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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

#131

Post by maxerickson »

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.

The whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are supposed to be aligned between miners and users.

If this were obviously true, there wouldn't be a problem. I think a better formulation talks about distributed ledgers working better when the interests of users and miners are aligned.

And of course they never quite are (miners want profit, users want minimal transaction costs with high security).

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

#132

Post by SkyMarshal »

rawtxapp wrote: post #48
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

One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.

Bitcoin is deliberately and wisely not Turing complete. That gives a lot of power and mischief-making ability to anonymous entities in an adversarial environment.

It's partly why Bitcoin is 5x Ethereum's market cap, despite technically being less capable. It's less capable of losing money, of DAO attacks, or other serious failures too.

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

#133

Post by johndoe42377 »

It is a disgrace to even mention this narcissistic clown here.

If we remove all the hype and worshipping he is technically illiterate, the code is a spaghetti crap, which defeats all the principles of Go, and there is no rigorous research, only Twitter bullshitting.

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

#134

Post by jude- »

hanniabu wrote: post #59
rawtxapp wrote: post #2

As someone who uses both BTC and ETH and who likes both, this is one of the reason why people prefer Bitcoin over Ethereum. The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly. While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very sig…

> that the developers have very significant control on the blockchain The case for BTC in this regard is no different from ETH. In both cases developers put together an upgrade, then miners can either upgrade or not.

In Bitcoin decisions are made on the principle of one CPU, one vote. Rules only change with overwhelming hash power. Developers take a back seat.

In Ethereum, developers run the show. They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.

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

#135

Post by bluecalm »

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-...

The article is about wealth, not money supply. Those are completely different concept. There could theoretically be a lot of wealth and very little money (if no one wants to trade there isn't much needed) or not so much wealth and a lot of money (a lot of people need loans to trade and build wealth).

It's convenient to measure wealth in dollars in a "how much you could get if you still it" way and it's possible because dollars are very stable but there is very little reason for the amount of dollars circulating to represent existing wealth.

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

#136

Post by ntr-- »

Sargos wrote: post #51
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except people who want to use ETH as a currency, rather than an asset. If we're going to have inflation or deflation, pick inflation; that way, you can actually spend the stuff without FOMO.

ETH is money but it's not currency. It's not meant to be used to buy everyday goods and services.

It is meant to be spent as gas in order to compensate for the energy costs of the computations in its smart-contracts.

Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to go up?

Additionally, ease of spending drives up adoption which is a clear benefit to any currency.

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

#137

Post by ZephyrBlu »

gruez wrote: post #129
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To do so, you'd need to control 51% of the staked ETH. Not only is this a lot of money but it would probably cause ETH's value to drop

To me "it" is pretty clearly referring to controlling 51% of staked ETH.

I don't know about the economics behind whether that would cause the value of ETH to decrease, but Bitcoin seems like a different situation altogether since miners don't control the the cryptocurrency itself.

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

#138

Post by oh_sigh »

All of these miners are the reason why, if you bought a graphics card 2 years ago, you can sell it for a profit today. So of course, they don't want a system that invalidates their investments in GPUs.

The beauty of this system though is that they don't really get a choice. If Vitalik forks ETH into a PoS system, and enough people get behind it - it doesn't matter what the miners say.

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

#139

Post by drcode »

latchkey wrote: post #92
drcode wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sure, nothing you said really disagrees with my summary.

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

#140

Post by jtsiskin »

AaronFriel wrote: post #93
Sargos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not true, those are two different things. Requiring 100x the total number of possible stakers is 100x lower. Versus if the price increases 100x, that means the same number of possible stakers is possible, but it’s now 100x more expensive to do a 51% (or whatever the PoS % needed is) attack.
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