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

151–160 of 414 posts

Re: The Merge

#151

Post by stepanhruda »

boosteri wrote: post #118
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.

Why would it need to be a significant amount of ETH? Could someone coordinate an attack on validator nodes, making themselves 67%+ temporarily?

Yes. That’s why diversity of client implementations is important.

Re: The Merge

#152

Post by skybrian »

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.

How do you know it's a "fraction of the previous costs?" You do need to buy ETH instead of hardware. I did some quick searches and got varying interest rates, so I'm not sure what the expected return is.

Re: The Merge

#153

Post by tzs »

bhaak wrote: post #112
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?

All the nodes that have been online long enough will know that the fake chain is fake. Because it doesn't match the state that they have been observing all along. So as long as you have no extended downtime, your nodes know what the right chain has to look like. Ethereum dynamically adds checkpoints so that block reorgs can't reach too far into the past but that is mostly a convenience function as it alone couldn't s…

Could POS and POW be combined? Say you have a POS chain that functions as your main cryptocurrency ledger, and a POW chain that runs at a much slower rate that serves as a ledger to periodically record history of the POS chain?

Re: The Merge

#154

Post by miohtama »

rakoo wrote: post #56
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…

Thanks for the explanation! I have a few questions: - how does the punishment work ? Do all nodes see that a malicious actor changed the chain and write the bad ideas in some ledger meaning "these nodes just lost X ETH" ? - 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 - is there an advantage to run more than one validator, i…

You can find more details on slashing and penalties in the Validator FAQ:

https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq

Re: The Merge

#155

Post by latchkey »

seibelj wrote: post #150
latchkey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs." ... "Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time…

That doesn’t mean we need more power. It just means the requirements of ZK proofs may need specialized equipment to process them efficiently. Different problem.

It wasn't a comparison about the power requirements between PoW and zk proofs.

In other words:

Switching to PoS, removes power allocated to GPUs for ethash mining. Adding ASICs for zk creates a requirement that doesn't exist today, for using power.

Re: The Merge

#156

Post by giaour »

pkulak wrote: post #111
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?

Nothing. But nothing moves forward without consensus. So you'd need 51% of the network to agree with your made up chain, which would mean controlling about $100 billion in Eth. And then you've managed to destroy a network that you have $100 billion wrapped up in, so... good job? And if you try with less than 51% and the rest of the network slaps you down, you lose your stake (or some portion of it).

> So you'd need 51% of the network to agree with your made up chain, which would mean controlling about $100 billion in Eth.

Does that sum assume that every coin will be staked? As I understand it, coins staked for validation are held in escrow and can’t be used for transactions until the validator node unstakes the coins. Surely only a small percentage of coins will be staked at any given time.

Re: The Merge

#157

Post by miohtama »

nr2x wrote: post #121
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…

What is the reward in PoS? Like, is it worthwhile for me to buy 32 ETH? Do I get more ETH for being a node?

More about staking rewards and calculators can be found at the Validator FAQ:

https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq

Re: The Merge

#158

Post by bitL »

OK, so you stake 32ETH, buy a dedicated server for a validator, and you'd get up to 5% reward per year. How is that going to pay off your dedicated server? Moreover, you are risking losing those 32ETH in case your validator goes down. Your payment would be proportional to the number of attestations, so if only a few people use ETH for transactions, your reward will be low. Did anyone think about making staking actually attractive to infrastructure providers? Infrastructure folks' reward was going down ridiculously even with POW, the POS seems like way worse, and if the number of attestations goes wild, I am sure ETH folks will find ways to penalize infrastructure folks again. I won't be surprised if ETH collapsed just because nobody would want to run 24/7 infrastructure for it.

Re: The Merge

#159

Post by scrlk »

jcranmer wrote: post #96
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Magically blinking away the US military would not change any of the above consideration one iota. Let's flip the question around: what happens when oil producing countries try to sell in non-USD? US military has entered the chat

Answer: nothing. No country has been invaded by the US military, or any other military for that matter, after selling, or even attempting to sell, oil in non-USD. Not Russia, not Iran, not Venezuela, not Iraq, not Libya, none of them. (And I include the last few because there's no evidence they even attempted to sell oil in non-US currencies.)

> No country has been invaded by the US military, or any other military for that matter, after selling, or even attempting to sell, oil in non-USD. Not Russia, not Iran, not Venezuela, not Iraq, not Libya, none of them.

Are you sure about that? Iraq was selling oil for euros and was then invaded in 2003.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur... (published about a month before the invasion)

> Almost all of Iraq's oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001. Around 26 billion euros (£17.4bn) has been paid for 3.3 billion barrels of oil into an escrow account in New York.

Re: The Merge

#160

Post by SilasX »

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…

What happens if most validators become non-responsive without unstaking? The network can’t create new blocks then?
Post reply on HN