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

Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#461

Post by drog »

usrusrusrusr wrote: post #417
drog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>There is no designated class of slashers. Not true. In your defence, I also only learned this today. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher https://lighthouse-book.sigmaprime.io/slasher.html

I know about that but thanks for your comment - I’ll clarify what I mean.

It’s just the specifics of how this works - slashing is part of the protocol in the sense that I described: when you are chosen to create a new block and you have proof that someone violated the rules then you include this proof in your proposed block and update balance. Any validator can do it including the smallest of home stakers.

More details here. https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/phase...

Here we have slashing fields in the block body where you insert your proofs of slashable offense. There are functions with a “slash” in the name that describes precise state transition.

The hard part of slashing is finding these proofs because you have to do more work than necessary to detect slashing and produce proofs - that’s what this software does. It’s more expensive to run a slasher but you need only one and it does not matter who runs it, anyone can run it. The link that you sent says that this slasher broadcasts proofs by default - that way anyone can include it.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#463

Post by TheMaskedCoder »

aliljet wrote: post #3

I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.

But would you _want_ a GPU that had a former life as a cryptominer? Running all those computations 24/7 probably takes a bit out of the life expectancy.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#464

Post by kkielhofner »

chrisco255 wrote: post #438
kkielhofner wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wayback Machine begs to differ: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google... I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc. I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was skipping trips to the library for homework by 1…

> The Wayback Machine begs to differ: Yeah, I get that the website google.com was around in 1998. I was around then, too, and used it too. But behind the scenes of that deceptively simple looking frontend, is a mass of data centers and a multi-million line code base that was (and indeed, still is) being updated and maintained by thousands of engineers to prevent it from falling apart or being abused by SEO maximizers…

I have no idea how we're still talking past each other but assuming good faith I can only think we're having a basic communication problem? I'll try to be more explicit.

Are you claiming Google had millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers in 1998? It certainly didn't - as best I can tell from history it had less than five people in the entire company at that point.

My point is Google went from research paper to you and I using it in two years with a few hundred thousand dollars. For the record - I couldn't do this today let alone then and I don't know where you got the implication I said I could?

Yes, over 25 years later it does roughly six billion searches per day and is what you describe. 500 hours of content are uploaded per minute to YouTube alone.

I also didn't say Google was simple - actually the opposite. Again, point is a tiny number of people with an accompanying tiny amount of investment (relative to almost anything in blockchain today) did something very hard and had it in the hands of you and I in two years.

Back to my original point, Ethereum is seven years in with an army of people (808 contributors to geth alone) and billions of dollars. Yet, as this merge has shown so far the implementation is fundamentally still a mess.

I'm trying to make some comparisons between the early (10 or so) years of the web and blockchain. We don't have 30 years of blockchain to look back on so I have no idea why you insist on bringing the state of Google in 2022 to the discussion as it has no relevance whatsoever.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#465

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

OGWhales wrote: post #373
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also fundamentally limits the growth potential of BTC. In a PoW system, the amount of work done must be proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it would make 51% attacks feasible). So if BTC uses an Argentina's worth of energy now, if the value of BTC grew 10X it would have to use on the order of 10 Argentina's worth of electricity. Obviously, that is not sustainable, and it ensures BTC can never gro…

> In a PoW system, the amount of work done must be proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it would make 51% attacks feasible). I’m confused. Why must this be the case and how would it lead to a 51% attack if it were not? I know the difficult goes up when the price goes up because more people are able to mine profitably and the system will automatically scale the difficulty to maintain the 1 block per 10…

1. The whole design of "Proof of Work" is that a miner must prove that he has spent a certain amount of money (in the form of electricity spend) to mine a block and win the block rewards and fees.

2. First of all, this means that (eventually) the amount of electricity spent on mining is proportional to the total rewards earned (again, block rewards PLUS fees). So if the value of BTC goes up, it's a classic arbitrage play - miners would spend more electricity to win the more valuable rewards. Of course, everyone with the capacity would do this, until the difficulty level is set at a higher level.

3. Similarly, the value to be gained from a nefarious mining attack is proportional to the total value of BTC, so the difficulty must increase to keep a 51% from being feasible.

The fact that electricity spend absolutely must be proportional (over time, there can be short term imbalances before they are arbitraged away) to total value of the coins in a PoW system is a fundamental, undeniable fact. It is simply how PoW works. Yet I still am amazed how many BTC fan boys try to wave this away.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#466

Post by spywaregorilla »

pa7x1 wrote: post #453
spywaregorilla wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... you can't be slashed unless a block gets processed that supports your slashing, correct?

There is an inactivity leak that gets triggered if you prevent with over 1/3 of your votes from the network reaching consensus. Inactive validators start to leak ETH from their stake until they become less than 1/3 of the total stake and cannot prevent consensus again. https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity

Does the network recognize a difference between being inactive/offline and actively voting no?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#467

Post by haunter »

TheMaskedCoder wrote: post #463
aliljet wrote: post #3

I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.

But would you _want_ a GPU that had a former life as a cryptominer? Running all those computations 24/7 probably takes a bit out of the life expectancy.

You can replace the fans and repaste the die.

I’m curious about the prices though like don’t expect anything firesale-y

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#468

Post by HenriTEL »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #426
drog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am one of the maintainers of the Go implementation of Ethereum proof-of-stake, called Prysm (github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and also implemented a "slasher" in Go that can be used to slash malicious validators. Anyone can run a slasher and you don't need to have 32 ETH to do so. As long as your slasher software can prove that a validator committed a slashable offense, you can submit this proof to any full node to…

You can run the slasher this way but won't get the associated reward.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#470

Post by dane-pgp »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #161
jsheard wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, but I think the idea is that it would be incredibly expensive and unproductive to pull off such an attack. You'd first have to acquire billions of dollars worth of Ethereum, and then launching that attack would torpedo any trust in the network and send the value of Ethereum to zero, lighting your billions of dollars on fire. The theory is that it's too expensive to realistically do for the lulz or ou…

Or you could be a government with billions staked in your jurisdiction, and bureaucratic indifference to the outcome of your regulatory actions.

A government spending billions of taxpayer dollars on an attack which can be reversed in an afternoon with a new software update is more likely to be an existential threat to that government than to Ethereum.

The sort of software update I'm imagining is one which just zeroes the holdings of the government wallet(s), and continues the chain from just before they launched their attack.

Post reply on HN