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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

221–230 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#221
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they then show bogus evidence

Then the software will automatically discard the evidence. I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you to.

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#222
post #57
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead you just need a massive amount of eth

Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be the best alignment of incentives.

What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have the system you describe with fiat currency and traditional banks.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#223
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules have always been made by the ethereum foundation and friends. How many rollbacks and forks have they done at this point?

Just the one I think? Sure there have been network and client issues at times but that goes for Bitcoin as well.

I believe there were more than that one. From what I've read some time ago, to prevent the Ethereum 1 (proof-of-work) chain from continuing to exist after the migration to the Ethereum 2 (proof-of-stake) chain, the Ethereum 1 protocol has a built-in "difficulty bomb" which dramatically increases the proof-of-work difficulty after some time. But since the migration to Ethereum 2 has been delayed for so long, they've had to reset that "difficulty bomb" more than once (making it trigger later), which AFAIK requires a hard fork (and updating all nodes with the new rules).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slashing can only occur if the validator can be proven to break certain rules e.g. double voting. The reports are evaluated by the network.

> The reports are evaluated by the network. The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests?

51% is possible, but if it happens someone has wasted (at current valuations) ~$15B gaining a majority stake in a network they are torpedoing. It would be pretty dumb to do something like that to your own investment.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#225

In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State transition was known as Serenity. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.

Any details on what changed since serenity?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#226
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Except that blocks are not “finalized”, like you’re imagining. With 51% of mining power, I can mine faster than the rest of the network, for an arbitrary number of blocks. The 51% attacker will have the longest chain for as long as they keep mining their chain because they’re chain will always (eventually) be the longest one.

51% The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining population.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#227
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the question I am asking. You can have many people putting up their 32 ETH. Sure that's "decentralized". But what if most of the stakers collude to double spend tokens? My understanding is that there is an additional layer of validators that have the power to force them to give up their stake as a penalty. Hence "proof of stake". And that there are very few validators. And it's really just the ethereum fo…

You’re mistaken, validators and stakers are one and the same. A 51% attack becomes unbelievably more expensive in a proof of stake system, especially because at the end of it all of your money is burned (whereas with POW you get to keep the GPUs unless they change the algo).

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#228

I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this. First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.) Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!

> First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. How long until BTC follows suit?

Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin valuable.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#230
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reports are evaluated by the network. The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests?

Evaluated in the same way that “does this address have enough to send to this much to this other address” is evaluated? If it isn’t valid, then a block containing it isn’t valid, and this is a thing which any client can automatically check. What happens if you try to send trillions of invalid transactions in any sensible chain?

Normally there's a fee to try and send such things to prevent such behavior. I haven't seen anything suggesting thats the case for slasher reports.

The thing here is that the validators don't need to be honest when responding to a slasher report.

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