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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#561

Post by zodiac »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #473
leppr wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the OP is not asking this in good faith. Their first comment is not in the form of a neutral question, but a prejudiced assumption based on a false idea that nothing in the linked article could lead one to believe. > 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 i…

> Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the OP is not asking this in good faith. There's nothing here that was done in bad faith and I should not need to defend myself for asking a question in a tech forum. Assuming I'm not asking in good faith is bad faith. The reason I asked was a description pasted a short while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325…

> Which sure sounds like a decentralized process that is ultimately just centralized around the ETH foundation at the end of the day.

The validators need to be decentralized (i.e. prevent "harmful collusion"), but the slashers don't need to be in the same way (as long as the validators are).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#562

Post by kmeisthax »

SilverBirch wrote: post #535
kmeisthax wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should point out that because Ethereum is a dark forest[0], slashers will collapse to a subset of stakers. More specifically, anyone who is not a staker is at the mercy of the mempool[1] to broadcast their slashing transaction and at the mercy of other stakers to correctly record it. There is no economic incentive to do so, and no way to constrain the software such that stakers cannot manipulate the slashing messag…

I feel like I’m going insane you’re literally just quoting Scifi bull shit. This is money we’re talking about.

To be fair, most cryptocurrency is nonsense sci-fi bullshit. I hesitate to even call it money.

Ok, let me try ELI5ing it.

Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what. Everyone trusts the lists. But what if someone decide to change the list so that it says they own someone else's stuff? Proof of Stake says that if someone wants to change the list - say, if someone traded something on the list to someone else - the page they add to the list also has to have some of their money taped to it. If that change turned out to be fraudulent, someone else can tattle on them, and then that someone gets the money taped to the list instead. So if you want to make sure you're reading from a not-fraudulent list, just check for the money taped to the page.

This all continues fine for a while. There's a bunch of people who maintain the list, all of whom have their own money taped to different pages of it.

One day, someone tries adding a fake transaction to the list. You, of course, notice it and tattle on them. Except in order to claim the funds taped to the list, someone else has to... add a note to the list saying you own them. And there's no reason why they can't just write down that they tattled instead of you, because the only proof that you were the one who tattled is getting it onto the list that you have to tape money to in order to add to. So the only people who have a reason to make sure the list is valid are the same people who are updating the list in the first place. Everyone else can tattle but they don't get paid for doing so, which was the the thing keeping the system secure.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#563

Post by mypastself »

lupire wrote: post #506
mypastself wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn’t staking require active validator software on a computer with a great deal of uptime?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#564

Post by stablefusion »

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: post #527
leashless wrote: post #160

In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State transition was known as Serenity. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.

Could you perhaps please answer this Ask HN thread I have posted: "Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172 TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the o…

Thr udeal scenario would be for ethereum foundation to keep becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would they take on 'more' responsibility if the goal is decentralisation?

afaik, all clients are open source projects. And many are being funded by gitcoin grants now(crowdsourcing)

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#565

Post by pcthrowaway »

kmeisthax wrote: post #562
SilverBirch wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’m going insane you’re literally just quoting Scifi bull shit. This is money we’re talking about.

To be fair, most cryptocurrency is nonsense sci-fi bullshit. I hesitate to even call it money. Ok, let me try ELI5ing it. Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what. Everyone trusts the lists. But what if someone decide to change the list so that it says they own someone else's stuff? Proof of Stake says that if someone wants…

> Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what.

As an interesting aside, this is essentially how the economy of the Yap islands in Micronesia worked until the 20th century, with large stones from another island changing 'ownership', while being left in place (because it was too hard to move them)[1].

Except it was an oral history instead of a published list!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#566

Post by stablefusion »

jcfrei wrote: post #401
jacobn wrote: post #359

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)

If the majority of validators adhere to OFAC regulations then your chance of getting a transaction approved that violates OFAC drops. Anybody can be a validator but if the majority of validators choose to adhere to these rules then that's what you end up with. Crypto isn't successful because it creates some anarcho-capitalist alternative universe (though that was the initial impetus). And the die-hard bitcoin followe…

die hard bitcoin followers want regulations and etfs. The cypherpunks aren't relevant in bitcoinland these days. In fact in a poll overwhelmingly 90% responded that they'd be willing to slash ofac validators if the need arises. The greatest strength of crypto is the ability to fork, and you'd see which one of those would be called 'ethereum' by some derivatives market before the event even happens

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#567

Post by stablefusion »

warkdarrior wrote: post #495
chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

difference is that a blockchain can always fork away from corrupted entities. (bitcoin -bitcoin cash fork in 2017)

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#568

Post by pcthrowaway »

cesarb wrote: post #214
TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will become centralized, but not in the way that you think. We're likely to see base-layer transaction censorship, since nodes are no longer allowed to disagree with each other (or they'll be slashed), and far more than 33% of staked value is in the USA (and subject to OFAC compliance). I explained in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532604

There's a third option you didn't mention in your comment: instead of signing the block with these banned transactions (option 1), or signing an alternate block with other transactions (option 2), the node could pretend to be offline for that block (option 3). Instead of being slashed, the node would then be subject only to the much smaller inactivity leak for these blocks. The only question then is how indirect thes…

I think many American stakers wouldn't bother with the hassle, and instead would take a small haircut to stake with fully decentralized services (like rocket pool) or semi-centralized (but foreign-based) staking pools (like Lido) to prevent the threat of the U.S. government having any kind of control over the network.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#569

Post by pcthrowaway »

Geee wrote: post #218
jsheard wrote: post #123

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.

Kind of like the top 2 mining pools owning more than 51% of the hashrate.

At the very least, for an individual actor, it would be much more expensive to acquire 33% of all ETH than it would be to acquire 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#570

Post by pcthrowaway »

KallDrexx wrote: post #423
steeleduncan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite far from true > but now it is just managed by the big holders To have any influence during the proof of work days you needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions.

> To have any influence during the proof of work days you needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions. Legitimate question because I don't know. When I'm mining eth on my GPU while part of a mining pool, my understanding is that my GPU is racing to try and find the hash that works to start the next block. If I find it, I then am able to put transactio…

I don't know the specifics of your pool, but the block is the transactions, so if you get the lucky number and mine a block, you have mined a block that consists of a specific set of transactions in a specific order.

Though it's entirely possible that mining pools dictate which transactions get sent to their miners for them to try mining.

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