[HN Gopher] Mainnet Merge Announcement ___________________________________________________________________ Mainnet Merge Announcement Author : bowsamic Score : 485 points Date : 2022-08-24 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.ethereum.org) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.ethereum.org) | jbaczuk wrote: | What is the reason for this? "less energy-intensive" There is no | a shortage of available energy we have a nuclear fusion reactor | in the sky that provides more energy than we could ever use. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not | clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large | increase in energy costs or, in Europe's case, an impending | energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine. | jbaczuk wrote: | If your answer to clean energy to just use less energy, that | seems inane. Also the increase in energy costs because of the | war in Ukraine is directly related to dependence on foreign | fuel which is not clean. So the problem isn't energy | consumption, the problem is using fossil fuels. | rcxdude wrote: | Energy reduction is basically the best possible option. | It's why insulating houses (in both hot and cold climates) | is possibly one of the most effective green initiatives, | since so much energy goes into heating. Even with a pure | renewables grid where you have huge excess of energy at | certain times of day and year you will have bottlenecks due | to inflexible demands when supply is at the lowest and that | will determine how much renewables actually need building | (and mining is suprisingly inflexible: when capital costs | are as large a portion of the total costs as they are, | miners will keep mining even with quite high spikes in | energy prices). | jbaczuk wrote: | > Even with a pure renewables grid where you have huge | excess of energy at certain times of day and year you | will have bottlenecks due to inflexible demands when | supply is at the lowest | | Not with good energy storage solutions. | teaearlgraycold wrote: | Lower consumption works even better than cleaner energy. | Even wind/solar/nuclear has a carbon cost to it. | | PoS consumes less energy than PoW. That's a win. | jbaczuk wrote: | > Even wind/solar/nuclear has a carbon cost to it. | | Yeah, so does life. | stale2002 wrote: | But the point here is that if there are easy ways to | reduce energy usage, that have few drawbacks, then that | is a good thing to get that free lunch. | jbaczuk wrote: | I understand. My point is there is no reason to reduce | energy usage. There is reason to reduce "dirty" energy | usage. There is an abundant supply of "clean" energy. | rglover wrote: | survirtual wrote: | Exactly. | | We've had over 50 years to transition off of oil and onto | nuclear / electric infrastructure. Instead of that, the | world leaders sat with their thumbs in ass on yachts, coked | out orgies, and mc-mansions on humanities dime, slurping a | gravy train that lasts a generation or two because "who | cares what happens after I'm gone". | | Now the bell of death tolls and it is suddenly "everyone | who has been locked up with no say"'s problem. People were | duped and trusted greedy imbeciles with resource | allocation, and then have to bail the same morons out. | | PoW binds value to unavoidable physics. Clean up your | energy or your planet dies. Increase compute capabilities | or you will be left behind by others that do. It forces | progress. | | PoS binds value to rich people's ballsacks. It results in | no physical value binding, and is a digital continuation of | the incompetent making resource allocation decisions -- | leading humanity right off a cliff. | | I just don't get how we can have all knowledge at our | fingertips and humanity is still this bad at decision | making. | marshray wrote: | > All of the world's problems are government-created | | Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity? | rglover wrote: | > Earthquakes? | | Earthquakes aren't the problem, zoning policies and poor | decision making skills are. | | > Dandelions? Sunburn? | | Assuming you mean allergies, these are problems of the | human body, not the world. | | > Marital infidelity? | | 1. Financial stress caused by government mismanagement of | money. | | 2. Weakening the relational bonds of men and women and | incentivizing infidelity via the welfare system and no- | fault divorce. | | 3. The controversial one: a constant, unrelenting | weakening of the male population via manipulation of the | food, water, and media (incentivized by government | meddling in private industry), rendering them genetically | unattractive (or incapable) forcing women to | seek...alternatives. And for the pedant that says "what | about men that cheat," there's a good chance he's the | alternative (and actively circumvents the system others | willfully subject themselves to out of naivety). | marshray wrote: | This isn't 'controversial', it's total Alex Jones | Infowars-type batshit. | rglover wrote: | It's not, that's just a convenient dismissal. Look | around. None of what's happening is a mistake, it's just | painful to contemplate and denial of it is easier (hence | why politicians continue to run amok--nobody wants to | face the truth). | marshray wrote: | 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. | rglover wrote: | 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, employment, etc) [4], leading to | companies having to spend more for compliance and look | for ways to corner cut, with the unfortunate choice being | product quality, or, increased prices. | | 2. The government legislating to have ever-increasing | budgets for entitlement programs [5] and other | superfluous spending which necessitate higher taxes | (financial pressure on working class people) and money | printing. These, predictably, lead to inflation which | corporations combat by increasing prices and so upward | mobility gets knee-capped for a large chunk of the | population. | | On the relationships side, divorces went up significantly | in the 80s and were stable until the early 2010s [6] as | marriages started to decline and single parenting | increased [7]. | | The greater point being, all of these changes can be | attributed back to social changes with a root cause of | government decision making. Like I said, look around. | It's all there. Admittedly, it's complex and it's far too | easy to take an irrational stance in the form of "it's | the globalists!" but in reality, a lot of poor decision | making and mismanagement in the government is the root of | our woes. | | [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7063751/ | | [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20516261/ | | [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21367944/ | | [4] https://www.nahb.org/blog/2021/05/regulatory-costs- | add-a-who... | | [5] https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0027_entitlement- | programs... | | [6] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has- | hit-a-50-... | | [7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us- | percentage-of-... | marshray wrote: | [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. | rglover wrote: | I knew this would be your response. | | You met someone who doesn't capitulate to your | manipulation, took the time to cite things, and you're | predictably "not impressed" even going so far as to | refute the source I gave with "something else is going | on" (conspiratorial thinking) or the source being "right- | wing navel-gazing" (when all of the sources are either | published papers, politically neutral statistics, or | mainstream media outlets). | | I made a point to look at your HN profile and | subsequently your Twitter and you're clearly | ideologically overwhelmed. | falcolas wrote: | > here is no a shortage of available energy we have a nuclear | fusion reactor in the sky that provides more energy than we | could ever use. | | We can only capture a small fraction of that energy; limited by | land space and efficiency of the capture devices. In fact, we | capture so little that we primarily rely upon the sun's energy | that fell on past-earth to power our world today. | | To take this idea to the next step, even if we could capture | and utilize every photon to fall upon our little sphere - given | how much of our planet's ecology is based around using that | very same energy - we'd destroy that same ecology. | | Sure, we might be able to convert CO2 to Oxygen more | efficiently than plants, but it would still take energy. Sure, | we can heat buildings and individuals, but that would also take | energy. We could grow food in labs, but again, energy. | | There's a distinct cap on how much energy we can harvest from | the sun. Using it to perform useless calculations because you | want to work around government controls is wasteful. | jbaczuk wrote: | We are not limited by land space. What do you mean "fell on | past-earth"? | | And it's not wasteful if those government controls are | harmful. | bowsamic wrote: | [quote] | | Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as | The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the | Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will | migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total | Difficulty value. | | The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon | Chain - 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. | | The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is | 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. | | Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. | Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022. | | [/quote] | kkielhofner wrote: | What surprises me most about the Ethereum ecosystem is the | software and release engineering of the implementations, | especially the reference (now execution layer) go-ethereum. | | As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for | years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this | morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client | was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for | 9/6 this gives the approximately 4500 Ethereum nodes (of which | 3381 are geth)[0] 10 days to update... | | It also doesn't help that they botched the prior release (two | days ago) of the geth client that had a nasty corruption issue | that requires a little more than the update warning footnote in | this release to fix[1]. Many people who deployed 1.10.22 are re- | syncing from (almost) scratch. | | Even if you followed Prysm and the other Beacon implementations | the deployment and configuration changes required are non- | trivial[2] and again, the v3 release referenced in this | announcement was only released two days ago! | | As someone who runs Ethereum nodes I'm a little gun shy at this | point deploying new releases of this stack, especially given how | things have gone the past two days. Even with our relatively | trivial application this gives little time for any testing or | assurance process. | | It's amazing to me given the stakes (value of the Ethereum chain) | and complexity (huge) node operators are essentially in the | position of waiting until mere days (or hours) to upgrade their | nodes and as noted - there are thousands of us around the world. | | IMO this is yet another indication that the real issue with | regard to decentralization of blockchain solutions is the fact | that (as pointed out by Moxie and others) the vast majority of | the real users and platforms of Ethereum interact with the chain | via a handful of centralized node providers (Alchemy, Infura, | etc). Who can blame them given what a mess this is? | | I'm also not picking on Ethereum specifically, the same things | could be said about most of the other chains and implementations | I've interacted with. Given the hype, promise, age, and value in | the blockchain ecosystem the software itself makes Apache circa | 1996 look like mature, rock solid software. | | BTW, the Ethereum Foundation alone holds approximately $1.6B in | assets[3] and investors have poured tens of billions of dollars | in this ecosystem. IMO the quality and process of the fundamental | software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like | they're wanting for resources to do this right. | | [0] - https://ethernodes.org/ | | [1] - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases | | [2] - https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge | | [3] - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum- | founda... | chizhik-pyzhik wrote: | > IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software | enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're | wanting for resources to do this right. | | If anything, this just shows how complex the system is. | Distributed systems are hard to write. | | The recent Geth 1.10.22 bug only occurs on shutdown- an edge | case I imagine they will be testing from now on. | kkielhofner wrote: | I'm not saying it's not complex and hard. On the contrary - | it's incredibly complex and hard but that raises another | question: just how far from this ecosystem being ready for | prime time are we? | | At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the | internet: | | Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of | $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has | over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within | two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted | investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting | a few years after the release of the web. | | I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was | "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as | successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the | fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven | years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly | complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by | comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users | interacting with and depending on it everyday. | | All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain | look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first | thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile, | etc. | chrisco255 wrote: | Google wasn't "built within two years". It is a living | software program backed by massive infrastructure. It was | iterated on for decades and continues to be. The very first | iteration of page rank maybe was done in two years. But | stop implying that Sergey and Larry built it in their dorm | and could walk away from it with zero input or assistance | from the tens of thousands of engineers they hired in the | ensuing years. | | The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on | dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its | wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the | year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies | were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow | as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of | employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet. | | Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of | complexity and effort that went into making the modern web | fairly solid. | kkielhofner wrote: | The Wayback Machine begs to differ: | | https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.goo | gle... | | 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 1998 (at | the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering | it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and | client software, etc) were already vastly more mature | than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent | comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still | works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire | Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best) | to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental | protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough - | 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0]. | | I don't know about you but I don't remember a single | instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the | next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three | decades of being on the internet. | | I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem | reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked. | Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software | reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of | miles and countless components of physical infrastructure | that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of | people by 2000? | | The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still | worked. It was slow because it turns out literally | digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and | laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the | least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long | process. | | [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge | chrisco255 wrote: | > 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 to the | point of being unusable. | | If it's so simple, please try to re-create it. It | shouldn't take you too long. Just a wave of your hand. | | > if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks | it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on | the internet. | | Plenty of back-end servers with zero day exploits have to | be patched all the time. Other incidents happen all the | time behind the scenes that engineers are forced to fix | on short notice to keep a massive service operational. | I'm guessing you've never worked on call as a dev ops | engineer. | | Ethereum works. It has 100% uptime since 2015. That's | impressive. Not even Google can claim that. | kkielhofner wrote: | 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. | pcthrowaway wrote: | I asked this in response to another comment, but how were | (formerly) PoW testnets already upgraded to PoS if geth wasn't | ready for PoS yet? | yieldcrv wrote: | node software is pretty bad | | but alot of us run custom clients and know there is major room | for improvement, with Go-Ethereum being the worst one | | this doesn't address what you need to do for the merge | | but definitely look into node software thats not written in Go. | The rust ones are 10x faster and use 90% less time and space to | sync (an archive node) than Go-Ethereum | | writing node software doesnt make money so its neglected | kkielhofner wrote: | Agreed! | | Have any pointers? I've looked around plenty and all of the | non-go clients I've tried (for mainnet and beacon) have had | pretty serious issues - wrong/invalid data, missing blocks, | various other weird edge cases, stability, etc. | | It definitely is neglected. Alchemy isn't worth $10B because | they're just running geth... It's a vicious circle - node | software sucks so anyone serious that needs things to "just | work" uses a commercial node provider. Result is less | emphasis, testing, investment, engineering, etc put into the | available open source implementations. | yieldcrv wrote: | pay attention to gitcoin grants | | contribute code to projects like Akula and Silkworm | | continue raising awareness about shitty open source node | software underpinning all of this | api wrote: | I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this | plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this | won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy. | | Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least | privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as | many alternatives. | dcolkitt wrote: | Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other | capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH | and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today). | Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock | up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4% | today). | AlexandrB wrote: | That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get | adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't | there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns | elsewhere? | rcxdude wrote: | If they do rates will go up. So in that sense it's self- | levelling. And the rate corresponding to the minimum secure | number of stakers is likely extremely high. | exo762 wrote: | Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically | adjusted to compensate for that. | idiotsecant wrote: | Yes, they get adjusted- by the market, the best adjuster | there is! If you can make more investing in low-risk bonds | you will do that. If you make more investing in ETH staking | you will do that. Eventually it will more or less look like | the bond market in terms of value. | AgentME wrote: | Locking up some currency is better than a similar amount being | continuously needlessly spent on mining hardware and | electricity. | michaelsbradley wrote: | So far it's locked up 32 x 416987 ETH. That's about 10% of the | circulating supply. | | The number of validators probably won't grow beyond a couple | million because the earnings/rewards per validator shrink as | the total number of active validators grows. The effective APR | is already down to ~4%. | erwinh wrote: | What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) | is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be | the largest block bakers: | https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer... | | With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my | understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe | its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that | exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature. | chizhik-pyzhik wrote: | Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service: | https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co... | | It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. | So far the distribution isn't so bad: | https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png | warkdarrior wrote: | There are fewer staking pools in that chart than there are | traditional banks in the US! | https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic- | in... | zeroclip wrote: | There's already a bunch of delegated staking options for ETH2, | including Lido, RocketPool and Coinbase.