Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm theory London could because it reduces the mining reward, but MEV has really thrown a wrench into that plan
MEV?
Miner extracted value.
Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
171–180 of 205 posts
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#172Can someone explain to me how PoS is not centralized? The whole point of crypto and the blockchain is decentralization, no? I feel like crypto/blockchain will end up looking nothing like how it was intended, and be regulated to the point that it's just the next iteration of the traditional banking system, where the current power holders continue holding the power. Maybe I was naive to ever think it would be any diffe…
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…
If somebody does a 51% attack his tokens would be worth nothing the next day. Might be plausible if you target smart contracts that are worth a lot more than the coin itself.
Otherwise this is just a nonissue.
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
PoS doesn't exactly lower the barrier to entry. Anyone with a GPU can mine (very unlikely to be profitable as a stand alone miner)...but staking 32ETH is a pretty high cost right now ($90Kish). However both can be overcome by pooling money or hash power...but then again that doesn't lead to more decentralization.
Decentralized pools like Rocketpool do lead to more decentralization and are almost not affected by the economies of scale issue mentioned above (there is a small commission to pay to the operator). While pooling hashpower doesn't solve the economies of scale mentioned above. If your hashrate per kW is bad you will get a very poor yield on your investment. There is also a commission to pay to the pool operator. Pooli…
Pooling in PoW still means the pool operators are the ones to vote on proposals through the block mining. That is the whole point of decentralization...if one or two large pools (Ethermine and Sparkpool) get too big then they can sway proposals almost single handedly (they have 45% of ETH hash rate now).
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is that it isn't, and none of these systems ever were. They're distributed, not decentralized. And this distinction, and the refusal to acknowledge it is what put me off crypto entirely.
May I ask you to elaborate a bit? What is they are centralized around? Capital? Misbehaving capital can easily be destroyed in PoS by a fork. Please see Steem/Hive case.
So we are going to fork(splinter) at the first sign of disagreement. I see a plate of forks coming up.
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea is that if piles of money grow proportionally to their size, the biggest pile of money will grow the fastest, effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. With proof of work, the same effect exists, thought it involves a loop where hashrate is exchanged for money, which is converted into more efficient hashrate at a TSMC fab. An actor that openly attacks the network will quickl…
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the att…
Right, though I think I address that in my comment.
Trying to cheat through the protocol is uninteresting. You don't destroy the system by breaking L1 rules, any such attack if successful would just get rolled back by hardfork (and nevermind the 'staked money is lost if cheating is detected' system, no one would willingly trigger it).
More ETH is automatically equal to more power, because that's exactly what money is defined to be. We trade it as power.
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea is that if piles of money grow proportionally to their size, the biggest pile of money will grow the fastest, effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. With proof of work, the same effect exists, thought it involves a loop where hashrate is exchanged for money, which is converted into more efficient hashrate at a TSMC fab. An actor that openly attacks the network will quickl…
>…effectively becoming the central point where power is concentrated. More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars. But actually exercising this control by attacking the network would undermine the network’s security/utility, potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the wealth of the att…
They wouldn’t necessarily attack the system to destroy it. Can they modify it to make it more favourable to incumbents. Consolidate power?
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#177Earlier 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…
> You need permission from an existing player in order to start participating. This is an incorrect explanation of what a permissioned blockchain is. A permissioned blockchain is one in which the ability to add blocks is limited to a certain collection of entities whose public keys are hard coded into the blockchain's consensus mechanism. We don't say that needing to buy tokens constitutes needing "permission" any mo…
The inability for anyone to modify the hard coded public keys makes it permissioned.
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#178To me in a way the big news here is a major news website (cnbc) reporting on this near live.
That's a pretty solid "sht is about to get real" in my books
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#179Earlier 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 $162.3B in capital. However, as soon as you start acquiring ETH the price will increase, especially at those large volumes. It would be insanely hard to come up with enough resources to buy enough ETH…
I wonder if a state actor could pull it off more cheaply. Start buying large amounts while letting it leak that you're going to take over the network. See if enough people will panic-sell on the leak to drop the price of your takeover. It's kinda like taking over a condo building on a much larger scale: the people you buy out first can charge a premium; by the end, you set the terms.
Why assume a state actor? Given the sorry state of DeFi contract security, it's far more likely that an enterprising hacker can gain a dominant staking position by pillaging and then staking ETH from buggy contracts.
Re: Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork
#180Gas fees becoming more predictable is nice, but the fact they can get so large for small transactions is quite frustrating. I wanted to swap a bunch of coins worth 8$ into another token and the gas fees were around 28$, which is just insane.
Yeah, unfortunately the main chain will likely be this bad until all the shards are executing shards. You'll need to go to an L2 until that happens
Note that execution shards are not really on the roadmap anymore as sharding is planned to be data only and serve as a scaling factor for L2 rollups.
In just a few years the only usage of the L1 will be security and data availability for rollups and a settlement layer for international organizations and state level actors with the vast majority of normal activity happening on various L2s.