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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

d0mine wrote: post #109
jerf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

More likely the one person would hire some people to convince the rest that it in their best interests that all money belong to the one person or even more likely to provide to the people some distraction, destroy the notion of the facts, so they wouldn't even know to ask inconvenient questions.

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by treelovinhippie »

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…

Lookup mutual credit cryptocurrencies (eg what Holochain plans to do with the HOT swap).

In that model supply breathes directly instep with underlying demand. The users themselves are the agents that cause the supply to expand or contract.

Tada: maximum velocity with no incentive to hoard.

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

#143

Post by gruez »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #137
gruez wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And how does the ethereum network differentiate two people with different wallets and one person with two wallets? Short of attaching some sort of real world identity to ethereum wallets it's impossible to tell whether someone controls 51% of staked ETH because it's trivial to split that up.

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

#144

Post by shp0ngle »

Bluestein wrote: post #3

This could get really ugly. (Not only per se, but, also, as it really shows how "centralized" these suposedly decentralized systems are ... ... and -this- could have consequences.)

ETH, and any cryptocurrency for that matter, has never been “decentralized” in terms of development. There are always a few guys making all major decisions, and it’s hard to oppose them other than making a forked currency.

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

#145

Post by bluecalm »

gruez wrote: post #128
Barrin92 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wanna store value? Buy actual value - that is things that make the wealth. Stocks in major companies, real estate, land in places people want to live in. The concept that buying promises is a good way to store value is a bizarre concept to me.

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

#146

Post by jwolfe »

Dolores12 wrote: post #113
jerf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

Money used to represent the value backed up by gold in bank storage. Nowadays its just a paper, so indeed its easy to create new money.

Not that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That was also arbitrary.

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

#147

Post by gonational »

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-...

Yeah.

That's what they do. That's what inflation is. We work hard and save up $100,000, they (the 1%) turn that into $25,000 in 25 years.

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

#148

Post by hanniabu »

jude- wrote: post #134
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> In Bitcoin decisions are made on the principle of one CPU, one vote

This is how it works in Ethereum as well

> They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.

Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different.

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

#149

Post by tcgv »

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…

I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years.

Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste.

It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential.

So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field.

Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends.

[1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions

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

#150

Post by gorgoiler »

jwolfe wrote: post #146
Dolores12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money used to represent the value backed up by gold in bank storage. Nowadays its just a paper, so indeed its easy to create new money.

Not that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That was also arbitrary.

It is hard to mine and hard to find.

If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work.

In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.

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