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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

#451

Post by teawrecks »

Zetaphor wrote: post #424
proto-n wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik there's no plan to attack, they are planning a "show of force", i.e. get more then 51% in a pool for a while without doing anything with the power. This is separate from either adapting or not adapting the fork itself and happens before the fork. The original chain has to be forked either way, with or without eip 1559 because the "ice age" coded into the current version (it's in there for this exact reason). So…

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how it's gonna be.

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

#452

Post by IFoundBiden »

teawrecks wrote: post #451
Zetaphor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how it's gonna be.

I wish you were Biden man. Have my babies have my ass, expertly told. Consider a career in writing. Or being oiled up. Good show dude.

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

#453

Post by everfree »

mrkramer wrote: post #279
everfree wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitalik announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.

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…

Both didn't start with PoS because it's much more difficult to come up with a practical PoS design than a practical PoW design. I consider Casper CBC to be the first robust PoS design, and it took many years of research for it to developed. Look at peercoin for an example of an early PoS design that was fundamentally flawed.

PoW was ready back then, PoS tech was not there yet.

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

#454

Post by Rapzid »

thekyle wrote: post #182
Rapzid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing but yeah, 40 dollars to swap tokens... You could almost imagine it all being kept track of on paper or punch cards with people manually carrying out every transaction for that price LOL. I'm looking forward to smart contracts costing pennies per transaction. It's going to be a game changer for the utility of it all.

Are the high gas fees something that proof of stake will solve?

I would recommend reading about ETH 2.0. There are a few aspects to it that increase scalability and drive down gas prices. Unless I'm mistaken proof of stake will contribute to this as the "work" is done away with.

Eth 2.0 has been slow and a long time coming, but it's the future and inevitable IMHO.

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

#455

Post by pjfin123 »

antpls wrote: post #217

Doesn't Vitalik/the dev team own the "Ethereum" name, which means they decide what get called "Ethereum" ? If there are two versions of the chain, because of a 51% attack or a fork, there always will be only one dev-approved chain called "Ethereum" on the exchanges, and that's what the users will buy.

I think the Ethereum Foundation owns the trademark.

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

#456

Post by jki275 »

casi wrote: post #446
jki275 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how it works. The people who hold the majority of the stake are the majority, not the minority.

There is a difference (with the introduction of slashing and user activated soft forks) in 51% attacks that revert finalized blocks. In PoW this type of attack would become cheaper as it persists, in PoS we have some defense that keeps making this attack expensive. On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin with. https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06…

Vitalik and company have zero history in the proof of stake game, and what little security history they do have is pretty much awful. So I'm not too worried about what they have to say about things. If it's not something he copied from Tezos or ADA, I wouldn't consider it relevant to the discussion at all.

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

#457

Post by from »

d0gbread wrote: post #390
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…

Share this quote with someone in Venezuela with a straight face. Or the countless unbanked that have access to a divisible digital gold but not stocks, bonds, gold, or enough to direct invest.

I can definitely agree that Bitcoin is a step in the right direction for expanding access to the financial system and I think the whole DeFi space on Ethereum is pretty incredible too (Uniswap, Curve, etc). It's outrageous that there are hundreds of millions of people who can't even open a bank account because they have no form of ID. I recognize that theoretically everyone can have a Bitcoin address and obviously there is tremendous value in that. But it's unlikely that these people will have real access to Bitcoin either when you consider that most Bitcoin users get it through centralized exchanges like Coinbase who must comply with whatever AMC/KYC garbage FINCEN and the rest of the American regulatory apparatus put out.

I would guess that Venezuelans mostly want a stable currency. There's plenty of reports (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/dollars..., https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807488229/use-of-u-s-dollar-i..., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/there-are...) of Venezuelans using USD and there are plenty of other developing countries (Lebanon, Zimbabwe, etc) that have a widespread black market for dollars. From Feb 21 to Feb 27 Bitcoin's dollar value dropped by 25%. From Feb 27 to today Bitcoin's value has increased by almost 30%. Even with all the inflation fear going on now safe-haven currencies like the Swiss Franc do not have this level of volatility. If you just want to avoid hyperinflation there are much safer (and [accessible](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iaETafdC5WN...)) places to park your savings.

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

#458

Post by Sargos »

CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #438
herbst wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Crypto literally is the best thing that happened carrier wise to my life. From the wild wild west in the early days that allowed anyone to make some beermoney then (and be rich today if they holded) to the immense community we have today that turn simple products/dapps/whatever into millions strong businesses over night. Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the people (for a while at least)…

Where would you tell a crypto noob to start today?

This is the go-to guide for anyone new to crypto today. It goes over the why and how and provides links for further reading. https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-1-starting-with-b...

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

#459

Post by mratsim »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #227
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

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…

How does this effect the viability of L2 side chain solutions?

L2 can scale Eth2 as well. In fact Vitalik mentions often that scaling can go 100x with Eth2 and 100x with L2 for 10000x total scaling.

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

#460

Post by mratsim »

dmingod666 wrote: post #290
seibelj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the…

It doesn't help that the shadiest of people use crypto and ICOs to cheat and steal from gullible people. The suspicion and guard is up because the stakes are different. Let's say you write an opensource logging library for your language and promote it on HN - the stakes are low for everyone involved. Let's say you're trying to launch rabbit token that's going to be the next only-fans replacement. You have a ton of mo…

It's likely that the shadiest people use cash though.
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