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

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

our.status.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 532 posts

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

#291

Post by throwingduck001 »

keymone wrote: post #243
everfree wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas" model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas before the program returns. If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.

In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas it requires to complete because that’s what it means - to solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your financial system handling all people’s economic interactions. What can possibly go wrong. I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.

Determining whether a Turing machine halts within k steps is computable: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-pro...

If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the problem is NP-complete: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html

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

#292

Post by incrudible »

gonational wrote: post #147
hertzrat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t half of our current money supply controlled by 1% of people? If the asset holders controlled things, why wouldn’t they just demand everyone else hand over their cash? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-more-...

Yeah. That's what they do. That's what inflation is. We work hard and save up $100,000, they (the 1%) turn that into $25,000 in 25 years.

Nobody forces you to hold cash for 25 years. In fact, you are given many incentives to invest it, inflation being just one.

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

#293

Post by anonymoushn »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #227
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

I'm one of the maintainers of one of the implementations of eth2 live today ( https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm ) and can help offer more context on this. Ethereum proof of stake has been live since December 1st and it currently secures over 6 billion USD worth of value https://beaconcha.in/ . Currently, this is a chain that lives in parallel to the proof of work chain we know as Ethereum today. The idea is that…

How does this effect the viability of L2 side chain solutions?

Eth2 and L2 are independent solutions that are both happening. After Eth2, low tx throughput on Ethereum will likely still cause transactions to be expensive enough that users strongly prefer to use L2.

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

#294

Post by sect2k »

Magodo wrote: post #203
Aeolun wrote: post #201

Every time I read about anything related to cryptocurrency it reads like a high-school opera. With several orders of magnitude more money involved. I really don’t like this whole industry, and I cannot see how anyone would. It’s like a cult.

You seem to have described nations and religions as well. It applies to anything with a large number of interest groups involved

You are absolutely right, Bitcoin is a like religion, you need to let go of rational thought and have faith, HODL!

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

#295

Post by ArtTimeInvestor »

6nf wrote: post #286
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

I'm one of the maintainers of one of the implementations of eth2 live today ( https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm ) and can help offer more context on this. Ethereum proof of stake has been live since December 1st and it currently secures over 6 billion USD worth of value https://beaconcha.in/ . Currently, this is a chain that lives in parallel to the proof of work chain we know as Ethereum today. The idea is that…

Question: Will there be a chain split - will we end up with 'ETH classic' and 'ETH proof of stake' after the upgrade or how does it work?

I think this is guaranteed.

As long as one person keeps running the old software, the old chain is alive.

Even if nobody does it, somebody could start running it again at any time.

The different chains will have different market caps. And the general public will forget about chains that have sufficiently small market caps.

I wonder what will happen to Ether that is in custody. Like in the Greyscale Ethereum Trust or the 21Shares Ethereum ETP.

Has anybody ever checked the TOS of these companies on what will happen if multiple forks carry significant value?

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

#296

Post by dmingod666 »

from wrote: post #167
bluecalm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanna store value? Buy actual value - that is things that make the wealth. Stocks in major companies, real estate, land in places people want to live in. The concept that buying promises is a good way to store value is a bizarre concept to me.

This has always perplexed me too. There's a nice Buffett quote on this ( https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf ): "Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 tri…

Gold held it's value before we started counting the years from the death of christ.

It was valuable when britain was pairing criminals and prostitutes in handcuffs and shipping them to the US to populate the damn place.

It is valuable even today when there are people willing to risk death just to reach its shore..

I am willing to bet it will remain being valuable even when America becomes an irrelevant once-was in a few decades..

I want to know which asset class will survive the collapse of the US dollar and the fall of US influence...?

If your answer to that question is, "that's just absurd, never going to happen in my lifetime.." I can just smile and wish you all the best..

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

#297

Post by rcxdude »

jude- wrote: post #134
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the developers have very significant control on the blockchain The case for BTC in this regard is no different from ETH. In both cases developers put together an upgrade, then miners can either upgrade or not.

In Bitcoin decisions are made on the principle of one CPU, one vote. Rules only change with overwhelming hash power. Developers take a back seat. In Ethereum, developers run the show. They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.

Miners chase the chain the market decides. They can in theory mine the less profitable chain, but in practise they don't. The markets are the ultimate deciders of the rule changes. This is true of bitcoin and etherium and all other cryptocurrencies alike (anyone can always change the rules and try to get others to use the new rules. Who the market actually pays any attention to is the main question).

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

#298

Post by vletal »

Taek wrote: post #247
malikNF wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should have the power to…

Decentralized blockchains are entirely opt-in. If you are a participant in a blockchain that isn't serving your needs, you can opt out of that blockchain and into a new blockchain. A hard fork is essentially a large coordinated migration from one blockchain to a new blockchain, generally with a shared history. Vitalik does not have the sole power to go against the stakeholders of the network and make massive changes…

My grandpa lived in a building with unnecessarily expensive local coal heating. They never plugged into a heat pipe from a nearby powerplant, because the neighbor, who operated the local boiler always vetoed the decision. Why? Because he was being payed for operating it.

This is pretty similar situation. Incentives of the miners are not aligned with those of the users.

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

#299

Post by rsj_hn »

csomar wrote: post #280
_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?

Because people incur nominal debt contracts which causes wages to be sticky downwards --> they can go up more easily than down. With inflation, if wages are too high, you can let inflation eat away at them. If there were no inflation, the downward stickiness would lead to a lot of market failures (bankruptcies and unemployment) when wages were too high.

But then why do people incur nominal debt contracts? Because production occurs throughout time but must be settled in some medium. The farmer needs to know how much he will get for his wheat, the shipper needs to know, so someone needs to promise to buy wheat next year for $X and for that contract to be useful, everything else needs to be priced in terms of $ as well, so that the farmer can buy fertilizer for $ today, and agree to hire workers to work the field for $ from today to harvest time, etc. In this way, the farmer can estimate what he will get next year, what he will pay throughout the year, and what investments he needs to make right now. It is nothing special about the dollar -- if everyone used bitcoin for real contracts then wages would be downward sticky in terms of bitcoin, too. But as there is no way of expanding the supply of bitcoin, this downward stickiness would lead to a lot more market failures, and thus a lot more unemployment. We would then be effectively back on the gold standard, but at least with the gold standard, you'd occasionally find lots of gold in a mountain and this would stimulate the economy and increase employment. With BTC, you'd have all the financial crises of sticky prices but without the occasional gold discovery.

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

#300

Post by DJBunnies »

6nf wrote: post #286
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #168

I'm one of the maintainers of one of the implementations of eth2 live today ( https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm ) and can help offer more context on this. Ethereum proof of stake has been live since December 1st and it currently secures over 6 billion USD worth of value https://beaconcha.in/ . Currently, this is a chain that lives in parallel to the proof of work chain we know as Ethereum today. The idea is that…

Question: Will there be a chain split - will we end up with 'ETH classic' and 'ETH proof of stake' after the upgrade or how does it work?

This will not be the first time this has happened to eth.
Post reply on HN