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

Ethereum 2.0 launches

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 639 posts

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#451

Post by whiskyant »

konschubert wrote: post #190
lekevicius wrote: post #39

I am incredibly happy about this. It's the first step for a major cryptocurrency towards ledger security that does not damage the environment via mining. I always hated how wasteful and energy-inefficient mining is. Staking reduces energy costs by many, many orders of magnitude. With lightweight clients in development, it is possible to validate chain using Raspberry Pi. I hope (but don't expect) that some time in th…

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…

Lightning Network

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#452

Post by whiskyant »

konschubert wrote: post #216
thebean11 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your take on off chain solutions like lightning as a solution to the high tx fees?

It doesn't solve the fundamental cost problem with Proof of Work: - If people pay high effective tx fees, it's shit because, well, it's expensive. - If people pay low effective tx fees (through lightning or block size increase or whatever) then, as soon as inflation ends, the money won't be enough to pay for a sufficient hash rate.

Writing to the block should be expensive. But there won't be a problem because it'll only be used to settle Lightning Network transactions very infrequently, and could be massive amounts... not for small transactions.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#453

Post by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 »

colecut wrote: post #435
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, what distinguishes it from the other 23?

It has the highest dapp compatibility

> It has the highest dapp compatibility

Mmh thanks, well security is more relevant to me, but I nevertheless went to their website.

Apparently it's a browser plugin. That's a big security no-no from my side, too much attack surface - sorry.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#454

Post by downandout »

beaner wrote: post #443
downandout wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The false premise you're using is that smart contracts provide more utility than sound economic policy does.

I don’t think that “sound economic policy” would, for example, have major banks offering flash loans. There are many things that can only be achieved through decentralization. Policymakers and banks alike have a serious interest in remaining gatekeepers, and would never enable many of the DeFi functions.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#455

Post by roasbeef »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #420
wrinkl3 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.

It would be disingenuous to claim that the Bitcoin protocol is only defined by the consensus layer. Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 When Btcd was first released, it was pretty capable, and had lots of development. But it has fallen behind, which makes sense. Why would an…

> Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations

Does that? What I see here is bitcoind adding a new feature that isn't yet implemented in btcd. The new feature uses a different extension mechanism in the p2p protocol (a new message to signal knowledge of a new feature vs using the existing version message bits in the main p2p handshake). That new version of bitcoind also hasn't yet been released, but I'd imagine that btcd will land a fix sooner to permit unknown message types being sent from its PoV.

> Check this vulnerability, which was caused by LND relying on the btcd project's library

Incorrect. The btcsuite libraries we use weren't related to the bug at all. Instead, the bug was introduced by _new_ code which attempted to convert between the fixed 64-byte signature encoding used in the LN Protocol, and the variable sized encoding used in the base Bitcoin protocol. The resulting signatures _were_ valid ECDSA signatures, but didn't adhere to an additional constraint that the Bitcoin system places on this signatures from a mempool policy standpoint. The signatures themselves were still valid from the PoV of Bitcoin consensus, in that they would be included in blocks.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#456

Post by dmitriid »

packetlost wrote: post #441
api wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it this way: - Every system will be gamed, no exceptions. - It is impossible for the architects of any system to imagine all the ways it will be gamed. That's why it's not possible to create fixed laws that are just. Inevitably someone will find a hack that turns the intent of the law around while remaining true to its letter. This seems to be what dooms both pure libertarian capitalist schemes and pure so…

Any political or economic system built on the expectation that people won't be assholes to each other (and work with others to be assholes) is a flawed system.

Ethereum is also built on the assumption that:

- people aren't assholes

- all involved parties can audit blockchain transactions

- all involved parties are programmers and can audit a contract written in an esoteric programming language

- all involved parties voluntarily agree to be bound by these contracts despite the fact there's no way they can be enforced

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#457

Post by roasbeef »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #420
wrinkl3 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.

