331–340 of 414 posts
No amount of fancy, serious, technical, professional talk will convince me that crypto is anything but a giant ponzi scheme.
No amount of fancy, serious, technical, professional talk will convince me that is anything but .
It's the same stance a lot of people take to vaccines, politics, religion, climate change, wars etc etc and it's causing heaps of problems.
There seem to be at least two big issues with the upcoming merge: 1 - Stablecoin issuers like USDC can de facto determine which chain succeeds in case of a fork (PoW vs PoS) 2 - 70% of validators are US-based, and as custodians, they will have to comply with OFAC. More info in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/milessuter/status/1560070819518234624
1 is true, but reframed: tools people use de facto decide what infrastructure they run on, and therefore what infrastructure those people use their tools on. it's not as controversial when framed in an unbiased way. We are just describing network effects.
As far as the twitter thread goes, there's a 3rx option: the big validators can no longer validate. Remember, validators aren't the only ones that validate blocks, all nodes do, validators validate transactions and finalize epochs. If they refuse to validate a valid block proposed by another validator that the rest of the network sees is valid, they basically have to fork themselves off onto their own, valueless chain. If most validators start refusing to finalize blocks, their stake gets slashed and they no longer validate. They have no choice but to violate OFAC if it is deemed that finalizing a block which contains transactions they didn't and wouldn't include is a violation, so in that scenario they'd have no choice but to stop validating. The other side of this hill to me looks like a lot of decentralized, anonymous validators, and I'm happy with that.
I don't get proof of stake. What's stopping anyone from presenting a new chain made up of thousands of fake transactions? And why wouldn't such chain be accepted by the network? Is it just "checkpoints" hardcoded in the software that don't allow this?
All the nodes that have been online long enough will know that the fake chain is fake. Because it doesn't match the state that they have been observing all along. So as long as you have no extended downtime, your nodes know what the right chain has to look like. Ethereum dynamically adds checkpoints so that block reorgs can't reach too far into the past but that is mostly a convenience function as it alone couldn't s…
And with algorithmic difficulty adjustment in PoW, you don't pick the chain with the headers with the most 0s preceding, you pick the longest chain. A longer chain with a sudden difficulty adjustment is an obvious invalid chain, but I digress
The bigger problems for me are the nothing st stake problem. Why pick one chain when you're new? Just pick both, it costs virtually nothing, and when you figure out which one is more profitable to you, just let the stake in the other one get slashed. Validators can help an attack on the network just in case it becomes profitable, and if it doesn't they lose nothing, because they incur no ongoing costs in the real world to do so.
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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…
I definitely think it matters. The metaphor of "some moron pulling a slot machine over and over and over" (which is what I use) is more accurate and I think better represents what's actually happening than something like "solving," which evokes the image of smart person (or machine) sitting down and using their brain to discover useful information. When you say "solve" it implies that the information that is produced…
> The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%. That's something Bitcoin needs ... or even better get rid of it altogether. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
Bitcoin is never going to change from PoW... That's the point of the system, Bitcoin is unchangable, unlike Ethereum. But you are free to create your own PoS cryptocurrency. If some PoS system offers the same security features as Bitcoin, people will just switch from Bitcoin to that.
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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.
At some point I'm sure they'll remove the legacy mining code, I just don't know whether they've done it yet.
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While that is true, I think the point that other users are trying to make is that wording it as "a complex mathematical problem being solved" makes it look like that work is doing something useful when it really is not.
It's worse than that, they're aren't solving anything at all. They're taking part in a lottery, in which participants have to guess a number, and the winner gets to update the ledger. Nobody is solving complex mathematical problems.