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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

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Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#151

Post by _81ih »

SilverBirch wrote: post #101
clippablematt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I absolutely agree we should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape and co-ordinate. Which is why this infrastructure, which is clearly designed to empower those regimes, is bad. Are North Koreans using crypto-currencies? Maybe, it doesn't seem like it. Is the North Korean regime using crypto-currencies? Absolutely, we repeatedly see the North Kore…

I really don't get what the argument is here? NK and others also use Tor, Signal (Protocol), and more. Are they all bad? And why always use the most extreme examples like NK and China?

If US citizens could empathize with people not only from NK, but also from places like Turkey, where the value of our currency has been demolished under the current authoritarian government (and, IMO, they aren't far away from putting limits on buying USD), I think we would have healthier discussions. Now, I can — and am — moving out of the country, but not everyone can. Thinking otherwise is privileged and ignorant thinking.

Of course ETH is not flawless, and if I were in a middle-class family in the US, I would love to have these deep philosophical discussions about if Ethereum is really really decentralized, but the fact remains that cryptocurrencies DO solve real problems, and they DO help more people than they hurt, just like any technology. If this weren't the case, humans would have stoped innovating a long time ago.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#152

Post by mavhc »

totetsu wrote: post #104
blackhaz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, no. Helping North Korea to bypass international agreements won't help us to "reject violence and authority." What authority are you talking about here specifically, what are you trying to reject? Throwing an existing system out of the window without offering anything in return is madness. Cryptocurrency won't replace all the financial and government systems that have been developed internationally for years. How…

Is there a peer to peer way to stop nuclear proliferation?

Be nice to people and don't drop so many bombs on their country they'll live in poverty for decades?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#153

Post by olalonde »

RL_Quine wrote: post #150
olalonde wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work as it would still require PoW to "include within it a valid block for OldChain". Any change to proof of work requires a hard fork.

Nobody would be mining OldChain so it's difficulty would be irrelevantly close to zero, you'd just just drop the requirement for POW down to something effectively gone. I said it's contrived as anything, but it's all technically possible if you mess with the incentives and intentionally create really perverse systems. That's the messiest of them though, changing the transaction format, script language, issuing new co…

> Nobody would be mining OldChain so it's difficulty would be irrelevantly close to zero, you'd just just drop the requirement for POW down to something effectively gone.

Why would nobody be mining OldChain? You can't remove the block reward or change the difficulty without a hard fork. PoW miners would still decide which blocks are mined and reap the rewards (block reward and transaction fees). You haven't actually proposed a solution that wouldn't require a hard fork.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#154

Post by cowtools »

elif wrote: post #121
drdrek wrote: post #31

Ahh 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…

"machine enforced plutocratic system where early adopters and syndicates have absolute power" Also applies to, e.g. USD spent on amazon, casting votes in bipartisan elections, paying taxes, etc. It is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalist organization of wealth. It is worth assessing the rate at which it is being concentrated, which for USD is a historically unprecedented rate.

>It is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalist organization of wealth.

In a functioning system it's a property that reflects the time-value of money.

In cryptocurrency, there is no need for such a property. Any altruistically-designed cryptocurrency would have inflationary tokenomics.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#155

Post by coffeeblack »

drdrek wrote: post #31

Ahh 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?

You can influence the payment processing. And if the crypto would allow false payments, it’s value would immediately drop to zero. The more money you have invested, the higher your incentive to keep it’s value stable.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#156

Post by amluto »

Following some links:

https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality

> If 51% of validators start censoring, the victims and users can coordinate on a minority soft fork where they build on each other’s blocks and ignore the attacker. On the minority soft fork, the attacker’s deposits would lose millions of ETH to an inactivity leak, and after a few weeks the chain resumes finalizing.

It seems that this could easily be turned around: if enough malicious validators coordinate, they can create a soft fork that burns every honest validator’s stake until the malicious validators have an ever increasing supermajority.

New victims who aren’t validators could try to become validators to fight back, but the colluding validators can just ignore those proposed transactions.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#157

Post by gregwebs »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #79
gregwebs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

She does write about this topic as well, it is worth reading the full article. Bitcoin can never be used directly for all the world's financial transactions since it is not capable of that throughput. But those transactions can use things like the Lightning Network that is built on top of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is useful as a final settlement layer, more like how banks use Fedwire today.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#158

Post by cowtools »

xadhominemx wrote: post #35
drdrek wrote: post #31

Ahh 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…

It’s a lot more challenging to run a mining operation that even breaks even over the long run than it is to buy a couple eth and start staking

Why is it necessary to break even? Ordinary users can mine on their home hardware and make a return on their existing hardware before it depreciates.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#159

Post by 0xfoobar »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #2

I have seen description like this so many times, but no guide seems to describe exactly how everything is done in decentralised way. "The validators for each slot are assigned to committees". By whom? Also what if there is network partition for these 12 seconds. It's not very unlikely that some country could be completely cutoff from the internet for some time due to anything from natural or political reasons. Could…

Article author here.

Great questions, should have explored the randomness beacon more. Ethereum uses [RANDAO](https://github.com/randao/randao), which is a distributed commit-reveal scheme where participants in the generation post a hash of their data on the commit portion and then at a later timestamp reveal the data preimage, and get slashed if they do not reveal a correct preimage. Then all participant data is aggregated together. This means if there is at least one honest participant the generation will be random.

A supermajority (2/3rds) of validators is required to finalize a block, in case of a 50-50 network partition blocks would stop being finalized and attestation rewards would stop. Non-participating validators would slowly leak stake through the inactivity leak until online validators once again had a supermajority. This is the "self-healing" mechanism that allows both safety and liveness.

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