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

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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

jtsiskin wrote: post #140
AaronFriel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could just require a higher stake, the price of eth is irrelevant. Let's say hypothetically one eth was worth about a Satoshi, 0.05 cents or so. So they could just require 1,000,000 eth as a stake. Or ten times that. Or a hundred times that. It's irrelevant what the price is, the choice of the stake amount is. If eth was inflationary, they could inflate the stake proportionally.

That’s not true, those are two different things. Requiring 100x the total number of possible stakers is 100x lower. Versus if the price increases 100x, that means the same number of possible stakers is possible, but it’s now 100x more expensive to do a 51% (or whatever the PoS % needed is) attack.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by Sargos »

ntr-- wrote: post #136
Sargos wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH is money but it's not currency. It's not meant to be used to buy everyday goods and services.

It is meant to be spent as gas in order to compensate for the energy costs of the computations in its smart-contracts. Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to go up? Additionally, ease of spending drives up adoption which is a clear benefit to any currency.

>Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to go up?

Most people aren't going to have a choice. ETH is required to be spent when making transactions and using dapps, NFTs, etc. Even L2s like Optimism, zkSync, etc will be spending ETH when writing to the L1 even if the end users are shielded from that. There is a built in economy that burns ETH so demand won't be a problem.

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

#173

Post by AaronFriel »

jtsiskin wrote: post #140
AaronFriel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could just require a higher stake, the price of eth is irrelevant. Let's say hypothetically one eth was worth about a Satoshi, 0.05 cents or so. So they could just require 1,000,000 eth as a stake. Or ten times that. Or a hundred times that. It's irrelevant what the price is, the choice of the stake amount is. If eth was inflationary, they could inflate the stake proportionally.

That’s not true, those are two different things. Requiring 100x the total number of possible stakers is 100x lower. Versus if the price increases 100x, that means the same number of possible stakers is possible, but it’s now 100x more expensive to do a 51% (or whatever the PoS % needed is) attack.

The ethereum protocol can choose whatever stake amount (in equivalent USD when they decide the bond to stake) they want. The currency being deflationary or not is irrelevant - the stake could be adjusted. The currency going up in down in value relative to ETH could be adjusted.

They could choose to require one gwei, one ETH, or one million ETH. That's your protection. The exchange rate from USD to ETH is irrelevant.

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

#174

Post by AaronFriel »

hanklazard wrote: post #154
AaronFriel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been repeated many times but is not true, the price of an arbitrary unit of currency or crypto has no relationship to its security. That price going up or down has no relationship on the "security level" of the blockchain.

I’m not so sure. Currently each validator has about 60k usd (32 eth) staked. They are disincentivized from misbehaving / attacking the network by the threat of their eth being slashed (and there are clear rules about how this happens). To me, it seems that as the value of that ether increases, they have more incentive to behave, rather than risk the loss of their investment + large capital gain.

Okay, so imagine a fictional universe in which the exchange rate USD to ETH was 100 times greater. The stake could be... 0.32 eth and it would be equivalent for the purpose of the protocol.

Consider the reverse, the exchange rate for USD to ETH is one one hundredth. So the stake is just 3,200 eth, and again, same thing.

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

#176

Post by wmf »

Barrin92 wrote: post #122
_7fvc wrote: post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are effectively useless as a means of exchange and as a primary tool to run an economy then you should just ditch decentralized currencies altogether because then you also get rid of the meaningless complications around mining, energy efficiency or user-friendliness and go to a digital central-bank currency dir…

I do think CBDCs are the digital cash that most people want but a decentralized implementation of Keynesian monetary policy would be interesting to see (for the half-dozen people who care).

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

#177

Post by wmf »

seibelj wrote: post #125
_7fvc wrote: post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

What does “worship” mean? I am a believer of the Austrian theory of economics. Are Keynesian / Monetarists also “worshippers” of a theory? Modern economics is not that old. I fundamentally believe printing as much money as we are across the rich world is going to lead to disaster, just as it has time and again in the developing world (see Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Brazil, etc.). If anything, Austrian economics…

Austrian economics is a reversion to the standard theory of economics for thousands of years.

Thousands of incredibly poor years by today's standards.

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

#178

Post by wmf »

missedthecue wrote: post #124
wmf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has been completely captured by get-rich-quick goldbugs.

That was most of the crypto community back in 2012. It's not a recent development.

Yeah, some people were hoping Ethereum would be different. But no, number gotta go up.

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

#179

Post by CryptoPunk »

discardable_dan wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network. If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes…

The difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat curre…

>>The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share."

Unlike with employers and real world unions, the Ethereum network is not bound by labor laws to negotiate exclusively with unionized miners, or refrain from replacing them with non-unionized miners. Without those laws, unions are pretty powerless, which is why the late 19th century had such low unionization rates.

>>I hope the miners get their due, because it was the initial philosophy of Ethereum.

The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof of Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of Stake. Miners have already gotten much more time to earn from ETH issuance than was originally planned.

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

#180

Post by cachvico »

discardable_dan wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network. If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes…

The difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat curre…

The miners do not give Ethereum its value; the market does.
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