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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

151–160 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#151
What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be the largest block bakers: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer...

With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 51% attack thing is such a canard. If 51% of Bitcoin miners are malicious, the most harm they can do is fail to include your valid transaction in their blocks. So, your transaction will be confirmed in the next block mined by one of the other 49% of miners. Big whoop.

Not correct, they can choose to not accept any blocks containing banned transactions, and still have the longest chain (statistically speaking). That's why the 51% number is significant.

That assumes the other 49% won't accept the bad guys' blocks in their chain. Those blocks are valid, so the 49% will accept them and build off of them.

At any point there is still a 49% chance the next block will be mined by a good guy.

If the bad guys decide not to accept the good guys' blocks, then they are hard forking Bitcoin and will end up just like Bitcoin Cash: irrelevant.

This is the exact problem PoW was designed to solve, and it works very well, which is why a 51% attack has never succeeded or even been attempted against Bitcoin, and never will.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#153
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't stake 1 eth yourself. You need to at least 32 eth. Plus you need to make an investment to run your own a validator.

There are staking pools, just like there were mining pools.

You can mine with one GPU, pool or no.

Stake pooling also eliminates one of the supposed benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency - you have to trust someone else with your currency.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#154
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules who to include in the block. Imagine 51% of validators exclude people who use Tornado cash (as an example of addresses that somehow relate to a smart contract) The rest has to agree otherwise their stake is slashed. This can't happen in bitcoin. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In scenario when 51% coalition is censoring everyone else (block producers / validators that don't belong to coalition), the way out is via UASF - user-activated soft fork. This will cause slashing of attackers via "inactivity leak mechanism". Source: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

Thanks. To me it seems this would greatly damage the value of the assets (like the blockchain wars but for ETH) but yes, it can be recovered from.

I think the problem here is centralization and this can be more easily avoided in PoW (because of energy costs rising a lot if all miners go in one place) instead of PoS (there are no physical restraints, so in theory all staking pools could be in Switzerland).

So politically it's much harder to censor a more decentralized chain.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are spreading false information. Besides the "centralization" thing that was already replied, the part of > and if you try to validate and not censor, you will get your staked coins taken from you by the protocol (as opposed to PoW, where you just fail to get your block in the chain) Is outright false. It is the same as PoW. You choose what transactions you include in your block. So some people may choose to not…

This only proves that ether is already too centralized. FWIW. I used to mine eth on a small scale so I am obviously biased.

That doesn't prove anything. You can solo mine with a single GPU and choose to censor whoever you want. Any miner no matter how small can censor their own blocks.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#156
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a group of miners with minority compute power deviate from the rules they are ignored. If a group of miners with majority of compute power deviate from the rules, they become the rules. This process is how all changes to Bitcoin get rolled out.

The rules of the Bitcoin network are not validated by miners, they are validated by nodes. The miners have no control over nodes and unless their mining work is accepted by the consensus rules of the nodes they receive no mining reward.

> On 21 July 2017, bitcoin miners locked-in a software upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91

> By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of the bitcoin mining pools signaled support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit#Activation

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#157

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nod…

tangentially, how can one profit from ETH becoming more centralized?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no defined role called a “slasher”. There are randomly-decided committees that are regularly updated as part of Ethereum PoS consensus that play different roles. Your validator could be in any one of those roles (or in a pending state) at any time.

I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an optional, expensive seeming process. e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher

[deleted]

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#159
post #85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealth centralization effect is not an inherent aspect of crypto, it was nothing more than a result of the liquidity injections from central banks. The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the reduced cost of debt, which naturally fav…

Crypto has the same wealth centralization problem as all currencies (so far) - it's not immune, at all. It's not because of central bank activity. Wealth just centralizes. Free market economics lead to this emergent outcome. In principle, inflationary currencies have a force pushing away from wealth centralization, while deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it, which is why everyone who thinks they'll…

> In principle, inflationary currencies have a force pushing away from wealth centralization

That depends entirely where the new money gets injected. If it gets injected at the top, like with our current fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth-decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1]

Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least mitigated.

[1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the-cantillo...

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