Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes away.
Mainnet Merge Announcement
291–300 of 609 posts
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#292Earlier 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?
It would depend on how close the attack is to 51/49%. If it's close, the 49% chain should be able to keep ahead, making the attack take a long time and thus be very expensive... but there would be constant block reorganisations.
The 51% chain is mined with 51% of the total mining power, while the 49% chain will contain 100% of the mining power (as the 49% miners are more than happy to build off the 51% chain, while the 51% miners will only building off the chain without the censored transactions).
They are correct in asserting that a 51% attack to censor transaction is largely just a nuisance to the users and that all transactions should eventually end up on the longest chain (the 49%).
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners close up shop.
I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat out 24/7. I don't know how true that is.
Buying used in general is risky, but I’d wager buying from a miner is not much worse than buying used from a non-miner.
I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards and with running them at a constant rate, they won’t undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down each time it gets used.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today). Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4% today).
That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns elsewhere?
If they do rates will go up. So in that sense it's self-levelling. And the rate corresponding to the minimum secure number of stakers is likely extremely high.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no such thing as bogus evidence. Block signatures are validated cryptographically
But all evidence needs to be voted on. Even it's just a divine truth bool, the network still needs to vote on a consensus of whether or not it says TRUE. edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M. You say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it wasn't a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get x% of validators to agree with you. As far as I can tell, you cannot get slashed for your vote on a s…
If a network "votes down" cryptographic proof, that itself becomes cryptographic proof of dishonesty.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally wrong. Anybody has the ability to declare "the people with stakes did not validate correctly" In this context, what it means is that a person posted conflicting validation messages on different parts of the network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a reward, and the offending validator gets slashed. (There are also other ways you ca…
Who slashes the Slashers? (with apologies to The Watchmen) EDIT: Clarification - once a slasher posts the violation, who removes the ether?
Every Ethereum client (whether you are a staker or not; you can run a full node without staking!) recognises slashing transactions, and debits the balance of the misbehaving staker in their records.
In other words, the blockchain; in the same way that it's not _miners_ / stakers who process transactions on bitcoin or ethereum ; miners / stakers only decide _ordering_ but everyone who runs an Ethereum client is processing and verifying every transaction; the same way your browser checks a TLS certificate.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#297Earlier 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…
Already happening - the biggest miner refused to include Tornado Cash transactions in the mining pool. Stick a fork in it. Ethereum is done. With that degree of centralization, might as well just run a database and call it a day.
some salty crypto tribalists ITT, I expected better of you HN.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Running a slasher is not meant to be profitable. Slashing is meant to be rare and whistleblower rewards are purposefully low. Running a slasher is meant to be an altruistic action, and as stated, only a single, honest, properly functioning slasher needs to be active in the network to catch slashable offenses. Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic enforcement in a network built around economic incentives. W…
How can you detect that people are NOT running slasher nodes? This model assumes that 1/n is honest. This is almost as safe as it gets.
Depends how big "n" is. It's certainly not the number of ETH users. Running a slasher currently requires 1TB of SSD among other things[1]. I assume these requirements will grow with the popularity of ETH? If so, in a world where 100TB of SSD space is required the number of individuals who can run slashers drops rapidly. In the extreme case, aren't we looking at a small(er) number of well-funded organizations doing all the slashing?
[1] https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
> However, home stakers are advised not to run a slasher on personal hardware, as it is a tremendously resource-hungry process. Slasher is very heavy on database access and disk usage, and the slasher.db will quickly grow to 1TB or more when running on mainnet.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners close up shop.
I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat out 24/7. I don't know how true that is.
The cores should be fine since they have usually been run undervolted at lower temperatures, but the memory has been more stressed than a gaming card’s memory.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#300I 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 a…
It's a worthy ideal but it doesn't shape up in reality. 75% of current eth clients are one implementation[0]. Beacon is a little better but it looks like it could be heading that way (with Prysm already being well over half).
I would have loved to contribute to client diversity but my experience with non-geth and non-prysm clients has been so bad I did what it looks like everyone else does - throw my hands up and jump on the bandwagon of what seems to actually work.