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Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

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Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#91

Post by antimatter15 »

tom_mellior wrote: post #74
mrkramer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in Computer Theory but other people proved Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script are Turing Complete: [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279 [2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scryp... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c

These are deliberate redefinitions of the term "Turing complete". The reasonable interpretation is that evaluating a single block can involve an arbitrary computation (if given enough gas). Ethereum has this property, Bitcoin doesn't. These redefinitions say that you can take a few computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state such that a later block can take a few more steps, so over time, very slowly, sp…

Ethereum blocks have a gas limit so it wouldn't be Turing complete under your definition either.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#92

Post by latchkey »

drcode wrote: post #79
gus_massa wrote: post #42

If the fee are going to be (partially) burned, can the miners just ask that everyone pays the fees by a side channel? Perhaps make a smart contract that holds the same value of the fee until the transaction is included. The miners can just ensure to include both or neither, and get paid.

The game theory with the EIP1559 changes is that there will be ample space in blocks to put in transactions, and there will (roughly, under normal circumstances) be just enough transactions in the pool to fill each block. So the miner only has the options of either (A) filling the block with transactions to earn tips or (B) chose to be hostile and generate an empty block, just to have the next miner put the most prof…

The blocks will be variable sized and can still fill up.

Point #1 and #10 from the image here:

https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm...

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#93

Post by AaronFriel »

Sargos wrote: post #89
AaronFriel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been repeated many times but is not true, the price of an arbitrary unit of currency or crypto has no relationship to its security. That price going up or down has no relationship on the "security level" of the blockchain.

Look up Proof of Stake which is what Ethereum is moving to later this year. In Proof of Stake validators put up an ETH bond in order to randomly get picked to help create blocks in the network. The higher the price of ETH the more expensive it becomes to attack the network.

They could just require a higher stake, the price of eth is irrelevant.

Let's say hypothetically one eth was worth about a Satoshi, 0.05 cents or so. So they could just require 1,000,000 eth as a stake. Or ten times that. Or a hundred times that.

It's irrelevant what the price is, the choice of the stake amount is. If eth was inflationary, they could inflate the stake proportionally.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#94

Post by jerf »

hertzrat wrote: post #77
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a problem. That's a big reason for moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake- to more directly make the _holders_ of Ethereum in charge of the chain. It's a difficult thing to do, though. Hashpower based mining is easier to get going. Proof of stake has issues like the nothing-at-stake problem, where theoretically you could stake-mine on multiple chains: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2402/what-…

Isn’t half of our current money supply controlled by 1% of people? If the asset holders controlled things, why wouldn’t they just demand everyone else hand over their cash? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-more-...

That's a good question.

Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than the whole world.

One thing that would have to happen is everyone else would develop their own money/currency, which would turn mean that the one person with all the money is no longer the one person with all the money.

A thing quite likely to happen is that everyone would decide that whatever the money is that the one person has, everybody would decide it is not money.

It isn't entirely dissimilar from me claiming I have all the Jerfoleans on the world, and what the world is really doing about that currency right now. They're worth a zero so zero-y that even an infinite number of them is still worth a flat zero. Someone who has "all the money" might find themselves in a similar boat.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#95

Post by wmf »

Sargos wrote: post #33
AaronFriel wrote: post #27

> There are a wide variety of benefits to this proposal, such as potentially making Ethereum deflationary Interesting that this is framed as a benefit.

A high price of ETH as an asset creates a higher security level for Ethereum the blockchain. The ecosystem of projects, apps, protocols, organizations, etc on Ethereum is healthier when the blockchain is guaranteed secure and stable for everyone to use. It's a benefit to everyone.

A higher market cap can be more secure in a PoS system but burning ETH doesn't increase the market cap. Like stock buybacks, burning coins increases the price without necessarily creating new overall value.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#96

Post by jki275 »

typest wrote: post #12

I'm not an expert, but if 51% of the existing hashpower doesn't want a change, it sounds less a 51% attack and more like miners voting against something that isn't in their interest. The whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are supposed to be aligned between miners and users. If that isn't the case here, it sounds like a problem.

Precisely. Vitalik wants to fork ETH (as he's done before when they rolled back the DAO hack) to make a new version of ETH that is proof of stake.

The miners, as I've predicted here before, disagree, because this fork obliterates their entire business model. Shocking.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#97

Post by wmf »

tom_mellior wrote: post #56
Sargos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high price of ETH as an asset creates a higher security level for Ethereum the blockchain. The ecosystem of projects, apps, protocols, organizations, etc on Ethereum is healthier when the blockchain is guaranteed secure and stable for everyone to use. It's a benefit to everyone.

If one wants higher security, one shouldn't be pissing off the miners who provide that security.

The point of this proposal is that Ethereum no longer needs miners and they know it, so there's kind of a race between the miners trying to take Ethereum hostage and the developers kicking miners off the island before they can do it.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#98

Post by jki275 »

mrkramer wrote: post #45
jaimehrubiks wrote: post #21

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

I believe that was disabled in the protocol long ago because it was deemed to be a security risk.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#99

Post by viraptor »

typest wrote: post #12

I'm not an expert, but if 51% of the existing hashpower doesn't want a change, it sounds less a 51% attack and more like miners voting against something that isn't in their interest. The whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are supposed to be aligned between miners and users. If that isn't the case here, it sounds like a problem.

It will be interesting to see how the situation develops if they really do attempt to fork and if normal users want to use ETH2. Miners could potentially want to keep the blockchain going and the value could be artificially high, but with transactions falling down and holders migrating, they couldn't keep it up forever...

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#100

Post by gruez »

jki275 wrote: post #98
mrkramer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

I believe that was disabled in the protocol long ago because it was deemed to be a security risk.

Some opcodes were disabled but most of them remain. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
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