I'm going to be really impressed and surprised if this ends up working (moving ETH to PoS). I'm still fairly skeptical. It seems like PoS has so many issues that come up with additional complexity being added to handle them. Worried it's increasing the attack surface too much and making a system that's not going to be able to be secured. That being said, I hope it works but it's been "two months from merge" for 5 years so hard to say
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
71–80 of 338 posts
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#72Ahh proof of stake, the nail in the coffin of decentralization. What did you say? the more you have of the capital the more you influence the system? what a novel concept! Monterey and legal systems based on structures that are at least partially built to take care of the needs of people of similar culture and geographic area? YUCK! Machine enforced plutocratic system where early adopters and syndicates have absolute…
> the more you have of the capital the more you influence the system That's not how PoS works, though?
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Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient confl…
That's a gross misrepresentation of how it works in the real-world. Do you believe the same about cryptography? Since you can't understand it, and few really understand the full system, algorithms and functions, it must be "review resistant" rather than actually safe to use?
I personally would be suspicious of a distributed cryptographic algorithm that can include malicious actors.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#74>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
On the other hand, North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology. I think much like TOR did for Iraq this would actually move them away from China and closer to us.
EDIT (out of comment quota): I'd hope not but I'm not convinced they aren't. It sure seems to degenerate into that more often than not.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#75>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
Yes, if you actively and knowing break the law, you might get punished for it. Not sure what's new here? If you don't want to connect to North Korea, block connections coming from North Korea, it's like one or two commands of iptables.
What I'm saying here is that this system is designed to tax your staked ETH if you do that. So you have three choices: 1: Run a validator blocking NK transactions, safe in the knowledge it's probably legal, but your staked ETH is slowly going to taxed by the network costing you money. 2: Run a validator including the NK transactions, your staked ETH is safe, but you are violating your countries money laundering laws most likely. 3: Don't run a validator, now the only people running ETH validator nodes are those who work with North Korean money launderers, which doesn't seem like a particularly stable footing for Ethereum.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#76I can't see governments allowing PoW to continue to exist in our current climate (in all senses). How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
> How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
I believe it would be possible for Bitcoin to migrate to proof of stake with a soft fork, similar to how they migrated to SegWit. A majority of nodes (both non-miner full nodes and miners) would have to upgrade to a version which rejects blocks which do not contain a proof of stake together with the current proof of work; non-upgraded nodes would ignore the proof of stake but would still accept the blocks as valid since the proof of work is valid (this is the key difference between a soft fork and a hard fork; on a hard fork, non-upgraded notes would reject the new chain). And to get rid of the proof of work, the block intervals would have to be tweaked to make the network appear to be running slow (for instance, making every block take one minute longer, either on reality or through clever manipulation of the block timestamps), so that the difficulty adjustment gradually reduces the difficulty, until the (now vestigial) proof of work becomes trivial to compute.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#77I can't see governments allowing PoW to continue to exist in our current climate (in all senses). How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ If Bitcoin moved to PoS it would be fundamentally different. It might work for other coins since they aren't as decentralized. > Instead, proof-of-stake mainly seems less suitable for a decentralized and censorship-resistant global monetary asset, especiall…
1% of ALL energy generated just to operate a part of the world economy is a massive amount though...
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#78>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority. It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people…
Providing technology to help dissidents is clearly a separate activity from providing technology to help the entire economy of your enemies.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#79I can't see governments allowing PoW to continue to exist in our current climate (in all senses). How would Bitcoin ever move over to PoS like this? Would it just be a Bitcoin hard fork?
Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ If Bitcoin moved to PoS it would be fundamentally different. It might work for other coins since they aren't as decentralized. > Instead, proof-of-stake mainly seems less suitable for a decentralized and censorship-resistant global monetary asset, especiall…
> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
That author doesn't seem to actually understand the scale of financial transactions in the world. Right now, there are about 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. The author defines Bitcoin being "wildly successful" as a 20x increase. Right now there are over 1 billion credit card transactions per day alone right now. If Bitcoin grew by 20x it still would be a drop in the bucket of global transactions but using up a relatively huge percentage of the world's energy compared to it's share of financial transactions. The author also justifies bitcoins energy usage by saying it's similar to Google's. But Google serves billions of people everyday and Bitcoin is used by a very small subset of people.
Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
#80>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
Just to play devil’s advocate, is a server responding to a ping request also actively helping North Korea?