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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

#281

Post by proto-n »

3np wrote: post #209
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

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…

Do you think the headline is correct in labeling this as a 51% attack? The other argument would be that developers are trying to push through a contentious fork (mostly but not only contested by miners and mining pools), and mining nodes are planning to not adopt the proposed change?

Afaik there's no plan to attack, they are planning a "show of force", i.e. get more then 51% in a pool for a while without doing anything with the power. This is separate from either adapting or not adapting the fork itself and happens before the fork.

The original chain has to be forked either way, with or without eip 1559 because the "ice age" coded into the current version (it's in there for this exact reason). So if the change goes through and some miners decide to block it, there's not going to be an "original chain" and a "fork", but two forks, one supported by devs and minority of miners, and one supported by miner majority.

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

#282

Post by whitepaint »

keymone wrote: post #230
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…

Sorry, plopping JavaScript on top of blockchain is not something I would call visionary. Smart contracts were there long before eth. Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery. It’s got nice PR, but it’s really the PHP of cryptocurrencies. But of course almost everything else except bitcoin is much worse. Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It’s an anti-feature.…

> Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery.

You really should visit https://ethereum.org/

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

#283

Post by mvanaltvorst »

keymone wrote: post #243
everfree wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas" model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas before the program returns. If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.

In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas it requires to complete because that’s what it means - to solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your financial system handling all people’s economic interactions. What can possibly go wrong. I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.

You don't have to know how much gas it requires to /complete/, you can just run the program and check whether it runs out of gas before it exits. You do not need to solve the halting problem. Actually, it's pretty trivial to implement this and this model has scaled quite well considering the size of Ethereum today.

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

#284

Post by whitepaint »

_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…

> The problem with crypto is volatility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency)

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

#285

Post by starfallg »

iamwil wrote: post #265
deanCommie wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I the only one who thinks No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns. First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first…

> Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us. No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest. So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time looking into it. But it sounds like you've at least look…

>No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest.

In order to make it in the crypto market this is the way they have to behave, because the measure of success is the coin price, which is directly tied to the number of people buying into their coin (the vast majority know nothing of the underlying technical details and don't care). It's a race to the bottom and a real problem with the industry, reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but I think far more pervasive in crypto. This is also why crypto will keep experiencing popping bubbles until it finds enough use cases with actual advantageous compared to existing solutions.

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

#286

Post by 6nf »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

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…

Question: Will there be a chain split - will we end up with 'ETH classic' and 'ETH proof of stake' after the upgrade or how does it work?

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

#287

Post by xorcist »

malikNF wrote: post #250
keymone wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are also users, merchants and developers. Governance of any cryptocurrency is extremely touchy subject and one thing you don’t want to do is setting a precedent for making a controversial change. If you justify such change by “majority of miners want it” - you’re…

>> Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does. So they are partly responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said initially it is hard to say who the actual decision…

> its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does

You have cause and effect mixed up.

The miners that follow the same consensus rules that the merchants and exchanges do, get paid. The others do not.

A majority of miners following incompatible consensus would look like a huge drop off in mining capacity from the end users perspective. Similar things have happened multiple times.

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

#288

Post by rcxdude »

arcticbull wrote: post #225
cachvico wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners do not give Ethereum its value; the market does.

It has no value without security and transactibility which is what the miners provide.

Not in proof of stake (which provides it through stakers instead), which is what this whole thing is about.

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

#290

Post by dmingod666 »

seibelj wrote: post #110
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…

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the…

It doesn't help that the shadiest of people use crypto and ICOs to cheat and steal from gullible people. The suspicion and guard is up because the stakes are different. Let's say you write an opensource logging library for your language and promote it on HN - the stakes are low for everyone involved.

Let's say you're trying to launch rabbit token that's going to be the next only-fans replacement. You have a ton of motivation to hard sell your product and for this reason people are going to be equally not so exited and will have their guards up. I think it'd be naive to expect a OpenSource launch like happy reaction...

So it's 1) bad guys in that industry that have the wrong motivation giving the industry a partial deserved bad name.

2) A recognition that people espousing a technology are not purely talking about those technologies but have a vested interest in those assets having a positive view in other people's perception.

Ofcourse it comes with the territory. Like if a lawyer says, wonder "why is my profession, not universally loved?"

"Its just the 80% of the corrupt politicians giving the rest of the 20% a bad name."

Not passing judgement or moral judgement but I don't think crypto is going to shake-off the suspicion for quite a while.

This is because there is a knowledge gap between the masses and the people that know how things work. Till you have that gap there will be opportunists that will want to cash out on the knowledge arbitrage.

Its actually not just with crypto. Look at products that talk about AI enhanced this and AI enhanced that. Those guys are viewed with suspicion as well. Just slap-on an AI label to your PPT and bang your product is now cutting edge. Everyone see through that BS..

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