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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

#391

Post by gruez »

dsco wrote: post #335
keymone wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, I just don’t want it to power any of my financial future.

You don't have to, that's the beauty of having a choice. Now that HN knows that you're so opinionated about the tech stack of your bank - can you detail down what type of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just something you assume since you basically have zero knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-ends?

>can you detail down what type of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just something you assume since you basically have zero knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-ends?

It doesn't really matter what backend my bank uses because there's regulatory backstops (eg. FDIC) to protect me if something goes wrong. The same can't be said for crytpo.

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

#392

Post by zionic »

_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…

Are you unaware of stable coins such as DAI that run on ETH?

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

#393

Post by cfcosta »

177tcca wrote: post #372
delaaxe wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not OP, but I can give some elaboration on why Cardano is a really interesting project:

1. Staking in Cardano does not lock up your funds, and is really decentralized, getting more every day. Because of that, more than 70% of all coins are currently staked. This brings less volatility to the price and ensure longevity of the chain. The interest is not too big too, everything seems as sustainable as it can be.

2. Cardano supports assets natively instead of having them just being backed by smart contracts (this is/will be still possible though), which means that there are no extra gas fees to send/receive stablecoins or assets other than Ada.

3. Babel fees are part of 2, it means that the transaction fees can be paid by native tokens, not only ada. This is a huge improvement from the BSC or Eth, where you need BNB/ETH to pay transaction fees even if you're only dealing in stablecoins.

4. Smart contracts are finally coming in Q2, which will bring DeFi to Cardano (this explains the price mooning in late feb, early march, because of the mary hardfork).

5. Forks and updates in the chain are painless, last one I didn't even had to send money to a new wallet or anything like that.

6. New developments and features to the chain and ecosystem are being "baked into the protocol", in a sense. Project Catalyst is the first step for this, financing some projects, but in their roadmap they plan on giving away all control of the direction of the coin, and only work as a service provider to the ecosystem using the same infrastructure as all the other projects.

I'm really bullish on this coin, not only on price but also on the kinds of problems it can solve. Can answer more questions if you have any :)

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

#394

Post by justushamalaine »

panarky wrote: post #192
gorgoiler wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work Work for the sake of work is not valuable. You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20 feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up again. That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to anyone, except maybe as comedy.

Well cards against humanity did that and the hole was worth over 100k!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...

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

#395

Post by psKama »

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…

I believe your analogy is totally ill-structured and it misses the very main idea behind decentralization. There is no security guards, there is no concert-goers and there is no superstar singing at the stage. There is only MH/s and every single MH/s is equal to other one. That's the all idea about the system proposed and has been used.

Miners are wrong not because you believe different people should have different weighted power to change the system, they are wrong because the roadmap for PoS was well-established long long time ago giving them more than enough time to re-structure their revenue channels and invest accordingly. Therefore for them to say "we have been used. we invested a lot and now we are pushed aside" doesn't make any sense because the investment they had made until the roadmap for ETH2.0 was public has a ROI multiples times of what they invested already as of today.

For them to say this there are 2 options.

1) They were living in a cage and missed the plans for ETH2.0 and even after the roadmap is public they kept investing in mining equipment which will be useless soon. 2) They are just greedy and they just want to keep the same earnings although they have not got even a single argument for "why keeping the high fees is good for the ecosystem" apart from it means more money for them.

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

#396

Post by zadler »

malikNF wrote: post #218
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…

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…

I’m tired of this argument that “this is not decentralized”. It is meaningfully decentralized in multiple ways:

* there is no legal entity representing the Ethereum blockchain because it is decentralized

* the correct chain is not dictated by a single person or group of people

What you are seeing is an implicit form of democracy or people acting in shared interests and in support of Ethereum’s original developer and “leader”. The moment vitalik loses it and the organization loses credibility, alternate plans will be made according to the common interests of the people who have a stake in the system. Perhaps there will be a fork, but in the end the greatest demand will be for the most universally accepted version and the other will whither into insignificance ala Ethereum classic.

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

#397

Post by jude- »

015a wrote: post #224
jude- wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is how it works in Ethereum as well So is Ethereum not going to PoS if miners say no? > Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different. Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers provide the code, but it only activates with miner consent.

You say "miners" like they're a union with a spokesperson. They're not; they're thousands of people spread across the world, with different agendas. Miners who refuse to adopt the new PoS system have the right to not upgrade to it. At that point, the system "forks" (the article calls it a 51% attack, but I think that's a little inflammatory). This literally already happened with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic; Bitcoin…

So I guess Ethereum is, in fact, a developer-run show.

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

#398

Post by jkhdigital »

shawnz wrote: post #346
discardable_dan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the current group of Ethereum miners decide to stop mining, why wouldn't new parties come in to take the profits they are leaving behind?

It’s not like there’s a giant pool of mining hardware waiting in the wings to take over... I think we can assume that all hardware is always in use mining something as long as marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost.

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

#399

Post by jkhdigital »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #179
discardable_dan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." Unlike with employers and real world unions, the Ethereum network is not bound by labor laws to negotiate exclusively with unionized miners, or refrain from replacing them with non-unionized miners. Without those laws, unions are pretty powerless, which is why the late 19th cen…

> The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof of Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of Stake

And that’s the problem... it’s a bait and switch, because the miners had to bear the capital costs of investing in mining rigs, which would suddenly lose a lot of value in a switch to PoS. I think this is the original sin of Ethereum, and the network will be forever plagued by conflict because of it.

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

#400

Post by TomSwirly »

psKama wrote: post #395
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…

I believe your analogy is totally ill-structured and it misses the very main idea behind decentralization. There is no security guards, there is no concert-goers and there is no superstar singing at the stage. There is only MH/s and every single MH/s is equal to other one. That's the all idea about the system proposed and has been used. Miners are wrong not because you believe different people should have different w…

> more than enough time to re-structure their revenue channels and invest accordingly.

In other words, their business just goes away, but they can always start some other business?

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