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The Merge

ethereum.org

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Re: The Merge

#361

Post by rakoo »

pa7x1 wrote: post #321
rakoo wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Validators only add transactions to the ledger. What I was talking about is the slasher, which makes sure nodes are behaving correctly.

When a validator adds a block to the ledger it can include evidence of slashable offenses. Including evidence of a slashable offense gets rewarded so every validator is incentivized to include them. Further reading: https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/slashing#the-v... There is no separate notion of a slasher, everyone gets to provide slashing evidence when they build a block. I don't understand why you bui…

The initial post talks about slashers as some special entities so I was talking about them

Re: The Merge

#362

Post by rakoo »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #349
rakoo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a pessimist, but I have stopped assuming rationality of all actors acting to secure a long-term future, especially in the world of cryptocurrencies

PoW is magical in that these actors are strongly incentivized to secure the network. PoS is not the same.

This was the whole point of blockchains. No one trusts anyone, everyone is in it for themselves only. The Adam Smith model. And it works, if you don't loom at the disastrous environmental impact.

Re: The Merge

#363

Post by cinntaile »

jrm4 wrote: post #356
cinntaile wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is valuable. You get to include the pending transactions in a block and you get rewarded for solving the puzzle.

This is what I was trying to get to with "inherently." The information ITSELF that is yielded by the process is 100% arbitrary and not valuable, i.e. relays no additional useful information about the world (e.g. the boiling point of some new liquid or something), like many would think of when we think of people doing math to solve things.

I totally understood that you tried to define valuable in such a way to exclude cryptocurrency mining, as you can see below however it's not easy to create a definition like that. It also begs the question why that arbitrary definition of valuable is more correct than another arbitrary definition that excludes something else instead...

> valuable, i.e. relays no additional useful information about the world (e.g. the boiling point of some new liquid or something)

Theoretical mathematicians don't provide anything useful according to your definition.

Re: The Merge

#364

Post by myroon5 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #250
giaour wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is $200B ETH staked already

All ETH is worth slightly less than $200B:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/

and most of it is not staked

Re: The Merge

#365

Post by aagha »

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…

Great summary. Thanks.

A more in-depth explanation can be found here:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/the-merge-the-bi...

Re: The Merge

#366

Post by noelsusman »

cl1nk wrote: post #357
noelsusman wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy part of crypto is a pretty small part of why I hate on it. More of a cherry on top. I'll stop hating on crypto when it becomes useful for anything other than committing crimes.

It is by far the cheapest and fastest option to send money internationally, fees from using SWIFT are ridiculous and the banks always use terrible exchange rates, I used to lose about ~4% of the money I sent to my family in another country

International money transfers cost money because complying with international financial regulations costs money. Crypto transfers are cheaper and faster because they evade these regulations, which is just a downstream effect of committing crimes being the only real use case for crypto.

To be clear, I don't think it's bad for you to use crypto for this purpose. I would do the same. I just think systems that allow anyone to evade laws are a net negative for society.

Re: The Merge

#367

Post by yencabulator »

osigurdson wrote: post #229
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this point for the same reason; what matters is how people interpret it. Of course if I'm talking to a CS type I can go right into the details. The analolgy I use with laymen is solving a large rubiks cube by randomly moving pieces instead of using any other sophisticated methods. Somebody please correct my if I'm wrong as I haven't been in the cryptocurrency space for a minute, but I believe most of the…

The only problem with the rubik's cube analogy is that it may suggest that there are more optimal methods to solve it and they just aren't being used.

Worse; if someone came up with an efficient means of solving this particular "Rubik's Cube", the cryptocurrency people would be in a rush to move away from that, and find an alternate lottery where only dumb luck helps.

Re: The Merge

#368

Post by erulabs »

dcow wrote: post #264
Cantinflas wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not after we learn the intrinsic value of the network.

Objects and ideas do not have intrinsic value. Value is a subjective judgement of individuals at a particular time and place. We will find out the new price after the merge.

Re: The Merge

#369

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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…

You're nitpicking. Poster was trying to explain things in a simple way.

Side question: what about your username? I live in Venezia and I'm curious now.

Re: The Merge

#370

Post by thesausageking »

ahtihn wrote: post #312
thesausageking wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS is less proven than PoW and has some edges cases that give many concerns. To say this up front, I own ETH, have worked on dapps on it, and completely supprt the move to PoS. That said, the fact that PoW has been running the longest and Bitcoin uses it to secure the most value of any chain and it has had 100% uptime for the last 9.5 years, means people naturally trust it more. PoS also in theory incentivizes centr…

> so miners can filter out transactions they legally aren't allow to process and all that happens is those transactions get validated in a future block by other miners. You could fairly easily argue that building on a chain that includes sanctioned transactions is also "processing" them. Therefore miners would need to fork the chain to remain in the clear legally or just stop mining altogether.

That doesn't make sense legally and regulators have given their blessing to the approach for Bitcoin I mentioned.

I personally think even going after stakers is a bridge too far, but in that case the staker is profiting off of the illegal transaction and they're also directly participating in processing it.

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