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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

#411

Post by dastx »

jules-jules wrote: post #330

Surprised that there hasn't been a mention of how the merge to Ethereum 2.0, PoS will reduce energy consumption by 99%. A great background article going into some of the details here https://consensys.net/blog/ethereum-2-0/proof-of-stake-is-co...

I suppose the issue in this scenario isn't necessarily energy, but that it's miners are at odds with Ethereum devs to the point where they're willing to attack the network itself. Either way, I'm all for PoS because of the reduced energy consumption, and if it puts a middle finger in the face of the miners, who are partially to blame for shortages of consoles and GPUs, then I'm even more for it.

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

#412

Post by Fede_V »

I've been moderately interested in crypto, but, I've held off on touching them in any form until a real ecofriendly alternative is in play - and I emphasize real (not a few obviously paid shills/imbecilles talking about how crypto is actually good for environment because it allocates capitol efficiently/thorium reactors etc etc).

If eth switches to proof of stake in a meaningful way, I'll definitely take a serious look and possibly start investing in that ecosystem.

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

#413

Post by DennisP »

jkhdigital wrote: post #405
DennisP wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing-at-stake is a solved problem in Ethereum's PoS. The basic idea is that stakers' deposits act as security bonds. If a staker commits to two conflicting chains, any other staker can see that they did so, and get rewarded for publishing a proof of that. Then the cheating staker gets their stake destroyed on both chains.

There is a deeper problem with PoS, which is about where the value of the staked token comes from in the first place. PoW ties this to the burning of real-world value, specifically electricity which is about as close to distilled economic value as you can get. Ethereum is trying to bootstrap value with PoW and then switch, but I have strong doubts that this is a sustainable solution.

Coin value is not based on electricity usage in PoW. Due to difficulty adjustment, electricity usage is an effect of coin value, not a cause. If coin value goes up, mining becomes more profitable, more miners jump in, and electricity usage goes up. If coin value drops, the opposite happens.

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

#414

Post by Fede_V »

Fede_V wrote: post #412

I've been moderately interested in crypto, but, I've held off on touching them in any form until a real ecofriendly alternative is in play - and I emphasize real (not a few obviously paid shills/imbecilles talking about how crypto is actually good for environment because it allocates capitol efficiently/thorium reactors etc etc). If eth switches to proof of stake in a meaningful way, I'll definitely take a serious lo…

Beyond naked self interest - it's also completely unclear to me how it's possible to defend mining. It's literally useless work that ruins our beautiful planet to accumulate wealth. How is that in any way defensible? It's far less ethical than investing in weapons manufacturing.

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

#415

Post by psKama »

TomSwirly wrote: post #400
psKama wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In other words, they have been notified 2+ years ago that, their business -which has been very profitable so far- would go away because there is a better technology which can be used so that the network can still run with less environmental impact on earth. I wish every business was that lucky to be notified that early against the next technological breakthrough which deemed them obsolete.

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

#416

Post by drcode »

mrkramer wrote: post #276
drcode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and Vitalik announced long before Ethereum 0.1 was released that it would switch to POS in the future.

I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; th…

Proof of stake technology wasn't good enough in 2014, so POW was the only option.

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

#417

Post by derefr »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #126
derefr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation. Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow…

I’ve never understood Oracles as a concept. They seem fundamentally untrustworthy. ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin. But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of couldn’t compute any meaningful logic without requiring an absurd amount of resources from the main net. If you’re making a distributed computer, it’s like you’re scaling silicon circuits…

Like I said, Ethereum can be used as a distributed computer presuming an complete web of 100% trust between nodes. E.g. when the nodes are all run by a single corporation, with the node operators being different employees in different locations. In that case, the oracles (= native processes interacting with the blockchain nodes) would be presumed-trustworthy just as much as the nodes themselves are. The only question would be whether the out-of-chain computations of the oracles are able to move the state forward in a deterministic, linearizable manner as if they were on-chain computations — which is totally possible if you make your blockchain into a collection of arbitrary-CRDT smart-contracts and only interact with shared data through them.

But to directly address your statement, in general, oracles as a concept are “trustworthy” iff 1. they rely solely on public information as input; or 2. are run by a centralized entity, which is the same entity that has sole ownership of the resource being modified by the oracle; or 3. the system is built such that any oracles can submit a cryptographic proof of X, and as soon as any oracle does so, the condition is triggered.

Re: case 1, just as you can re-compute the transactions of a blockchain to arrive at the same consensus state, you should be able to grab a copy of the oracle’s code yourself and run it in a proper “context”, whereupon it will re-assert all the same transactions it ever originally asserted to the chain. This requires that all APIs the oracle deduces its assertions from have historical-data variants.

Re: case 2, the oracle is basically just standing in for a human. If you trust a human to do X, then you trust an oracle to do X.

Re: case 3, this is what on-chain prediction markets do. Rather than the win-condition for a prediction being something a human watches for and then enters, many private individuals (bettors) are incentivized to each have their own oracle running that watches for the win-condition however they like, and then — as soon as that condition attains — proves to the smart contract that the condition attains. The smart contract doesn’t have to care which oracle submitted the proof, only that there is now such a proof.

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

#418

Post by SimonPStevens »

ptrincr wrote: post #328
svara wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's every 15 seconds for Ethereum blocks.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/blocks/

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

#419

Post by gonational »

incrudible wrote: post #292
gonational wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That's what they do. That's what inflation is. We work hard and save up $100,000, they (the 1%) turn that into $25,000 in 25 years.

Nobody forces you to hold cash for 25 years. In fact, you are given many incentives to invest it, inflation being just one.

This is true.

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

#420

Post by iamwil »

starfallg wrote: post #285
iamwil wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While true, that's a separate point about marketing on the internet today. The person I was replying to was saying how traditional tech is allergic to crypto because of the hype machine.

I'm saying, if you dig beyond the hype machine, you'll find plenty of hard core tech and tech adopters that you found in previous platforms, like PC and internet.

OP apparently cares about the underlying technical details. I'm saying if he/she looks deeper, they'll find what they're looking for.

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