It would be disingenuous to claim that the Bitcoin protocol is only defined by the consensus layer. Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 When Btcd was first released, it was pretty capable, and had lots of development. But it has fallen behind, which makes sense. Why would an…

> Why would anybody take the risk of trusting that an alternate implementation when it doesn't decide what bitcoin is, in the end?

bitcoind doesn't decide what Bitcoin is either: a recent consensus issue introduced for a period of times in _newer_ versions caused it to potentially fork off the "actual" chain. In this instance, btcd was unaffected along with many other implementations and earlier versions of bitcoind.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#458

Post by pietjepuk88 »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #427
pietjepuk88 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the advent of hardware wallets, and so many competing wallets/interfaces out there (tailored to different user bases), I feel it makes little sense for the Ethereum Foundation to pour their own (human) resources into this. They will support the ecosystems as necessary though, e.g. Metamask got funding way back in 2016.

> I feel it makes little sense for the Ethereum Foundation to pour their own (human) resources into this. Well, they received $ 18.3 million in crowdfunding [1], so I would dare to say it's not only "their" resources but also the resources of the community which they're spending, isn't it? Given that the central thing a user needs to use a cryptocurrency is the wallet it would seem a bit weird to collect $ 18M from t…

I guess I shouldn't have put the "human" in parentheses. I did give an example of how the EF is spending their money on development of the ecosystem though, hoping that'd make it clear what I meant. I even chose a grant to a wallet as the example.

I personally prefer the role of the EF as a facilitator more than monolithic employer. And they can (and do) do facilitate in more ways than just handing out grants. It's just they experience has shown that helping out this way for wallet development (or even more generically software development) works better.

To add, they did start out providing the software as you say. After a certain point though, their efforts were outpaced by community effort or business opportunities arising in the Ethereum ecosystem. At this point it took a while for them to figure out what new role to take on with their ("our") funds, eventually settling on what they're doing now.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#459

Post by cwkoss »

joosters wrote: post #259
The_Colonel wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese... You're probably referencing this fuck up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) The huge advantage of smart contracts is that they are supposed to be trustless - you don't need to necessarily trust your business partners because contract is set in stone ... code and will be executed exactly as agree…

You don't have to go back that far in time, 'hacks' and bugs in 'smart' contracts happen almost every day. Here's a recent $7M loss: https://cointelegraph.com/news/yield-generating-stablecoin-p... and here's a $89M loss less than a week ago: https://decrypt.co/49657/oracle-exploit-sees-100-million-liq... It's not even the first time that the 'Compound' smart contract has been 'hacked', but that doesn't stop fools fro…

Have any ethereum "hacks" ever been prosecuted?

It seems like there would be a reasonable argument that taking value from a contract as defined by code (even if not the intention of the programmer) is not theft.

But would be very interesting to see how a court interprets this.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#460

Post by JohnTHaller »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #412
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #246

Eth2 dev here, maintainer of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm , one of the implementations currently running the blockchain written in Go. This has been a monumental effort. There are 3 other implementations in mainnet, and consensus is running perfectly. Few other protocols in blockchain have more than one dominant implementation. The beauty of eth2 comes from its efficiency in signature aggregation: https://t…

Hey, I tried figuring out what the most recent official Ethereum wallet is, but the wallets which the website lists all seem like third-party ones. The previous official wallet's repository says "Mist and Ethereum Wallet have been deprecated.". Is it true that the Ethereum foundation isn't providing a wallet software anymore? Why is that? I would consider it as quite unsolvable as a user to determine which of the 24…

Honestly, I'm in the same boat. I have the full Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin core clients installed and with a full blockchain on my PC. With Ethereum, I always found the base client much buggier than the others (browser-based apps do that). And now, it's just 'pick one of these 24 random wallets'. Really?

I went from mining Ethereum and even releasing a minimal mining GUI for folks who wanted to support PortableApps.com to feeling uneasy about it. I don't even have an ETH client on my PC now, so I can't even access the fraction of an ETH I own. I'll probably ditch ETH donations to PortableApps.com as well.

Post reply on HN