. There's an ongoing project[2] to create an LLVM backend for EVM but the stack based nature is at odds with LLVM IR's bias towards register-based architectures. (EVM doesn't even have a separate stack for return addresses to implement subroutines cleanly!)

The switch to eWASM would greatly improve security, efficiency and perhaps allow a diversity of languages to be used on Ethereum. It should be a matter of exposing the appropriate primitives to call other contracts, generate log events, write to the store and so on.

[0] For instance, see a PR that reduces codegen from 55K to 1.6K bytes on an innocuous contract https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488

[1] I'm guilty of it too; https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs...

[2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#368

Post by [deleted] »

awelkie wrote: post #35

Can someone explain how block timing works in proof-of-stake systems? As I understand it, with proof-of-work the mining difficulty increases or decreases to maintain that each block is found in roughly the same amount of time. In proof-of-stake is there also a mechanism to regulate the time for each block to be added to the blockchain?

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#369

Post by delaaxe »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #363
nootropicat wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with rollups) allows for a truly global scale platform - over 100k TPS, potentially 1M, while still running on normal computers in people's homes. PoS is a requirement for sharding, as dividing security under PoW would make each shard too easy to attack. Last but not…

> PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW Uh, why do you say that? The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW: The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fa…

Thanks for answering questions I’ve had for a long time about POS. Do you have any links to share on the subject?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#370

Post by api »

wpietri wrote: post #358
markkat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me sad, because I expected a comment like this to be the highest on HN. In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to…

For me at least, "Imagine the possibilities!" is not an answer to the question, "What's it good for?" Indeed, my experience is that it's almost an anti-answer. For example, in the mid-aughts I was talking with the CEO of a well-funded "semantic web" company about joining. I liked the people and the tech was cool, but I just couldn't figure out how it would turn a profit. His answer was similar to yours, a "what could…

You touched on the core problem with cryptocurrency, and it is not a technology problem.

The problem is that cryptocurrency and the community around it is absolutely crawling with scams to the point that it's hard to find things that are not scams. Bad drives out good. Even if the tech works perfectly and can be made to scale, if the ecosystem is full of scams it will never be used for anything but scams and black/grey market applications. Anyone not looking to scam will run away.

Contrast with the stock market. There are scams, sure, but the majority of stocks are not scams. If you bought stocks at random you have at least >50% odds of buying stock in a real and honest business of some kind. If you participate in cryptocurrency stuff at random I'd say you have a >90% chance of being scammed... probably closer to 99%.

All the ad-hoc regulations and institutions around conventional finance are the outcome of a multiple century long Red Queen's race between productive economic activity and noise. Noise includes scams, frauds, bubbles, and other forms of undesirable action or emergent behaviors in markets that get in the way of productive economic activity. That hodge-podge of adaptations is almost certainly sub-optimal, but you're not going to do better by just ignoring the problem domain and offloading everything onto individual market participants. That means every market participant has to operate their own SEC and investigative journalist outfit to have any chance of not being scammed. Not going to happen.

A recurrent fallacy of techno-libertarians and techno-utopians is to vastly underestimate human avarice and opportunism. The people designing these systems are usually fairly honest, so they have a hard time imagining what sociopaths and con artists will do with the things they create. If you create anything that offers even the tiniest chance at making money or obtaining some form of status or power, it will be DDOSed with fraud and con artistry of every kind.

Edit: I am not totally bearish on this stuff and I see valid uses for it, but I don't think it's as broadly world changing as its evangelists do.

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