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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

501–510 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#501
post #3

I'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.

The rewards on other chains aren't enough to sustain all the GPUs.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#502
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am one of the maintainers of the Go implementation of Ethereum proof-of-stake, called Prysm (github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and also implemented a "slasher" in Go that can be used to slash malicious validators. Anyone can run a slasher and you don't need to have 32 ETH to do so. As long as your slasher software can prove that a validator committed a slashable offense, you can submit this proof to any full node to…

By "A few", how much do you mean? Or is that a dynamic number? How does it get defined? Who can change it later, if it's mutable?

Security is maintained with at least one slasher.

And there is no upper limit on the number of slashers.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#504

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…

Costs are lower, but the rewards are also lower, at about 10% of Ethereum's mining rewards.

Last I saw, ETH mining was about 33% profitable. With mining rewards ten times higher than staking rewards, that means miners take home about three times more on their investment than stakers.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#505

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nod…

As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to create a technology so complicated that proponents can't concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why it doesn't.

Please explain the tcp/ip protocol or the paxos algorithm concisely.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#506
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re mistaken, validators and stakers are one and the same. A 51% attack becomes unbelievably more expensive in a proof of stake system, especially because at the end of it all of your money is burned (whereas with POW you get to keep the GPUs unless they change the algo).

What happens if the majority of infrastructure is provided by a small number of cloud computing services? An attacker with access to those services needn’t stake their own funds, and an “attack” might simply entail complying with local laws.

The 51% is staked coins, not computers.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#508
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, but I think the idea is that it would be incredibly expensive and unproductive to pull off such an attack. You'd first have to acquire billions of dollars worth of Ethereum, and then launching that attack would torpedo any trust in the network and send the value of Ethereum to zero, lighting your billions of dollars on fire. The theory is that it's too expensive to realistically do for the lulz or ou…

It is not "incredibly expensive". Top 4 exchanges already hold > 50% of stake. Users give away their coins for free. For users, it's more expensive to run their own validator nodes than staking on a centralized service.

Exchanges make money from transactions. If they destroy the network for their users, they lose all their cash flow.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#509
post #129

I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy. Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as many alternatives.

Locking up some currency is better than a similar amount being continuously needlessly spent on mining hardware and electricity.
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