[1] | | Once withdraws are enabled this landscape may change. There is | a lot more work that needs to be done to improve decentralized | staking pools, if they continue to expand they can consume | large percentage of the total staked Eth with less concern than | centralized staking services like Coinbase. | | One of the big problems with Tezos is that the governance is | tied to the stake. This means in practice most users will not | have much of a say in governance because the largest stakers | will consume most of the votes. The only thing that has stopped | this so far is that large CEX stakers are voting Pass, but this | act of goodwill may not always be the case in the future. | | [1] https://research.paradigm.xyz/staking | zionic wrote: | ETH PoS includes offline penalties proportional to the % of the | network that goes down. | | If your home RasPi validator drops you don't lose much. If 25% | of users stake on coinbase and _they_ go down the penalties are | much higher. | | So there's an incentive to validate on your own | hardware/connection. | mattnewton wrote: | If that were true why wouldn't coinbase just stake through a | few hundred different vms on servers instead of one block of | nodes? Or is there some mechanism that ties it to a legal | person / corporation? | [deleted] | aliljet wrote: | 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. | tmalsburg2 wrote: | I predict that many of these GPUs will continue to mine just on | different chains. | wmf wrote: | The rewards on other chains aren't enough to sustain all the | GPUs. | TheMaskedCoder wrote: | 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. | ajaimk wrote: | Actually yes. Gpu miners undervolt their cards these days and | mining is a consistent load on the cards. | | The mining cards experience less stress and wear compared to | gaming. | haunter wrote: | You can replace the fans and repaste the die. | | I'm curious about the prices though like don't expect | anything firesale-y | factorialboy wrote: | Isn't the whole point that outrageous processing power is no | longer a prerequisite. | karaterobot wrote: | Yep. So now you may be able to pick up GPUs for MSRP, unlike | the last few years. | ru552 wrote: | Yes, and all of the GPUs currently being used will be | available at fire sale prices. | tingletech wrote: | right, so presumably there will be a lot of idle GPUs that | miners will sell / less demand for new GPUs? | Seattle3503 wrote: | Does staking make Etherium deflationary? (or make it more | deflationary if it already is) | everfree wrote: | According to ultrasound.money, Ethereum's current 30d inflation | rate is 4.1% annualized. If the merge were already behind us | (flip the "simulate merge" switch), inflation would be 0.1%. | | So, not quite deflationary but pretty close. If Ethereum | network usage picks up again like it did in 2021, Ethereum will | experience long stretches of time where it is deflationary. | | https://ultrasound.money/ | dsimmons wrote: | This. Based on current activity, it gets close, but if/once | fees rise again, there's a threshold above which it becomes | net deflationary. | coolspot wrote: | Not sure this is correct. | | PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year, which can be offset with | burn rate, but it is at 0.5% now. | | The site projects that in 200 years, burn and issuance will | be at equilibrium. | everfree wrote: | > PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year | | PoS issuance is 4.6%/year _per staked ETH_. | | Only 14M of the total 120M ETH are staked right now, making | the real issuance only 0.5%/year when taken as a percentage | of total ETH supply. | | Subtract the 0.5% burn rate from that 0.5% real issuance | rate (with rounding errors), and that's how you get | Ethereum's current situation of being "pretty close" to | deflationary. | michaelsbradley wrote: | You can check running stats at https://etherchain.org/burn | zelag wrote: | I have a question, why was 32 ETH chosen for one to become a | validator? Also, would this number change if value of ETH were to | plummet? | drewp41 wrote: | It's basically the minimum amount of ETH needed to ensure there | are a lot of validators all in sync. If it was less than 32 | ETH, there would be way more validators and it would be very | difficult for them to all sync to the correct block every 12 | seconds. | olalonde wrote: | https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationa... | typingmonkey wrote: | Originally it was 3200 eth, but the price has risen too much. | drewp41 wrote: | Not exactly. The main reason they reduced it to 32 ETH was | because of BLS signatures, so a lot more validators could be | in sync with each other | | But yeah, 32 ETH at the time of the Beacon chain starting was | only a few thousand dollars | hartAtWork wrote: | Can I unstake my staked eth after this merge? | wmf wrote: | No, you have to wait for a future protocol upgrade. | rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: | Nope. | nailer wrote: | If you were wondering: | | "The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion | of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. " | | https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ | AgentME wrote: | There are some old articles that get this wrong, because years | ago it was planned that sharding support would get added at the | same time as the shift to PoS (in an upgraded called "Eth2"), | and sharding support would result in lower gas fees. Some | articles mixed up the benefits of sharding and PoS with each | other. But now sharding has been delayed so that the move to | PoS could be prioritized. | dang wrote: | Related. Others? | | _The Merge_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 - | Aug 2022 (387 comments) | | _Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won't | fix other problems_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44 | comments) | | _"The Merge," the biggest change in Ethereum history_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15 | comments) | | _The Merge_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 - | Aug 2022 (175 comments) | | _Ethereum merge on schedule after successful Goerli test merge_ | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 - Aug 2022 (1 | comment) | | _Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof- | of-stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 - Aug | 2022 (310 comments) | | _Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)?_ | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 - July 2022 (35 | comments) | | _Ethereum Proof-of-Stake_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 - July 2022 (326 | comments) | | _Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 - June 2022 (23 | comments) | | _Why Proof of Stake?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 - Nov 2020 (35 | comments) | | _Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQs_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 - Jan 2019 (11 | comments) | | _Proof of Stake or Proof of Work, What 's the Difference?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 - Nov 2018 (107 | comments) | | _Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake | Testnet_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 - Dec | 2017 (199 comments) | | _Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 - Aug 2017 (120 | comments) | | _Proof of Stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511 | - Nov 2016 (77 comments) | | _Long Read: Alternatives for Proof of Work, Part 1: Proof of | Stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 - Aug 2015 | (3 comments) | sfjailbird wrote: | The news here is that there is now a (sort of) fixed date (next | month!). Not really related to general stories about the merge | or proof-of-stake, imho. | tempnow987 wrote: | Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty | impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes | away. | coolspot wrote: | Ethernet? 12 GW? | | Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards. | yuan43 wrote: | It's a brilliant plan really. First, the Ethereum foundation | premines the entire supply of ether, then distributes some of it | to the "public" through a sale and the rest to miners. Eventually | the Foundation produces an upgrade that replaces mining with | validators posting collateral in the form of the very token that | was premined. | | What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will | become to Ripple post-merge. Yes Ripple doesn't have anywhere | near the fancy contract capabilities of Ethereum, nor does it | have the concept of validators posting collateral or getting | rewards. But in terms of where the power resides and the | existence of major chokepoints, they're both very similar. | everfree wrote: | > distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale | | Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in | 2015? | revskill wrote: | aaaaaaaaata wrote: | What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...? | | Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version | of politics? | swalsh wrote: | I think focusing on the technology of blockchain is a | mistake. A lot of web2 people look at blockchain like its a | capability they csn integrate into their enterprise | architecture. That's not really what it is. | | What modern crypto has become is a new digital economy. You | can build a digital economy without blockchain (most people | here probably work in one), but what blockchain is bringing | is sovereignty to the economy. | | This distinction is important. Tech people keep talking about | technical solutions to recent problems, but this isn't a | problem caused by tech and its not a problem solved by tech. | The conversation about things like tornado cash is one of | foreign policy. | | A self sovereign digital economy has autonomy, but it relies | on imported compute, which means it needs friendly | relationships with foreign governments. | codesnik wrote: | is it low cost, though? | bowsamic wrote: | Low cost as in energy and computation, but the cost of | transactions are still higher and transactions are still | slower than some of the alternatives as far as I'm aware | bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: | Compared to similarly functioning systems that are | decentralized and distributed? Yes. | cowtools wrote: | Bitcoin and Etherium are probably amongst the most | inefficient cryptocurrencies on the market. | idiotsecant wrote: | There are much cheaper ways to achieve consensus, so long | as you don't care very much about that consensus being | real. | exo762 wrote: | Is this analysis based on technical details of protocols? | Or their economics? If latter, then I must object. Tx on | one chain is not the same as tx on other chain. They are | not interchangeable. | rcxdude wrote: | Consensus on what, is the question. Cryptos have a billion | solutions for moving stuff around in crypto space, not very | many for actually linking it with the real world, which is in | fact what a very large fraction of the existing financial | infrastructure is built to do. For the length of time crypto | has been promising to change everything, it's really lacking | in killer applications (basically the only value I actually | see is private/censorship-resistant transactions, but the | chains which actually focus on that tend not to be seeing | anywhere near as much interest, and there's a bunch of | baggage associated with that because it's most useful for | enabling harmful activities and money laundering). | idiotsecant wrote: | Consensus in this case has a very specific technical | meaning. You're trying to start some kind of philosophical | discussion but you're not using the right words. | rcxdude wrote: | I know what the technical meaning is, but if you're going | to argue for the usefulness of crypto you need to argue | why the consensus that crypto achieves is actually | useful, instead of just acting as if this is obvious. | idiotsecant wrote: | No, you don't need to demonstrate that at all. This could | just as easily be a decentralized database for counting | the number of jellybeans that exist on pluto and that | word would still mean the same thing. | rcxdude wrote: | Yes you do. If you wish to argue that 'if crypto then | useful', and you want to use the proposition 'if crypto | then consensus', then you also need to provide something | to support the proposition 'if consensus then useful'. | You can substitude jellybeans on pluto or whatever else | you want in the middle, the point is there are two steps | necessary to the argument and only one is actually well | supported. | cowtools wrote: | etherium is hardly low-cost | everfree wrote: | It's low-cost to maintain (post-merge). The high prices to | use it are a result of users crowding around a limited | amount of product (block space). | Zamicol wrote: | It's currently about $.02 to send Ethereum on an Ethereum | L2 (Loopring): https://l2fees.info | | Ethereum at the moment isn't too bad with a fee of ~$0.83. | goethes_kind wrote: | lucasyvas wrote: | With such a tone I wouldn't expect an answer. Do your own | research. | leashless wrote: | 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. | proto-n wrote: | Any details on what changed since serenity? | RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: | 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._ | jacobn wrote: | Has there been any resolution to the issues raised in | https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html ? | | My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto, | and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would | effectively destroy it. | | (my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant) | jcfrei wrote: | If the majority of validators adhere to OFAC regulations then | your chance of getting a transaction approved that violates | OFAC drops. Anybody can be a validator but if the majority of | validators choose to adhere to these rules then that's what you | end up with. Crypto isn't successful because it creates some | anarcho-capitalist alternative universe (though that was the | initial impetus). And the die-hard bitcoin followers who | believe so are slowly seeing their market cap falling below | that of ether. | [deleted] | sbierwagen wrote: | If being subject to OFAC oversight would "destroy" Ethereum, | then Ethereum should be destroyed. | capableweb wrote: | Why is that? OFAC is a US government agency, Ethereum is not | a US-based organization. Why should they be forced to follow | US laws? There are plenty of us outside of the US who do not | care about what's illegal in the US or not. | brobinson wrote: | You're misunderstanding his post. He's saying that if such | a US-centric thing threatens the entire system, the system | shouldn't exist at all. It will have failed at its mission | to be decentralized and thus has no reason to exist. | IncRnd wrote: | If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about | doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this | article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of | understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject | constantly coin new words and meanings. * | Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as | The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain | with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work | chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a | specific Total Difficulty value. * The Bellatrix upgrade is | scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain - | 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. * The Terminal Total | Difficulty value triggering The Merge is | 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022. | * Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset. | Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022. | dsimmons wrote: | To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH | ecosystem developers specifically). | | While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem | (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would | largely just interact with an application without needing to | know any of this. | IncRnd wrote: | You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog | page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one | seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to | understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would | look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using | etherium. | | Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every | page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up | jargon? That's the issue that I see here. | beambot wrote: | Spot on: This underlying infrastructure isn't meant for | "regular people", it's meant for the people who directly | build atop it. By way of example from TradFi, the news | updates from SWIFT about ISO-20022 is similarly laden with | jargon: | | https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes- | payme... | tdaltonc wrote: | I think that the coinages are mostly reasonable. | Finance/accounting have a thick lexicon. So does computer | science. So does devops. And those lexicons are all mostly non- | overlapping. Granted the crypto lexicon is a lot more | playful/childish. Stuff like "HODL" is just shibboleth but | that's a minority of the jargon. The stuff that grinds me is | when crypto totally redefines a word and doesn't realize it or | expects everyone to follow along. "Inflationary" in crypto- | speak has only a passing resemblance to the concept by the same | name in economics. | simpleblend wrote: | 1. This is mostly for developers 2. The iPhone was once new. | Electric vehicles were once new. People will adapt. | unixbane wrote: | This. The wikipedia page for years seemed (not looking at it | again, lol) to be written by people of the same ilk, who | introduce a bunch of terminology without explaining what any of | it means. When I read the wiki in 2020 it was literally | impossible to understand, knowing already at the time how | Bitcoin and a few other alt coins worked, as well as someone | being into smart contracts well before even Bitcoin was | created. And Ethereum is literally just a Bitcoin + smart | contracts. There is no other core, fundamental concept to | understand in it (until now: PoS). Also yes, as someone who has | used hundreds of cryptocurrency products, this applies to | basically anything related to cryptocurrency like you said. | | One absolutely obnoxious practice is how they all make their | own fancy names for millicoins microcoins, etc. | rvz wrote: | > Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time | coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching, | specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or | explaining everything that got us to The Merge. | | At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the | parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will | NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc. | | But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics | will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The | crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their | claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is | extremely unlikely to happen. | | Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The | Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software | architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented | process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions | of dollars worth of money. | | I await to see what happens next. | DanHulton wrote: | That has hardly ever been the ONLY problem crypto has had, ands | acting as if solving this one problem should silence all | dissenters lest they be considered unserious is disingenuous. | Look at the comments for literally any popular article about | crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one and | you'll probably find plenty. | | I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a | massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying | amounts of electricity and hardware, but that is about as | positive as I can be about this news. | rvz wrote: | > That has hardly ever been the ONLY problem crypto has had, | | Where did I say it was the only problem? Why are you | strawmaning my comment with such anger? | | > ands acting as if solving this one problem should silence | all dissenters lest they be considered unserious is | disingenuous. | | Another strawman and this rhetoric sounds like defeat and | denial and my point was (if you've properly read my comment | instead of misconstruing it) as soon as it moves to proof-of- | stake, there will be _no_ argument on the environmental | issues in Ethereum, which was regularly parroted by the | critics. | | > Look at the comments for literally any popular article | about crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one | and you'll probably find plenty. | | Look at what? I see no comments about the environmental | issues in Ethereum anymore, which proves my point. I already | recognise that there are scams, ponzis, etc happening in | Ethereum which the regulators will step in and crackdown on | them anyway. | | > I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a | massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying | amounts of electricity and hardware | | Exactly. All the fraud and scams are visible on a public | blockchain which is easily traceable for everyone including | the SEC, CFTC and the FBI to see. | DanHulton wrote: | If your line: "But I imagine that they will invent new | problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their | low effort hot takes" was _only_ intended to refer to | "inventing new problems about environmental issues" and | "low effort hot takes about environmental issues", you have | not achieved the clarity in communication you were looking | for. | | Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen | anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set | out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in | PoW-based blockchains. Maybe we just run in different | circles, but the main criticism I see of PoS is that it | doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any | more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other | externalities more clearly. | bowsamic wrote: | Honestly I think the biggest problem with crypto is how it | has mainly been used either to scam people or to further | centralise wealth towards the richest. I have seen very | little morally good outcomes of crypto yet, but a vast number | of morally bad ones. | rvz wrote: | So given we all know that there are indeed scams on | Ethereum, does that mean that all of crypto will go away | entirely as a result of this 100%? | | I know precisely that I see the same old arguments against | crypto time after time, but somehow despite all of these | scams, carnage, etc. it still refuses to die somehow. | | Maybe companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe, | Monegram, and even the regulators want it to succeed? If | not, they would have banned all the exchanges, coins, and | removed all wallets off of the apps stores a long time ago. | | So I'm afraid that it is here to stay, with some survivors | existing for a long time under certain compliance | requirements and other crypto projects withering away. | leppr wrote: | The wealth centralization effect is not an inherent aspect | of crypto, it was nothing more than a result of the | liquidity injections from central banks. | | The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that | rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock | market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize | wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the | reduced cost of debt, which naturally favors the | wealthiest, which reflects in the price of what wealthy | people buy when they have too much money (scarce assets). | | The base concept of cryptocurrency is enabling free market | economies by bypassing government regulation, and at least | in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, regulating inflation | by setting it in code, instead of being opaquely decided by | a few wealthy people (some of them convicted of insider- | trading[1]). Those two things tend to favor bottom-up | wealth creation, rather than the trickle-down model fiat | currencies encourage. That's a wealth decentralization | force, not centralization like you claim. | | [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-timeline-of-the- | federal-res... | bowsamic wrote: | I don't really care I'm just saying how it looks from the | outside | leppr wrote: | We all know the pedestrian outsider opinions about | cryptocurrency, they are repeated ad-nauseam here on HN | and everywhere else. Adding informed color to this is a | good thing, I would think. | immibis wrote: | Crypto has the same wealth centralization problem as all | currencies (so far) - it's not immune, at all. It's not | because of central bank activity. Wealth just | centralizes. Free market economics lead to this emergent | outcome. | | In principle, inflationary currencies have a force | pushing away from wealth centralization, while | deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it, | which is why everyone who thinks they'll have the | centralized wealth likes deflationary currencies. | leppr wrote: | _> In principle, inflationary currencies have a force | pushing away from wealth centralization_ | | That depends entirely where the new money gets injected. | If it gets injected at the top, like with our current | fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth- | decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1] | | Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever | mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the | current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the | case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing | mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least | mitigated. | | [1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the- | cantillo... | Balladeer wrote: | > Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to | whoever mines them, which could be anyone | | While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with | the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus | receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the | cycle of centralization continues. | | That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it? | muglug wrote: | As long as Bitcoin is still around crypto will have a heavy | environmental asterisk attached to it. | | But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of | interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase. | swalsh wrote: | You can bridge bitcoin natively to Avalanche (look up btc.b) | and then you can trade bitcoin with low fees, fast finality, | get smart contracts, use it in defi.... oh, and it's proof of | stake already so more environmental. | | Just saying :) | colinsane wrote: | that just makes the environmental asterisk bigger. you buy | bitcoin you wouldn't have bought otherwise (or would have | sold otherwise), bridge it, lock it up on a different | network. these actions marginally push the price of bitcoin | up. higher price means (temporarily) more profitable | mining, means miners divert more power to mining. | gfodor wrote: | No, I think once ethereum goes PoS, average people will stop | caring about the energy use of crypto because the public at | large won't be able to digest the nuance. | muglug wrote: | The average person with a computer in the US (just taking | the country I live in) has never heard the words "proof of | stake" or Ethereum. | | All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of | Super Bowl commercials about "crypto", and their cousin who | spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his | parents money investing in a thing called "Bitcoin" last | year. | paulmd wrote: | the existence of ethereum as proof-of-stake makes it | impossible to stop proof-of-work coins via exchange | regulation/etc. It's trivial to run exchanges on ethereum and | therefore they largely exist outside any possibility of | regulation. Previously you could sorta leverage this in via | the exchanges/etc but now there is no possibility of ever | banning the environmentally-harmful PoW coins. | exo762 wrote: | Your post makes many assumptions. One - existence of | trustless bridges from PoW chain to Ethereum (trustful | bridges are rather easy to kill). Second, regulation can be | achieved in a way OFAC does it - "anyone who holds/buys | this token is a felon". This drives money away from the | chain, reducing its PoW budget. | | And I really suspect that Ethereum will win the race | anyway. At least until something really juicy appears (like | private contracts, chain-managed secrets, etc). | davidy123 wrote: | Oh funny, I just, inspired by Stable Diffusion, ordered a 3090 ti | at what I thought was a good price. Well, I have 30 days to see | what happens... There could be an interesting ripple effect if | GPUs become more widely available in general. <<Simple division | yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on | April 16 2021.>> (from | https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...) | camjw wrote: | Off-topic but have you got any recommendations on stuff to read | to set up a GPU at home to run stable diffusion? | fleddr wrote: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99WBrs1D3g | OGWhales wrote: | I found this reddit post that has a guide on how to set it | up. I recommend reading through the comments as well: | | https://reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/wvr23n/d_how_t. | .. | stavros wrote: | If you have a GPU that has more than 4 GB VRAM, you should be | able to easily run it: | | https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion | | I didn't manage to run it on mine, as it segfaults, but I've | heard of people running it fine on an old 1060 (which I have | too). | squeaky-clean wrote: | Are you running the scripts in the optimizedSD folder | instead of the scripts folder? For me a 512x512 image uses | 3.7GB of VRAM. You can reduce the resolution to use less | (to a point, the model needs a fixed amount). | stavros wrote: | I am, yes. I don't think it's the memory because it | segfaults immediately, even if I try 64x64... It's very | odd, I'm running Ubuntu 22.04, I'm not sure if the CUDA | version is somehow wrong. | squeaky-clean wrote: | Oh damn that's weird. Any chance the segfault is on the | CPU side? When I try to generate too large of an image I | get an allocation error rather than a segfault. | | Also crazy idea but could it be related to open source / | proprietary driver differences? I haven't done nvidia on | Linux in a long time so I don't know if that's in a more | reasonable place yet. | stavros wrote: | Hmm, thanks for the info, it might be a CPU error! | There's zero information in the error, it just says | "error SIGSEGV" or something similar. I don't think it's | an open source driver issue, I'm using nVidia's | proprietary one... | | It's so odd, it just dies outright. Maybe it is a CPU | error, as you say, I think I'll investigate there. | yreg wrote: | Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp. | squeaky-clean wrote: | I don't believe there's anything OS specific for it, just | most guides are for Windows for simplicity. | | However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are | generally AMD or integrated gpus. | benreesman wrote: | Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People | Who Hate Crypto but Won't Stop Talking About It | sph wrote: | I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing | messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage. | pearjuice wrote: | Are there known cases of miners or other organizations resisting | this transition? Will there be people left mining the old proof- | of-work chain? Something like Ethereum Classic but for PoW. | dboreham wrote: | Yes. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/ | xyst wrote: | bullish outlook. Heavily loaded up when ETH was at <$1K. | arez wrote: | nobody cares what you bought | stiltzkin wrote: | neither your comment. | rcarmo wrote: | Thank goodness. I have been waiting for this to happen so I can | consider building a couple of GPU powered machines at non- | outrageous prices, and it seems that savvy miners have already | begun selling part of their gear early. | Linda703 wrote: | targ65 wrote: | What are the chances that this doesn't end in disaster? Honest | question. | dsimmons wrote: | Many/most people "in the know" peg it somewhere in the ballpark | of ~90-95% chance of success from what I've seen. | everfree wrote: | Chances are high that it will not end in disaster, in my | opinion. | | They've simulated the switchover dozens of times on a diverse | set of networks, including development ("shadow") forks of the | main network itself. | endorphine wrote: | Can you provide some examples? | spywaregorilla wrote: | Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized | with some extra steps? | | Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it | works is because there's just a small number of validators, which | is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. | | edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on | topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 | eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people | with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not | validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My | understanding is that this is a very small number of people and | is mostly just the ethereum foundation. | | edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers, | not validators. | johnnymorgan wrote: | One way or another we are going to find out... | | What a time to be alive :) | | Whether the project dies or continues forward the innovation | coming from the space is pretty amazing. | dmichulke wrote: | Let's say it like this: | | In the near future the rules are made by the people with the | most ETH | | and soon after the most ETHs will be earned by the people who | make the rules. | sicp-enjoyer wrote: | The rules have always been made by the ethereum foundation | and friends. How many rollbacks and forks have they done at | this point? | 3np wrote: | Just the one I think? Sure there have been network and | client issues at times but that goes for Bitcoin as well. | cesarb wrote: | I believe there were more than that one. From what I've | read some time ago, to prevent the Ethereum 1 (proof-of- | work) chain from continuing to exist after the migration | to the Ethereum 2 (proof-of-stake) chain, the Ethereum 1 | protocol has a built-in "difficulty bomb" which | dramatically increases the proof-of-work difficulty after | some time. But since the migration to Ethereum 2 has been | delayed for so long, they've had to reset that | "difficulty bomb" more than once (making it trigger | later), which AFAIK requires a hard fork (and updating | all nodes with the new rules). | 3np wrote: | This was always (well, long enough) a part of the plan | and openly communicated. Dropping or changing difficulty | bomb does not depend on the EF or the client software | maintainers. Dropping or extending it preemptively would | be trivial and would have been done already if there | weren't consensus to keep it in place. It's in everyone's | interest that nodes stay up to date if the network is to | evolve and without it there would probably be a couple of | years more until the merge that is scheduled for next | month. | | The first difficulty bomb was never set with the | intention that this would be the move to PoS. It's a | conscious choice to introduce regular hard forks in order | to keep the protocol and network evolving. | | It looks very likely that some percentage of node | operators and miners will patch out the bomb this time, | which will result in the PoW side of the fork staying | alive. Which side of the chain retains monetary value in | their tokens is up to social consensus. It will probably | differ from protocol to protocol. So far industry and | most major exchanges have been aligned with the rest of | the Ethereum community here. | | What you're saying is mostly correct but seems taken out | of context. I've only ever seen people looking in from | the outside have strong opinions on this particular | point, not from the actual stakeholders involved. | tylersmith wrote: | That's not true. Stakers don't make the rules any more than | miners make Bitcoin rules. | eterm wrote: | Miners do make Bitcoin rules though, the entire protocol is | a consensus protocol driven by the miners. | tylersmith wrote: | They do not, they simply produce blocks. If they produce | blocks that don't comply your nodes rules you'll ignore | them and it would simply be a liveness fault and not a | safety one. | tromp wrote: | Wrong; if miners deviate from the rules, then their | blocks are simply ignored by everyone else. | Spivak wrote: | 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. | tylersmith wrote: | 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. | sph wrote: | 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. | garydevenay wrote: | The rules of the Bitcoin network are not validated by | miners, they are validated by nodes. The miners have no | control over nodes and unless their mining work is | accepted by the consensus rules of the nodes they receive | no mining reward. | marshray wrote: | > On 21 July 2017, bitcoin _miners_ locked-in a software | upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) | 91 | | > By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of | the bitcoin _mining pools_ signaled support | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit#Activation | tylersmith wrote: | That's signaling, built into