Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by discardable_dan » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #155

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.

You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network. If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes…

The difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share."

These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat currency, less participants make it, unfortunately, less valuable.

Telling 60% of holders their currency (or income toward driving that currency) is not how you keep them on your side, just like old mining town scrip is only worthwhile if the mine works. The second the mine shuts down on a union strike, the scrip becomes paper.

On a personal note, I hope the miners get their due, because it was the initial philosophy of Ethereum. If they don't, I am curious to see how Ethereum moves w/r/t proof of stake vs proof of work guarantees. PoS seems at odds with the initial platform, and possibly long-term problematic for their "contracts-first" architecture.

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

#162

Post by rauljordan2020 » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #6

Not trying to be snarky but Vitalik itself is ETH's 51% attack ... What's the point of decentralized cryptocurrency when it falls down on the hands of one person.

I am one of the maintainers of one of the main implementations of eth2 https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, which runs a large portion of the current network. We are not affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation. Any ideas or changes need to be implemented into code and shipped to users. Development is decentralized, as there are 4 client implementations of eth2 today. Vitalik does not control our code, of course.

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

#163

Post by mminer237 » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:15 AM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #132

rawtxapp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin is five times the price of Etherium because it was the first cryptocurrency and everyone knows its name. It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of either.

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

#164

Post by discardable_dan » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:16 AM UTC

chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #23

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 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-…

Imagine if you owned a billion dollars, and that allowed you to say if someone spent 10 dollars at the gas station.

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

#165

Post by rauljordan2020 » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:18 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #144

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.

This is not true. I am one of the maintainers of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, one of the main client implementations of eth2 today. My team is unaffiliated with the Ethereum Foundation. There are also 3 other client implementations of the protocol that are very robust and done by independent teams in different parts of the world. We also can't force users to accept all our changes, and development on ETH's infrastructure has indeed been trending towards more decentralization. There are few blockchains out there today with more than 1, production-quality client implementation.

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

#166

Post by Sargos » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

542458 wrote: post #157

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.

But isn’t that “the higher the market cap of ETH, the harder it is to attack”? Does the price of a single unit actually matter here, market cap being held equal?

The thing that matters is how valuable the 32ETH stake the validators put up is as that is the amount of penalty for trying any attack. The theoretical attacks on Proof of Stake are well known and discussed but generally require 33% - 51% of all staked ETH for various annoying attacks on the blockchain but not actually killing it.

3,491,906 ETH is currently staked right now which is actually way lower than will eventually be staked when PoS goes live later this year. 33% of this is 1,152,329 ETH which at current prices of $1,776 puts a minor attack at over $2billion. This is without considering that after the attack the network could easily fork and remove the attacker's ETH from existence so it's hard to see economics working in the attackers favor.

A high price of ETH means it costs an increasingly astronomical amount to attack the network and pretty much no way to do it profitably.

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

#167

Post by from » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #145

gruez wrote: post #128

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 [...] 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.

This has always perplexed me too. There's a nice Buffett quote on this (https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf):

"Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today’s annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B."

I have noticed that people who advocate for this "store of value" idea have this tendency to insinuate that cash is the only alternative to gold or bitcoin or whatever it is. There has always been alternatives to letting your savings be eroded by inflation (stocks, bonds, etc) and part of the reason for inflation is to incentivize people to invest their money in these productive things.

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

#168

Post by rauljordan2020 » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

I'm one of the maintainers of one of the implementations of eth2 live today (https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and can help offer more context on this. Ethereum proof of stake has been live since December 1st and it currently secures over 6 billion USD worth of value https://beaconcha.in/. Currently, this is a chain that lives in parallel to the proof of work chain we know as Ethereum today. The idea is that over this coming year, the entire state of Ethereum will be "merged" into this new chain that uses proof of stake consensus via a docking process. "Escalating the eth2 merge" means there is more expedited work from researchers and developers when it comes to performing this critical decision. Since eth2 consensus is already live and running correctly with a large set of validators, miners cannot censor this new chain and therefore cannot really stop the merge.

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

#169

Post by jude- » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

antimatter15 wrote: post #91

tom_mellior wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EVM is TC in that you cannot determine if a snippet of code will halt, given sufficient gas. EVM code is undecidable, whereas Bitcoin script is not.

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

#170

Post by latchkey » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

drcode wrote: post #139

latchkey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do all replies have to be a disagreement or can they just attempt to be informative?