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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

281–290 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#281
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that blocks are not “finalized”, like you’re imagining. With 51% of mining power, I can mine faster than the rest of the network, for an arbitrary number of blocks. The 51% attacker will have the longest chain for as long as they keep mining their chain because they’re chain will always (eventually) be the longest one.

51% The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining population.

[deleted]

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#282
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be the best alignment of incentives.

What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have the system you describe with fiat currency and traditional banks.

There are additional goals including in part censorship resistance and it can't be seized without the keys.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.

If your answer to clean energy to just use less energy, that seems inane. Also the increase in energy costs because of the war in Ukraine is directly related to dependence on foreign fuel which is not clean. So the problem isn't energy consumption, the problem is using fossil fuels.

Energy reduction is basically the best possible option. It's why insulating houses (in both hot and cold climates) is possibly one of the most effective green initiatives, since so much energy goes into heating. Even with a pure renewables grid where you have huge excess of energy at certain times of day and year you will have bottlenecks due to inflexible demands when supply is at the lowest and that will determine how much renewables actually need building (and mining is suprisingly inflexible: when capital costs are as large a portion of the total costs as they are, miners will keep mining even with quite high spikes in energy prices).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This proves the validator is cheating. To whom? Who gets to decide to slash the funds? I caught you cheating and can prove it. You don't give a shit and control 51% of the network. How do you get punished?

If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook. It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you please stop with the concern trolling?

> If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook.

If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol, then that means you just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?

> Can you please stop with the concern trolling?

Can you please stop trying to claim a moral high ground for no reason?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> All of the world's problems are government-created Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?

> Earthquakes?

Earthquakes aren't the problem, zoning policies and poor decision making skills are.

> Dandelions? Sunburn?

Assuming you mean allergies, these are problems of the human body, not the world.

> Marital infidelity?

1. Financial stress caused by government mismanagement of money.

2. Weakening the relational bonds of men and women and incentivizing infidelity via the welfare system and no-fault divorce.

3. The controversial one: a constant, unrelenting weakening of the male population via manipulation of the food, water, and media (incentivized by government meddling in private industry), rendering them genetically unattractive (or incapable) forcing women to seek...alternatives. And for the pedant that says "what about men that cheat," there's a good chance he's the alternative (and actively circumvents the system others willfully subject themselves to out of naivety).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters, Ethereum is not inflationary. ETH is minted and burned according to network activity. The more people making transactions (and paying for them) the less ETH will be created. It can even get to the point where some blocks lead to a net burn of ETH. Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help secure the chain at a (relative…

I won't beat around the bush. What is an ETH worth? There are not details about the economics, just the ecosystem, which is replicated across more thoughtful platforms. I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in adoption. $53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that m…

Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it was well below $100.

And for those that are joining now, but worry that the investment would be too big, consider the possibility of pooling resources with other people and stake using your own node. This is one the things that I would like to do next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool together resources with their friends and to manage their validators...

> so is there some mathematical guarantee that means there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?

Guarantee? No, of course not.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#287
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that blocks are not “finalized”, like you’re imagining. With 51% of mining power, I can mine faster than the rest of the network, for an arbitrary number of blocks. The 51% attacker will have the longest chain for as long as they keep mining their chain because they’re chain will always (eventually) be the longest one.

51% The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining population.

> The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in their work.

It's not that simple. That block from the 49% will be ignored by the 51% (since it contains "banned" transactions), which will continue the chain on the previous block (the "51% chain". Now the 49% has two options. If they continue to build the chain on top of that 49% block (the "49% chain"), after a while the 51% chain will be longer (because that side has the most hash power). The other option is to build again on top of the 51% chain, as you suggested (and AFAIK that's what unmodified Bitcoin software will do after a while); but to do that, they have to discard that block they had included earlier (since it's not in the 51% chain).

That is: yes, the 49% can include "banned" transactions, but that inclusion will be undone later. They can include these transactions again, but that inclusion will be undone again. They can never get far enough for these blocks with the "banned" transactions to be permanent.

> Again, a 51% attack has never even been attempted on the Bitcoin network despite huge potential monetary upside if it succeeds.

First, this is not the "traditional" 51% attack, which involves mining an alternative longer chain in secret. Second, the most a 51% attack can do is double spend coins (or prevent them from being spent); converting that into real money requires spending the coin twice (for instance, sending coins to an exchange, withdrawing the resulting money, and then undoing the sending to the exchange so the attacker keeps the coins), and the monetary upside isn't that big in most scenarios. Third, the cost for doing that is not as small as you're thinking (start with the cost to obtain enough miners to have 51% of the hash power), which is why it hasn't AFAIK been attempted on Bitcoin (but AFAIK, it has been attempted on less popular networks which have small total hash power). And if you fail the attack, you have wasted all that cost.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#288

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nod…

Yes it is incorrect. https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.

> No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.

No, you just need money, 32 eth is only around $50000.

And there's a lot of people with sufficient money to stand up multiple validators. And validators can also initiate/vote on arbitrary slash requests (which costs them nothing, as I read it).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook. It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you please stop with the concern trolling?

> If you control 51% of the network (actually, with Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the validators to control consensus) and people know you are malicious, people will abandon the network and you will lose your investment because no one is interested in participating in a network controlled by a crook. If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol, then that means you just need 33% of th…

> just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?

Yes, it is wrong.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#290
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally wrong. Anybody has the ability to declare "the people with stakes did not validate correctly" In this context, what it means is that a person posted conflicting validation messages on different parts of the network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a reward, and the offending validator gets slashed. (There are also other ways you ca…

I should point out that because Ethereum is a dark forest[0], slashers will collapse to a subset of stakers. More specifically, anyone who is not a staker is at the mercy of the mempool[1] to broadcast their slashing transaction and at the mercy of other stakers to correctly record it. There is no economic incentive to do so, and no way to constrain the software such that stakers cannot manipulate the slashing messag…

This isn't exactly correct:

1. Every full node is part of this dark forest, maintains its own mempool, and gossips the mempool to others. You do not have to be a validator or miner to run a full node; just run an Ethereum client.

2. There are indirect economic incentives to 'watch the watchmen': a slashable staking violation that doesn't get slashed breaks the Ethereum security model, and is expected to be an extremely rare event (if it ever happens). With a network that has a market cap in the hundreds of billions; someone is watching and it only takes one to sound the horn.

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