the end users fully- | validating nodes, to coordinate between the miners | producing blocks and nodes validating them. The | validating nodes are the ones that offered up and then | accepted the signaling. | garydevenay wrote: | Signalling is not consensus I'm afraid... | Spivak wrote: | Miners and nodes have to be in agreement, when they're | not you're right they've essentially fork BTC but I think | you're wrong about who really holds the power and which | chain would end up being the authoritative one after such | an event. | exo762 wrote: | Rules of the system are implemented in the software | validating the block, in so called "full nodes". It does | not matter how much hashing power miner has - if they | will produce invalid block, this block will get rejected | by nodes. Miners have very limited powers: they decide | which transactions are included (this is why we need many | miners) and they decide in which order transactions are | included. Users decide which token they hold (BTC or BTC | Cash or Eth), which node software they run. Miners are | low-margin workers. | dmichulke wrote: | The rules who to include in the block. Imagine 51% of | validators exclude people who use Tornado cash (as an | example of addresses that somehow relate to a smart | contract) | | The rest has to agree otherwise their stake is slashed. | | This can't happen in bitcoin. | | Please correct me if I'm wrong. | exo762 wrote: | In scenario when 51% coalition is censoring everyone else | (block producers / validators that don't belong to | coalition), the way out is via UASF - user-activated soft | fork. This will cause slashing of attackers via | "inactivity leak mechanism". | | Source: | https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html | dmichulke wrote: | Thanks. To me it seems this would greatly damage the | value of the assets (like the blockchain wars but for | ETH) but yes, it can be recovered from. | | I think the problem here is centralization and this can | be more easily avoided in PoW (because of energy costs | rising a lot if all miners go in one place) instead of | PoS (there are no physical restraints, so in theory all | staking pools could be in Switzerland). | | So politically it's much harder to censor a more | decentralized chain. | dcolkitt wrote: | The flip side is it's virtually impossible to hide a | large-scale mining operation. The meatspace footprint is | just gigantic. By contrast a validator node, even one | securing billions of value, can run on consumer hardware | sitting behind a VPN or TOR gateway. | exo762 wrote: | > To me it seems this would greatly damage the value of | the assets but it can be recovered from. | | Why? I see this as an event that would skyrocket the | price. It at the same time affirms commitment of the | community to its stated values and decreases the supply | greatly. | immibis wrote: | And then the ETH becomes worthless, and despite having all | the ETH, those people have no real-world money. | spraveenitpro wrote: | potatototoo99 wrote: | Yes, it is correct. It was already much more centralized than | for instance bitcoin, due to the difficulty in having a | validator node, but now it is just managed by the big holders | and that's that. Furthermore, they will censor transactions | according to US laws at least, and if you try to validate and | not censor, you will get your staked coins taken from you by | the protocol (as opposed to PoW, where you just fail to get | your block in the chain), so this is another nail in the coffin | of this project imo. | [deleted] | bowsamic wrote: | No, it's the opposite. Proof of work is more centralised than | proof of stake, because the former has an economy of scale: | it's cheaper to add a single miner if you are a big mining | operation vs a small mining operation. On the other hand, | staking 1 eth is always staking 1 eth. | AlexandrB wrote: | Another article pointed out that the economics of staking | are completely different than those of mining. With mining, | some of the earned coins need to be sold to pay for | electricity. With staking, the biggest holders just sit | there and collect coins with few operational costs. | | To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful | snowball effect than mining and the gap between the | wealthiest ETH participants and everyone else will increase | faster under PoS. | landemva wrote: | There is some legitimate concern here. On the other hand, | PoS looks to be more accessible to hobby miners/stakers | because they don't have to convert their coin into ASICs | or GPUs. | DennisP wrote: | Costs are lower, but the rewards are also lower, at about | 10% of Ethereum's mining rewards. | | Last I saw, ETH mining was about 33% profitable. With | mining rewards ten times higher than staking rewards, | that means miners take home about three times more on | their investment than stakers. | mcdee wrote: | > With staking, the biggest holders just sit there and | collect coins with few operational costs. | | _Every_ holder who is staking is rewarded for staking, | in proportion to their stake. | | > To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful | snowball effect than mining | | No, because issuance under proof of stake is much lower | than that under proof of work. | | The point of validating is to secure the chain, not to | get rich. The more validators that are active, the lower | the per-validator rewards, reducing compounding effects. | pa7x1 wrote: | It is much cheaper to run a staking operation but not | 0-cost. You still need an internet connection to pay and | a bit of energy to run your validator. You may owe taxes | on staking rewards, etc... So there is likely to be some | selling by validators. Rewards are also much lower, | issuance of ETH is cut by 90%, for example. | | Also you lock-up capital which has an opportunity cost | and must competes with every other investable asset. As | the barriers to entry staking are negligible (just | acquiring a liquid staking derivative like rETH, for | example) it means that everyone willing to stake will | likely do so which drops the returns lower, which may | push some stakers out as they see better investing | opportunities. So staking is likely going to have thin | margins in the future and will give a rate of return that | is fairly priced given its risk adjusted returns. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | Running a small validator is much riskier than being a | small miner. If you're running a validator and have network | downtime or any operational issues, you risk losing funds | (the inactivity leak[1]). If you're mining and you have | downtime, your only downside is the opportunity cost of not | mining any blocks while you're offline. | | [1]: | https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity | landemva wrote: | And the opportunity cost of the funds used to purchase | (er, stake?) the expensive ASIC which loses resale value. | Acres of silicon boat anchors. | | In PoS you still have the staking tokens. | exo762 wrote: | Inactivity leak for a solo validator going offline is | very cheap, and it is by design. People are expected to | run validator nodes on home connections and be | profitable. | drog wrote: | No. | | Inactivity leak is an emergency measure to restore | liveness when the network stops finalizing blocks. It | happens when >33% of validators are offline(WW3 | scenario), major bug in widespread implementation, etc. | | Your link explains that. | | ETH2 is friendly to home stackers - you may lose some | profit by being offline sometimes, and in the worst case | minor penalties are applied. | | EDIT: If you are interested in a much better description | of what happens if you are offline, see this: | | https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/penalties | | Some points from the link: | | - penalties =/= slashing | | - If you are online > 42.5% of the sime - you are earning | profits | thesz wrote: | One of the attacks on PBFT protocol is to split network | in half, send block to one half, do not send anything to | other half and the proposer wents offline and restore | connectivity between the rest of the nodes. | | In that case, without any stakes, half of nodes will be | locked to NIL, half - to a valid block. | | In case of stakes, byzantine proposer (it is only one | node that is really byzantine, but it can control how | network is split) can partition network according to a | proportion of stakes, so that neither half gets | prevalence. | | The algorithm in the link you provided does nothing in | that case. The only node that will be punished is a | byzantine validator which does not care. | | The system will be in no-progress-possible state | indefinitely. | [deleted] | zyphr wrote: | You can't stake 1 eth yourself. You need to at least 32 | eth. Plus you need to make an investment to run your own a | validator. | programmarchy wrote: | There are staking pools, just like there were mining | pools. | joosters wrote: | If you join a staking pool, then by definition you are | increasing the centralization of the network. | pa7x1 wrote: | There are decentralized staking pools. | https://rocketpool.net/ | usrusrusrusr wrote: | You can mine with one GPU, pool or no. | | Stake pooling also eliminates one of the supposed | benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency - you have to | trust someone else with your currency. | MaxikCZ wrote: | If I understand correctly, you are not trusting | "someone", u are trusting the network itself. Imo no | different than any other operation on the network. Any | operation on the network requires trust that the network | will do what it agreed it will do. | usrusrusrusr wrote: | Staking pools are not part of the Ethereum network | protocol - they are a third party that you need to trust | with your Eth. You are lending your Eth to this third | party, who will then participate in the Eth network on | your behalf, and who is also under no particular | requirement to do what they say they will. | | If I have to give my currency to a third party who will | then invest it for me, then why bother with decentralised | cryptos at all? | | >any operation on the network requires trust that the | network will do what it agreed it will do. | | If I were an Eth apologist, I would explain how the code | that defines the network operations is fully open and | inspectable, so no trust needed. | Anon1096 wrote: | 32 eth is such a small investment that it isn't that | meaningfully different than 1 eth. | pawelduda wrote: | Yeah, taking $4k (price it reached in the recent bull | market). | | $4k vs $128k | | Literally the same numbers. | SilasX wrote: | Right, parent is overstating it, and that's fair to call | out, but it's still a low barrier to entry (even without | the staking pools). At the current price (where anyone | can get in), it's ~$1660, so 32 ETH would be ~$53k. How | many "paycheck-to-paycheck" households blew that much on | a fancy new pickup truck? Or home remodel? Or extra | interest charges on the lifetime of a home loan from | stretching their budget? | jagger27 wrote: | You're joking right? | SilasX wrote: | Am I joking about the quantities of money that working | families will spend on unnecessary stuff instead of | investments while complaining about the inability to | secure their financial futures? I am not. | [deleted] | bowsamic wrote: | For the scales usually considered in the crypto scene | these would be considered incidental | 735409264082 wrote: | If they try that Ethereum will fork and I (and everyone I | have any interest in interacting with) will be on the non- | censored fork. | | With the old system, miners could try to sabotage our fork if | most hashing power were to be on the censored fork. With this | update, that would not be possible as the censors would lose | their money on the non-censored fork and therefore be unable | to stake. The relative power of the forks no longer matter as | they cannot attack each other anymore. | | Ethereum is becoming more decentralized and permissionless as | a result of this change. | steeleduncan wrote: | This is quite far from true | | > but now it is just managed by the big holders | | To have any influence during the proof of work days you | needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small | elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | It's incorrect to say PoW miners can censor transactions. | | With PoS, the big players control the small players. If the | minority doesn't play along, their funds will be slashed by | the procotol. If 66% of validators censor you, your | transaction will never be finalized. | | With PoW, the big players cannot coerce the small players | in any way. Everyone independently controls their own | blocks. If 66% of miners censor you, your transaction will | merely take 3x as long to be confirmed. | baobabKoodaa wrote: | > With PoW, the big players cannot coerce the small | players in any way. Everyone independently controls their | own blocks. If 66% of miners censor you, your transaction | will merely take 3x as long to be confirmed. | | This is false. If miners controlling 66% of hash power | decide to censor you, they can ignore any blocks produced | by the minority who include your transaction. | immibis wrote: | The part about PoW is falase. If 66% of miners really | want to censor you, they will also censor the other 34% | of miners if those miners choose to mine a block | including your transactions. | | If <50% of miners want to censor you, they can make it | take longer for your transactions to be processed. If | it's >50% (or thereabouts) they can prevent your | transactions from every getting confirmed. Sure, the 34% | could collude until they happen to produce 6 blocks in a | row, but each individual member of that group would make | more money by going along with the censorship and not | being censored themselves. | | I believe it's similar with PoS, but with somewhat | different incentive magnitudes. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | I suppose that is possible, but we're thinking of two | different incentive structures. | | If 66% of miners censor their own blocks to comply with | OFAC, then eventually the transaction will get in. | | If 66% of miners not only censor their own blocks, but | also collude to continually reorg the chain, then | obviously all bets are off, the project has failed, and | the exchange rate is headed to 0. | | I think the former is infinitely more likely than the | latter. | AlexandrB wrote: | > If 66% of miners not only censor their own blocks, but | also collude to continually reorg the chain, then | obviously all bets are off, the project has failed, and | the exchange rate is headed to 0. | | Is it though? If crypto ever becomes a common currency | people will still want to transact in it regardless of | corruption/collusion among miners. Most are not going to | stop using it for ideological reasons like "miners are | altering the chain" unless it negatively impacts their | own transactions. | yunohn wrote: | > Everyone independently controls their own blocks. | | I believe the point is that there's no prerequisite that | all miners are independent, and will definitely collude. | PoW or PoS this is the case, as blockchains cannot | prevent IRL agreements. | KallDrexx wrote: | > To have any influence during the proof of work days you | needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small | elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions. | | Legitimate question because I don't know. | | When I'm mining eth on my GPU while part of a mining pool, | my understanding is that my GPU is racing to try and find | the hash that works to start the next block. If I find it, | _I_ then am able to put transactions into the block and cap | it off, but the reward doesn 't go to me because I was part | of a pool, so the pool shares the reward with everyone | involved. | | Are you saying I only find the answer to the block but the | pool itself stuffs the block with transactions? | redox99 wrote: | You are spreading false information. Besides the | "centralization" thing that was already replied, the part of | | > and if you try to validate and not censor, you will get | your staked coins taken from you by the protocol (as opposed | to PoW, where you just fail to get your block in the chain) | | Is outright false. It is the same as PoW. You choose what | transactions you include in your block. 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. At | most your block will not get attested. Slashing can only | happen for other reasons (proposing twice, attesting twice, | attesting something that surrounds something else). | | PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can | kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that | slashes their stake. In PoW if 51% of miners are malicious | there's nothing you can do, you can't slash their hardware. | [deleted] | tboyd47 wrote: | This 51% attack thing is such a canard. If 51% of Bitcoin | miners are malicious, the most harm they can do is fail to | include your valid transaction in their blocks. | | So, your transaction will be confirmed in the next block | mined by one of the other 49% of miners. Big whoop. | ithinkso wrote: | 51% _is_ Bitcoin. That 's what decentralized means | remram wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | tboyd47 wrote: | 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. | ahtihn wrote: | You don't need to change the validation rules to double | spend. | | What you do is this: | | - spend btc with a transaction and get it included in the | chain. | | - start mining blocks starting from before your | transaction _in secret_ | | - include a trnasaction to a different address in the | secret chain | | - broadcast the secret chain once it's longer than the | "official" one | | - since your chain is longer, your chain is now the | official one. All the transactions in the other chain are | now discarded | remram wrote: | 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. | sam0x17 wrote: | 51% attack on a proof of stake network would be a truly | "I just want to watch the world burn" scenario, since | you'd have to control 51% of the currency, why even | bother. You control most of the money, why risk losing it | with a takeover attempt? | proto-n wrote: | Not correct, they can choose to not accept any blocks | containing banned transactions, and still have the | longest chain (statistically speaking). That's why the | 51% number is significant. | tboyd47 wrote: | That assumes the other 49% won't accept the bad guys' | blocks in their chain. Those blocks are valid, so the 49% | will accept them and build off of them. | | At any point there is still a 49% chance the next block | will be mined by a good guy. | | If the bad guys decide not to accept the good guys' | blocks, then they are hard forking Bitcoin and will end | up just like Bitcoin Cash: irrelevant. | | This is the exact problem PoW was designed to solve, and | it works very well, which is why a 51% attack has never | succeeded or even been attempted against Bitcoin, and | never will. | proto-n wrote: | They are not hard-forking, it will be compatible with the | original chain and original rules. There will be two | competing forks, one censored, one not censored, and the | censored one is longer (because 51%). Consensus rules say | longer chain is valid. So it _is_ the official "bitcoin", | according to consensus rules. | | The 51% attack is not some made up thing. | tboyd47 wrote: | If 51% of miners decide to totally ignore the other 49% | then their chain will most definitely not be the longest | chain for any more than 30 minutes. Because the 49% are | still using 100% of miners' work. | | The only way they can maintain that chain is by a hard | fork. | gus_massa wrote: | It's easier to explain a 66% attract. The censored chain | produce the double of blocks of the censored one. Each | time the uncensored chain produce a block it's ignored by | the censored one. | | So after a time, they are behind and have to jump to the | other chain and ignore their own old blocks. Something | like this graph: | | Censored blocks: - | | Uncensored