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The Merge

ethereum.org

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Re: The Merge

#211

Post by randomran01234 »

tootie wrote: post #195
sprkwd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're not an idiot. It's extremely obtuse and only makes sense to insiders. It's orders of magnitude more obscure than how fractional reserve banking works and understood by far fewer people.

It takes time to learn but it isn’t obtuse. It’s extensively documented, with multiple open source clients being built in tandem. Besides, it is not the only PoS system running today.

All fields of engineering are complex to those that have an not studied them.

Re: The Merge

#212

Post by bawolff »

Banana699 wrote: post #181
osigurdson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is how I explain it to people: Imagine a page of a book, for each letter a-z, assign a number to it (a=1, b=2, .. , z=26). Compute the sum of all of the letters on the page but reset back to zero when 100 is reached (i.e. 97 + 5 = 2). The resulting number is a kind of signature for the page. Changing a letter would result in a different sum. At this point, people usually understand the utility and irreversible n…

Modulo summation is a good hash function to teach non-CS people what hash functions are in principle. But, judging by my experience in learning about how Bitcoin works, is not sufficient to see why it's a secure currency (and PoW explanations are only invoked in that context). I knew about hash functions long before I knew why bitcoin works. I think the first thing people need to get over to understand de-centralized…

> Concept #3 : Bitcoin utilized super-smart magic from several apparently-unrelated fields of CS to make the fantastical spreadsheet from concept

Not really. Bitcoin (i.e. the original satoshi version) is hashcash, data structure merging and some game theory. Its an ingenious system, no doubt, but its ingenious because it put together some really well known building blocks in a smart way. It definitely did not use super advanced stuff from any field of CS, let alone multiple.

And that's not a dig at it either. In many ways that makes it more impressive.

Re: The Merge

#213

Post by 1ark »

tzs wrote: post #153
bhaak wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Peercoin is hybrid PoS+PoW, but for other reasons. Their university pages are well written for most people to read.

Re: The Merge

#214

Post by bawolff »

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.

Why are we explaining in layman's terms on hacker news? Maybe i'm being pretensious, but surely we all know what sha256 is. Its used pretty constantly everywhere, long before bitcoin was a thing.

Re: The Merge

#215

Post by bawolff »

khazhoux wrote: post #137
pavlov wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the layman’s explanation because the average person doesn’t encounter mathematical problems being solved by a brute force lottery. In high school math, problems are solved by choosing the right formula and plugging in the right variables. Throwing the dice trillions of times isn’t what people imagine when they hear “solving a complex mathematical problem.” That framing is designed to make PoW more acceptable…

The average person doesn’t encounter mathematical problems -- full stop. They have no reference point between one algorithm and the next. Heck, I understand well how POW works, and even I think of it as solving a "complex mathematical problem"... the inherently difficult problem of prime factorization. Anyways, potayto potahto.

> Heck, I understand well how POW works, and even I think of it as solving a "complex mathematical problem"... the inherently difficult problem of prime factorization.

???

Factoring is not a common problem for proof of work. In fact im not sure how you could even make that work in a way that ensures participants arent cheating.

Re: The Merge

#216

Post by tootie »

randomran01234 wrote: post #211
tootie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not an idiot. It's extremely obtuse and only makes sense to insiders. It's orders of magnitude more obscure than how fractional reserve banking works and understood by far fewer people.

It takes time to learn but it isn’t obtuse. It’s extensively documented, with multiple open source clients being built in tandem. Besides, it is not the only PoS system running today. All fields of engineering are complex to those that have an not studied them.

The mechanics aren't extremely complicated but they also make no sense. Proof of work or proof of stake are both solving an abstract and meaningless problem. Crypto makes more sense if you study psychology than engineering.

Re: The Merge

#217

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

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…

Only when explaining to laymen can you make PoS, and Ethereum's implementation of it, sound reasonable, open and secure.

Re: The Merge

#218

Post by adrr »

randomran01234 wrote: post #207
ww520 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the checking mechanisms that 2/3 of the nodes are not colluding together? In other words how do you prove someone owning 51% or 2/3 of the network?

Their actions would most likely be visible on the network because it is transparent. The community can then decide whether to activate a fork and punish the colluding nodes.

Who is the community and how do they decide to fork(eg: is there a vote?)?

Re: The Merge

#219

Post by jxi »

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…

that’s like saying doing algebra problems isn’t “solving” any real world problems. it is solving in the mathematical sense.

Re: The Merge

#220

Post by setr »

ikt wrote: post #182
papa-whisky wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if "waste of bytes" is referring to the blog post shared by GP, or to proof of stake as a whole. If the former; as someone with little knowledge of cryptocurrency the post read fairly convincingly to me. In what ways is it misinformed?

You can read more here when it was posted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366310 Basically he built up a strawman and then burned it to the ground.

I’m scouring through the comment chain but I’m not really finding such a definitive response. I’m assuming you’re referring to the first chain of comments, but that seems to boil down to “the attack exists but it’s fine because to successfully attack the network would destroy the network, and with it any profit you’ve made in the attack; thus you cannot profit” — but this is directly addressed by the “nothing at stake” section of the article; if I can attack the successfully attack the network, and liquidate my position before the network implodes, I win (which PoW mitigates by making the 51% attack itself prohibitively expensive). Which hardly seems unreasonable, because the network imploding is a feature of humans losing trust in the network and abandoning it — in compute-land, an eternity.

In my skimming, I can’t find anything that addresses this — and especially not anything that merits describing TFA as a strawman.

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