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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

#371

Post by delaaxe »

dmingod666 wrote: post #296
from wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tri…

Gold held it's value before we started counting the years from the death of christ. It was valuable when britain was pairing criminals and prostitutes in handcuffs and shipping them to the US to populate the damn place. It is valuable even today when there are people willing to risk death just to reach its shore.. I am willing to bet it will remain being valuable even when America becomes an irrelevant once-was in a…

> britain was pairing criminals and prostitutes in handcuffs and shipping them to the US to populate the damn place

What can I Google to know more about this? I though it was also the case about Australia

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

#372

Post by 177tcca »

delaaxe wrote: post #337
hjorthjort wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You send your ETH to a specific contract, from which it can't be moved (whether you want to call that "burning" is up to you, but it's probably a bit confusing). Each validator must also run an Eth full node, and uses the state of that contract to determine who can act as a validator on the Beacon chain.

Are there any plans to do staking Polkadot/Cardano style? I'd like to stake my ETH but have no interest in running a full validator

This is the first time I've seen someone praising Cardano without me looking for it.

Could you elaborate?

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

#373

Post by delaaxe »

_7fvc wrote: post #237
CameronNemo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they replace fiat? Why can't crypto be minted to represent real world assets (like batches of nuts or nickel, not magic pieces of paper)?

Because real world assets don't get minted like crypto. They are tied to physical world. They are volatile. Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes. It's a fairly precise schedule. On the other hand, real world assets grow and contract at unpredictable rates. Even gold mining fluctuates. The real world is volatile. The BTCUSD peg is free floating. It's also volatile. Crypto is rigid. Real world is volatile. It's ha…

BTCUSD is a pair, not a "peg"

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

#374

Post by ryanlol »

jki275 wrote: post #366
ryanlol wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Ethereum never have breaking updates before the ETC split? If no, it’s pretty disingenious to describe ETC as the “original” chain.

What are you talking about? The fork that left ETC as the original chain was a rollback of the chain that destroyed the concept of its immutability for the purpose of fixing a massive financial mistake. There were no other chains left as a result of such a fork. It is a fork, and ETC is the original chain. Those are facts.

ETC is not the original chain as the homestead hardfork predates it.

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

#375

Post by bhjgh777 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #202
bhjgh777 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EVM is a natural extension of bitcoin's scripting system. Here's the original Ethereum whitepaper, Vitalik cites all sorts of pre-Ethereum work: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al... There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on Bitcoin before ETH was launched.

Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. That's what powers the Tether network. It's far from decentralized though. It's a cartel of exchanges that operate the network. Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.

>Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC.

This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at the top of their website:

https://www.omnilayer.org/

>That's what powers the Tether network.

Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum, and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed here:

https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

>Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.

My original point was that weak smart contract features on Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.

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

#376

Post by mjburgess »

shawnz wrote: post #342
Vespasian wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 imp…

If a big government seized control of a coin's development, it would surely lose most of its value and users would likely just create a fork which is not under that government's control.

Miners would try to fork it.

Users would be overjoyed, and the user base would grow dramatically.

People aren't using bitcoin day-to-day because it lacks a government backing.

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

#377

Post by gverrilla »

discardable_dan wrote: post #164
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-…

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

can you tell us more? what are you refering to?

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

#378

Post by shawnz »

mjburgess wrote: post #376
shawnz wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a big government seized control of a coin's development, it would surely lose most of its value and users would likely just create a fork which is not under that government's control.

Miners would try to fork it. Users would be overjoyed, and the user base would grow dramatically. People aren't using bitcoin day-to-day because it lacks a government backing.

I will reply to this despite the fact that it's an obvious troll and has nothing to do with the topic at hand (this thread isn't even about Bitcoin).

People are actually using Bitcoin strictly because it lacks a government backing. For those users who want an asset that is government-backed, there are already lots of options and there is little need for cryptocurrency to try and compete in that space.

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

#379

Post by throwaway4good »

throwaway4good wrote: post #370
throwaway4good wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitalik and friends can just sell their coins on the proof of work chain and thus make it unattractive.

However you could change the protocol / software and block the addresses of people who don't support the PoW chain. It would be a bit messy. However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining rig, you would like to do something with your hardware.

So one can ask. Who has the biggest say in a cryptocurrency?

The owners of the coins, the developers, the miners?

Actually I would argue it would be the exchanges: What the major exchanges choose to trade as Ethereum is what will continue.

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

#380

Post by cesarb »

chrisco255 wrote: post #210
cachvico wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less-popular and original, interestingly in this case.

"original" is a matter of debate. For example, which chain is the original Bitcoin: BTC or BCH? Prior to the fork, they both share the same history. The community aligned more behind BTC but surely there's a fork of the multiverse somewhere in the space-time continuum where the community rallied behind BCH and gave it more hashing power.

> For example, which chain is the original Bitcoin: BTC or BCH? Prior to the fork, they both share the same history.

That one is easy to answer: if you get a node running code from before the BTC/BCH split, which chain would it follow? AFAIK, that old node would follow the BTC side, since BCH changed the proof-of-work parameters in a way that wouldn't be accepted by older nodes, while BTC only changed some validation parameters in a way that would still be accepted by older nodes (the older nodes might accept some things which newer nodes would reject, but the older nodes would not reject anything newer nodes would accept, so the current BTC chain should still be seen as valid by older nodes).

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