Fork blocks: \ | | Uncensored Normal blocks: * Censored: | *-------------------------- Uncensored: \** \* | \*** \** \* | tboyd47 wrote: | So, now that I've obliterated the 51% attack idea, shall | we move on to 66% attack? | | It doesn't matter if it's a 90% attack. The minority | miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's | blocks. So it is not 66% vs. 33%, or 90% vs. 10%; it is | 60% vs. 100% and 90% vs. 100%. | | All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine | two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the | majority's more restrictive chain. | gus_massa wrote: | They are not block, they are chained blocks. | Oversimplifiying, each block has 3 parts: | | 1) The hash of the old block. | | 2) The new transactions. | | 3) A number that must be bruteforced until you get a hash | of all the block with a lot of zeros. | | If you try to copy one block in the other chain/fork, | then the hash of the previos block is invalid. If you | change just that part of the block, you must bruteforce a | new number until you get a new hash of all the block with | a lot of zeros, that has the same cost of creating a new | block from scratch. | | You can copy the info of the transactions from one chain | to the other, but you must create a new block to put | them. You can't just copy the block. | cesarb wrote: | > The minority miners are constantly receiving and using | the majority's blocks. | | They can use the majority blocks _at the cost of | discarding their earlier blocks_. Every time they accept | a block from the majority, they undo all the work they | had done earlier. | | > All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to | mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced | the majority's more restrictive chain. | | All it takes then is for the majority to mine three | blocks in a row. The probability is always on their side. | proto-n wrote: | Let me make sure I get this right: if you have two | chains, one is mined by 49% hash power, the other is | mined by 51% hash power, you think the 51% one won't be | the longer one? | tboyd47 wrote: | As I've explained in nearly every comment, one is mined | by 100% hashpower, the other is mined by 51% hashpower. | The 49% are still using the other blocks, too. | simiones wrote: | This is where your mistake is: they can't be using the | other blocks as well, because they are erasing their own | (uncensored) transactions by doing so. | | Let's say that MiningPoolA controls 51% of hashpower, and | MiningPoolB controls 49%. MiningPoolA is refusing to mine | transactions from/to some wallet W. Time | T1: MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W) | MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) still | in progress Any client will accept the chain | with Block1 (no transactions from/to W) Time | T2 - if MiningPoolB tries to compete MiningPoolA: | OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W) | MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) -- | Block2' (parent=Block1') still in progress | Any client will accept the chain with Block1 (no | transactions from/to W), and MiningPoolB will never be | able to catch up Time T2 - if MiningPoolB | decides to accept MiningPoolA's chain, but add the | transaction in the second block: | MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W) | MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2' | (parent=Block1, adds transaction W receives 1BTC) still | in progress Any client will accept the | chain with Block1 (no transactions from/to W), and | MiningPoolB will never be able to catch up | | If a mining pool had 51+% of hashpower, they would always | be mining the longest chain, no one would be able to | compete with them and publish another block (in | principle, at least; in practice, since mining is not | entirely deterministic, someone else will occasionally | win the lottery and propose a new block faster). | lupire wrote: | It's a block _chain_ , not a block _bag_. | jimmydorry wrote: | It would depend on how close the attack is to 51/49%. If | it's close, the 49% chain should be able to keep ahead, | making the attack take a long time and thus be very | expensive... but there would be constant block | reorganisations. | | The 51% chain is mined with 51% of the total mining | power, while the 49% chain will contain 100% of the | mining power (as the 49% miners are more than happy to | build off the 51% chain, while the 51% miners will only | building off the chain without the censored | transactions). | | They are correct in asserting that a 51% attack to censor | transaction is largely just a nuisance to the users and | that all transactions should eventually end up on the | longest chain (the 49%). | simiones wrote: | Any block you are working on has a reference to the | latest block in the network. So, every miner starts from | scratch once a new block is added - the 49% pool doesn't | have any advantage compared to the 51% pool. | | Each miner takes a bunch of transactions and chooses a | previous block B1 to build on, then starts hashing. If | some other minerB advertises a new block B2 based on B1 | that includes different transactions before minerA, then | minerA can throw away all the work it did, and start from | scratch on B3 based on B2. But minerB will probably | already be working on its own B3 - and has every chance | to win again. | remram wrote: | If the 49% mine a block, the 51% can ignore it and will | eventually surpass the 49%'s chain's length long term, no | matter how lucky they are short-term. | tboyd47 wrote: | The 51% can ignore the 49%'s blocks, but there is no way | the 51% can force the 49% to ignore THEIR blocks. | | The only way 51% of miners can fork the blockchain and | actually overtake the other 49% with more restrictive | rules is if they have a hidden nuclear reactor dedicated | to mining Bitcoin that produces hashpower equal or more | than 49% of the network and they flip it on at the moment | they fork. | | Again, it doesn't matter how many people are convinced a | 51% attack is possible on Bitcoin. It's never even been | tried once. So the burden of proof is on you all. I'm | just trying to help explain why this concept has never | been proven. | DSMan195276 wrote: | > The 51% can ignore the 49%'s blocks, but there is no | way the 51% can force the 49% to ignore THEIR blocks. | | If the 51% can ignore the blocks from the 49%, then why | does it matter what the 49% is doing? | | Occasionally the 49% will be able to mine a block and | temporarily create the longest chain, but the 51% can | always just ignore that block and continue mining off of | the one before it - eventually their chain will be the | longest and the block(s) from the 49% will be lost. | | Really this isn't theoretical, it happens all the time by | accident when two blocks get mined off of the same | previous block. When that happens one of the two blocks | gets lost, and the only difference with this scenario is | that the 51% have enough hash power to ensure that their | blocks are the ones that always (eventually) win and the | 49% blocks are always lost. | samkon wrote: | Except that blocks are not "finalized", like you're | imagining. With 51% of mining power, I can mine faster | than the rest of the network, for an arbitrary number of | blocks. The 51% attacker will have the longest chain for | as long as they keep mining their chain because they're | chain will always (eventually) be the longest one. | tboyd47 wrote: | 51% < 100% | | The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in | their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead | of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining | population. | [deleted] | cesarb wrote: | > The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks | in their work. | | It's not that simple. That block from the 49% will be | ignored by the 51% (since it contains "banned" | transactions), which will continue the chain on the | previous block (the "51% chain". Now the 49% has two | options. If they continue to build the chain on top of | that 49% block (the "49% chain"), after a while the 51% | chain will be longer (because that side has the most hash | power). The other option is to build again on top of the | 51% chain, as you suggested (and AFAIK that's what | unmodified Bitcoin software will do after a while); but | to do that, they have to _discard_ that block they had | included earlier (since it 's not in the 51% chain). | | That is: yes, the 49% _can_ include "banned" | transactions, but that inclusion will be undone later. | They can include these transactions again, but that | inclusion will be undone again. They can never get far | enough for these blocks with the "banned" transactions to | be permanent. | | > Again, a 51% attack has never even been attempted on | the Bitcoin network despite huge potential monetary | upside if it succeeds. | | First, this is not the "traditional" 51% attack, which | involves mining an alternative longer chain _in secret_. | Second, the most a 51% attack can do is double spend | coins (or prevent them from being spent); converting that | into real money requires spending the coin twice (for | instance, sending coins to an exchange, withdrawing the | resulting money, and then undoing the sending to the | exchange so the attacker keeps the coins), and the | monetary upside isn 't that big in most scenarios. Third, | the cost for doing that is not as small as you're | thinking (start with the cost to obtain enough miners to | have 51% of the hash power), which is why it hasn't AFAIK | been attempted on Bitcoin (but AFAIK, it has been | attempted on less popular networks which have small total | hash power). And if you fail the attack, you have wasted | all that cost. | stale2002 wrote: | You have this wrong. | | As soon as the chain diverges, they are seperate chains. | | Yes, if you have a minority of the hashpower, you can | hardfork yourself off the main chain, and continue to | follow your smaller chain, regardless. | | But you don't get a longer chain than the main one. So | you'd continuously be behind, and would not get the work | of the main chain, and likely most exchanges would not | accept your smaller fork coin, and you would end up like | bitcoin cash. | redox99 wrote: | Not true. If 51% of bitcoin miners are malicious they can | reorg as often as they'd like, so your transaction will | never be included. | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | << Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash | | This only proves that ether is already too centralized. | | FWIW. I used to mine eth on a small scale so I am obviously | biased. | redox99 wrote: | That doesn't prove anything. You can solo mine with a | single GPU and choose to censor whoever you want. Any | miner no matter how small can censor their own blocks. | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | What you say is true in the same way like saying that | taking a cup of water out of the ocean lowers the ocean | level a little. It is true, but it is not significant. | The moment the mining is moved to mostly non-solo miners | ( and even now non-solo miners seem to vastly outnumber | in sheer mining power established solo miners ). | | Basically, concentration of power means that eth will | quickly become everything the banks are.. only worse ( | because with banks you at least have some regulation to | back you up ):P | lesuorac wrote: | Isn't eth's power already concentrated more than banks | are? | | Like 4 pools control 51% of the hashrate so they already | can easily bully solo-miners. | jimmydorry wrote: | 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 their stake. | | If a group of validators don't agree with your particular | arrangement of transactions in the block, they can engineer | a "social fork" that slashes your stake. | pa7x1 wrote: | What I think he means is that there is no in-protocol | mechanism for slashing a censoring validator. | | But you can reach a social consensus (i.e. outside the | protocol) and decide to slash the censors. At that point | there would be effectively two different chains, the | censored one and an uncensored one. The worth of each | chain would be decided by market dynamics. | 735409264082 wrote: | > If a group of validators don't agree with your | particular arrangement of transactions in the block, they | can engineer a "social fork" that slashes your stake. | | Why would I want to be on their fork? They can have their | censored fork, but they can't do anything to anymore who | doesn't want to be a part of it. | redox99 wrote: | 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 original Ethereum is now called | Ethereum classic, and the current Ethereum is actually | forked). | sph wrote: | 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. | rawoke083600 wrote: | No 'they dont take your coins/stake'. That is just plain | false. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | 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. | rmujica wrote: | 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. | sph wrote: | 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. | samkon wrote: | Except that these transactions do eventually go through. | It's a relatively soft form of censorship - and doesn't | actually achieve the goal of preventing the transactions. | | IMO - this behavior is a blip. As soon as it becomes clear | that "censorship" isn't effective, it will become less | popular for validators to do it at all. | idiotsecant wrote: | some salty crypto tribalists ITT, I expected better of you | HN. | stiltzkin wrote: | Waiting you run a big central database as Ethereum with the | same marketcap. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | Why should the marketcap be of any concern to me? | | Is that how you evaluate technologies? By their | marketcap? | exo762 wrote: | Since blockchains are specifically built with idea of | censorship resistance in mind, and Ethermine not including | TC transactions can't actually prevent other miners from | including them... I'm struggling to understand the point | you are trying to make. | | Are you talking about lack of ideological purity of | Ethermine? | spaceman_2020 wrote: | > lack of ideological purity of Ethermine? | | Yes, and the fact that everyone in the Ethereum community | has largely glossed this over in their enthusiasm for the | "merge" and what it will do the price of their assets. | | Cryptocurrencies that embrace the centralization and | censorship of fiat currencies are completely unnecessary | and have no real utility. Tornado Cash and Ethermine | should have been a line in the sand, a hard boundary for | what's acceptable and what's not. | | But the fact that no one even cares tells me that the | community will be happy to accept even more censorship as | long as their bags keep going up. Pathetic, really. | miloignis wrote: | Apologies if I get this incorrect, I'm an amateur, but I have | read about the design - the slashers will likely be few and | centralized, but that's not disastrous because the slashers | must provide proof of wrong doing to cause someone's ETH to get | "slashed". That is, they're likely to be centralized (though | they don't have to be! I believe anyone can be one) but they | have to prove to everyone that something should be slashed in | order to do so, so you don't have to trust the centralized | part. Does that make sense? | codegladiator wrote: | Sounds like the police. | | Also do they prove before or after slashing? | rictic wrote: | Prove in a machine legible sense, picture a transaction | like: "here are two contradictory blocks validated by | validator ABC, including ABC's signature, therefore ABC's | stake is slashed". (at least, that's how it worked last | time I looked into it) | redox99 wrote: | So it works like this: | | - If you detect some wrongdoing, like somebody attesting | twice, you can get a reward for whistleblowing (free money!) | | - However to claim this reward, you have to include it in a | block. Therefore if everybody is aware of this wrongdoing, | the next block will get the rewards for | slashing/whistleblowing. | | - Therefore it's economically advantageous to keep this info | to yourself, until you get to propose a block, and only then | slash and get the rewards. | | - There are also what are called altruistic whistleblowers, | that as soon as they find wrongdoing, they'll broadcast it | (instead of keeping it to themselves) so next block proposer | will slash the wrongdoer. These kind of whistleblowers will | most likely be run by the Ethereum Foundation | | - In practice even if there were no altruistic | whistleblowers, it wouldn't really matter because the same | software that validators run can also detect wrongdoing, so | in practice even with no altruistic whistleblowers, the next | block is almost guaranteed to slash the wrongdoer anyway | (free money!). | spywaregorilla wrote: | > they have to prove to everyone that something should be | slashed in order to do so | | Who is everyone? Because obviously it can't include the | people who just colluded to deceive the network. | EddySchauHai wrote: | Wouldn't it be a percentage of the people? So > 51%? | spywaregorilla wrote: | But you already have 51% of people lying for their own | benefit in this scenario. | pkulak wrote: | Wait, I'm confused. Why exactly is this low-effort FUD post | pinned to the top? | seydor wrote: | tangentially, how can one profit from ETH becoming more | centralized? | drawingthesun wrote: | Not sure how Ethereum does it, but on Tezos any node can submit | proof another node has misbehaved and be awarded a certain | amount of the misbehaving nodes deposit. | | All of this works via code and no human intervention is needed. | | I assume Ethereum has something similar, as there isn't much | gain in restricting those who are allowed to submit a proof | that a node/validator is up to no good. | drcode wrote: | Totally wrong. Anybody has the ability to declare "the people | with stakes did not validate correctly" | | In this context, what it means is that a person posted | conflicting validation messages on different parts of the | network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such | conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a | reward, and the offending validator gets slashed. | | (There are also other ways you can get slashed, read the POS | documentation if you want to learn the details) All methods of | slashing are fully decentralized. | kmeisthax wrote: | I should point out that because Ethereum is a dark forest[0], | slashers will collapse to a subset of stakers. More | specifically, anyone who is _not_ a staker is at the mercy of | the mempool[1] to broadcast their slashing transaction and at | the mercy of other stakers to correctly record it. There is | no economic incentive to do so, and no way to constrain the | software such that stakers cannot manipulate the slashing | message to take the payout for themselves. And since regular | users who slash _don 't get rewarded for it_, there is less | incentive to actually bother watching the watchmen. | | [0] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark- | forest | | [1] No clue if this has a different name in Ethereum | SilverBirch wrote: | I feel like I'm going insane you're literally just quoting | Scifi bull shit. This is money we're talking about. | dannyw wrote: | This isn't exactly correct: | | 1. Every full node is part of this dark forest, maintains | its own mempool, and gossips the mempool to others. You do | not have to be a validator or miner to run a full node; | just run an Ethereum client. | | 2. There are indirect economic incentives to 'watch the | watchmen': a slashable staking violation that doesn't get | slashed breaks the Ethereum security model, and is expected | to be an extremely rare event (if it ever happens). With a | network that has a market cap in the hundreds of billions; | someone is watching and it only takes one to sound the | horn. | kmeisthax wrote: | Every full node can still manipulate the transaction to | make it look like _they_ are slashing rather than the | person who originally reported