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

The Merge

ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 414 posts

Re: The Merge

#231

Post by moralestapia »

fullsend wrote: post #51
wavefunction wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure staking pools will be available to people with less than 32 ETH

They already are. The Merge refers to the fact that the PoS chain has been running parallel to the main chain for one year now. It has been thoroughly tested live and so now will be merged back into the main chain like a branch of a git repo.

>It has been thoroughly tested live ...

Yes, definitely, and I'm sure all malicious actors made sure to disclose their exploits before it goes live, right? :)

Re: The Merge

#232

Post by Banana699 »

bawolff wrote: post #212
Banana699 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Concept #3 : Bitcoin utilized super-smart magic from several apparently-unrelated fields of CS to make the fantastical spreadsheet from concept Not really. Bitcoin (i.e. the original satoshi version) is hashcash, data structure merging and some game theory. Its an ingenious system, no doubt, but its ingenious because it put together some really well known building blocks in a smart way. It definitely did not use su…

Bitcoin effectively invented, completely from scratch with no precedents I'm aware of, a probabilistic Atomic Total-Order Broadcast algorithm, that's a pretty damn advanced Distributed Systems problem to me, and a solution that was never investigated in Distributed Systems orthodox literature before it as far as I know. So, in no way "really well known".

And public-private crypto & hash pointer data structures are both fairly advanced CS from multiple fields. Public Key Crypto was discovered in the late 1970s and only further explored in the 1980s, hash data structures only in the 1980s and 1990s. That's fairly young, most vanilla CS ideas date from the 1960s or before. Just because the public APIs of those things can be explained in an afternoon doesn't mean at all that they aren't advanced concepts: I can explain what a hydrogen bomb does to a 10 year old, but that wouldn't imply the Hbomb isn't advanced nuclear physics.

Re: The Merge

#233

Post by alchemist1e9 »

DennisP wrote: post #178
p4bl0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can two chains be merged if one is a fork of the other without having instances of double spending? With source code in Git you can manually pick which version of each line you want in the merged result, but here it's not possible to do that if services or merch have been exchanged with coins. Except if you're fine with having to deal forever with coins and merged-from-the-fork coins on the eth blockchain?

Transactions and state are only on the PoW chain. The PoS chain only runs the staking protocol. When the merge happens, the PoW software (the "execution client") will keep running transactions, but instead of choosing blocks by looking at miner hashes, it will look to the beacon chain to choose them. So stakers will run both the PoS client, and the execution client with the mining function turned off.

PoW software that does no work? More likely Ethereum is about to fork and big question will be does the market value of ETHpow really go to zero quickly.

Re: The Merge

#235

Post by landemva »

Banana699 wrote: post #181
osigurdson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice write up. I noticed a couple things you may want to consider.

>>> Money doesn't actually have to be a scarce thing, it just needs to be a trusty record of transactions

Physical cash or coin, exchanged between parties, is trusted by both parties yet leaves no transaction record.

>>> Money is simply any promise backed by trust

Credit is backed by trust.

A finalized and appended bitcoin block needs no further trust. It is settled.

Re: The Merge

#236

Post by kybernetikos »

IncRnd wrote: post #193
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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.

You actually lose a relatively small part of your stake for being offline, so it happens gradually. I believe the amount lost corresponds roughly to what you would have gained in rewards over the same time period.

Re: The Merge

#237

Post by alchemist1e9 »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #227

You do not need to wait for the merge to see the effects. Staking pools are already heavily centralizing power in the network on centralized exchanges and """"decentralized"""" contract pools like Lido which can be manipulated and changed with the keys of a small group of people. Vitalik is already preparing to organize social enforcement and democratic slashing for when these pools have their arms twisted to censor…

We could see a very unexpected outcome of an ETHpow chain living on and PoS falling on it’s face, effectively validating PoW as the important innovation that is is. How does it fail you ask? Probably something along the lines of the outages seen with Solana, some unexpected sequence of events that causes a cascading failure of validators which needs a “restart”. PoW doesn’t ever need a restart condition, it’s build into the foundation. I don’t know what will happen, perhaps PoS will work fine, the Merge takes place and all the miners shutdown or move to ETC or whatever. Or does The Merge and some failure around it mark the eventual slow death of PoS and a resurgence of Bitcoin dominance?

Re: The Merge

#238

Post by landemva »

thesausageking wrote: post #199
uncletammy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to objectively articulate the arguments against switching to proof-of-stake? Why is it controversial?

PoS is less proven than PoW and has some edges cases that give many concerns. To say this up front, I own ETH, have worked on dapps on it, and completely supprt the move to PoS. 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 centr…

> 100% uptime for the last 9.5 years

While correct, that conveniently omits the downtime in 2010 and 2013. Why be shady?

Edit: three nines is considerably different than infinite nines. Around 2018 there was an inflation bug which was kept quiet until it was patched. It's human to have an occasional bug. Setting the bar too high may be a dis-service if/when there is an exploit.

Re: The Merge

#239

Post by landemva »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #76
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #30

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…

> If you deposit more than 32 ETH, you will be assigned multiple "validator slots" by the protocol, but you will still be able to run them from a single computer, though hardware requirements go up the more you stake. Is there a good place to read more about this hardware requirements as a function of validator slots? A concern in my mind with PoS is what is the incentive to expand the physical hardware footprint of…

> if everyone calculates the same, the network will physically shrink.

Are you asking why it won't consolidate on AWS?

Penalties for offline validators are greater if many validators go offline for similar timeframe.

Re: The Merge

#240

Post by alchemist1e9 »

clord wrote: post #95

Say I have a few GPUs churning but my payout date is late 2022. Should I just give up now?

Obviously you will keep running them for a bit to see what happens. That’s why for me it seems unavoidable there will exist an ETHpow or Ethereum Legacy, the only questions are does it’s value go to zero and if so, how quickly. If it does drop in value quickly then you will switch to ETC or some other PoW chain that your GPUs can mine and see if those are profitable.
Post reply on HN