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Ethereum 2.0 launches

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#501

Post by downandout »

kgin wrote: post #499
Flashtoo wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash loans let anyone borrow a large amount of crypto with no collateral, provided the loan amount plus a fee is returned in the same transaction it is borrowed in. No collateral is required because there is no risk (assuming no exploits). This means you can't take the highly speculative trade, you can only go for a sure thing. But if you do have a sure thing, you can borrow as much currency as the lender can provid…

So the loan and the return is a single "transaction" (in db terms)? What sort of situation could this be used in? I'm having a hard time truly imagining use without any risk of transaction rollback.

They are primarily used for arbitrage transactions. Token swaps on decentralized exchanges are instant - there is no order book. So you can compose a single transaction that involves many exchanges, swaps involving different tokens, flash loans, etc. If the transaction ends with a profit after the loan is paid back, at the market prices that exist at the time the transaction is executed, the flash loan occurs, and profits are collected by the person that created the transaction. If it does not end with a profit, then the transaction is reverted as if it never existed.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#502

Post by woah »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #434
woah wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume that the attacker has control over the entire internet.

Ethereum has 11 000 nodes currently: https://www.ethernodes.org/ There are probably many botnets of IoT devices with 10x that many nodes, aren't there? So a single botnet could probably ensure that a target victim has the majority of peer connections to the attacker.

If a validator signs two blocks at the same height, they will be slashed, lose their tokens, and not be able to participate in consensus. They get slashed when anyone submits evidence of them doing this. This trivially solves the "nothing at stake" problem from 2014 that you wrote your long original comment about.

If I understand it correctly, you are now saying that someone would DDOS the entire gossip network, completely halting any more production of blocks so that their slashing doesn't go through?

We're not even talking about "nothing at stake", or anything having to do with PoS anymore. We're just talking about a massive DDOS of an entire network. Node operators in PoS networks, as well as Bitcoin, have ways of dealing with DDOS which are the same as how anyone deals with it, and I don't need to get into them here.

If someone was able to overcome these DDOS mitigations and completely prevent a PoS network from receiving any legitimate transactions, they could do this to Bitcoin as well.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#503

Post by kgin »

dmitriid wrote: post #456
packetlost wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think ETH contracts count on humans doing anything.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#504

Post by AgentME »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #494
cdiddy2 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you really want is a hardware wallet(trezor) that hooks into metamask. That way you have the usability of the plugin without the risk that it can take all your money

Thanks. Hardware wallets are extremely insecure IMHO: The people who sell them - and many people in their supply-chain! - are handed the very dangerous combination of: A) Being able to hard-code software into the silicon whose source code you will be completely unable to inspect unless you own an electron microscope and a very large amount of knowledge on hardware reverse engineering. What if the hardware forces the…

Trezor is open source, and you could generate your recovery seed on a computer and import it onto your hardware wallet. I believe Ethereum and some other cryptocurrencies prefer to use deterministic signatures on transactions, so in theory it's possible to check that all of the signatures generated by the hardware wallet match the expected deterministic signatures so you can know that the wallet isn't secretly leaking information through the signatures it's generating.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#505

Post by nyhc99 »

tsujp wrote: post #33
naringas wrote: post #17

One thing I haven't been able to figure out about proof of stake is this: if one entity somehow manages to control over half to the total ETH tokens, does this enable an attack analogous to bitcoin's 51% problem (which happens when one miner controls over half of the network's raw cpu power)?

No. The required amount is greater than 2/3 (67%) not greater than 1/2 (51%) on PoS for Ethereum. Also, see this tweet from Vitalik: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/130129808602782105... So even if there was a successful first attack from some organised body that's all the time they get.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would only need greater than 2/3 of the amount of Ether currently staked, not 2/3 of the total amount of Ether. The amount of staked Ether probably would be less than 10% of the total issued Ether, maybe much less as staking rewards go down.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#506

Post by tick_tock_tick »

cwkoss wrote: post #465
twox2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In crypto there's this concept of delegation and also pooling. This allows folks with smaller holdings to be exposed to the benefits of staking.

Can this be done non-custodially? i.e. can an ETH holder somehow delegate a pool to be able to stake with that ETH but not spend it?

No or people could use that to bypass slashing.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#507

Post by hnick »

This might be as good a place as any to ask, since I'm completely out of the loop on the scene: Are there any successful crypto schemes that use human effort (labour) instead of capital/computing effort? Something like Captcha or Mechanical Turk, hopefully something generally useful to society at large. Solving problems that computers can't (yet).

It would seem to be a way to avoid the rich-get-richer aspect because hiring people wouldn't make sense - they'd get more value going it alone, so existing capital has reduced influence.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#508

Post by kgilpin »

dmihal wrote: post #475
nikolay wrote: post #330

One question - why didn't Bitcoin drop to zero? I know, VHS survive and Betamax didn't, but unlike Betamax, Ethereum is pretty popular for everything, not just for low-class commodity speculation.

Bitcoin isn't valuable because of its technical properties, just like gold isn't valuable because of its physical properties. Both are valuable because of their universally recognized scarcity and value. If you want to put your wealth in a SoV cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is the clear schelling point. Ether will remain competitive with BTC, it may even flip it in market cap, but I doubt Bitcoin will ever go away.

Bitcoin is valuable because of its value?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#509

Post by kgilpin »

damon_c wrote: post #474
lifeformed wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because laypeople know what benefit the internet or their phones provide. No layperson knows what the benefit of cryptocurrency is.

> laypeople know what benefit the internet Yes that's true now, but what about in 1997? That's what year it is in Ethereum now.

Well to be fair, transferring information instantly was pretty great even in 1997.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#510

Post by The_Founder »

hnick wrote: post #507

This might be as good a place as any to ask, since I'm completely out of the loop on the scene: Are there any successful crypto schemes that use human effort (labour) instead of capital/computing effort? Something like Captcha or Mechanical Turk, hopefully something generally useful to society at large. Solving problems that computers can't (yet). It would seem to be a way to avoid the rich-get-richer aspect because…

First, absolutely not.

I would love to know what something like this would look like but bottom line is that it would need to be automated and I can't think of anyway to do that.

How would work be verified? It would need to be done by people and as soon as there are people verifying the work those same people would be better off verifying fake work.

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