the fraud. This is also a | "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive. | | I do agree that there probably will be altruistic | validators in some cases, but the economic incentives | work against them. The history of cryptocurrency has | trended towards doing the minimum amount of validation | work that satisfies network consensus[0]. It's entirely | possible that the market just shrugs its shoulders and | says that a violation of the Ethereum security model just | isn't actually that bad. Consider the relative lack of | concern over MEV[1] and automated arbitrage bots, and the | fact that the valuation of the coin is entirely | unconnected to any security issues it may or may not | have. It may just wind up being the case that the network | just... tolerates a handful of people getting screwed. | | [0] For example, Bitcoin miners accept new blocks by | literally joining other mining pools purely to steal | their previous block hash. It's significantly faster than | waiting for a full 4MB block to get P2P gossiped around | the world, but the downside is that you can't actually | validate any of the data in that block. This effectively | means that miners _aren 't full nodes anymore_, and the | result has been _several_ long chainsplits and reorgs | whenever a softfork occurs. | | [1] Miner Extractable Value | xur17 wrote: | > Every full node can still manipulate the transaction to | make it look like they are slashing rather than the | person who originally reported the fraud. This is also a | "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive. | | Following this logic, stakers themselves are incentivized | to just run the software to submit a slashing tx | themselves (free money), at which point just having | stakers running slashing software is sufficient. And if | they aren't someone else will submit it to the mempool. | spywaregorilla wrote: | What if they then show bogus evidence | Zetaphor wrote: | This would require forging the existence of an invalid | block signed with the key of the validator you're claiming | should be slashed, which is not possible | chizhik-pyzhik wrote: | There's no such thing as bogus evidence. Block signatures | are validated cryptographically | spywaregorilla wrote: | But all evidence needs to be voted on. Even it's just a | divine truth bool, the network still needs to vote on a | consensus of whether or not it says TRUE. | | edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M. You | say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it wasn't | a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get x% of | validators to agree with you. | | As far as I can tell, you cannot get slashed for your | vote on a slash. So lying is ok. | DennisP wrote: | > submit a slasher report that says it wasn't a valid | transaction...offer enough money to get x% of validators | to agree | | That's not how this works at all. | | Slashing happens under a very specific circumstance: a | staker submits contradictory messages. Those | circumstances are testable with built-in code that's part | of the protocol. To get someone slashed, you send a | transaction including their contradictory signed | messages. When your transaction is included in a block, | the staker gets slashed by the protocol rules hardcoded | in all the consensus clients. | | The only other thing that can cause a staker to lose | stake is the "inactivity leak," where an active staking | node doesn't send the messages they're supposed to send. | That's completely automatic. | exo762 wrote: | I'm sorry. There seems to be a fundamental | misunderstanding of what slashing is. Slashing is just a | tx. It is included (or not) just as any other tx. There | is no magical dance, there is no voting process. | | You are basically stating that slashing is impossible in | certain conditions because network is not censorship | resistant. | | There is one avenue where network can censor. It is a 51% | coalition that orphans blocks that contains slashing | txes. This coalition is dealt with UASF (user activated | soft fork), since this type of behavior goes against core | principals of the network and convincing people to do it | will be really easy. | Zamicol wrote: | If a network "votes down" cryptographic proof, that | itself becomes cryptographic proof of dishonesty. | spywaregorilla wrote: | And... so what? Is there a mechanism to punish validators | for not being honest on slasher votes? | 735409264082 wrote: | You don't recognise their actions and let them fork of | into a useless chain. This happens automatically, just as | when a miner would mine an invalid block. | spicybright wrote: | It's a shame you're being downvoted as your post has | substance. This is a genuine issue worth discussing. | | Validators are run by people who fully control if a | transaction is valid or not. You either need a ton of | GPUs (currently) or a ton of money to have tangible | influence over translations. | | This isn't even a hypothetical, there's a few massive | wallets that are hoarding a ton of eth that will be given | more power from the POS transition. | | We're relying on "the goodness of their hearts" validator | operators and crossing our fingers validators run the | same software with the same rules. | | Even if you call out sketchy transactions that are close | to 50/50 consensus, nothing will happen unless a ton of | people have a ton of money on the line like the DAO | split. | | We need more discussion on how incentives of each party | should be to give the most stable network possible. | michaelsbradley wrote: | > there's a few massive wallets that are hoarding a ton | of eth that will be given more power from the POS | transition | | It's not as if they're automatically given more power. | Such hoards of ETH would need to be deposited in units of | 32 ETH to activate unique validators. You could have a | large number of validators that are actually a single | computer program participating in the Beacon chain, but | that doesn't make too much difference. | | At the bottom layer, we're talking about the application | of an open p2p protocol on the Internet. People can and | will analyze the traffic for that protocol, and it will | be possible to identify rough shapes and sizes of players | in the network. And such analyses won't be long in coming | to public blog posts, etc. following the Merge. | | If decentralization in the network seems at risk, there | will be efforts to remedy the situation. Whether they can | succeed is another question. | 735409264082 wrote: | > edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M. | You say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it | wasn't a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get | x% of validators to agree with you. | | That's not what slashing is supposed to be used for, but | if that situation happened again, Ethereum would fork | again, just as last time when Ethereum classic didn't | agree to freeze the Ether from the DAO hack. PoS makes it | a little easier to fork (which is good imo), but doesn't | change anything fundamental. Everyone still needs to be | in complete agreement about the rules and history for | Ethereum to work. | leppr wrote: | Then the software will automatically discard the evidence. | | I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and | read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you | to. | ethbr0 wrote: | It's a simple question. No need for ad hom. | Karunamon wrote: | What GP posted is not an ad hom; they did not argue for | or against anything, and even if they did it wasn't based | on the characteristics of the speaker. | ethbr0 wrote: | > _I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment | section and read the introductory articles people | helpfully linked you to._ | Karunamon wrote: | Yep, this is what was said. It is not an argument for or | against any point under discussion. | | Ad hominem is "you are wrong because you (fill in the | blank)". It is not "go read the articles given to you". | | "You are wrong because you are an idiot" is ad hominem. | | "You are wrong" is denial. | | "You are an idiot" is insult. | ethbr0 wrote: | "You are spamming the HN comments and didn't read links, | therefore your question is invalid, because of who asked | it" is ad hominem. | | It's easy enough not to reply. No need to get an attitude | about it. | leppr wrote: | Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the OP | is not asking this in good faith. Their first comment is | not in the form of a neutral question, but a prejudiced | assumption based on a false idea that nothing in the | linked article could lead one to believe. | | _> Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely | centralized with some extra steps? | | > Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only | reason it works is because there's just a small number of | validators, which is just going to be the ethereum | foundation and friends._ | | I know Cunningham's Law is a valid discussion strategy, | but the topics of cryptocurrency on HN already tends to | attract enough flamewars and misinformation as it is. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the | OP is not asking this in good faith. | | There's nothing here that was done in bad faith and I | should not need to defend myself for asking a question in | a tech forum. Assuming I'm not asking in good faith is | bad faith. | | The reason I asked was a description pasted a short while | ago: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535409 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535912 | | Which included this line: | | > Slashing is not meant to profitable, and the | whistleblower reward is quite small. We don't need a | million slashers, in fact, we could operate with just | one... expect the Eth Foundation to run them, among other | large players who can spare the resources. | | Which sure sounds like a decentralized process that is | ultimately just centralized around the ETH foundation at | the end of the day. | | Honestly I've learned a lot from the responses here. And | I think people who assumed I was doing anything other | than just asking questions because the idea I was asking | about offended them are asshole. So yeah. Go pound sand. | spywaregorilla wrote: | madeofpalk wrote: | The evidence isn't like a Youtube video. | MR4D wrote: | Who slashes the Slashers? (with apologies to The Watchmen) | | EDIT: Clarification - once a slasher posts the violation, who | removes the ether? | drcode wrote: | To answer "who removes the ether": | | The value in a staking account is calculated on the | blockchain as "amount staked minus slashing penalties", and | this violation is automatically recorded as a slashing | penalty, so the answer is "everybody" | dannyw wrote: | Every Ethereum client (whether you are a staker or not; you | can run a full node without staking!) recognises slashing | transactions, and debits the balance of the misbehaving | staker in their records. | | In other words, the blockchain; in the same way that it's | not _miners_ / stakers who process transactions on bitcoin | or ethereum ; miners / stakers only decide _ordering_ but | everyone who runs an Ethereum client is processing and | verifying every transaction; the same way your browser | checks a TLS certificate. | MR4D wrote: | So, since the client is debiting the slasher, then THAT | transaction is an ether transaction on the chain, and it | gets reviewed just like any other transaction as well? | | Thanks for your answer! | anderspitman wrote: | As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads | here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to | create a technology so complicated that proponents can't | concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why | it doesn't. | codeflo wrote: | As Tony Hoare already wrote in the 80s: "There are two ways | of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so | simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the | other way is to make it so complicated that there are no | obvious deficiencies." | rcxdude wrote: | To be fair, you'll find the same problem with PoW, except | people are more confident in their misunderstandings. | DSMan195276 wrote: | I feel like PoS has always had this problem, it will be | interesting to see how this goes. Certainly PoW has some | hairy details as well, but the backbone of "you can only run | computations so fast" makes it simpler to reason about. | | The question being asked is also a harder one to answer than | just explaining PoS. Similar to a PoW scheme where only one | or two people control all of the hashing power, it could be | decentralized in theory but not actually in practice, and it | doesn't seem like there are any super hard numbers on this | aspect. | AgentME wrote: | The previous post is completely making up the concept of | slashers being an exclusive role. People should not be coming | to any conclusions from a thread that starts off so wildly | disconnected from reality. | serverholic wrote: | Please explain the tcp/ip protocol or the paxos algorithm | concisely. | sebzim4500 wrote: | Aren't there loads of things where you can't concisely | explain how it works? Fundamentally this is a hard problem, | we shouldn't be too surprised if the solution does not fit in | a hackernews comment. (Especially when so many people on this | site seem desperate to misunderstand anything related to | cryptocurrencies). | rglullis wrote: | > I am talking about the class of people with the ability to | declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly | and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this | is a very small number of people and is mostly just the | ethereum foundation. | | There is no such thing as "separate slashers", and there is no | such thing as distinct classes of validators. Whoever told you | that is spreading baseless FUD. | Baopab wrote: | [deleted] | drog wrote: | 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 | same slot as a proof and nodes will slash validator that | produced that signatures (update his balance). Anyone can find | these signatures, and block proposers of the new blocks will | include them into the chain. | SilverBirch wrote: | You know this will be hacked right? 2 layers of jargon, | billion dollars? It'll be a "hack" | 3np wrote: | Thank you. Given all the other radical changes in PoS plans | that have slipped by during the years, that one threw me off | (: | rauljordan2020 wrote: | 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 proceed with slashing | the malicious actor. It is permissionless, global, and we | only need a few honest slashers in the world for the system | to work correctly | plq wrote: | By "A few", how much do you mean? Or is that a dynamic | number? How does it get defined? Who can change it later, | if it's mutable? | londons_explore wrote: | Security is maintained with at least one slasher. | | And there is no upper limit on the number of slashers. | rauljordan2020 wrote: | In fact, here are the instructions anyone can use to run a | slasher at home https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm- | usage/slasher | HenriTEL wrote: | You can run the slasher this way but won't get the | associated reward. | usrusrusrusr wrote: | >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 | 735409264082 wrote: | Your links contradicts your statement. It's absolutely true | that there is no designated class of slashers. Who do you | think designates slashers? | | Anyone can be a slasher, just as anyone can be a staker (as | long as you have 32 Ether). | darawk wrote: | Your links do not say that there is a designated class of | slashers. They just say that it is resource intensive | relative to its rewards, so not everyone will want to be | one. Anyone who chooses to, however, can be one. | drog wrote: | 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. | koheripbal wrote: | Slashing is only detrimental to the bad actor if the fork | fails. If the fork succeeds, then there is no penalty for | a malicious fork. | | This is why they are limiting the number of validators. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | I think it will become centralized, but not in the way that you | think. We're likely to see base-layer transaction censorship, | since nodes are no longer allowed to disagree with each other | (or they'll be slashed), and far more than 33% of staked value | is in the USA (and subject to OFAC compliance). | | I explained in more detail here: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532604 | cesarb wrote: | There's a third option you didn't mention in your comment: | instead of signing the block with these banned transactions | (option 1), or signing an alternate block with other | transactions (option 2), the node could pretend to be offline | for that block (option 3). Instead of being slashed, the node | would then be subject only to the much smaller inactivity | leak for these blocks. | | The only question then is how indirect these sanctions can | be. The node might not be allowed to validate a block with | banned transactions, but what about the _next_ block, which | does not include these blocked transactions, only a pointer | to a block with these banned transactions? What about the | _second next_ block, which has only a pointer to a block with | a pointer to a block with these banned transactions? How many | blocks until the link is tenuous enough that the validators | under USA jurisdiction could validate again without fear? | dcolkitt wrote: | One thing to keep in mind is that Ethereum is nothing but a | network of computers passing messages to each other. Those | messages are considered speech from a Constitutional | perspective. Same as you sending a text message to your | friend. Therefore normal free speech protections almost | certainly apply, and most relevantly _the Brandenburg test_ | for imminent lawless action. | | Suppose Tony texts Paulie and tells him to wack a guy. | That's illegal, unprotected speech, because it directly | leads to imminent lawless action. Similarly the wallet | owner who signs and broadcasts an Ethereum transaction to | send money to North Korea would bass the Brandenburg test | because it obviously leads to imminent lawless action. | | The validator who builds the block that includes an illegal | transaction is an interesting question. On the one hand by | building the block, one could argue that they're | instrumental in putting carrying out the illegal | transaction. OTOH one might argue that if the transaction | is in the network (and priced appropriately) it almost | certainly will get included on-chain eventually. Therefore | the validator might argue that it's activity doesn't create | any imminent lawless activity, because the transaction | being in the mempool is already fait accompli. The | validator is more like the reporter writing about a crime | in the newspaper. | | But what I'm nearly certain of is that building on top of a | chain with a previously finalized illegal transaction is | okay. It's certainly not illegal to talk about a crime | that's already happened. The further a block gets away from | the initial block, then the less imminent the illegal | action becomes. SCOTUS has historically held a very high | standard for Brandenburg, which is why it's not even | illegal to advocate for genocide or the violent overthrow | of the American government. | codeflo wrote: | > Those messages are considered speech from a | Constitutional perspective. | | I have no reason to doubt that your credentials as a | constitutional lawyer are impeccable. | | > The further a block gets away from the initial block, | then the less imminent the illegal action becomes. | | This very plausible legal theory inspires incredible | confidence. