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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#391

Post by kkielhofner »

chrisco255 wrote: post #355
kkielhofner wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

The Wayback Machine begs to differ:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google...

I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc.

I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was skipping trips to the library for homework by 1998 (at the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and client software, etc) were already vastly more mature than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best) to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough - 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0].

I don't know about you but I don't remember a single instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet.

I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked. Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of miles and countless components of physical infrastructure that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of people by 2000?

The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still worked. It was slow because it turns out literally digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long process.

[0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#392

Post by SilasX »

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.

Wait, really? It only costs $5k to mine one when they sell for $21k?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#393

Post by 735409264082 »

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…

> 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.

That's not what slashing is supposed to be used for, but if that situation happened again, Ethereum would fork again, just as last time when Ethereum classic didn't agree to freeze the Ether from the DAO hack. PoS makes it a little easier to fork (which is good imo), but doesn't change anything fundamental. Everyone still needs to be in complete agreement about the rules and history for Ethereum to work.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#394

Post by everfree »

cowtools wrote: post #73
aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...? Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version of politics?

etherium is hardly low-cost

It's low-cost to maintain (post-merge). The high prices to use it are a result of users crowding around a limited amount of product (block space).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#395

Post by redox99 »

jimmydorry wrote: post #272
redox99 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Social fork here means running some other software basically. Imagine Vitalik saying "Ok, since coinbase is being evil, let's all move to a new Ethereum-without-cb that is a copy of Ethereum but their ETH is removed. To do so download the following software that follows a new Ethereum-without-cb chain instead of the Ethereum chain. And if enough people agree, we'll probably just call that just Ethereum (like the original Ethereum is now called Ethereum classic, and the current Ethereum is actually forked).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#396

Post by 735409264082 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #325
Zamicol wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a network "votes down" cryptographic proof, that itself becomes cryptographic proof of dishonesty.

And... so what? Is there a mechanism to punish validators for not being honest on slasher votes?

You don't recognise their actions and let them fork of into a useless chain. This happens automatically, just as when a miner would mine an invalid block.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#397

Post by matheusmoreira »

swalsh wrote: post #349
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Satoshi consensus is essentially the bible to their cultural ideology. You can bridge bitcoin to another chain with faster finality, smart contracts, and environmental consensus. But at the end if the day there will still be a huge amount of people who will never deviate from the core ideology.

It's not ideology. There are pros and cons to both proof and stake and proof of work.

The idea behind PoW was to decentralize proofs by allowing anyone to participate. This is a valuable property in a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin's implementation utterly failed in that regard. There are better projects out there, like Monero, but Bitcoin just refuses to die.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#398

Post by everfree »

yuan43 wrote: post #193

It's a brilliant plan really. First, the Ethereum foundation premines the entire supply of ether, then distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale and the rest to miners. Eventually the Foundation produces an upgrade that replaces mining with validators posting collateral in the form of the very token that was premined. What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will become to Ripple post-mer…

> distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale

Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in 2015?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#399

Post by anonporridge »

jahewson wrote: post #110
stockpricethrow wrote: post #17

How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up, would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way?

Unlikely. There are plenty of other coins out there to mine and one of the advantages of GPU vs ASIC is that you can just switch instantly.

Na. Bitcoin and Ethereum make up 60% of the total cryptocurrency "market cap" and a good chunk of the remainder are USD stablecoins that run on top of a base chain with no mining itself.

The next most valuable proof of work coin at Unless Ethereum miners forcibly maintain a PoW fork or try to pump up Ethereum Classic back into the spotlight, GPU mining might finally be effectively dead.

As many people have said for years, there's only room on this planet for one proof of work chain, and it's bitcoin. All other use cases with be proof of stake, or sidechains and layer twos of some base chain.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#400

Post by nowahe »

exo762 wrote: post #246
josu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.

Basically, to validate a block, you need to bruteforce a SHA-256 hash of the block by incrementing a nonce in it. And by essence, bruteforceing is wasteful (and by extension, expensive).

And this is by design, as the only way to mint a new bitcoin is to throw away computational power (ie energy -> money). And the amount of power needing to be wasted is constantly adjusted by the network (it's targeting a certain amount of blocks / hour, adjusting the difficulty of the sha bruteforce, compensating for technological improvement).

Now, to create a bitcoin you need to mine a block (solving the bruteforce), inherently requiring a set (on average) amount of real world value (mostly energy) to be irrevocably wasted. For the miners to recoup those losses, they MUST sell the bitcoin they just created for at least their lost value. Which in turn, guarantee the minimum value of each bitcoin.

And with this system, the minimum value of each bitcoin is inversely equal to the amount of value "wasted".

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