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

521–530 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#521

Post by pa7x1 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #466
pa7x1 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is no difference as far as I know. The network is supposed to finalize blocks that are almost 13 minutes old. If it's not able to do that because there is not sufficient quorum then it starts the inactivity leak phase and the penalties associated.

By the way, there is a bug bounty program. You can earn up to 1M USD per critical bug either in the protocol or its implementations.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#522

Post by sph »

redox99 wrote: post #395
jimmydorry wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to have contradicted yourself? >So some people may choose to not include some transactions (Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash). But there is no mechanism that slashes your staked coins because the other validators didn't like what transactions you included. >PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that slashes…

Social fork here means running some other software basically. Imagine Vitalik saying "Ok, since coinbase is being evil, let's all move to a new Ethereum-without-cb that is a copy of Ethereum but their ETH is removed. To do so download the following software that follows a new Ethereum-without-cb chain instead of the Ethereum chain. And if enough people agree, we'll probably just call that just Ethereum (like the orig…

How is this a good thing, that a "charismatic leader" can censor transactions?

It's absolutely terrible. Wasn't the goal to create digital money no one can control? I might as well use the US dollar then.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#523

Post by sph »

rmujica wrote: post #187
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already happening - the biggest miner refused to include Tornado Cash transactions in the mining pool. Stick a fork in it. Ethereum is done. With that degree of centralization, might as well just run a database and call it a day.

AFAIK in any network (including Bitcoin), any miner can select any transaction in the mempool. There will always be a miner (or validator in PoS) that will be willing to take Tornado Cash fees.

A miner can choose whatever fork they want, but if the other clients don't accept it it's effectively useless.

There is only one Bitcoin, and it's basically the chain the most clients are following. If you decide to follow another chain, you have created a new "coin", but Bitcoin is unaffected.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#524

Post by marshray »

rglover wrote: post #477
marshray wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Some of us do, in fact, seek the truth and attempt to face it. You are being dismissed out-of-hand because you make extraordinary, non-falsifiable claims ("None of what's happening is a mistake") without bothering to present any evidence in support of them.

Testosterone rates are down over the last 50 years [1]. That correlates with the changes to food production to lower costs [2], [3]. Based on your "alex jones" jab, you clearly took my statement to refer to a "conspiracy," when really I attribute these changes to a combination of: 1. Financial incentives for corner-cutting which are bolstered by government policies increasing regulation (production, safety, employmen…

[1] Not impressed by this study of only Israeli men over 2006 to 2019.

For every age range, the number of subjects went up during the study period. Overall, the study ended with about twice the number of subjects in the last period than the first.

Look at Chart A. The error bars are noticeably smaller for later periods compared to the earlier periods.

Something else is going on in this data that they are not accounting for. Probably some combination of either the tests were changed, or the criteria for ordering the test were loosened over the study period.

The other stuff you wrote is just the same right-wing navel-gazing that I've heard over and over since the 1980's.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#525

Post by remram »

tboyd47 wrote: post #261
remram wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

51% can do double-spend in Bitcoin, e.g. they can undo entire blocks of transactions and spend that money again. They can also prevent you from getting your transaction in ever . The 49% cannot prevent this because they cannot make a longer chain, that is the entire point of proof-of-work.

Adding the double-spend concept into it makes it even more silly. If you are changing the validation rules of Bitcoin to allow double-spend, then your block is rejected by the entire network and you must fork, even if you had 99% of the hashpower.

I'm describing an attack. An attack happens when the attacker doesn't play by the rules, while the rest tries to.

Here an attacker controlling 51% of mining power decides to not play by the rules; we are considering what that means for everybody else. For Bitcoin it means they can block transactions forever, and they can double-spend.

Obviously if the attacker plays by the rules there is no attack.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#526

Post by sph »

tylersmith wrote: post #189
Spivak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a group of miners with minority compute power deviate from the rules they are ignored. If a group of miners with majority of compute power deviate from the rules, they become the rules. This process is how all changes to Bitcoin get rolled out.

If a majority of miners implements new rules that the validating nodes don't support, then the blocks are just ignored. They may as well be mining Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin blocks. The majority of miners implementing new rules only has an effect on which rules the validating nodes will start enforcing if those nodes implemented them and allowed miners to signal when to start.

Indeed, in Bitcoin it's "one CPU one vote", and by CPU it means any validating Bitcoin client.

A big miner has the same voting power as you with the client running on an RPi.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#527

Post by RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm »

leashless wrote: post #160

In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State transition was known as Serenity. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... here is the blog post.

Could you perhaps please answer this Ask HN thread I have posted:

"Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a post-Merge client?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172

TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#528

Post by sph »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #191
bluelightning2k wrote: post #143

I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this. First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.) Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!

> First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. How long until BTC follows suit?

Never, and that's a feature.

The energy consumption has always been a red herring. Everything consumes energy. Humanity's goal is to optimise energy generation and make it as green as possible, not reduce total energy usage to zero. That's just an idiotic proposition. The problem has never been "Bitcoin draws too much power", the problem is "we need more energy generation, and cheaper, and possibly not from fossil fuels."

But it certainly doesn't fit on a slogan.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#529

Post by sph »

nowahe wrote: post #400
exo762 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.

Basically, to validate a block, you need to bruteforce a SHA-256 hash of the block by incrementing a nonce in it. And by essence, bruteforceing is wasteful (and by extension, expensive). And this is by design, as the only way to mint a new bitcoin is to throw away computational power (ie energy -> money). And the amount of power needing to be wasted is constantly adjusted by the network (it's targeting a certain amou…

And you can extrapolate this correlation between energy consumption and Bitcoin price into the idea that a Bitcoin represents some unit of energy.

I wonder if there's a graph anywhere showing the value of 1 BTC in kWh.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#530

Post by sph »

benreesman wrote: post #135

Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People Who Hate Crypto but Won’t Stop Talking About It

I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage.
Post reply on HN