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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

#341

Post by shawnz »

3np wrote: post #211
Taek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network. If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes…

That bodyguard narrative is yours and I think it makes little sense. Hash power is required to form consensus. If anything, non-mining full nodes run by users would be the closest to “body guards”. Miners would be the ones who settle and publish the lineup.

The point of the analogy is that they are being paid to provide a service, and if they have a disagreement about it, then their only choice is to forefit their profits and let someone else come in to extract them instead.

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

#342

Post by shawnz »

Vespasian wrote: post #326
keymone wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are also users, merchants and developers. Governance of any cryptocurrency is extremely touchy subject and one thing you don’t want to do is setting a precedent for making a controversial change. If you justify such change by “majority of miners want it” - you’re…

> Governance of any cryptocurrency is extremely touchy subject and one thing you don’t want to do is setting a precedent for making a controversial change This got me thinking. How likely is it that, if and when crypto grows into a significant financial sector, the actual government will take over the governance. It seems likely that the public (or their representatives) will grow increasingly uneasy with such an imp…

If a big government seized control of a coin's development, it would surely lose most of its value and users would likely just create a fork which is not under that government's control.

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

#344

Post by shawnz »

arcticbull wrote: post #225
cachvico wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners do not give Ethereum its value; the market does.

It has no value without security and transactibility which is what the miners provide.

They are paid fairly in exchange for providing it. If the current set of miners decide that they don't like Ethereum anymore then those profits are sitting on the table for anyone to take.

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

#345

Post by DennisP »

xiphias2 wrote: post #220
chrisco255 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this happen in other open source software projects? My understanding is that Linus Torvalds was pretty opinionated as well. Linux is better off for it.

Yes, but Bitcoin is special in that it aims to be as decentralized as possible. Ethereum aims to move fast, that’s why it needs a leader. Both are great projects, and both approaches have tradeoffs.

Does Bitcoin still have one main implementation, which is considered the standard in place of a spec? Because ETH2 has four production implementations, developed by different teams in different languages. ETH1 has two in common use, one written in Go and one in Rust. All open source of course.

If Bitcoin still runs on a single implementation then I'd argue its development is more centralized.

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

#346

Post by shawnz »

discardable_dan wrote: post #161
Taek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network. If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes…

The difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat curre…

If the current group of Ethereum miners decide to stop mining, why wouldn't new parties come in to take the profits they are leaving behind?

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

#347

Post by ThePowerOfDirge »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #295
6nf wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

False, the difficulty bomb will kill off eth1.

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

#348

Post by stonesweep »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #318
gorgoiler wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to mine and hard to find. If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work. In gold’s case, that work is gas, electricity, and human labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to produce, the price goes down.

> If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the world, you are proving that you have done some known — or at least bounded — amount of work Making origami pirate ships also requires a certain amount of work. That doesn’t give it value.

Much like Ethereum, gold has an actual use post discovery/creation but your origami crane does not (outside of artistic value and testing for replicants) - GP did not go into the details, but they chose an appropriate analogy - origami cranes, not so much. Fun trivia: NASA uses a bunch of gold https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/hm2.html

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

#349

Post by shawnz »

vletal wrote: post #298
Taek wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The incentives of the miners are aligned with the users: The miners mine and then they get paid.

If the incumbent miners stop mining in protest of their future profits declining, then new miners will just come in to take the profits they are refusing to collect today. There is no incentive for them to conspire and every incentive for them to not conspire.

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

#350

Post by akimball »

xorcist wrote: post #287
malikNF wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does. So they are partly responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said initially it is hard to say who the actual decision…

> its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does You have cause and effect mixed up. The miners that follow the same consensus rules that the merchants and exchanges do, get paid. The others do not. A majority of miners following incompatible consensus would look like a huge drop off in mining capacity from the end users perspective. Simila…

There aren’t “merchants” in eth, really, there are dapps. Exchanges don’t care about protocols beyond send and receive. Still, I agree with your larger point: The value goes where the dapps go, and many will go to eth2. (But some will move to more stable and sustainable platforms.)
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