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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#271

Post by kkielhofner »

chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #220
kkielhofner wrote: post #211

What surprises me most about the Ethereum ecosystem is the software and release engineering of the implementations, especially the reference (now execution layer) go-ethereum. As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is sch…

> IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right. If anything, this just shows how complex the system is. Distributed systems are hard to write. The recent Geth 1.10.22 bug only occurs on shutdown- an edge case I imagine they will be testing from now on.

I'm not saying it's not complex and hard. On the contrary - it's incredibly complex and hard but that raises another question: just how far from this ecosystem being ready for prime time are we?

At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the internet:

Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting a few years after the release of the web.

I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users interacting with and depending on it everyday.

All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile, etc.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#272

Post by jimmydorry »

redox99 wrote: post #108
potatototoo99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is correct. It was already much more centralized than for instance bitcoin, due to the difficulty in having a validator node, but now it is just managed by the big holders and that's that. Furthermore, they will censor transactions according to US laws at least, 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 g…

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…

You appear to have contradicted yourself?

>So some people may choose to not include some transactions (Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash). But there is no mechanism that slashes your staked coins because the other validators didn't like what transactions you included.

>PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that slashes their stake.

If a group of validators don't agree with your particular arrangement of transactions in the block, they can engineer a "social fork" that slashes your stake.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#273

Post by Spivak »

garydevenay wrote: post #115
Spivak wrote: 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.

Miners and nodes have to be in agreement, when they're not you're right they've essentially fork BTC but I think you're wrong about who really holds the power and which chain would end up being the authoritative one after such an event.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#274

Post by jagger27 »

SilasX wrote: post #182
pawelduda wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, taking $4k (price it reached in the recent bull market). $4k vs $128k Literally the same numbers.

Right, parent is overstating it, and that's fair to call out, but it's still a low barrier to entry (even without the staking pools). At the current price (where anyone can get in), it's ~$1660, so 32 ETH would be ~$53k. How many "paycheck-to-paycheck" households blew that much on a fancy new pickup truck? Or home remodel? Or extra interest charges on the lifetime of a home loan from stretching their budget?

You’re joking right?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#275

Post by michaelsbradley »

api wrote: post #129

I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy. Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as many alternatives.

So far it’s locked up 32 x 416987 ETH. That’s about 10% of the circulating supply.

The number of validators probably won’t grow beyond a couple million because the earnings/rewards per validator shrink as the total number of active validators grows. The effective APR is already down to ~4%.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#276

Post by tyrust »

stiltzkin wrote: post #249
swamp40 wrote: post #113

My suspicion is that Ethereum got so popular because there were so many ways to make money from it. Basically a cash cow for developers and miners. Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease.

Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire staking with just 3 validators.

This site has a calculator: https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/

Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year. You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that to work.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#277

Post by swalsh »

muglug wrote: post #11
rvz wrote: post #8

> Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching, specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or explaining everything that got us to The Merge. At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc. But I imagine that…

As long as Bitcoin is still around crypto will have a heavy environmental asterisk attached to it. But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.

You can bridge bitcoin natively to Avalanche (look up btc.b) and then you can trade bitcoin with low fees, fast finality, get smart contracts, use it in defi.... oh, and it's proof of stake already so more environmental.

Just saying :)

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#278

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #143

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!

If you're interested in the technical coordination part of it you may be interested in the client diversity ideal that Ethereum has. Changes to Ethereuem don't happen by implementing the change on a client, but by updating a spec and then the ~5 execution clients or the ~5 consensus clients all update their code to become compliant.

It's a really high cost to pay, but in theory (assuming that the mix that is run is actually diverse) can protect against implementation bugs. In the browser world It'd be like running two different browser engines and only displaying DOMs that are consistent with both engines, or JS engine or final render etc.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#279

Post by tboyd47 »

proto-n wrote: post #266
tboyd47 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 51% of miners decide to totally ignore the other 49% then their chain will most definitely not be the longest chain for any more than 30 minutes. Because the 49% are still using 100% of miners' work. The only way they can maintain that chain is by a hard fork.

Let me make sure I get this right: if you have two chains, one is mined by 49% hash power, the other is mined by 51% hash power, you think the 51% one won't be the longer one?

As I've explained in nearly every comment, one is mined by 100% hashpower, the other is mined by 51% hashpower. The 49% are still using the other blocks, too.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#280

Post by camjw »

bowsamic wrote: post #260
camjw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment: "but staking 1eth is always staking 1eth". If I have 100 GPUs and I buy one more can't I turn around and say "But buying one more GPU is just buying one more GPU"? Even if your point is that electricity bills are lower per additional GPU, surely humans discount the value of incremental money after some point so for those with lots of eth incremental eth isn't worth as much?

It’s cheaper to run 1 more GPU when you are already running 100 It’s the same price to add 1 eth when you own 100 eth as when you own 1 eth

Kind of, but doesn't that assume a linear utility function for holding eth which I think seems unrealistic? Plus, there are costs associated with holding eth (cold storage etc) which seem fixed, so its cheaper to securely stake 1 additional eth when you're already staking 100eth than when you're not running any. Plus fixed costs of actually running a staking business (by analogy with a mining business).
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