Ethereum "validators" are just an address with 32ETH. They are nothing like a separate "node".
Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
81–90 of 179 posts
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#82Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complic…
Answer (0 yr crypto dev & veteran): I start a new coin call $FOO. I release 1,000,000 coins. I sell one coin to a friend for $1,0000, and keep the remaining 999,999 coins for myself. The market cap is now $100M. > Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. You can game either one.
> 0 yr crypto dev & veteran
0yr experience with all investments?
> The market cap is now $100M.
Look up "closely-held shares" vs "floating stock" and how free-float market cap is calculated.
Btw your comment has nothing to do with the one you're replying to. Why derail the thread instead of starting your own?
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet so many instances of crypto coins that did this. I’m pretty sure they all had public books. The challenge isn’t I sell one coin. It’s wash trading. You create sufficient volume from multiple different anonymous accounts continuously. That’s impossible to decipher because ownership is impossible to untangle.
This only works if the exchange is in on it. That has happened many times but it's much harder to do than faking node activity.
Why does the exchange need to be in on it? If it’s not a KYC exchange, they would have no way of knowing all the Sybil accounts doing the wash trading were being run by the same individual.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#84Newbie question, how do you know how many nodes are under the same entity, to avoid somebody compromising the distributed system?
You can't, that's why miners vote with their computing power (or their staked coins in PoS) instead of the number of nodes. The second metric is gameable by spinning up many nodes (Sybil attack).
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
This only works if the exchange is in on it. That has happened many times but it's much harder to do than faking node activity.
Why does the exchange need to be in on it? If it’s not a KYC exchange, they would have no way of knowing all the Sybil accounts doing the wash trading were being run by the same individual.
Almost all limit order books required posting the assets on the book and take a fee on trades. You can read off the amount paid to generate the fictional market cap and judge for yourself if it's likely to be fake activity. For thinly traded books with low liquidity, it's cheap. For thick books with high volume, it's expensive.
Also exchanges that are not participating in scams, actively or passively, will attempt to detect wash trading and stop it.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#86Can someone explain to me why any of these values truly matter? My background is in game development both on Facebook and mobile, and I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the growth of the web and its various startups. Number of nodes and market cap both look a lot like vanity metrics to me - numbers that sound good in a market/tech-specific way but don't actually reflect the true value or growth potential…
The number of nodes doesn't really matter as long as it's sufficiently high. The network security is mostly based on how decentralized the hash-power is (or staking-power) is.
You're right that better measures are number of transactions-per-second, merchant acceptance, etc:
https://mempool.space/lightning https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-lt... https://moneroj.net/merchants/
I agree that crypto games have been pretty pitiful in their current incarnation, outside of gambling applications (thanks to provable fairness). They have a bad reputation of being too centralized and pay-to-win, which is really the only problem cryptocurrency is supposed to solve.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#87I think cryptocurrencies should be ranked by the mass in kilograms of the actual, real, physical products and the weight of people performing actual, real, services that have been paid for using them.
Arbitrage and exchange, and all of the people and infrastructure surrounding those, would have no mass in this ranking system.
"What about online stuff?"
Well, yeah. If you pay for a small instance VPS using bitcoin then you get credit for 1/64th of the weight of that PowerEdge R7525 you're renting and the 375 lbs dev you hired to run your site. Unless it's an exchange or trading platform, of course.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it 'illegal' to attempt a 51% attack?
It seems very likely it would be considered theft or fraud.
I mean maybe if you try to double-spend on purchases that you make with cryptocurrency, but small reorgs happen all the time and they would have to prove you intentionally caused the reorg in order to double spend.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
These numbers are really low, I think I'm missing something otherwise I don't understand why 51% aren't a common issue.
It is a common issue. ETC was 51'd 3 times in a month not too long ago... that said, with the upcoming merge, it'll soon be the largest hash GPU/ASIC coin. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/08/29/ethereum-classic...
If I recall, the problem was that they were using the same PoW function as etherium was, so people could just use their old ETH hardware to attack ETC. Pretty sure the fix was to switch to a slightly different PoW that entails re-designing the ASICs.
Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
#90Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complic…
>Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. I'm not sure that this dynamic would compromise the metric's usefulness. A cryptocurrency can only offer such incentives in-protocol if it's made the currency have real-world, persistent…
Even if the nodes are independent, I don't think it really matters as much as the distribution of the hash-power. The non-mining nodes will not be able to resist a re-org by antagonistic miners.