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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

#191

Post by garmaine »

rawtxapp wrote: post #48
mrkramer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.

That's not a limitation. There is absolutely no reason to have a Turing-complete language in bitcoin.

This can even be proved from first principles: bitcoin, and blockchains generally exist to validate the execution of contracts which have already occurred in meat-space. Basically you and I agree to conditions under which some money is transferred from me to you and vice-versa, which is the actual contract, then write a program (the "smart" contract) which validates that those rules were faithfully executed. It can be shown though that any Turing-complete contract rules can be validated using a non-Turing-complete language like Bitcoin script (ignoring runtime limits). The block chain doesn't need to run every contract, it just needs to validate that every contract ran correctly. A different problem, for which Turing completeness is not required.

Edit: For the down-voters, show me a Turing-complete contract that can't have its execution trace validated in a non-Turing complete language. In the 10 years I've been in this space I've yet to encounter a single one.

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

#192

Post by panarky »

gorgoiler wrote: post #150
jwolfe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That was also arbitrary.

It is hard to mine and hard to find. If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work. In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.

> proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work

Work for the sake of work is not valuable.

You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20 feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up again.

That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to anyone, except maybe as comedy.

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

#193

Post by dlubarov »

Sargos wrote: post #166
542458 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn’t that “the higher the market cap of ETH, the harder it is to attack”? Does the price of a single unit actually matter here, market cap being held equal?

The thing that matters is how valuable the 32ETH stake the validators put up is as that is the amount of penalty for trying any attack. The theoretical attacks on Proof of Stake are well known and discussed but generally require 33% - 51% of all staked ETH for various annoying attacks on the blockchain but not actually killing it. 3,491,906 ETH is currently staked right now which is actually way lower than will event…

> The thing that matters is how valuable the 32ETH stake the validators put up is as that is the amount of penalty for trying any attack.

Well, there wouldn't be much point in attempting an attack if the attacker didn't have the ~1/3 voting power to successfully execute it, right?

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

#194

Post by panarky »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #121
jki275 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. Vitalik wants to fork ETH (as he's done before when they rolled back the DAO hack) to make a new version of ETH that is proof of stake. The miners, as I've predicted here before, disagree, because this fork obliterates their entire business model. Shocking.

As an ETH user and holder (and former miner), I want Ethereum 2.0. Describing it as a fork is ridiculous. Proof of stake is the future and miners have known that for years. Proof of work is a dead end that ends with a Dyson sphere harvesting all power from the sun to process a few transactions. If miners want to make another Ethereum Classic dead chain let them do so. The innovation, the users, and all the developers…

> ends with a Dyson sphere ...

Just because too much of a thing is bad doesn't mean the thing is bad in lower quantities.

Drinking ten liters of water in an hour is bad. That doesn't mean you shouldn't drink any water.

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

#196

Post by chrisco255 »

mminer237 wrote: post #163
SkyMarshal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is deliberately and wisely not Turing complete. That gives a lot of power and mischief-making ability to anonymous entities in an adversarial environment. It's partly why Bitcoin is 5x Ethereum's market cap, despite technically being less capable. It's less capable of losing money, of DAO attacks, or other serious failures too.

Bitcoin is five times the price of Etherium because it was the first cryptocurrency and everyone knows its name. It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of either.

I generally agree with this. But Ethereum is "less finished" than Bitcoin. I feel like this situation might be different in a year or two once ETH2 is fully rolled out. Right now, ETH is a bit more risky. There's no doubt that more economic activity is happening on the ETH chain, though

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

#197

Post by dlubarov »

AaronFriel wrote: post #173
jtsiskin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you agree that attacking Eth2's consensus requires a certain percentage [1] of total voting power? If so, then by extension, it requires a certain (somewhat different) percentage of the total Eth supply.

> The exchange rate from USD to ETH is irrelevant.

Unless the attacker already has a large enough portion of the Eth supply to execute an attack, they'll have to pay to acquire it.

[1] 1/3 voting power would theoretically let an attacker double spend by getting two conflicting forks committed; 2/3 would let them commit invalid and/or unavailable state.

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

#198

Post by chrisco255 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #126
derefr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation. Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow…

I’ve never understood Oracles as a concept. They seem fundamentally untrustworthy. ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin. But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of couldn’t compute any meaningful logic without requiring an absurd amount of resources from the main net. If you’re making a distributed computer, it’s like you’re scaling silicon circuits…

Oracles are always going to be less decentralized than a distributed blockchain VM. Chainlink's (oracle platform) approach to this is to have oracle nodes post a bond that can get slashed if the computation is deemed invalid. But most Chainlink oracles have 21 or fewer nodes. This is fine for supplemental data but would be vulnerable to all the same attacks that DPOS chains have suffered if used as base layer consensus.

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

#199

Post by bopbeepboop »

gruez wrote: post #100
jki275 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that was disabled in the protocol long ago because it was deemed to be a security risk.

Some opcodes were disabled but most of them remain. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

Yeah — they totally butchered it.

The removed op codes are the ones essential to make cool things:

Arithmetic, string manipulation, and bit manipulation.

The remaining ones are substantially less useful... and why I’m long in ETH rather than BTC.

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

#200

Post by CryptoPunk »

wmf wrote: post #177
seibelj wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The gold standard's deflation was associated with pretty good results:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w10329

In any case, in a multi-currency world with low-friction electronic exchanges available, it stands to reason that deflation is less likely to be damaging, since the switching costs to more inflationary currencies are low.

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