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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#471

Post by sanderjd »

lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

The technology side of all this is definitely interesting, but don't be fooled into thinking it's too interesting; you can read one guys book (the recommendations below are good) and understand how it works in enough detail. The basic idea is a series of data blobs with a cryptographic signature for each blob, with (importantly) the signature of the previous blob in the series included in the next blob. Then there is some distributed consensus mechanism (of which many have been devised) to come to consensus on which blob is canonically the next one in the series. Everything else is details or game theory.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#472

Post by Darkstryder »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #352
Darkstryder wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Withdrawals haven’t been enabled _yet_. Per your own link it will be enabled in an upcoming upgrade. Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade, and this one did happen in the end.

I'm saying that right now staking is an activity with a serious risk of losing all of the staked money, an undefined period of the money being inaccessible, and just 4% gross reward for that, which is so poor I can only imagine very specific people engaging in it. It doesn't make sense financially, so the people doing that are either foolish, enthusiasts, or looking for other ways to profit such as regulatory capture…

It does make sense if you accept two hypotheses:

1/ cryptocurrencies are here to stay, like it or not

2/ The environmental harm done by PoW is a much greater risk to oneself than losing some money on staking.

Then staking becomes a « vote with your wallet » situation to nudge the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem towards non-polluting algorithms.

If you prove switching to PoS can be done at Ethereum’s scale, the case to ban PoW altogether becomes much stronger.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#473

Post by imtringued »

tcgv wrote: post #452
lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

> I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to understand the technicalities. That's been my entrance into crypto as well. I really dislike the speculative, get-rich-quick, even casino like connotation crypto has (inevitably) acquired. It shades the incredible technology behind it. For a couple of years I have been studying and playing around with smart contracts in my free time, getting a better understanding o…

The year of cryptocurrency is just as far away as the year of the linux desktop. I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm just saying that you will grow old while waiting for it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#474

Post by lucozade »

0xfoobar wrote: post #68

For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake

I have a question if I may.

What mechanism is deciding who pays inactivity leaks?

It says that if a minority stop attesting then they will leak until eventually the attestors get to a supermajority. That makes sense.

It also says that, if a dishonest minority start a soft fork, the fact that they stop attesting on the honest fork means that they eventually leak out until the honest fork gets a supermajority.

That implies that, unless some mechanism has decided which is the honest fork, then all attestors will leak assuming that they aren't trying to attest to both blocks (which is illegal). But if all attestors are leaking then that supermajority won't occur will it?

So something must be deciding which is honest. But it can't be using number of attestors/deniers because of USAF ie where the honest fork is the less attested one.

So how does that work? How is honesty determined given that both forks are legal wrt rules and failed attestation is penalised but cannot be shown to be malicious (according to the doc).

Also, as an aside, how are leaks actually transacted? They can't be using the main transaction or none of the above would work. Is there some sort of shadow transaction system for staked ETH? If so, what mechanism decides the validity of the leak transactions?

Very interesting mechanism. Clearly a lot of thought has been put into it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#476

Post by once_inc »

CodeShmode wrote: post #468
ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?

If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#477

Post by api »

ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

At the very least it makes something that is the world's problem -- massive energy waste due to PoW -- into an economic problem that is self-contained to the Ethereum block chain.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#478

Post by chaseadam17 »

ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#479

Post by mudrockbestgirl »

kranke155 wrote: post #467
neprotivo wrote: post #457

It looks like the new Blockchain is quite centralized. 45% of blocks are mined by just two addresses: https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1570339602346684416...

Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very large numbers of users. Seems the most likely explanation. The idea that this isn’t true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild fiction to me.

Probably liquid staking providers, including exchanges that offer that service.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#480

Post by pedro_hab »

I think this is nice, it forces people that want to participate to have skin in the game.

With proof of work there is incentive for people not invested in crypto to mine as much as possible and sell everything.

If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should make a 51% attack on a network as proof it is a quantum computer.

I know it is unlikely, I myself think is impossible. But the incentive is there.

With proof of stake there is no incentive to do it, a 51% attack is idiotic since you have to buy so much.

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