191–200 of 414 posts
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I don't understand how that comment applies to the discussion. Are you implying that L2s are somehow lower power requirements?
I’m saying there will be no requirement for ASICS in Ethereum. There may be L2s to scale Ethereum that require ASICS but that would be a voluntary decision by users who want to use said L2.
Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…
What happens if most validators become non-responsive without unstaking? The network can’t create new blocks then?
The non-responsive stakers would gradually lose their stake. The penalty for going offline is normally small, but if most validators go offline at once it's considerably larger. Their stake will shrink, until they don't hold most of the stake anymore and the network can start finalizing again.
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Thanks for the explanation! I have a few questions: - how does the punishment work ? Do all nodes see that a malicious actor changed the chain and write the bad ideas in some ledger meaning "these nodes just lost X ETH" ? - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what block is accepted - is there an advantage to run more than one validator, i…
1. Punishment mechanisms here are kind of complicated, but in short, you're punished for mainly 2 reasons: being an offline validator, or for an attestation violating. Slashers are entities that enforce the two above rules. If a slasher determines that you're node is down, or that you're committing an attestation violation (i.e. that you're signing more than one attestation in a given epoch mainly). The slasher actua…
A malicious actor can cause the network to slash a validator's funds by inhibiting the validator's connection. Slashing funds seems completely disproportionate for a validator being offline.
What’s the incentive to be a validator?
The issuance is much lower than it is for miners, because the cost of staking is much lower than the cost of mining.
Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…
I’m literally an idiot. Make this sense for me.
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What reason would anyone have to believe in their benevolence? It would be safer to believe in and use their greed and self preservation.
If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.
Awesome If crypto wasn't contributing causing a crash in the GPU market and contributing even more to climate change, I don't think it would have nearly as much hate as it does. Sure it's largely used for scams and money laundering, but at least it's used for scams and money laundering in a way I can ignore. Right now Bitcoin and Etherium, the leading cryptocoins, are absurdly slow and expensive, on top of causing al…
I thought this, and then my mom got scammed. She realized one day later, and the bank was able to recover the portion sent via bank transfer. But they also tricked her into sending money via bitcoin ATMs, and that portion was not recovered.
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What reason would anyone have to believe in their benevolence? It would be safer to believe in and use their greed and self preservation.
If you own a large amount of a currency, you want to ensure that the currency in question is trusted, or otherwise that currency would end up losing its value. It is your greed that is guiding you, not your benevolence.
And, as always, sometimes folks just want to watch the world burn. It's a relatively low investment (~$50k) to become a validator, and the fine's only about $7k (.5 eth).
Imagine the damage someone with a few million (say, some baby-boomer who just sold their California duplex) could do if they wanted to.
Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…
Care to objectively articulate the arguments against switching to proof-of-stake? Why is it controversial?
That said, the fact that PoW has been running the longest and Bitcoin uses it to secure the most value of any chain and it has had 100% uptime for the last 9.5 years, means people naturally trust it more.
PoS also in theory incentivizes centralization of staking over time. It's already started to play out this way way with the top two stakers controlling 46% of the staked ETH on the Beacon Chain. With Bitcoin, because you constantly have to buy new hardware and find cheap energy every single block, there's been a constant rise and fall of large miners.
A related issue is that it's more fragile to government censorship as the Tornado Cash OFAC sanctions show. Bitcoin has had mixers sanctioned and it didn't affect the core chain at all. With Tornado Cash, it's possible that Coinbase and other US-based stakers will have to not validate certain transactions, which doesn’t work in PoS, so they've said they will stop staking if the US gov't decides OFAC applies to stakers (which there's a legal argument it does). It's a bit in the weeds, but basically Bitcoin/PoW works in a fundamentally different way, so miners can filter out transactions they legally aren't allow to process and all that happens is those transactions get validated in a future block by other miners.
One other is that PoS has no deterministic way to recover from a complete outage. If a huge EMP brought down every computer network on Earth, when they come back online, PoW has a clear rule for determining which chain is the real one. PoS does not, so it's unclear what would happen. This may seem like a small edge case, and it is, but trust and security are so important when $500B and growing is at stake that tiny edge cases matter.
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Here is how I explain it to people: Imagine a page of a book, for each letter a-z, assign a number to it (a=1, b=2, .. , z=26). Compute the sum of all of the letters on the page but reset back to zero when 100 is reached (i.e. 97 + 5 = 2). The resulting number is a kind of signature for the page. Changing a letter would result in a different sum. At this point, people usually understand the utility and irreversible n…
Modulo summation is a good hash function to teach non-CS people what hash functions are in principle. But, judging by my experience in learning about how Bitcoin works, is not sufficient to see why it's a secure currency (and PoW explanations are only invoked in that context). I knew about hash functions long before I knew why bitcoin works. I think the first thing people need to get over to understand de-centralized…
Of course, the hashing/nonce part is only one part of the mechanism and probably not even the most important part. However, it is where the bulk of the energy is used - most people have heard that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy and would like to understand that a bit better. I have other "parables" for explaining public/private key encryption, etc., but I was primarily responding to the parent comment.
>> That's a very human centric way of putting it
Humans are the ones assigning the value to this and they may be more likely to assign a higher value if it appeals to their sense of aesthetic. Solving beautiful equations sounds better than trial and error to many. That being said, I do think there is beauty in crypto - just maybe not in the nonce guessing bit.