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Who gets to decide if something should be slashed | jsheard wrote: | It's determined by the majority of validators. There's two | ways this can go - either the majority of validators | enforce OFAC sanctions, effectively giving OFAC authority | over the entire Ethereum network since validators who go | against it will be slashed, or the majority of validators | don't enforce sanctions, in which case validators with any | presence in the US must put themselves in legal jeopardy to | avoid getting slashed. | spywaregorilla wrote: | So if I acquire 51% of validation power, and you catch me | cheating, the person who gets to decide if I get punished | is me? | jsheard wrote: | 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 out of spite, and it | wouldn't make economic sense to do it for profit. | | As for how that theory will interact with reality, who | knows. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | Or you could be a government with billions staked in your | jurisdiction, and bureaucratic indifference to the | outcome of your regulatory actions. | dane-pgp wrote: | 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. | Geee wrote: | It is not "incredibly expensive". Top 4 exchanges already | hold > 50% of stake. Users give away their coins for | free. For users, it's more expensive to run their own | validator nodes than staking on a centralized service. | lupire wrote: | Exchanges make money from transactions. If they destroy | the network for their users, they lose all their cash | flow. | spywaregorilla wrote: | So what happens if I instead submit a billion slasher | reports that claim the eth foundation nodes have all | lied, none of which contain valid evidence, and continue | to do so every second. If there's no gatekeeper for these | reports, then they're all valid. And they still need to | be voted on, right? | Zetaphor wrote: | Nothing, nothing happens. You can't just lie about | slashing, the term "proof" is being used in the | computational sense. | | The submission you're describing requires a cryptographic | proof of that validator submitting two or more existing | invalid blocks that they signed. You can't just falsify | that without their private keys, so what you're | suggesting is not possible. | cypress66 wrote: | Sorry that's not correct. See | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582316 | [deleted] | cypress66 wrote: | It's baked into the protocol. A single validator can | cryptographically prove that some other validator did | something not allowed, and generate a special transaction | that slashes that validator and gives you some ETH as a | reward. | | A common misconception here is that slashing happens based | on what transactions you include or not. False. Slashing | happens because of things such as proposing or attesting | twice. | davidgerard wrote: | > Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely | centralized with some extra steps? | | no, that's right. It's now a chain where you make money (fresh | coins) by a procedure controlled by the Ethereum Foundation. | | What happens if something goes fatally wrong? The EF will step | in and fix it. | | This has (for a few years now) raised serious questions as to | whether the new network will constitute an offering of | securities - EF sets rules to run a validator and get paid in | ETH. | remram wrote: | I was always wondering about this. From the start it seemed | like "blockchain" could be easily replaced by a few trusted | validators run by independent organizations, the same way | certificate transparency logs are operated, for example. The | value in Bitcoin and proof-of-work was that everyone could | contribute to the security of the log. | | As soon as mining pools appeared, and now even more with proof- | of-stake, we are back with a few parties being the trusted | validators. The fact that they get their powers from on-chain | tokens rather than community decision... is it really a good | thing? | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | Yes it is incorrect. | | https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png | | Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No | longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider | access to gpu or asic manufacturers. | luma wrote: | Instead you just need a massive amount of eth | Zamicol wrote: | Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted | with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be | the best alignment of incentives. | luma wrote: | Sure, and Regular Money is best governed by billionaires. | Incentives line up nicely if you're already rich. | AlexandrB wrote: | What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have | the system you describe with fiat currency and | traditional banks. | landemva wrote: | There are additional goals including in part censorship | resistance and it can't be seized without the keys. | 735409264082 wrote: | 32 Ether or mining equipment is nothing compared to what | you need to have any real influence over fiat money. | spywaregorilla wrote: | This is not the question I am asking. You can have many | people putting up their 32 ETH. Sure that's "decentralized". | | But what if most of the stakers collude to double spend | tokens? My understanding is that there is an additional layer | of validators that have the power to force them to give up | their stake as a penalty. Hence "proof of stake". And that | there are very few validators. And it's really just the | ethereum foundation. | chippiewill wrote: | Coordinating and attempting an attack is seriously | expensive in proof of stake if something goes wrong due to | the slashing | zaptrem wrote: | You're mistaken, validators and stakers are one and the | same. A 51% attack becomes unbelievably more expensive in a | proof of stake system, especially because at the end of it | all of your money is burned (whereas with POW you get to | keep the GPUs unless they change the algo). | spywaregorilla wrote: | stakers/validators vs. slashers | PretzelPirate wrote: | There is no defined role called a "slasher". There are | randomly-decided committees that are regularly updated as | part of Ethereum PoS consensus that play different roles. | Your validator could be in any one of those roles (or in | a pending state) at any time. | spywaregorilla wrote: | I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an | optional, expensive seeming process. | | e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm- | usage/slasher | PretzelPirate wrote: | You're misunderstanding. Enabling the "slasher feature" | on your validators is an option that any validator can | do, not something that only "approved" validators can do. | | There's no one gate keeping your ability to become a | slasher as long as you run a validator, and there's no | centralized entity deciding whether or not to slash | someone's stake. | AlexandrB wrote: | > Running a slasher is not meant to be profitable. | Slashing is meant to be rare and whistleblower rewards | are purposefully low. Running a slasher is meant to be an | altruistic action, and as stated, only a single, honest, | properly functioning slasher needs to be active in the | network to catch slashable offenses. | | Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic | enforcement in a network built around economic | incentives. What if the altruistic slashers are simply | paid money to turn off their nodes? | exo762 wrote: | How can you detect that people are NOT running slasher | nodes? | | This model assumes that 1/n is honest. This is almost as | safe as it gets. | AlexandrB wrote: | Depends how big "n" is. It's certainly not the number of | ETH users. Running a slasher currently requires 1TB of | SSD among other things[1]. I assume these requirements | will grow with the popularity of ETH? If so, in a world | where 100TB of SSD space is required the number of | individuals who can run slashers drops rapidly. In the | extreme case, aren't we looking at a small(er) number of | well-funded organizations doing all the slashing? | | [1] https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher | | > However, home stakers are advised not to run a slasher | on personal hardware, as it is a tremendously resource- | hungry process. Slasher is very heavy on database access | and disk usage, and the slasher.db will quickly grow to | 1TB or more when running on mainnet. | NavinF wrote: | A 1TB SSD is like $50. I put one in a small USB-C M.2 | case and use it as a flash drive. | | I'm pretty sure hardware costs will always be a rounding | error compared to the $50k that "home stakers" need if | they want to run their own validator. | [deleted] | overtonwhy wrote: | What about a DDoS attack? | mypastself wrote: | What happens if the majority of infrastructure is | provided by a small number of cloud computing services? | An attacker with access to those services needn't stake | their own funds, and an "attack" might simply entail | complying with local laws. | lupire wrote: | The 51% is staked coins, not computers. | [deleted] | bowsamic wrote: | What if most of the miners collude to double spend tokens? | The problem is the same. | | The difference is that proof of work automatically tends to | centralisation due to its economy of scale: it's cheaper to | add one more miner to your pool if you already have a big | mining operation, but staking 1 eth is always staking 1 | eth. | | Both PoS and PoW have the problem where you can buy out the | majority if you have the power to do so. | spywaregorilla wrote: | The problem is not the same. In proof of work, it just | breaks and you can double spend. In this proof of stake | setup, you can double spend, but then the ethereum | foundation can punish you with its slashers. | howinteresting wrote: | If most of the miners collude like that than ETH will | lose most of its value. The game theoretic aspect of PoS | is an important part of its overall security. | AlexandrB wrote: | This is only true if ETH remains a niche security and not | a widespread currency. A large population won't drop a | commonly used currency because of ideological concerns | like miner collusion. Indeed, they'll have massive | incentive to keep using it since their saving may be | denominated in it. | camjw wrote: | I don't understand this comment: "but staking 1eth is | always staking 1eth". | | If I have 100 GPUs and I buy one more can't I turn around | and say "But buying one more GPU is just buying one more | GPU"? Even if your point is that electricity bills are | lower per additional GPU, surely humans discount the | value of incremental money after some point so for those | with lots of eth incremental eth isn't worth as much? | bowsamic wrote: | It's cheaper to run 1 more GPU when you are already | running 100 | | It's the same price to add 1 eth when you own 100 eth as | when you own 1 eth | camjw wrote: | Kind of, but doesn't that assume a linear utility | function for holding eth which I think seems unrealistic? | Plus, there are costs associated with holding eth (cold | storage etc) which seem fixed, so its cheaper to securely | stake 1 additional eth when you're already staking 100eth | than when you're not running any. Plus fixed costs of | actually running a staking business (by analogy with a | mining business). | bowsamic wrote: | Yes, the utility function is linear for PoS, and wildly | non linear for PoW | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus- | mechanisms... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake | | Start here. | | "The threat of a 51% attack still exists on proof-of-stake | as it does on proof-of-work, but it's even riskier for the | attackers. A attacker would need 51% of the staked ETH | (about $15,000,000,000 USD)." | spywaregorilla wrote: | I'm pretty much just asking the same question on every | thread now. How does something get slashed? These | articles say nothing about it. There are many docs saying | all you need is 1 honest slasher node. Well, what happens | if you have a dishonest slasher node? | pa7x1 wrote: | There is no separate notion of slasher, every staker is | potentially a slasher. Slashing evidence can be included | when you make a block. Doing so is rewarded, so you are | economically incentivized to report slashable offenses if | you find them. Blocks are validated and "attested" by | everyone else. Failing to produce a block that everyone | else accepts (edit: everyone else meaning at least 2/3 | which is the quorum used) has at best the economic | opportunity cost of what you could have earned and missed | on and at worst (if someone else reports a slashable | offense on your part that is accepted) a slashing penalty | plus you get kicked out of the validators. | | The rest is game theory. Dishonest validators win the | game being dishonest if they are over 2/3 of the | validator set. Then they can enforce their bad blocks | into everyone else. Otherwise they get slashed or suffer | other kind of penalties (inactivity leak if they manage | to prevent the network from reaching consensus for a | while). | | So if you manage to bribe or buy 2/3 of the staked ETH | then you can attack the network. There is of course a | very significant economic cost to it. More interestingly | at that point you are strongly aligned with the network | itself as you represent a huge % of its value so you | would be attacking yourself in a way. This is a notable | difference with PoW where miners are not necessarily | aligned in economic incentives with token-holders or | users. | programmarchy wrote: | The slashing can only occur if the validator can be | proven to break certain rules e.g. double voting. The | reports are evaluated by the network. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > The reports are evaluated by the network. | | The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious | actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is | dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests? | drdeca wrote: | Evaluated in the same way that "does this address have | enough to send to this much to this other address" is | evaluated? If it isn't valid, then a block containing it | isn't valid, and this is a thing which any client can | automatically check. | | What happens if you try to send trillions of invalid | transactions in any sensible chain? | Zamicol wrote: | To whatever node your client is talking to, the invalid | transactions should not be relayed. This is more of a | DDOS situation than anything novelly technical. Like all | computer systems, DDOS is a technical challenge that | requires careful consideration. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Normally there's a fee to try and send such things to | prevent such behavior. I haven't seen anything suggesting | thats the case for slasher reports. | | The thing here is that the validators don't need to be | honest when responding to a slasher report. | rekoil wrote: | 51% is possible, but if it happens someone has wasted (at | current valuations) ~$15B gaining a majority stake in a | network they are torpedoing. It would be pretty dumb to | do something like that to your own investment. | vntok wrote: | So Elon Musk alone could do it on a whim, for the lolz? | bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: | What you are referring to is an old problem (arguably now | solved) called "nothing at stake." Short, bastardized | answer is that something built into the consensus code | called "slashing" keeps the validators/shakers from trying | to stake two versions of a block. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Who gets to run a slasher node and who gets to agree that | its valid to slash a block? | immibis wrote: | I don't know the specific rules for Ethereum, but in | general PoS systems, anyone can slash. All you have to do | is submit two different headers for the same block signed | by the same validator. This proves the validator is | cheating. The person who submits the proof may get to | keep some of the validator's slashed money, which is a | good incentive to run slashing nodes as this can amount | to thousands of dollars per slash, and a good incentive | not to double-validate as this can amount to thousands of | dollars per time you are caught. | | Perversely, since double-validation happens rarely, since | it is expensive, the actual interface for slashing on | e.g. BSC is not well-documented or user-friendly. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > This proves the validator is cheating. | | To whom? Who gets to decide to slash the funds? | | I caught you cheating and can prove it. You don't give a | shit and control 51% of the network. How do you get | punished? | tromp wrote: | You're right that for a slash to be publicly verifiable, | the cheating evidence has to appear on-chain. So indeed | there is the question of whether this evidence can be | censored... | rglullis wrote: | If you control 51% of the network (actually, with | Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the | validators to control consensus) and people know you are | malicious, people will abandon the network and you will | lose your investment because no one is interested in | participating in a network controlled by a crook. | | It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you | please stop with the concern trolling? | spywaregorilla wrote: | > If you control 51% of the network (actually, with | Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the | validators to control consensus) and people know you are | malicious, people will abandon the network and you will | lose your investment because no one is interested in | participating in a network controlled by a crook. | | If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol, | then that means you just need 33% of the network to avoid | being slashed. Is that wrong? | | > Can you please stop with the concern trolling? | | Can you please stop trying to claim a moral high ground | for no reason? | rglullis wrote: | > just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is | that wrong? | | Yes, it is wrong. | spywaregorilla wrote: | How is it wrong? If you need 67% consensus to approve a | transaction, and slashing is a transaction, then you can | prevent slashing with 33%. What's incorrect about that | reasoning? | rglullis wrote: | You won't be prevent slashing with 1/3, you will be | merely delaying the block production each time is is | proposed. Every time your 1/3 of the nodes attempt | maliciously delays of production of a valid block, _you_ | will be slashed, and then you won 't have 1/3 of the | required funds at stake anymore. | spywaregorilla wrote: | But... you can't be slashed unless a block gets processed | that supports your slashing, correct? | rglullis wrote: | Yes, but what is your point? You will be slashed no | matter how hard you try to avoid it, unless you have 2/3 | of the validators. The closer you are to 2/3, the faster | you will be slashed. The system is self-estabilizing. | pa7x1 wrote: | 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 | spywaregorilla wrote: | Does the network recognize a difference between being | inactive/offline and actively voting no? | pa7x1 wrote: | 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. | ahahahahah wrote: | The people you are discussing this with clearly have no | idea how the system actually works and are far out of | their depth as far as considering the ways malicious | actors interact with it. | bhaak wrote: | Social slashing. The honest parts of the community would | organize and fork you away. | | If you were following the current events on Ethereum, | this question has just arisen in the last weeks when the | US sanctioned the privacy oriented Tornado Cash contract. | addaon wrote: | In a general PoS system like you describe, what prevents | a bistable situation from emerging? If there is any | significant level of cheating, then running a slasher is | profitable, which makes cheating very unprofitable, | driving it to zero. But in the absence of cheating, | what's the motivation to develop, maintain, test, and | operate a slasher node? Isn't this prone to long periods | of time with negligible cheating where all the slashers | die out, followed by one big malicious attack that isn't | caught promptly? | Zamicol wrote: | 1. Energy production and 2. specialized chip production | | are both centralized, with the later being highly | centralized. The move to PoS removes both of these | centralized targets. | falcolas wrote: | > No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and | insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers. | | No, you _just_ need money, 32 eth is only around $50000. | | And there's a lot of people with sufficient money to stand up | multiple validators. And validators can also initiate/vote on | arbitrary slash requests (which costs them nothing, as I read | it). | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | Sounds like an improvement to burning an entire country's | worth of electricity... | falcolas wrote: | There's a tradeoff. We need to acknowledge the tradeoff, | and be prepared for the folks who just want to watch the | world burn, and have the money to do so. | newsclues wrote: | As a not well off person with a gaming computer with power | included in my rent, I don't have 50,000$. | | Shrinking the number of people with the financial means to | contribute doesn't seem like it's going to result in | decentralization. | sebzim4500 wrote: | Right but you can't afford to buy ASICs either so from | your point of view the situation hasn't really changed. | The chance of you ever being able to mine an ETH block | with your gaming PC is negligable. | Anunayj wrote: | It should however be noted that Ethereum had a ICO [1] on | launch, where you could buy ethereum for a particular price. | | 9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders". | (it could however be more [2]) | | Today it accounts for something like 59% (72m) of total | supply (~120m). Make what you will of that. | | 1. