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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

#271

Post by herbst »

seibelj wrote: post #110
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…

Same here. Crypto literally is the best thing that happened carrier wise to my life. From the wild wild west in the early days that allowed anyone to make some beermoney then (and be rich today if they holded) to the immense community we have today that turn simple products/dapps/whatever into millions strong businesses over night.

Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the people (for a while at least) its sad to hear such a negative attudide from a otherwise forward thinking community

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

#272

Post by FDSGSG »

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…

>Describing it as a fork is ridiculous

Why? It's a fork.

Monero has pre-planned hardforks every 6 months or so, is it ridiculous to describe them as forks?

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

#273

Post by olouv »

AaronFriel wrote: post #87
Sargos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high price of ETH as an asset creates a higher security level for Ethereum the blockchain. The ecosystem of projects, apps, protocols, organizations, etc on Ethereum is healthier when the blockchain is guaranteed secure and stable for everyone to use. It's a benefit to everyone.

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.

This is just not true for a proof of stake blockchain. The higher the price of Ether is, the harder it gets to loan enough ether to stake to attack the network. And attacking the network or misbehaving does cost you a lot more dollar money.

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

#274

Post by casi »

mrkramer wrote: post #45
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…

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

Most of the ethereum devs I know were bitcoin people first. Bitcoin is cool but you simply can’t do what you can do on ethereum. Remember Vitalik himself worked for bitcoin magazine and pushed hard for updates that would make his ideas possible on bitcoin, but they were repeatedly rejected. So we had to build ethereum instead. Now with ethereums success we are seeing people go back and say “bitcoin does this too” but it simply doesn’t. And a side chain, that isn’t inheriting security from layer one isn’t good enough.

There is a lot more bitcoin wrapped onto ethereum that there is on lightning. (Now 1% of total supply). Ethereum is eating bitcoin.

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

#276

Post by mrkramer »

drcode wrote: post #82
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.…

Yes, and Vitalik announced long before Ethereum 0.1 was released that it would switch to POS in the future.

I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins?

Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake:

"an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency."

And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good.

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

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

#277

Post by FeepingCreature »

Sargos wrote: post #172
ntr-- wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deman…

Yes, but that's exactly the problem.

With any currency, spending happens when you see something that is worth more to you in sum over the future than the value of the currency. So when the value of the currency gets lower, you are eager to jump on opportunities; conversely, when the value of the currency gets higher, you are reluctant to jump on opportunities. To a first approximation, you spend inflationary money as early as you can, but deflationary money as late as you can. And that's the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem you get with a deflationary ETH - an ecosystem where everybody spends as late as they can. Does that sound like it will lead to a vibrant offering of services to you, cause it doesn't to me.

This is also why I never got into Bitcoin. Why would I ever spend a bitcoin? As a currency it's near worthless, ironically; people who spend it will in the long run always be outcompeted by people who buy and hold. (Before the bubble bursts, anyways.) The medium of transaction should not be an investment vehicle; those purposes are directly opposed.

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

#278

Post by jillesvangurp »

oh_sigh wrote: post #138

All of these miners are the reason why, if you bought a graphics card 2 years ago, you can sell it for a profit today. So of course, they don't want a system that invalidates their investments in GPUs. The beauty of this system though is that they don't really get a choice. If Vitalik forks ETH into a PoS system, and enough people get behind it - it doesn't matter what the miners say.

The nature of a fork is that the old system doesn't really go away. It's just that most of the economic activity that made it valuable (presumably) is going to move to the new system; so staying behind is kind of pointless. Of course the assumption here is that its current value had anything to do with economic activity (other than people gambling on the price of eth and other tokens). That's about to be validated in the real world.

I've been more than a bit underwhelmed by ethereum, which if you separate out the speculative transactions actually doesn't have a whole lot going on in terms of people actually using it for real things. There's a little bit of that but mostly it's just people trying to get rich quickly. Lots of smart contracts idling and generally not doing what they were designed to do, games not really getting played, etc.

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

#279

Post by mrkramer »

everfree wrote: post #242
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 announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.

I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins?

Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake:

"an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency."

And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good.

[1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

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

#280

Post by csomar »

_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…

> We need also need inflation.

Why?

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