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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

#491

Post by diragon »

teawrecks wrote: post #451
Zetaphor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how it's gonna be.

But when we elevate from PoW to PoS the whole point is that compute power won't matter anymore. So a more appropriate analogy would be that if 51% of horse carriage drivers wanted that cars shouldn't be able to drive on roads, then cars shouldn't be able to drive on roads.

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

#492

Post by rualca »

lupire wrote: post #440
Zetaphor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

"attack" is a misnomer. 51% is a majority vote.

Doesn't the majority vote mean that they get to control the cryptocurrency?

Sounds like an attack to me.

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

#493

Post by rualca »

teawrecks wrote: post #451
Zetaphor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how it's gonna be.

> Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole" the election by getting at least 51% of the votes.

A better comparison would be that a billionaire decided to take over just because he had more cash.

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

#494

Post by dvh1990 »

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…

But this is an odd conundrum. If Ethereum is decentralized, any such change must be achieved by a vote. Circumventing such a vote is detrimental to the eco-system in the long term, wouldn't you agree?

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

#495

Post by helen___keller »

dmingod666 wrote: post #296
from wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Farmland has also been valuable that long

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

#496

Post by CrackpotGonzo »

Sargos wrote: post #458
CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would you tell a crypto noob to start today?

This is the go-to guide for anyone new to crypto today. It goes over the why and how and provides links for further reading. https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-1-starting-with-b...

I hadn't seen this, thank you for sharing!

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

#497

Post by SilasX »

morelisp wrote: post #466
TacticalCoder wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really surprises me is how in bad faith the PoW miners are acting. Ethereum was, from day one, planning to transition to PoS once the research and proof-of-concept was working. If anything the Ethereum PoW miners have been very lucky in that Ethereum is kinda late on its roadmap to switch to PoS (at least compared to when first announced).

You're saying a significant number of people who gathered behind the maxim "code is law" for money may have signed onto what the code was doing and not what the long-term social plan was? Quelle surprise!

Yep, the Ethereum Classic crowd made the same mistake in the context of the DAO "hack".

DAO: Code is law, code is law, trust the code over any natural language document that describes our smartcontracts.

"Hacker": Okay, if the smartcontract says that, then it follows that I'm entitled to these ETH if I do this...

DAO: What? No! That's not fair! That's not what we meant! Oh, come on, do-over!

ETH Classic: No? That defeats the entire purpose of Ethereum, for code to be law.

DAO: Not when it comes at the cost of significant wealth for the core team!

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

#498

Post by SilasX »

lupire wrote: post #440
Zetaphor wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to demonstrate that we could 51% attack the network" Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year…

"attack" is a misnomer. 51% is a majority vote.

Yes, but, in fairness, the assumption behind blockchain is that it works as long as 50%+1 of the computation is power is honest, not that any block constituting 50%+1 is necessarily honest/good/correct.

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

#499

Post by svara »

ptrincr wrote: post #328
svara wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that ever increasing hash power is a consequence of the design of the system.

This isn't strictly true. The protocol ensures that there is on average a block produced every 10 minutes. As hash rates increase, and blocks are found slightly faster, the difficulty is adjusted upwards to ensure that the 1 block per 10 minutes is maintained. We've seen difficulty drop in the past, it doesn't necessarily rise forever. It only makes sense to increase when it's still profitable to mine at the current…

It's not strictly true in the sense that if the price were to fall over long enough periods of time, you would expect the hash rate to eventually fall, too.

But that's not plausible in the scenario where the world's financial system eventually runs on a proof of work cryptocurrency.

Since all miners compete over the same finite profits, each miner individually has an incentive to increase their hash power and therefore power consumption.

Even if the price was on average constant, the game theory would predict a competition over finding the cheapest way to burn the maximum amount of power.

Empirically, there were some transient drops in hash rate for both bitcoin and ethereum, on top of a constant massive run up.

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

#500

Post by vvillena »

SilasX wrote: post #497
morelisp wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying a significant number of people who gathered behind the maxim "code is law" for money may have signed onto what the code was doing and not what the long-term social plan was? Quelle surprise!

Yep, the Ethereum Classic crowd made the same mistake in the context of the DAO "hack". DAO: Code is law, code is law, trust the code over any natural language document that describes our smartcontracts. "Hacker": Okay, if the smartcontract says that, then it follows that I'm entitled to these ETH if I do this... DAO: What? No! That's not fair! That's not what we meant! Oh, come on, do-over! ETH Classic: No? That def…

This is the classical distributed consensus fallacy. Law is only law if there's consensus around it. The "original" law still lives on in the form of ETC, but it happens that the other one generates way more consensus around itself, and thus that's the more valuable one. Distributed consensus means no one can change the rules unless there's a "majority" defined by PoW, PoS, PoA, or something else, that chooses to change the rules. And there's nothing preventing anyone from proposing any kind of change and trying to get a majority behind it.
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