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The Merge

ethereum.org

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Re: The Merge

#251

Post by ChadNauseam »

setr wrote: post #220
ikt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stak…

To execute that attack, you would need validators to sign blocks on your forked chain. Presumably they’ve already signed blocks on the main chain, so they’d be double-signing, which instantly costs them a very large amount of money on both chains (when you double sign, people can submit proofs of that on either chain, causing you to get your stake slashed.) That’s what makes the attack you’re imagining prohibitively expensive.

If you’re still worried about that happening to some ETH you received, wait for the blocks to finalize. Once they have, they will never be reverted without a change to the protocol.

Re: The Merge

#253

Post by dcow »

I predict this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum.

First we will see what the intrinsic value of a blockchain is.

Then the network will die when someone buys the 2/3rds of the validators for less than Visa makes in a day. It will probably just be Visa.

Code is not law, money is. This is the core value on the network and has been for quite awhile now.

Re: The Merge

#254

Post by ChadNauseam »

fizzynut wrote: post #39
hackernudes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is someone out there buying ETH because of the power that went in to mining it? It's more about supply and demand, I think. The supply of ETH does change after the merge, but from what I understand there will be less generated than before. All the tokens and contracts that use Ethereum will still need to pay gas fees and now instead of miners earning ETH, stakers will.

Those with a "stake" of ETH will be gaining $xxxx of ETH for a cost of $x, so why would you not sell for a giant profit?

Miners already gain $xxxx of ETH for a cost of $x. And after the merge, the amount of ETH will actually rise more slowly than before

Re: The Merge

#255

Post by khazhoux »

bawolff wrote: post #215
khazhoux wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All cryptography exploits the inherent difficulty of factoring integers. POW requires brute force precisely because the underlying hashing algorithms are built around large primes.

This is, actually, how I layperson-explain cryptography: there’s no fast or easy way to take any huge number and know what two numbers mutiplied to make it, and this mathematical property is what makes (good) passwords hard to crack.

Re: The Merge

#256

Post by bfung »

rakoo wrote: post #249
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Punishment mechanisms here are kind of complicated, but in short, you're punished for mainly 2 reasons: being an offline validator, or for an attestation violating. Slashers are entities that enforce the two above rules. If a slasher determines that you're node is down, or that you're committing an attestation violation (i.e. that you're signing more than one attestation in a given epoch mainly). The slasher actua…

Thanks for the reply ! 1. So if I get it correctly, there is an actor in charge of surveiling the network. There is no financial incentive to do that which means only a few actors will be running a slasher, and thus completely remove all decentralization. Once a fraud has been detected, the proof of fraud is to be spread by nodes with a financial incentive, meaning they might spread whatever the slasher says like gos…

> This is a very large step away from decentralization. The network depends not just on a few coders, but also on an institution checking whether nodes behave correctly or not. The whole point of blockchain was that everyone would assume everyone was out to cheat, and came up with a way to make it useful.

Exactly. This is usually the tradeoff glossed over by PoS marketing, that decentralization is essentially lost and it's no different than government controlled currencies. Instead of the "elected officials", it's the crypto messiah's that control this currency. You can pay into it, just as you can try to pay into your local city, county, state, (assuming in the USA) etc...

Re: The Merge

#257

Post by bawolff »

khazhoux wrote: post #255
bawolff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

All cryptography exploits the inherent difficulty of factoring integers. POW requires brute force precisely because the underlying hashing algorithms are built around large primes. This is, actually, how I layperson-explain cryptography: there’s no fast or easy way to take any huge number and know what two numbers mutiplied to make it, and this mathematical property is what makes (good) passwords hard to crack.

This is very not true.

Only RSA is built around factoring. I suppose if you consider discrete log to also be factoring related, some other public key & key agreement algs are also.

Hash functions and symmetric algorithms are not based around factoring.

Re: The Merge

#258

Post by swznd »

rglullis wrote: post #113
uncletammy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to objectively articulate the arguments against switching to proof-of-stake? Why is it controversial?

It's only controversial in the minds of purists/"maximalists" who are too invested in BTC. Their arguments would be something like: - PoS is not "decentralized" nor "democratic", because it means that only those with capital can participate in the network consensus building. This is "technically correct", but (a) it ignores that existing PoW also require massive amounts of capital to deploy mining facilities and (b)…

In PoS the rich can become validator as long as they have money. The limit is money.

In PoW, they can’t buy gpu as long as they have money, because there is another limit that money can’t always buy, energy, resources, needs (gpu for gamers, researchers, etc)

Re: The Merge

#259

Post by Cantinflas »

dcow wrote: post #253

I predict this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum. First we will see what the intrinsic value of a blockchain is. Then the network will die when someone buys the 2/3rds of the validators for less than Visa makes in a day. It will probably just be Visa. Code is not law, money is. This is the core value on the network and has been for quite awhile now.

You'd need billions to buy a significant %...

Re: The Merge

#260

Post by littlestymaar »

latchkey wrote: post #94
bluquark wrote: post #90

This reminds me of the nerve-biting period up to the James Webb launch. The devs put off this transition for so many years trying to plan for every contingency, but we still can't be certain they didn't miss a crucial flaw. In a system where the only thing holding back malicious actors is technical constraints, it only takes one bug or one misaligned incentive for a vicious cycle to take down the entire Ethereum ecos…

It is order of magnitude easier for them to make changes after launch since the code and developers are here on earth and not floating in space.

Especially given Ethereum's decision power being entirely centralized in the hands of the developers (unlike bitcoin for instance) who has shown willingness to hard-fork when they consider it necessary.

In fact, the move from PoW to PoS illustrate this concentration of power: the miners lose a lot but they had no say in the decision.

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