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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

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Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#281

Post by nine_k »

thelamest wrote: post #180
_81ih wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can only be sure in hindsight which solution is comparatively or net good. Not all hard work done by smart and nice people turns out to be worthwhile. There are always trade-offs and cryptoassets bring them too. You have good reasons to be worried about centralization, but concerns that this technology empowers crime and totalitarianism, just in a different way, are valid too.

All technical solutions are trade-offs.

See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly.

Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a steam engine from 1800: large, dirty and inefficient as it is, it already solves real problems.

Now, moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a huge step, like moving from firewood boiler to a turbine. Maybe not a complete perfection yet, but a huge jump in efficiency.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#282

Post by dimgl »

stackedinserter wrote: post #52
dimgl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so marvelous about it? Also, how is proof of stake hard to understand? People with a lot of Ethereum are now validators. ???

Name a thing that you consider "marvelous".

I keep seeing this kind of retort online whenever I ask someone to describe what is "great" about something. Why does it matter what I consider "great"/marvelous?

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#283

Post by dlubarov »

codechicago277 wrote: post #212
Barrera wrote: post #64

The article does not even mention long range attacks in which large portions of the block chain are rewritten. This is made extremely hard in Bitcoin through proof-of-work. To rewrite history you must re-do all of the work, which means you burn enough real-world energy to work faster than the entire rest of the network (aka majority hash rate attack). It's allowed, but expensive. In PoS, there was never any work, so…

That you’re getting downvoted speaks to the poor quality of discussion on this thread. To me this is the core issue with PoS. I don’t know enough about it to say if the Ethereum devs have solved it or not, but this is a much more interesting topic than misguided comparisons of PoS to crony capitalism, which is just uninformed.

There's no solution that will give PoS the same objectivity PoW enjoys, but PoS (with slashing and exit delays) is secure against long forks under a weakly subjective model.

Vitalik has a pretty good post about it: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...

Essentially, the solution is to ignore forks whose lengths exceed the exit delay, since such forks can be created without a slashing risk.

The main issue is that new nodes need to start with a (somewhat recent) trusted checkpoint. This does open up some attack surface that doesn't exist in PoW, though in my view it's not much of an issue. If I want to be extra careful, I can always ask several sources for a checkpoint and make sure they match.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#284

Post by ruuda »

snapcaster wrote: post #71

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 yea…

The Merge has been a pipe dream for a long time, but at this point, the implementation exists. Multiple testnets have already undergone the PoW -> PoS transition. Some minor implementation issues came up that have been fixed. I'm pretty confident it will happen, it's more a matter of more extensive testing and coordination at this point.

As for when, Metaculus thinks 5 months from now [1], Polymarket thinks 2-3 months from now. [2] If you are truly skeptical about that timeline, you can make money on Polymarket (or virtual internet points on Metaculus).

[1]: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7971/ethereum-consensus-... [2]: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#285

Post by ryan93 »

kobieyc wrote: post #191
rekoil wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% of ALL energy generated just to operate a part of the world economy is a massive amount though...

food waste generates 60x more emissions than Bitcoin, yet nobody is freaking out about that, which makes me think people are just riding the ESG bandwagon

Food is literally finitely more important though

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#286

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

snapcaster wrote: post #71

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 yea…

I have been professionally close to the situation for more than four years, and it has never been "two months from the Merge" before. It was expected to be in about four years about five years ago. That's the most it's been delayed so far, which is impressive in my view given how much novel research has been required.

For anyone curious about an academic explanation of the problems being solved by ETH 2.0's consensus model, see this paper[1] out of David Tse's lab at Stanford.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04987

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#287

Post by TechBro8615 »

olalonde wrote: post #216
WJW wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link you posted: > The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a > convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user > is not a money transmitter under the BSA. That seems to leave rather a lot of open space IMO. For example, does a POS validator create convertible virtual currency? Clearly. But is it solely for their own purposes? Do they become a money transm…

It probably seems unclear to you because you are not familiar with the industry and/or AML regulations. To answer your questions, cryptocurrency miners are not money transmitters, even if they sell their cryptocurrency and they can accept fees from any transactions. Of course regulations can change, but in this case it seems unlikely unless the intention is to effectively "ban" cryptocurrency.

I didn't get the sense that WJW is unfamiliar with the industry. I read their comment as suggesting that the administrators who designed the existing regulations did so at a time when the widely understood definition of "miner" was a proof-of-work miner. If the same regulations were drafted today, would PoS validator nodes be considered functionally equivalent to PoW miner nodes? I hope not, since they aren't.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#288

Post by bhaak »

rgrmrts wrote: post #202
bhaak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Incorrect state is rejected by the majority, and the minority is punished (slashing their stake). That's wrong. Also the state of those validators that are separated from the larger network is not wrong it's just not the same as what the majority considers the state. They will be on a forked chain of the network. But for being on a fork, no validator is slashed. They will only lose out on the rewards they would hav…

Ah, thanks. How does the forked chain reconcile with the rest of the network once the networks sync back up?

I think that depends on how long the validators were cut off from the majority of validators.

Ethereum's POS has a concept called finality which means that under certain conditions the blockchain gets checkpoints that can't ever be reverted. Somewhat simplified but the the blocks are finalized if 2/3rd of the validators validated the last 64 blocks. So, normally after about 13 minutes you can be sure if the transactions are set in stone or not.

If the cut off validators are reunited after not too long, they won't have been able to finalize any blocks and then they will just throw away the part of the chain they have been building since they were separated from the majority. As far as I understand it that's quite similar to a reorg on a POW blockchain.

The other case, if they've been separated for a very long time, the situation is a bit different. If you don't follow your duties as a validator, you get penalized. A little of your staked ETH is burned. Note, that's not the same as slashing (which is much harsher) and if your staked ETH balance falls below 16 ETH, you're kicked off the list of validators. This is so that active validators will be able to reach again a 2/3rd majority after a while and be able to finalize blocks. If this happens to our cut off validators, even if they get access to the other validators data again, they can't reorg the blockchain as their blocks have been finalized.

In this case, the admins need to manually reset the data so the validators can rejoin the correct chain. This is a known issue which POW networks don't have. There you can always rely on the chain that has the most work done. But the work is cheap and fast in POS networks so you sometimes need to get external info and verify it by hand.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#289

Post by operator-name »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #133
rglullis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS does not give you any power to change the rules of the system, it only makes sure that those who are invested in the system get (slightly) rewarded for good behavior and (heavily) penalized for bad behavior.

This is the prevailing theory but in practice I'm not sure it will work. Ethereum forked early on due to someone stealing some money from The DAO. In reality the exchanges/large corporate owners will be the ones doing network validation, and they will be the ones most easily leaned on by their respective governments. If a government(s) says "you need to veer off this version of Ethereum and run your own", the chain w…

Ethereum's fork was at the social layer, and whatever om chain consensus mechanisms cannot prevent that. Even with the fork, ETC still exists to this day.

The difference with slashing is that forking is no longer "free" as each fork penalises members who only support the other fork. Let's consider your example in PoW and PoS with slashing. In PoW both chains would continue and miners can freely switch - their funds are also duplicated. In PoS those that support each chain will eventually be locked in, and penalised if the other chain "wins".

This doesn't prevent all (or effectively enough) stakers being coerced/forced by a powerful enough entity, but that's a social problem that no consensus algorithm can resolve - just as if effectively everyone was a bad actor.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#290

Post by [deleted] »

pa7x1 wrote: post #279
jayd16 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://g…

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