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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

0xfoobar.substack.com

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Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#271

Post by mike00632 »

clippablematt wrote: post #68
SilverBirch wrote: post #54

>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…

The entire UN has sanctions against North Korea.

What is a US-centric idea is the thought of helping North Korea because their are an enemy of the United States. If your primary concern is breaking US hegemony then that is a US-centric viewpoint.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#272

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

solardev wrote: post #243
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not in any sense a USA-centered opinion. Look at the list of countries and supra-national organizations which have comprehensive sanctions in place against North Korea: which include not only the US, but Japan, the European Union, Australia and Taiwan. You can adopt whatever degree of moral relativism suits your purpose, but there's basically not a lot of people anywhere in the world who are looking at what's h…

To be fair though, those are all Western-aligned countries dependent on US force. They'll typically go along with whatever the US says. They're not exactly vassal states but close enough. NK is just another tiny country caught in a proxy war between imperialists. Look at China, which I think is bigger (or nearly so) than all those countries combined, and they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do. I'm n…

>To be fair though, those are all Western-aligned countries dependent on US force.

They're not, but whatever ...

There is also the matter of nine United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions, of twenty one total resolutions relating to non-proliferation; and a UN Commission of Inquiry report on human rights that found, amongst other things that:

"systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In many instances, the violations found entailed crimes against humanity based on State policies"

"there is an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association"

"police and security forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government and to the ideology underpinning it. The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable. Impunity reigns"

Of all the hills to die on, the one that involves takes a moral relativist position on the badness of the North Korean regime is one of the oddest ones.

(the report being quoted is https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/HRC/25/63 for those that want to take a fuller read)

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#273

Post by overtonwhy »

SilverBirch wrote: post #54

>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…

Convenient feature especially for countries that are heavily under sanction. Isn't the alleged creator of Ethereum Russian? His father is a Russian computer scientist?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#274

Post by josh2600 »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #102
josh2600 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptography has mathematical proofs of the underlying math that are rigorous. There are constraints such as breaking if a proof of an attack against the discrete log were to emerge or other constraints related to p=np. The implementations are also very close to formally verified if not fully formally verified. Nothing is perfect but cryptographic code has to be pretty bulletproof or a lot of systems would get owned.…

I respectfully disagree. While some cryptographic primitives are surely based on some sound math, building cryptographic systems is very hard, and when built, they ane not generally proven to be correct. Some attacks involve influencing source of randomness, whereas proofs simply assume random unguessable numbers, for example. You correctly mention unintended degradation, that is another pretty serious concern, but e…

I would say that it really depends on how you think about "the system."

If the hardware is in-scope for the system, you're generally out of luck at having provable guarantees unless you're willing to operate a foundry and courier your own products.

I think it comes down to threat modeling. You have some threshold where it's unreasonable for someone to attack a system for less than $X spend. Right now on iOS I think that's on the order of $500k-$1m usd.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#275

Post by lottin »

olalonde wrote: post #131
haxiomic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out North Korea are using crypto! To fund missile programs https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129.amp The more I think on these things, the more I think trust is a feature, not a bug

Do you extend that thought to the Internet as well? The web is undoubtedly helpful to North Korea, probably more so than crypto.

I think the problem with this argument is the internet is useful to anyone, not just criminals.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#276

Post by mike00632 »

yellowapple wrote: post #250
nailer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The post you're replying to was discussing sanctions, not violence.

Sanctions are toothless without the implied threat of violence should said sanctions be ignored.

Quick reminder that the sanctions only exist because of the express threats of violence.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#277

Post by mike00632 »

pa7x1 wrote: post #210
0xfoobar wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article author here. The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer. Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen. Just as private communications make…

This is very well put. If you believe the trade-offs of permissionless and private communications (as granted by cryptography) are worth-it and you don't think similar trade-offs to value transfer are worth-it (as granted by cryptocurrencies) you have to be able to explain how you are tracing the risk-reward in both cases to arrive at different conclusions. I'm not claiming it's not possible but certainly some very f…

It's been explained countless times. The world has come together and numerous societies have agreed to not give money to North Korea. There is no comparable discussion or agreements about restricting communications among individuals. It's asinine to ignore all of the history and turmoil of North Korea, just about as asinine as creating a crypto currency for the espress purpose of funding the Kim regime.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#278

Post by Imnimo »

> Honest validators see both forks but would built on the honest fork because it has greater weight in the LMD-GHOST fork choice rule.

I don't understand this part. Is an "honest" validator someone who follows the rules, or someone who is purely profit-motivated? If the latter, what specifically incentivizes them to obey this LMD-GHOST rule?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#279

Post by pa7x1 »

jayd16 wrote: post #268
pa7x1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can this argument be made in good faith? The spec is open source, all the clients are open source. Furthermore, it's implemented and running. You could argue that someone in particular has made a poor or incomplete explanation of how it works but not that they way it works is unfathomable or being patched as your speak. It's already implemented, go look at the code if you don't want to believe what anyone says.

If the spec is open source, how can you say all the clients are open source? Or do you simply mean there are open source clients one can inspect and use?

There is a specification of the protocol, which is open source: https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs

And there are over 5 interoperable, independent and open source implementations of said specification:

- https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/

- https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar

- https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2

- https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm

- https://github.com/ConsenSys/teku

- https://github.com/sifraitech/grandine

...

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#280

Post by Vecr »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #57
TacticalCoder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the incentive for them to do that? They could be short trading ETH. They could just want to create havoc. Why did people deface websites long before online ransoms were a thing? I don't think bad people need many incentives to do bad things. I may be wrong of course. > If the node is secured physically they would need to break into a person's house and decrypt whatever security setup they might have in plac…

In Eth2 PoS the validator has two keys: signing key, and withdrawal key. They are derived from the same mnemonic seed phrase that can be kept in cold storage. The signing key must be stored on the device doing the staking, but the withdrawal key does not need to be, it is only secured by cold storage.

Right, but OP is not talking about theft, OP is talking about someone (with possible short interest) creating havoc by causing people's staking nodes to behave in a bad way caused them to be slashed. You can't get the money they lost (it's gone for good), but you might be able to profit of a short position, or with a more sophisticated scheme, a resulting fork.
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