Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think the headline is correct in labeling this as a 51% attack? The other argument would be that developers are trying to push through a contentious fork (mostly but not only contested by miners and mining pools), and mining nodes are planning to not adopt the proposed change?
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…
Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
471–480 of 532 posts
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#472Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…
I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years. Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste. It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential. So I starte…
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's the same when currencies around the world stopped using the gold standard and became floating across each other. I'd say the value of currencies is that you have to pay your taxes in one that is legal tender. In that case, the value of Eth is that you have to pay transaction fees in Eth. You decided how valuable those transactions are.
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely. Vitalik wants to fork ETH (as he's done before when they rolled back the DAO hack) to make a new version of ETH that is proof of stake. The miners, as I've predicted here before, disagree, because this fork obliterates their entire business model. Shocking.
ETH2 is the ETH main roadmap, not a fork.
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#476Earlier 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.
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GP…
Doesn't Vitalik defeat the purpose of Decentralisation? One man trying to push his agenda thru?
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years. Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste. It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential. So I starte…
Thanks for sharing! I'm curious what you use to generate the high quality diagrams for the readme and on your blog.
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Miners want money. Ethereum, like every currency, is worth what it is because of people. The value of Ethereum goes where the money velocity goes; in other words, where the users go. The critical question is not what the developers or miners support; its what the users support. Well, barring any major conflicts of interest, they'll/we'll probably support the developers; their power comes directly and only from the trust that the collective democracy of ethereum's users has in them. If Vitalik demonstrated extreme prejudice against ethereum's users, then the users would (probably) revolt, and new developers would be installed, but critically: Ethereum, like all blockchains, enables that in a way which doesn't involve the war, death, and bloodshed that overthrowing governments typically requires.
Miners want to have their cake and eat it too. They don't give a shit about Ethereum's users. They want a high ETH token price, wholly and totally supported by Ethereum's users, but without this RFC, which both the developers and most users support. They could fork, give the middle finger to the users, and their secondary TRASH-ETH blockchain would be worth nothing, because it doesn't have users, but at least they'd have proof of work. That's why they'll lose; not because the developers are on the other side, but because the users have put their faith in the developers, not the miners. And that's a very healthy position for ethereum to be in right now.
Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has no value without security and transactibility which is what the miners provide.
Not in proof of stake (which provides it through stakers instead), which is what this whole thing is about.