Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#351

Post by swalsh »

exo762 wrote: post #245
rglullis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by the BTC maxis on this thread and all the FUD they are spreading, never. If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether. But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready…

There is an amazing proposal [0] on building trustless bridge for BTC on Ethereum. Leona Hioki is GOAT. [0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-creation-wit...

Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#352

Post by PretzelPirate »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #76
PretzelPirate wrote: post #70

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

You’re misunderstanding. Enabling the “slasher feature” on your validators is an option that any validator can do, not something that only “approved” validators can do.

There’s no one gate keeping your ability to become a slasher as long as you run a validator, and there’s no centralized entity deciding whether or not to slash someone’s stake.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#353

Post by beambot »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #191
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!

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

If bitcoin doesn't find a more environmentally-conscious scaling mechanism, it will be challenging for any ESG-conscious institutional investor to remain invested. The capital exodus toward PoS-ETH could accelerate a sea change.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#354

Post by sp332 »

OGWhales wrote: post #293
johntb86 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might be true for the chips, but the fans have probably been run 24/7 for much longer than the comsumer-level cards are rated for. So keep an eye out for dying fans.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#355

Post by chrisco255 »

kkielhofner wrote: post #271
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 referen…

Google wasn't "built within two years". It is a living software program backed by massive infrastructure. It was iterated on for decades and continues to be. The very first iteration of page rank maybe was done in two years. But stop implying that Sergey and Larry built it in their dorm and could walk away from it with zero input or assistance from the tens of thousands of engineers they hired in the ensuing years.

The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet.

Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of complexity and effort that went into making the modern web fairly solid.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#356

Post by stale2002 »

unnouinceput wrote: post #301
exo762 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.

It costs an average of ~5k USD to mine one bitcoin. Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner will sell below this value due to not breaking even on electricity. That's why also bitcoin miners go to places where electricity cost is low, and why they undervoltage their mining cards.

> Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner will sell below this value due to not breaking even on electricity

You have causation reversed here. It is not that bitcoin would not sell/be worth less than the amount to mine it.

Instead, it is that it wouldn't be mined if it were worth less than the cost to mine it.

At which point, miners would drop out, and the cost to mine it would reduce, as the difficulty goes down.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#357

Post by michaelsbradley »

kkielhofner wrote: post #344
zeroclip wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client diversity has improved in recent months, particularly consensus clients: https://clientdiversity.org/

For beacon that is definitely better than the last time I looked. However geth is still 75% and relevant to the topic of the merge, roughly 88% of current clients aren't ready for it[0]!!! It will be interesting to see what these numbers look like when the merge actually happens... [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge

The maintainers of geth recently published and then flagged (as bugged) the first release that was fully Merge-ready, so it's not really possible that geth operators could be ready at this time.

I believe just today the next release was published, fixing the bug in the previous one:

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#358

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

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…

Yup, one of the big problems is that MEV typically happens on geth right now so there's a huge financial imperative to use geth. MEV is another topic that is quite interesting from a technical & game theory point of view, but some parts of it are pretty horrifying from a moral point of view (e.g. front-running, forced liquidations, sandwhich attacks).

Right now deciding what transactions go into a block (which includes manufacturing your own transactions that yield riskless profit (called MEV)) is tightly bound to running geth. Flash bots is working on ways to decouple that so there is increased specialization and allows for flexibility in which client you run.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#359

Post by jacobn »

Has there been any resolution to the issues raised in https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html ?

My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto, and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would effectively destroy it.

(my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant)

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#360

Post by simiones »

jimmydorry wrote: post #292
proto-n wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Any block you are working on has a reference to the latest block in the network. So, every miner starts from scratch once a new block is added - the 49% pool doesn't have any advantage compared to the 51% pool.

Each miner takes a bunch of transactions and chooses a previous block B1 to build on, then starts hashing. If some other minerB advertises a new block B2 based on B1 that includes different transactions before minerA, then minerA can throw away all the work it did, and start from scratch on B3 based on B2. But minerB will probably already be working on its own B3 - and has every chance to win again.

Post reply on HN