Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Merge

ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 414 posts

Re: The Merge

#101

Post by wyager »

Victerius wrote: post #13
wyager wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Proof of stake suffers from the "nothing at stake" problem, leading to grinding attacks etc.

> Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Every country's financial system: ahem. The U.S. dollar doesn't require giant energy-hungry server farms to be secure.

Are you familiar with petrodollar warfare? It consumes a lot more energy and resources than bitcoin.

Re: The Merge

#102

Post by WFHRenaissance »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #82
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #30

Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…

> required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. No mathematical problem is getting "solved". It is much more akin to playing the lottery: Entirely random numbers are being tried out, by sending them through an energy-intensive algorithm (being energy-intensive is the algorithm's only purpose in proof-of-work), until what comes out is less than another number. That other numb…

Eh, a mathematical puzzle is being solved via brute-force. My intent was to explain briefly that the problem/puzzle is by nature computationally-intensive to the extent that brute-force is the most efficient way to solve/complete it.

Re: The Merge

#103

Post by rglullis »

yunohn wrote: post #97
entrep wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what block is accepted As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the Ethereum blockchain.

Sure, but that wasn’t the question. How does the punishment play out, assuming they’re acting in bad faith?

If you have 2/3 of the validators, there is no way that you can be punished. You will effectively be able to produce the blocks and tell the network that they are valid.

If you don't have that, the most that you can do is to attack the network by proposing bad blocks to slow down block production. Anytime that a (selected) validator proposes a bad block, the other validators that catch your mistake will snitch on you (through attestations) and the validator will get their stake funds slashed. The more your funds are slashed, the less of a chance you will have to be proposing new blocks in the future.

Re: The Merge

#104

Post by WFHRenaissance »

falcolas wrote: post #99
entrep wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what block is accepted As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the Ethereum blockchain.

What reason would anyone have to believe in their benevolence? It would be safer to believe in and use their greed and self preservation.

No one would use a network with this level of centralization, or at least, it would be unwise to.

Re: The Merge

#105

Post by mondoveneziano »

Banana699 wrote: post #100
mondoveneziano wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. No mathematical problem is getting "solved". It is much more akin to playing the lottery: Entirely random numbers are being tried out, by sending them through an energy-intensive algorithm (being energy-intensive is the algorithm's only purpose in proof-of-work), until what comes out is less than another number. That other numb…

This is a lot of words to say that PoW involves an inverse-hash problem being solved. Inverse-hash is a mathematical problem. Finding the nonce is solving it.

I was explaining in layman's terms.

Re: The Merge

#106

Post by 6c737133 »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #64
sktrdie wrote: post #37

I don't get proof of stake. What's stopping anyone from presenting a new chain made up of thousands of fake transactions? And why wouldn't such chain be accepted by the network? Is it just "checkpoints" hardcoded in the software that don't allow this?

It's bullshit: https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...

A magnificently misinformed waste of bytes. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The Merge

#107

Post by sprkwd »

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #30

Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…

I’m literally an idiot. Make this sense for me.

Re: The Merge

#108

Post by candiddevmike »

fizzynut wrote: post #11

Given that the merge reduces the electricity cost for new Ethereum by ~1000x, won't the price just tank in a race to the bottom?

In theory the price of any cryptocurrency is close to $0 as they are all fundamentally swappable, especially when used as a means of moving fiat between two parties.

Re: The Merge

#109

Post by khazhoux »

mondoveneziano wrote: post #105
Banana699 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of words to say that PoW involves an inverse-hash problem being solved. Inverse-hash is a mathematical problem. Finding the nonce is solving it.

I was explaining in layman's terms.

Layman’s explanation: POW works by solving a complex mathematical problem. :-)

Re: The Merge

#110

Post by whatshisface »

fizzynut wrote: post #67
whatshisface wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply of ETH is only related to electricity when it's possible to mine it with electricity. Otherwise, what keeps the price of crypto up is people competing to get currency for uses like remittance. Since sending money to another country using a cryptocurrency ties up an amount of currency for a period of time, users have to compete for the available tokens in order to exchange with them.

That's my point though, after the merge the proof of stake nodes are earning a lot of ETH for a fraction of the previous cost, the only way price should stay stable is if everyone with a stake agrees not to undercut each other.

>earning a lot of ETH for a fraction of the previous cost

That will only be true if mining is a significant contributor to the availability of ETH. Instead, I think that most ETH comes from sellers of existing tokens rather than miners.

Post reply on HN