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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

#321

Post by Tepix »

fallingknife wrote: post #310
Taek wrote: 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.

Yes, the plan is to find a solution to make it work without the current bouncers

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

#322

Post by dorgo »

olouv wrote: post #273
AaronFriel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been repeated many times but is not true, the price of an arbitrary unit of currency or crypto has no relationship to its security. That price going up or down has no relationship on the "security level" of the blockchain.

This is just not true for a proof of stake blockchain. The higher the price of Ether is, the harder it gets to loan enough ether to stake to attack the network. And attacking the network or misbehaving does cost you a lot more dollar money.

>The higher the price of Ether is, the harder it gets to loan enough ether to stake to attack the network.

On the other hand, the higher the price of Ether is, the higher the incentive to do so. The return on investment of an attack is independent of the price of Ether (assuming one can actually gain something from attacking a POS chain).

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

#323

Post by [deleted] »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #277
Sargos wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to go up? Most people aren't going to have a choice. ETH is required to be spent when making transactions and using dapps, NFTs, etc. Even L2s like Optimism, zkSync, etc will be spending ETH when writing to the L1 even if the end users are shielded from that. There is a built in economy that burns ETH so deman…

Yes, but that's exactly the problem. With any currency, spending happens when you see something that is worth more to you in sum over the future than the value of the currency. So when the value of the currency gets lower, you are eager to jump on opportunities; conversely, when the value of the currency gets higher, you are reluctant to jump on opportunities. To a first approximation, you spend inflationary money as…

[deleted]

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

#324

Post by woah »

discardable_dan wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: 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…

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 curre…

You think that proof of work mining was the initial philosophy of Ethereum? It’s the exact opposite. Ethereum was always intended to be proof of stake, they just couldn’t get it shipped in time to launch, and then the schedule slipped a bunch more.

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

#325

Post by gus_massa »

latchkey wrote: post #170
drcode wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

After a few years, I realize that by default comments are interpreted as disagreement, so for this kind of comments I start my reply with "I agree" or "Just nitpicking".

[It's most tricky when I agree with most of the comment, but the rest is totally nuts, but I don't want to start an argument about that.]

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

#326

Post by Vespasian »

keymone wrote: post #228
malikNF wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should have the power to…

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…

> 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

This got me thinking. How likely is it that, if and when crypto grows into a significant financial sector, the actual government will take over the governance.

It seems likely that the public (or their representatives) will grow increasingly uneasy with such an important matter being handled by random internet people and foundations. Especially if these institutions are not willing to include themselves into other policy making processes.

I believe that sooner rather than later effective control will be wrestled away from people like Vitalik, through laws and regulations.

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

#327

Post by fock »

herbst wrote: post #269
martamorena943 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was visionary. Ever since, blockchain has struggled to find a real-world use case. We know how blockchain works, the concept is thousands of years old. This problem existed in the past (coordinating in an environment where no one trusts anyone). However if this was a real problem in the real world, companies would have built blockchains long ago. This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain fo…

I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast. Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee. Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example. Even if the crypto marke…

do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?

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

#328

Post by ptrincr »

svara wrote: post #306
panarky wrote: post #194

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.

The point is that ever increasing hash power is a consequence of the design of the system.

This isn't strictly true.

The protocol ensures that there is on average a block produced every 10 minutes.

As hash rates increase, and blocks are found slightly faster, the difficulty is adjusted upwards to ensure that the 1 block per 10 minutes is maintained.

We've seen difficulty drop in the past, it doesn't necessarily rise forever. It only makes sense to increase when it's still profitable to mine at the current difficulty.

If the difficulty rises to a certain level and the price falls, and it becomes unprofitable to mine for some miners, they switch off their rigs and the difficulty adjusts downwards after a period of time to compensate.

Over the years we have seen the price rise and hash optimizations made, which have both driven the difficulty upwards.

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

#329

Post by hanklazard »

AaronFriel wrote: post #174
hanklazard wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure. Currently each validator has about 60k usd (32 eth) staked. They are disincentivized from misbehaving / attacking the network by the threat of their eth being slashed (and there are clear rules about how this happens). To me, it seems that as the value of that ether increases, they have more incentive to behave, rather than risk the loss of their investment + large capital gain.

Okay, so imagine a fictional universe in which the exchange rate USD to ETH was 100 times greater. The stake could be... 0.32 eth and it would be equivalent for the purpose of the protocol. Consider the reverse, the exchange rate for USD to ETH is one one hundredth. So the stake is just 3,200 eth, and again, same thing.

I agree with your math, but that doesn’t address my point. What I’m saying is that the relative value of eth to usd (for example) matters. The validators don’t want to get slashed and the more value eth has, the less likely validators are to misbehave (ie, the network is more secure). I’m not certain that it plays out that way but that’s the theory as I understand it.
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