Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 205 posts

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#41

Post by majormajor »

krobbn wrote: post #39
majormajor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a state actor could pull it off more cheaply. Start buying large amounts while letting it leak that you're going to take over the network. See if enough people will panic-sell on the leak to drop the price of your takeover. It's kinda like taking over a condo building on a much larger scale: the people you buy out first can charge a premium; by the end, you set the terms.

Think of it this way, if another company announces they're planning to buy a publicly traded company, what happens to the value of the shares? The price goes up, you've just made it more expensive for yourself to take over the network. If you were to attempt to take over you'd be better to do so in silence. However, it would be hard to hide that kind of control and wealth when every information on the network is publ…

In a public company, though, having been taken over doesn't defeat the purpose of the company.

If you're intentionally trying to take things down, sellers have a huge incentive to not be left in the 49% who hold something that's now lost its value - as you say, "as it's become evident you've taken over the network the value of the network is essentially worthless." I think you could get the value to go to worthless well before actually hitting 51% on intent alone, if you're a big enough power.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#42

Post by nickthemagicman »

exo762 wrote: post #25
dyndos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key distinction is that PoW is permissionless, whereas PoS is permissioned. Bitcoin is secured by hashpower, which is produced by physical capital outside the network. Nobody needs to ask for permission to start hashing and trade kilowatts for sats. PoS networks are secured by on-chain assets. This means you can't "mine" it without first buying tokens from someone who already owns them. You need permission from a…

> Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for PoW You can switch the protocol once. Making ASICs useless. But you can't do it twice. > but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks. This is false in both theory and practice. It is true that PoS does not offer in-protocol solution for the problem. But there is a historical precedent of people forking away money of Justin Sun in Steem project, c…

That's pretty cool. The community can decide if something is corruption and take steps to fix it.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#43

Post by CryptoPunk »

MuirsGhost wrote: post #11
jl2718 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first stocks ever sold to the public were claims on land in a new world, an escape from servitude to kings. Turns out they were just being swindled by a bankrupt crown to keep their own oppressors in power. But there was a new world, and people did escape.

People don't escape, they toil for a new master, on new ground. From sea to shining sea, the new world's plundered resources eventually turned into Bitcoin.

Very melodramatic, but inaccurate. The American portion of the New World offered significantly higher hourly wages for unskilled labor than the industrial heartland of Europe, by the late 1800s.

And these wages grew at record rates all through the latter decades of the 1800s, in the midst of the largest influx of penniless workers in US history (causing the foreign born portion of the US population to reach 15% by 1890).

That wages grew as fast as they did, with such a massive increase in the supply side of the supply and demand equation for labor, is testament to the opportunities that the principal nation of the New World was generating.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#44

Post by jyu »

I asked this months ago and did not get any convincing answers.

Ethereum is currently decentralized because of the initial POW distribution. Won't there be centralized aggregators of eth so some point in the future a handful of POS nodes control a disproportionate amount of power? Is it so hard to imagine that coinbase or some other exchange accumulates enough eth to sway transaction validation?

Seriously, please answer if this is wrong!

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#45

Post by fogof »

dogman144 wrote: post #24
DennisP wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum's PoS supports up to a million or so independent full-fledged stakers. That seems fairly decentralized to me.

How many stakers actually have enough to win blocks though. What is the impact of shorting on PoS - what happens when I borrow enough ETH to win blocks, deliberately mis-verify TXs, and screw up consensus. I know Ethereum has planned recovery for situations like this, but PoS introduces risks that will never be as present in PoW bc the latter has built-in latency to how easy it is to aggregate resources which increas…

> How many stakers actually have enough to win blocks though.

Just as in PoW miners make blocks in proportion to their hashpower, PoS stakers win blocks in proportion to their stake

> What is the impact of shorting on PoS - what happens when I borrow enough ETH to win blocks, deliberately mis-verify TXs, and screw up consensus.

Well, you can't "mis-verify TXs", everyone can check your work to see that all of the transactions you put in your block verify. If you reached 1/3 of the total stake on the network, you would be able to screw up consensus and make conflicting blocks both appear to be finalized, just as a 51% attack on a PoW currency can revert a block that it treated as final by client software.

The ETH2 block explorer https://beaconscan.com/ tells me that there is about 6.5 million ether staked, which would be worth about 16 Billion USD, so you would need to borrow around 5 billion USD in order to make this attack work.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#47

Post by leesec »

jyu wrote: post #44

I asked this months ago and did not get any convincing answers. Ethereum is currently decentralized because of the initial POW distribution. Won't there be centralized aggregators of eth so some point in the future a handful of POS nodes control a disproportionate amount of power? Is it so hard to imagine that coinbase or some other exchange accumulates enough eth to sway transaction validation? Seriously, please ans…

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

>For certain kinds of 51% attacks (particularly, reverting finalized blocks), there is a built-in "slashing" mechanism in the proof of stake consensus by which a large portion of the attacker's stake (and no one else's stake) can get automatically destroyed.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#48

Post by null0pointer »

decentralised wrote: post #40
dyndos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key distinction is that PoW is permissionless, whereas PoS is permissioned. Bitcoin is secured by hashpower, which is produced by physical capital outside the network. Nobody needs to ask for permission to start hashing and trade kilowatts for sats. PoS networks are secured by on-chain assets. This means you can't "mine" it without first buying tokens from someone who already owns them. You need permission from a…

>Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for PoW, but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks. If a single entity ever accumulates more than half the tokens on a PoS network, they are unassailable. This is not true. PoS has many design flavours and the one Ethereum is planning on implementing includes random selection of validators and the amount staked has no influence on the inclusion or t…

If amount staked has no influence on inclusion or vote weight then what’s to stop a large ETH holder from splitting their wallet into several smaller wallets with the minimum staking balance and just gaining vote weight that way?

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#49

Post by gglon »

jyu wrote: post #44

I asked this months ago and did not get any convincing answers. Ethereum is currently decentralized because of the initial POW distribution. Won't there be centralized aggregators of eth so some point in the future a handful of POS nodes control a disproportionate amount of power? Is it so hard to imagine that coinbase or some other exchange accumulates enough eth to sway transaction validation? Seriously, please ans…

As I understand it a one way to disincentivise centralization is that when your node loses access to the network you lose more money if at the same time many other nodes/stake do not have access to the network. So it would be profitable to have an independent server and internet access.

Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork

#50

Post by QTnqs6C5 »

majormajor wrote: post #32
krobbn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing power is just a proxy for capital/resources. Why not be more efficient and use the capital directly and save power in the meanwhile. Current market cap of ETH is ~$324B, thus getting 50.1% of ETH would require $162.3B in capital. However, as soon as you start acquiring ETH the price will increase, especially at those large volumes. It would be insanely hard to come up with enough resources to buy enough ETH…

I wonder if a state actor could pull it off more cheaply. Start buying large amounts while letting it leak that you're going to take over the network. See if enough people will panic-sell on the leak to drop the price of your takeover. It's kinda like taking over a condo building on a much larger scale: the people you buy out first can charge a premium; by the end, you set the terms.

Why would people sell rather than fork to a version of the network where those ETH did not exist? One of the benefits of POS is that when you fork away from a malicious actor, they have to start over from the beginning while in POW, they can just point their hardware to your new chain unless you change the mining algorithm and screw over all the other miners.
Post reply on HN