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Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

301–310 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#301
post #246
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin valuable.

May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.

It costs an average of ~5k USD to mine one bitcoin. Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner will sell below this value due to not breaking even on electricity. That's why also bitcoin miners go to places where electricity cost is low, and why they undervoltage their mining cards.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sounds like an improvement to burning an entire country's worth of electricity...

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#303
post #4

Quoted post unavailable.

What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...? Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version of politics?

Consensus on what, is the question. Cryptos have a billion solutions for moving stuff around in crypto space, not very many for actually linking it with the real world, which is in fact what a very large fraction of the existing financial infrastructure is built to do. For the length of time crypto has been promising to change everything, it's really lacking in killer applications (basically the only value I actually see is private/censorship-resistant transactions, but the chains which actually focus on that tend not to be seeing anywhere near as much interest, and there's a bunch of baggage associated with that because it's most useful for enabling harmful activities and money laundering).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today). Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4% today).

That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns elsewhere?

Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically adjusted to compensate for that.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#305

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…

As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to create a technology so complicated that proponents can't concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why it doesn't.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#306

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…

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#307
post #200

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…

There is no designated class of slashers. Slashing is part of the protocol and to slash somebody you have to prove it to the protocol that they broke rules of slashing. One of the rules is that you can't create two different blocks in the same slot (block number) i.e. you can't deliberately fork. There is a designated place in the block of the beacon chain where you can put signatures of the different blocks in the s…

Thank you. Given all the other radical changes in PoS plans that have slipped by during the years, that one threw me off (:

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to explain a 66% attract. The censored chain produce the double of blocks of the censored one. Each time the uncensored chain produce a block it's ignored by the censored one. So after a time, they are behind and have to jump to the other chain and ignore their own old blocks. Something like this graph: Censored blocks: - Uncensored Fork blocks: \ Uncensored Normal blocks: * Censored: *-------------------…

So, now that I've obliterated the 51% attack idea, shall we move on to 66% attack? It doesn't matter if it's a 90% attack. The minority miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's blocks. So it is not 66% vs. 33%, or 90% vs. 10%; it is 60% vs. 100% and 90% vs. 100%. All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the majority's more restricti…

> The minority miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's blocks.

They can use the majority blocks at the cost of discarding their earlier blocks. Every time they accept a block from the majority, they undo all the work they had done earlier.

> All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the majority's more restrictive chain.

All it takes then is for the majority to mine three blocks in a row. The probability is always on their side.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will become centralized, but not in the way that you think. We're likely to see base-layer transaction censorship, since nodes are no longer allowed to disagree with each other (or they'll be slashed), and far more than 33% of staked value is in the USA (and subject to OFAC compliance). I explained in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532604

Who gets to decide if something should be slashed

It's baked into the protocol. A single validator can cryptographically prove that some other validator did something not allowed, and generate a special transaction that slashes that validator and gives you some ETH as a reward.

A common misconception here is that slashing happens based on what transactions you include or not. False. Slashing happens because of things such as proposing or attesting twice.

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