Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin valuable.
May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.
This is a good explanation
Mainnet Merge Announcement
491–500 of 609 posts
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reports are evaluated by the network. The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests?
51% is possible, but if it happens someone has wasted (at current valuations) ~$15B gaining a majority stake in a network they are torpedoing. It would be pretty dumb to do something like that to your own investment.
So Elon Musk alone could do it on a whim, for the lolz?
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
51% can do double-spend in Bitcoin, e.g. they can undo entire blocks of transactions and spend that money again. They can also prevent you from getting your transaction in ever . The 49% cannot prevent this because they cannot make a longer chain, that is the entire point of proof-of-work.
Adding the double-spend concept into it makes it even more silly. If you are changing the validation rules of Bitcoin to allow double-spend, then your block is rejected by the entire network and you must fork, even if you had 99% of the hashpower.
You don't need to change the validation rules to double spend.
What you do is this:
- spend btc with a transaction and get it included in the chain.
- start mining blocks starting from before your transaction in secret
- include a trnasaction to a different address in the secret chain
- broadcast the secret chain once it's longer than the "official" one
- since your chain is longer, your chain is now the official one. All the transactions in the other chain are now discarded
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#494If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject constantly coin new words and meanings. * Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with th…
I think that the coinages are mostly reasonable. Finance/accounting have a thick lexicon. So does computer science. So does devops. And those lexicons are all mostly non-overlapping. Granted the crypto lexicon is a lot more playful/childish. Stuff like "HODL" is just shibboleth but that's a minority of the jargon. The stuff that grinds me is when crypto totally redefines a word and doesn't realize it or expects everyone to follow along. "Inflationary" in crypto-speak has only a passing resemblance to the concept by the same name in economics.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#495What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be the largest block bakers: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer... With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges…
Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co... It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. So far the distribution isn't so bad: https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
There are fewer staking pools in that chart than there are traditional banks in the US!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-in...
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know the specific rules for Ethereum, but in general PoS systems, anyone can slash. All you have to do is submit two different headers for the same block signed by the same validator. This proves the validator is cheating. The person who submits the proof may get to keep some of the validator's slashed money, which is a good incentive to run slashing nodes as this can amount to thousands of dollars per slash,…
> This proves the validator is cheating. To whom? Who gets to decide to slash the funds? I caught you cheating and can prove it. You don't give a shit and control 51% of the network. How do you get punished?
The people you are discussing this with clearly have no idea how the system actually works and are far out of their depth as far as considering the ways malicious actors interact with it.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#497Related. Others? The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 - Aug 2022 (387 comments) Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won’t fix other problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44 comments) “The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15 comments) The Merge - https://news.ycombinator.com/…
The news here is that there is now a (sort of) fixed date (next month!). Not really related to general stories about the merge or proof-of-stake, imho.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#498I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.
I predict that many of these GPUs will continue to mine just on different chains.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to explain a 66% attract. The censored chain produce the double of blocks of the censored one. Each time the uncensored chain produce a block it's ignored by the censored one. So after a time, they are behind and have to jump to the other chain and ignore their own old blocks. Something like this graph: Censored blocks: - Uncensored Fork blocks: \ Uncensored Normal blocks: * Censored: *-------------------…
So, now that I've obliterated the 51% attack idea, shall we move on to 66% attack? It doesn't matter if it's a 90% attack. The minority miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's blocks. So it is not 66% vs. 33%, or 90% vs. 10%; it is 60% vs. 100% and 90% vs. 100%. All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the majority's more restricti…
They are not block, they are chained blocks. Oversimplifiying, each block has 3 parts:
1) The hash of the old block.
2) The new transactions.
3) A number that must be bruteforced until you get a hash of all the block with a lot of zeros.
If you try to copy one block in the other chain/fork, then the hash of the previos block is invalid. If you change just that part of the block, you must bruteforce a new number until you get a new hash of all the block with a lot of zeros, that has the same cost of creating a new block from scratch.
You can copy the info of the transactions from one chain to the other, but you must create a new block to put them. You can't just copy the block.
Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement
#500If you were wondering: "The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. " https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
There are some old articles that get this wrong, because years ago it was planned that sharding support would get added at the same time as the shift to PoS (in an upgraded called "Eth2"), and sharding support would result in lower gas fees. Some articles mixed up the benefits of sharding and PoS with each other. But now sharding has been delayed so that the move to PoS could be prioritized.