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Mainnet Merge Announcement

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#331

Post by zeroclip »

kkielhofner wrote: post #300
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jum…

Client diversity has improved in recent months, particularly consensus clients:

https://clientdiversity.org/

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#332

Post by landemva »

AlexandrB wrote: post #188
bowsamic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the opposite. Proof of work is more centralised than proof of stake, because the former has an economy of scale: it's cheaper to add a single miner if you are a big mining operation vs a small mining operation. On the other hand, staking 1 eth is always staking 1 eth.

Another article pointed out that the economics of staking are completely different than those of mining. With mining, some of the earned coins need to be sold to pay for electricity. With staking, the biggest holders just sit there and collect coins with few operational costs. To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful snowball effect than mining and the gap between the wealthiest ETH participants and ever…

There is some legitimate concern here. On the other hand, PoS looks to be more accessible to hobby miners/stakers because they don't have to convert their coin into ASICs or GPUs.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#334

Post by falcolas »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #302
falcolas wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers. No, you just need money, 32 eth is only around $50000. And there's a lot of people with sufficient money to stand up multiple validators. And validators can also initiate/vote on arbitrary slash requests (which costs them nothing, as I read it).

Sounds like an improvement to burning an entire country's worth of electricity...

There's a tradeoff. We need to acknowledge the tradeoff, and be prepared for the folks who just want to watch the world burn, and have the money to do so.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#335

Post by exo762 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #240
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

I'm sorry. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what slashing is. Slashing is just a tx. It is included (or not) just as any other tx. There is no magical dance, there is no voting process.

You are basically stating that slashing is impossible in certain conditions because network is not censorship resistant.

There is one avenue where network can censor. It is a 51% coalition that orphans blocks that contains slashing txes. This coalition is dealt with UASF (user activated soft fork), since this type of behavior goes against core principals of the network and convincing people to do it will be really easy.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#336

Post by kkielhofner »

yieldcrv wrote: post #319
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…

node software is pretty bad but alot of us run custom clients and know there is major room for improvement, with Go-Ethereum being the worst one this doesn't address what you need to do for the merge but definitely look into node software thats not written in Go. The rust ones are 10x faster and use 90% less time and space to sync (an archive node) than Go-Ethereum writing node software doesnt make money so its negle…

Agreed!

Have any pointers? I've looked around plenty and all of the non-go clients I've tried (for mainnet and beacon) have had pretty serious issues - wrong/invalid data, missing blocks, various other weird edge cases, stability, etc.

It definitely is neglected. Alchemy isn't worth $10B because they're just running geth... It's a vicious circle - node software sucks so anyone serious that needs things to "just work" uses a commercial node provider. Result is less emphasis, testing, investment, engineering, etc put into the available open source implementations.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#337

Post by pa7x1 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #72
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake Start here. “The threat of a 51% attack still exists on proof-of-stake as it does on proof-of-work, but it's even riskier for the attackers. A attacker would need 51% of the staked ETH (about $15,000,000,000 USD).”

I'm pretty much just asking the same question on every thread now. How does something get slashed? These articles say nothing about it. There are many docs saying all you need is 1 honest slasher node. Well, what happens if you have a dishonest slasher node?

There is no separate notion of slasher, every staker is potentially a slasher. Slashing evidence can be included when you make a block. Doing so is rewarded, so you are economically incentivized to report slashable offenses if you find them. Blocks are validated and "attested" by everyone else. Failing to produce a block that everyone else accepts (edit: everyone else meaning at least 2/3 which is the quorum used) has at best the economic opportunity cost of what you could have earned and missed on and at worst (if someone else reports a slashable offense on your part that is accepted) a slashing penalty plus you get kicked out of the validators.

The rest is game theory. Dishonest validators win the game being dishonest if they are over 2/3 of the validator set. Then they can enforce their bad blocks into everyone else. Otherwise they get slashed or suffer other kind of penalties (inactivity leak if they manage to prevent the network from reaching consensus for a while).

So if you manage to bribe or buy 2/3 of the staked ETH then you can attack the network. There is of course a very significant economic cost to it. More interestingly at that point you are strongly aligned with the network itself as you represent a huge % of its value so you would be attacking yourself in a way. This is a notable difference with PoW where miners are not necessarily aligned in economic incentives with token-holders or users.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#338

Post by spicybright »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #240
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

It's a shame you're being downvoted as your post has substance. This is a genuine issue worth discussing.

Validators are run by people who fully control if a transaction is valid or not. You either need a ton of GPUs (currently) or a ton of money to have tangible influence over translations.

This isn't even a hypothetical, there's a few massive wallets that are hoarding a ton of eth that will be given more power from the POS transition.

We're relying on "the goodness of their hearts" validator operators and crossing our fingers validators run the same software with the same rules.

Even if you call out sketchy transactions that are close to 50/50 consensus, nothing will happen unless a ton of people have a ton of money on the line like the DAO split.

We need more discussion on how incentives of each party should be to give the most stable network possible.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#339

Post by mcdee »

AlexandrB wrote: post #188
bowsamic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the opposite. Proof of work is more centralised than proof of stake, because the former has an economy of scale: it's cheaper to add a single miner if you are a big mining operation vs a small mining operation. On the other hand, staking 1 eth is always staking 1 eth.

Another article pointed out that the economics of staking are completely different than those of mining. With mining, some of the earned coins need to be sold to pay for electricity. With staking, the biggest holders just sit there and collect coins with few operational costs. To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful snowball effect than mining and the gap between the wealthiest ETH participants and ever…

> With staking, the biggest holders just sit there and collect coins with few operational costs.

Every holder who is staking is rewarded for staking, in proportion to their stake.

> To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful snowball effect than mining

No, because issuance under proof of stake is much lower than that under proof of work.

The point of validating is to secure the chain, not to get rich. The more validators that are active, the lower the per-validator rewards, reducing compounding effects.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#340

Post by codeflo »

dcolkitt wrote: post #238
cesarb wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third option you didn't mention in your comment: instead of signing the block with these banned transactions (option 1), or signing an alternate block with other transactions (option 2), the node could pretend to be offline for that block (option 3). Instead of being slashed, the node would then be subject only to the much smaller inactivity leak for these blocks. The only question then is how indirect thes…

One thing to keep in mind is that Ethereum is nothing but a network of computers passing messages to each other. Those messages are considered speech from a Constitutional perspective. Same as you sending a text message to your friend. Therefore normal free speech protections almost certainly apply, and most relevantly the Brandenburg test for imminent lawless action. Suppose Tony texts Paulie and tells him to wack a…

> Those messages are considered speech from a Constitutional perspective.

I have no reason to doubt that your credentials as a constitutional lawyer are impeccable.

> The further a block gets away from the initial block, then the less imminent the illegal action becomes.

This very plausible legal theory inspires incredible confidence.

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