Live data from Hacker News

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

our.status.im

311–320 of 532 posts

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

#311
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your analogy breaks down at "because of a grudge or whatever." The reason the miners are pissed is because ethereum is proposing to stop paying them. So what if the bouncers shut down the event because management told them they're not getting paid? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

That's not true, they can still join a staking pool if they want to continue being "paid", so really it's just the way they're being paid that's changing.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I see how that is possible. Anybody can probably burn ETH they own by sending it to an invalid address or something. And how was it created on the beacon chain? Was it simiply hard programmed into the software "We start with a bunch of ether at the following address: ..."?

There is a well-thought out and well-designed process for all stages of this. You can read up on that on the https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

Been poking around for a while but did not find the part where it explains how ETH moves from the old chain to the new prior to the merge.

Do you know where it is described?

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

#314

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…

It's not obvious that Turing-complete smart contracts are a good long term decision. I agree that Ethereum is fascinating tech, but with great power comes a great many ways to shoot yourselves in the foot. For financial institutions, being boring is to some degree a feature and not just a bug.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ends with a Dyson sphere ... Just because too much of a thing is bad doesn't mean the thing is bad in lower quantities. Drinking ten liters of water in an hour is bad. That doesn't mean you shouldn't drink any water.

That's the plan for PoS, no? It's not that mining gets eliminated altogether, but doesn't play as much of a central role.

No, mining is gone in a proof of stake chain.

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

#316
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ETH is a fork, ETC was the original chain. ETH 2.0 is a proposed fork.

Describing things accurately should be the norm.

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

#317
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.

That’s not how it works.

The people who hold the majority of the stake are the majority, not the minority.

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

#318
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Making origami pirate ships also requires a certain amount of work. That doesn’t give it value.

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

#319
post #286

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?

Unlikely as there is an ice age built-in to eth1 which will steadily increase the time between blocks until none are produced. There should also be a hard fork which includes code which just stops the old chain on block x. Anyone that wanted to continue with the old chain would need an additional hard fork.

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

#320
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This will not be the first time this has happened to eth.

They manage to avoid it most of the time via time bombs in the code
Post reply on HN