Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

our.status.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 532 posts

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#101

Post by jki275 »

undefined1 wrote: post #4
rawtxapp wrote: post #2

As someone who uses both BTC and ETH and who likes both, this is one of the reason why people prefer Bitcoin over Ethereum. The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly. While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very sig…

is this also an issue with Ethereum competitors like Cardano?

Not with ADA or Tezos.

Bottom line, ADA is a proof of stake chain. It is upgraded in place based on proposals and consensus of stake pools.

Same thing with Tezos.

ADA hasn't fully rolled out all the features of the ETH blockchain yet -- I believe we're a couple of months away from the smart contract upgrade.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#102

Post by jki275 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #10
rawtxapp wrote: post #2

As someone who uses both BTC and ETH and who likes both, this is one of the reason why people prefer Bitcoin over Ethereum. The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly. While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very sig…

The 51% attack here is only because PoW hasn't been completely eliminated yet... once ETH is on PoS, this attack won't be possible.

Sure it will. It will just involve 51% of the stake pools instead of 51% of the miners.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#103

Post by wmf »

mrkramer wrote: post #66
viklove wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GP…

>The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? How much power does each Google and Facebook click take? There are good power sources like renewables and nuclear. Power is not a problem. And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it.

If relativity is such a good theory, why didn't Newton use it?

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#105

Post by meowkit »

omginternets wrote: post #19

Why is it a good thing to make ETH deflationary? Don't you want people to spend it?

One of the biggest mistakes of cryptocurrency was calling it cryptocurrency.

Distributed Ledgers have multitudes of use cases. One of them is as a currency, but you don't need the base layer to be a currency. ETH doesn't need to be spent as much as its needed to act as a quantitative measure of ownership and buy in. You can build a currency on the second layer, which has been done.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#106

Post by drdeca »

mrkramer wrote: post #66
viklove wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GP…

>The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? How much power does each Google and Facebook click take? There are good power sources like renewables and nuclear. Power is not a problem. And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi would've used it or would've switched to it.

Is it not plausible that developing the math to get a stable version of PoS, could take longer than Satoshi had before he dropped off the face of the interwebs?

It's not like he's God .

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#107

Post by gruez »

viklove wrote: post #55
mrkramer wrote: post #52

Satoshi said "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime."[1] Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense for any crypto electronic cash currency because people can not trust it if core design changes from time to time. Vitalik will probably come back again to POW after miners calm down. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.…

> Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power. Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot. Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions (probably billions) on GP…

>Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing where BTC cannot.

proof of stake vs proof of work is totally orthogonal to transaction processing volume.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#108

Post by bibabaloo »

jki275 wrote: post #102
bpodgursky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 51% attack here is only because PoW hasn't been completely eliminated yet... once ETH is on PoS, this attack won't be possible.

Sure it will. It will just involve 51% of the stake pools instead of 51% of the miners.

It's a little different with proof of stake. If there's a minority group that holds a large stake that "attacks" the blockchain against the majority's wishes, the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in this same way.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#109

Post by d0mine »

jerf wrote: post #94
hertzrat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t half of our current money supply controlled by 1% of people? If the asset holders controlled things, why wouldn’t they just demand everyone else hand over their cash? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-more-...

That's a good question. Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than the whole world. One thing that would have to happen is everyone else would develop their own money/currency, which would turn mean that the one person with all the money is no longer the one person with all the money. A thing quite likely to happen is that every…

More likely the one person would hire some people to convince the rest that it in their best interests that all money belong to the one person or even more likely to provide to the people some distraction, destroy the notion of the facts, so they wouldn't even know to ask inconvenient questions.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#110

Post by seibelj »

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #21

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry.

I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently against what I have devoted my life to. It’s very sad. My conclusions are numerous, but I think it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Post reply on HN