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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#361

Post by zaroth »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #330
josu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's also fundamentally limits the growth potential of BTC. In a PoW system, the amount of work done must be proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it would make 51% attacks feasible). So if BTC uses an Argentina's worth of energy now, if the value of BTC grew 10X it would have to use on the order of 10 Argentina's worth of electricity. Obviously, that is not sustainable, and it ensures BTC can never gro…

It’s not really so clear cut.

Perhaps if a 51% attack let you fully steal coins yes. But there are only specific things a 51% attacker can do, and even attempting to pull off the attack has game-theoretic impact on the price if Bitcoin.

The more practical attacks are greedy miner type attacks which just boost a large miners win rate.

The 51%-esque chain rewriting, double-spending and transaction censorship stuff is a different story.

What you can definitely say is that economically the profitability of the block reward and transaction fees will drive new entrants into mining. As BTC price increases the willingness to spend more on mining (wasting electricity) increases. But the block reward also halves now and then to reduce the value of new blocks and prevent the waste from getting absurdly out of hand.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#362

Post by kkielhofner »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #330
josu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's also fundamentally limits the growth potential of BTC. In a PoW system, the amount of work done must be proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it would make 51% attacks feasible). So if BTC uses an Argentina's worth of energy now, if the value of BTC grew 10X it would have to use on the order of 10 Argentina's worth of electricity. Obviously, that is not sustainable, and it ensures BTC can never gro…

It also makes BTC positively radioactive to mainstream adoption. There are countless examples of $CORP announcing some bitcoin initiative or another only to roll it back almost immediately after the outrage expressed from a population that is increasingly aware of and concerned about climate change.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#363

Post by xur17 »

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…

FWIW, ethernodes is not an accurate source of data on this. They are missing a LOT of nodes (mine has been running for over a year and isn't listed, and others I have spoken to say the same thing).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#364

Post by rglullis »

meltyness wrote: post #329
rglullis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it was well below $100. And for those that are joining now, but worry that the investment would be too big, consider the possibility of pooling resources with other people and stake using your own node . This is one the things that I would like to do next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool together resources with their friends and to manage their va…

What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH-stability, ETH-usefulness?

1) Not specific to Ethereum, but to its goals. For me, turning a profit is secondary to the goal of having a permissionless and censorship-resistant way for cross-border payments. At the moment, I believe that Ethereum (as an ecosystem) is the closest to make that a reality because it has the largest developer mindshare and the Foundation seems to be the only one playing the long game.

2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for myself, and I believe that there are others like me.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#365

Post by naltun »

idiotsecant wrote: post #317

In this thread: A million crypto tribalists whatabouting and clutching pearls and absolutely nobody talking about what this is - a pretty cool organizational and technical achievement. Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large corporation of the interests or a nation-sta…

Nicely said.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#366

Post by SilasX »

jagger27 wrote: post #274
SilasX wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Am I joking about the quantities of money that working families will spend on unnecessary stuff instead of investments while complaining about the inability to secure their financial futures? I am not.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#367

Post by kkielhofner »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #357
kkielhofner wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I covered that debacle in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581419

As noted there prysm, geth, etc have had their first merge-ready releases less than 48 hours ago (with one "oops" already) I (for one) will be waiting for what I'm sure will be more bugs to shake out in the next several days.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#368

Post by stale2002 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #226
samkon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have this wrong.

As soon as the chain diverges, they are seperate chains.

Yes, if you have a minority of the hashpower, you can hardfork yourself off the main chain, and continue to follow your smaller chain, regardless.

But you don't get a longer chain than the main one. So you'd continuously be behind, and would not get the work of the main chain, and likely most exchanges would not accept your smaller fork coin, and you would end up like bitcoin cash.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#369

Post by Karunamon »

ethbr0 wrote: post #328
Karunamon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What GP posted is not an ad hom; they did not argue for or against anything, and even if they did it wasn't based on the characteristics of the speaker.

> I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you to.

Yep, this is what was said. It is not an argument for or against any point under discussion.

Ad hominem is "you are wrong because you (fill in the blank)". It is not "go read the articles given to you".

"You are wrong because you are an idiot" is ad hominem.

"You are wrong" is denial.

"You are an idiot" is insult.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#370

Post by DennisP »

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…

> submit a slasher report that says it wasn't a valid transaction...offer enough money to get x% of validators to agree

That's not how this works at all.

Slashing happens under a very specific circumstance: a staker submits contradictory messages. Those circumstances are testable with built-in code that's part of the protocol. To get someone slashed, you send a transaction including their contradictory signed messages. When your transaction is included in a block, the staker gets slashed by the protocol rules hardcoded in all the consensus clients.

The only other thing that can cause a staker to lose stake is the "inactivity leak," where an active staking node doesn't send the messages they're supposed to send. That's completely automatic.

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