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

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

our.status.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 532 posts

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

#121

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

jki275 wrote: post #96
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.

As an ETH user and holder (and former miner), I want Ethereum 2.0. Describing it as a fork is ridiculous. Proof of stake is the future and miners have known that for years. Proof of work is a dead end that ends with a Dyson sphere harvesting all power from the sun to process a few transactions.

If miners want to make another Ethereum Classic dead chain let them do so. The innovation, the users, and all the developers will be on Ethereum 2.0.

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

#122

Post by Barrin92 »

_7fvc wrote: post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are effectively useless as a means of exchange and as a primary tool to run an economy then you should just ditch decentralized currencies altogether because then you also get rid of the meaningless complications around mining, energy efficiency or user-friendliness and go to a digital central-bank currency directly which actually has the proper tools to do monetary policy and all you need is a database.

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

#123

Post by Rapzid »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #67

Looking at ETH in terms of wallets interacting with dapps, NFT, uniswap, etc it all honestly feels like magic. Obviously the high gas makes it feel a lot less like magic when every button click is 30-100$ but really this all gives me so much hope for a better post-mobile app based internet. I was so cynical for a long time about where tech was heading but this gives me hope that in 10 years we might be in a better pl…

It's amazing but yeah, 40 dollars to swap tokens... You could almost imagine it all being kept track of on paper or punch cards with people manually carrying out every transaction for that price LOL.

I'm looking forward to smart contracts costing pennies per transaction. It's going to be a game changer for the utility of it all.

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

#124

Post by missedthecue »

wmf wrote: post #50
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.

Crypto has been completely captured by get-rich-quick goldbugs.

That was most of the crypto community back in 2012. It's not a recent development.

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

#125

Post by seibelj »

_7fvc wrote: post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

What does “worship” mean? I am a believer of the Austrian theory of economics. Are Keynesian / Monetarists also “worshippers” of a theory? Modern economics is not that old. I fundamentally believe printing as much money as we are across the rich world is going to lead to disaster, just as it has time and again in the developing world (see Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Brazil, etc.).

If anything, Austrian economics is a reversion to the standard theory of economics for thousands of years. The “innovation” of Keynesian economics is one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated on society. But again - what do I know - I don’t have a PhD from an Ivy. I just protect my assets in a zero-interest world by avoiding government threat.

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

#126

Post by TechBro8615 »

derefr wrote: post #88
pgsimp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of Ethereum is not really to be a distributed computer. It also seems misleading to describe it that way, as it doesn't distribute computations. Every node computes the same thing.

Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation. Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow…

I’ve never understood Oracles as a concept. They seem fundamentally untrustworthy.

ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin.

But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of couldn’t compute any meaningful logic without requiring an absurd amount of resources from the main net.

If you’re making a distributed computer, it’s like you’re scaling silicon circuits up to the network level. So any operation using those circuits will of course be more expensive. That means that many computations on the main net are cost prohibitive.

I would like to learn more about the trade-offs and risks of a blockchain relying on Oracles as a source of truth.

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

#127

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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-...

Here's a couple of reasons why it probably wouldn't go this way:

1) Ethereum already has a market cap of $73B [0]. That's a lot of money.

2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the value of it to drop [1].

So you'd spend a lot of money to control Ethereum and then end up with something that's far less valuable than it was before you took control. Not really sure what you'd get out of doing that.

[0] https://en.ethereumworldnews.com/ethereums-market-cap-is-big...

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

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

#128

Post by gruez »

Barrin92 wrote: post #122
_7fvc wrote: post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are effectively useless as a means of exchange and as a primary tool to run an economy then you should just ditch decentralized currencies altogether because then you also get rid of the meaningless complications around mining, energy efficiency or user-friendliness and go to a digital central-bank currency dir…

>If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are effectively useless as a means of exchange and as a primary tool to run an economy then [...]

What about as a store of value? Gold is still around despite being heavy and hard to transact with.

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

#129

Post by gruez »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #127
hertzrat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Here's a couple of reasons why it probably wouldn't go this way: 1) Ethereum already has a market cap of $73B [0]. That's a lot of money. 2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the value of it to drop [1]. So you'd spend a lot of money to control Ethereum and then end up with something that's far less valuable than it was before you took control. Not really sure what you'd get out of doing that. [0] http…

>2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the value of it to drop [1].

I think you're misinterpreting the paragraph. It's not that controlling 51% will cause the value to drop (it won't, see bitcoin miner control), it's that controlling 51% and trying to pull off an attack will cause it to drop.

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

#130

Post by trhway »

bibabaloo wrote: post #108
jki275 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it will. It will just involve 51% of the stake pools instead of 51% of the miners.

It's a little different with proof of stake. If there's a minority group that holds a large stake that "attacks" the blockchain against the majority's wishes, the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in this same way.

>the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in this same way.

and that is supposedly advantage of pos over pow?

In philosophical view the pow -> pos means taking power away from the more technical and giving it to the more business oriented group/approach. That has happened to Internet for example, and I just personally dont like such transitions.

Post reply on HN