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/initial-coin-offering- | exp... | | 2. https://medium.com/@hasufly/ethereum-presale-dynamics- | revisi... | xur17 wrote: | > 9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders" | | > Today it accounts for something like 59% of total supply. | Make what you will of that. | | Can you help me understand what exactly this means? | Ethereum's supply has grown since the presale, so if | anything the 9.9% should have gotten smaller since then. | bhaak wrote: | OP has provided the right links but either misunderstood | the text or phrased it very confusingly. | | https://messari.io/asset/ethereum/profile/launch-and- | initial... | | Ethereum's crowdsale supply was 72 million ETH. Of that | 60 million were sold for BTC in the crowdsale. 6 million | was given to the Ethereum Foundation and 6 million to | early contributors (overall 20% of what was sold was | created as a pre-mine). | | Now Ethereum's supply is ~122 million, so the miners | produced 50 millions new ETH. | Anunayj wrote: | Oh, I was a bit unclear there. The 9.9% was of the total | money that was raised in the ICO (60m) and ended up being | ~5.9m. | | The total initial premine was 72m (~59% of today's | supply). | | I think someone more knowledgeable might provide a better | breakdown of those funds, except that the article(s) | linked covers it a lot better than my comment. | flarex wrote: | It should also be noted in the 7 years since launch that a | large portion of that 59% would have been sold or lost and | hence re-distributed to other users on the platform. | jjulius wrote: | I have been wondering the same thing about this, too. I'm | fairly eye-rolly when it comes to crypto and such, so I'd be | curious to see if this take is accurate or not. | thebeastie wrote: | No, the validators are anyone with a stake in the system, not | just the Ethereum foundation and friends. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Not the people putting up the stake. The people with the | power to declare them liars who lose their stake. | IHLayman wrote: | But, a stake has to be at least 32 ETH, where at $1650/ETH | lands you at $52,800. So, the validators have to have a | significant investment in the platform, more than your | average investor, and far more than anyone simply owning ETH. | While I don't necessarily agree with the centralization | arguments, I do agree that it is a far smaller group of | people than you'd think. | bowsamic wrote: | $52,800 is a pittance compared to any remotely significant | mining operation | shudza wrote: | you don't need mining equipment to validate transactions | on bitcoin, nor do you need to own it. With ETH, you need | to own 32 ETH, obviously. | exo762 wrote: | There is a confusion in language used. Bitcoin has two | types of actors: block consumers and block producers. | Ethereum has three types of actors: block consumers, | validators and block producers. Thing often described as | "full node" does just that - it consumes blocks, checking | if blocks are valid. Ethereum validators are different, | they not only consume blocks, they also attest their | correctness for the rest of the network. | Rebelgecko wrote: | Who validates the validators? The other validators? | exo762 wrote: | No. Their role is a bit different. They exist to prevent | so called nothing-at-stake attack. If each block has to | be signed by known parties (parties selected in a way | attackers can't control), and those parties are bound by | slashing rules (signing two different blocks for the same | height is grounds for slashing), than it is very hard to | pull off nothing-at-stake attack and create an | alternative chain. | pa7x1 wrote: | Absolutely not the case. You can verify the transactions | without owning any ETH, you cannot participate in the | reward process for your efforts though for that you need | to be a validators and put up your stake. | | The parallel with Bitcoin is quite strong. You can run a | Bitcoin node without running a miner and verify the chain | but you don't get rewarded. You can run an Ethereum node | without staking and verify the chain but you don't get | rewarded. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Again, no, not the people putting up the stake. | | I am asking about the people with the power to declare that | people who put up the stake were dishonest in their | validations. | drcode wrote: | There is no such a power, slashing is 100% decentralized. | | The key innovation in modern POS systems was figuring out | how to do this, it is a solved problem. | bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: | The code - not the people. Trust but verify - just like | all other FOSS. | spywaregorilla wrote: | The people who are running the slasher nodes | drcode wrote: | If I understand what you mean by "slasher nodes" (there | is no such term in reality): Anybody can run a node that | checks for conflicting validation messages and get a | small reward by doing so. There is zero stake required to | do this. It is not some power conferred to "vitalik and | his friends" | upsidesinclude wrote: | Even that isn't accurate because many groups and exchanges | will aggregate eth from users. Then users with far less | than 32 eth are participants in a stake through their | chosen representative. | tsujp wrote: | there's just a small number of validators, which is just going | to be the ethereum foundation and friends. | | There are over 415 000 validators. | | See: https://beaconcha.in/ | spywaregorilla wrote: | Read the edit. Slashers. Not validators. | tyrust wrote: | Any validator can run the slasher process. | | Docs from one of the validator clients: | https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher | olalonde wrote: | Yes, it's incorrect to say that. Decentralisation is a spectrum | and those extra steps are there for a reason. In terms of | decentralisation, Ethereum probably sits somewhere between | Bitcoin and Paypal. | djschnei wrote: | let's just rebrand it JPMcoin and get this charade over with | already... | swamp40 wrote: | My suspicion is that Ethereum got so popular because there were | so many ways to make money from it. Basically a cash cow for | developers and miners. | | Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift | to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of | money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease. | spaceman_2020 wrote: | The money making opportunities will be in waiting for the next | bullrun, then just forking the biggest ongoing trend onto a new | and upcoming chain. | | You don't have to create anything of lasting value. Just time | the market and you can make wild money without doing any real | work. | stiltzkin wrote: | Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire | staking with just 3 validators. | tyrust wrote: | This site has a calculator: | https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/ | | Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year. | You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that | to work. | dannyw wrote: | 1. Yield is increasing to 7% - 12% after the merge, as | validators will now earn transaction fees, and MEV if | configured. This increases it to approx $18k a year. | | 2. This is assuming 1 ETH = $1650. If the Ethereum price | doubles (but still under the ATH), you'd be at $36k a year; | not enough for Cali or NYC (perhaps if you own your home?) | but certainly fine for cheaper COL states. | bee_rider wrote: | How involved is running a validator? If it can just run off | in the corner -- living somewhere cheap and doing small | scale contracting for fun or whatever could be a neat | lifestyle. | pimterry wrote: | This sets concrete trigger parameters for the switchover, which | implies an approximate date, but not a well-defined hard | deadline. | | If you're interested in the real progress, there's a helpful live | timer tracking the countdown to that trigger & current switchover | time estimates here: https://wenmerge.com/ | cypress66 wrote: | There's also http://bordel.wtf which I think is more accurate | meltyness wrote: | If Ethereum is inflationary, and there is a minimum cost to | staking, why would I ever begin to stake if I know that the cost | can only go down in the future? | rglullis wrote: | For starters, Ethereum is not inflationary. ETH is minted and | burned according to network activity. The more people making | transactions (and paying for them) the less ETH will be | created. It can even get to the point where some blocks lead to | a net _burn_ of ETH. | | Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to | what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help | secure the chain at a (relatively low) cost compared to PoW | chains, and having an efficient and secure blockchain opens up | _other_ opportunities for profit. | | In my case, I am less interested in speculating with tokens and | I am more interested in seeing a blockchain that can be an | _actual_ alternative for cross-border payments. I feel like by | becoming a staker (and by working in projects that leverage | layer-2 scaling networks [0]) I am contributing to that | becoming a reality with a (relatively) low opportunity cost. | | [0]: https://hub20.io | meltyness wrote: | I won't beat around the bush. What is an ETH worth? There are | not details about the economics, just the ecosystem, which is | replicated across more thoughtful platforms. I personally | prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better | foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in | adoption. | | $53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for | 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that means | there's any value in adopting ETH immediately? | pcthrowaway wrote: | > I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself | has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some | urgency in adoption. | | I really liked Cardano, until I started trying to learn | more about it and develop for it. | | It's _way_ behind Ethereum in developer experience. The way | funds are shuffled around between addresses for a wallet | also makes it much harder to reason about (even though in | theory the UTXO model is better than account-based for | parallel processing of transactions). In actuality, I don | 't think it's more scalable than Ethereum, and the scaling | solutions they're working on (which are years out IMO) are | L2s, like with Ethereum. | | The tooling is also way behind Ethereum, and running a full | wallet is incredibly resource-intensive. | | I'm still staking a lot of Cardano, but I think it's | unlikely it will overtake Ethereum in value at this point. | rglullis wrote: | Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it | was well below $100. | | And for those that are joining now, but worry that the | investment would be too big, consider the possibility of | pooling resources with other people and _stake using your | own node_. This is one the things that I would like to do | next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool | together resources with their friends and to manage their | validators... | | > so is there some mathematical guarantee that means | there's any value in adopting ETH immediately? | | Guarantee? No, of course not. | meltyness wrote: | What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some | collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH- | stability, ETH-usefulness? | rglullis wrote: | 1) Not specific to Ethereum, but to its goals. For me, | turning a profit is secondary to the goal of having a | permissionless and censorship-resistant way for cross- | border payments. At the moment, I believe that Ethereum | (as an ecosystem) is the closest to make that a reality | because it has the largest developer mindshare and the | Foundation seems to be the only one playing the long | game. | | 2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for | myself, and I believe that there are others like me. | meltyness wrote: | I did some digging and the principles are elucidated by | vitalik on his blog.[0] The principles are based on the | fact that proof of work is antisocial, impractical or | unrealistic. The 6 times this was discussed last year[1] | in the ethereum devs meeting on zoom might also be of- | interest. | | [0]: | https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html | [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361 | bluelightning2k wrote: | 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! | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | If you're interested in the technical coordination part of it | you may be interested in the client diversity ideal that | Ethereum has. Changes to Ethereuem don't happen by implementing | the change on a client, but by updating a spec and then the ~5 | execution clients or the ~5 consensus clients all update their | code to become compliant. | | It's a really high cost to pay, but in theory (assuming that | the mix that is run is actually diverse) can protect against | implementation bugs. In the browser world It'd be like running | two different browser engines and only displaying DOMs that are | consistent with both engines, or JS engine or final render etc. | kkielhofner wrote: | It's a worthy ideal but it doesn't shape up in reality. 75% | of current eth clients are one implementation[0]. Beacon is a | little better but it looks like it could be heading that way | (with Prysm already being well over half). | | I would have loved to contribute to client diversity but my | experience with non-geth and non-prysm clients has been so | bad I did what it looks like everyone else does - throw my | hands up and jump on the bandwagon of what seems to actually | work. | | [0] https://ethernodes.org/ | zeroclip wrote: | Client diversity has improved in recent months, | particularly consensus clients: | | https://clientdiversity.org/ | kkielhofner wrote: | For beacon that is definitely better than the last time I | looked. However geth is still 75% and relevant to the | topic of the merge, roughly 88% of current clients aren't | ready for it[0]!!! | | It will be interesting to see what these numbers look | like when the merge actually happens... | | [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge | michaelsbradley wrote: | The maintainers of geth recently published and then | flagged (as bugged) the first release that was fully | Merge-ready, so it's not really possible that geth | operators could be ready at this time. | | I believe just today the next release was published, | fixing the bug in the previous one: | | https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases | pcthrowaway wrote: | If geth isn't ready for the merge, how were (formerly) | PoW testnets upgraded to PoS already? | michaelsbradley wrote: | Because geth was ready for those test merges. | kkielhofner wrote: | I covered that debacle in another comment: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581419 | | As noted there prysm, geth, etc have had their first | merge-ready releases less than 48 hours ago (with one | "oops" already) I (for one) will be waiting for what I'm | sure will be more bugs to shake out in the next several | days. | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | Yup, one of the big problems is that MEV typically happens | on geth right now so there's a huge financial imperative to | use geth. MEV is another topic that is quite interesting | from a technical & game theory point of view, but some | parts of it are pretty horrifying from a moral point of | view (e.g. front-running, forced liquidations, sandwhich | attacks). | | Right now deciding what transactions go into a block (which | includes manufacturing your own transactions that yield | riskless profit (called MEV)) is tightly bound to running | geth. Flash bots is working on ways to decouple that so | there is increased specialization and allows for | flexibility in which client you run. | xur17 wrote: | FWIW, ethernodes is not an accurate source of data on this. | They are missing a LOT of nodes (mine has been running for | over a year and isn't listed, and others I have spoken to | say the same thing). | RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: | Is it true that the Ethereum foundation itself doesn't | develop a fully usable set of clients anymore for the post- | Merge network? | | There seem to be only 3rd-party and seemingly commercial | entities developing the "consensus" client which is needed to | use the PoS network? | | As a user it would be rather "meh" to not have an official | client to rely on :| | | See: | | "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._ | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything | by this much is pro-humanity. | | How long until BTC follows suit? | sph wrote: | 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. | beambot wrote: | If bitcoin _doesn 't_ find a more environmentally-conscious | scaling mechanism, it will be challenging for any ESG- | conscious institutional investor to remain invested. The | capital exodus toward PoS-ETH could accelerate a sea change. | yieldcrv wrote: | BTC mining will be the methane reduction solution as the | market dynamics force it to be | | the process generally creates some CO2, rerouting that energy | on flare gas sites into power for miners, but thats much less | worse than methane, and we can't let a sustainability goal of | perfect be the enemy of good | rglullis wrote: | Judging by the BTC maxis on this thread and all the FUD they | are spreading, never. | | If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will | happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for | the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once | it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will | campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether. | | But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready to | have, yet. | exo762 wrote: | There is an amazing proposal [0] on building trustless | bridge for BTC on Ethereum. Leona Hioki is GOAT. | | [0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge- | creation-wit... | swalsh wrote: | Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists. | AgentME wrote: | The Avalanche Bridge isn't trustless. It's dependent on | specific privileged operators to continue functioning who | have the ability to cheat or get hacked. | stiltzkin wrote: | Never, maxis know how much BTC will be worth when the last | BTC is mined. | chizhik-pyzhik wrote: | Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in | comparison to other blockchain projects. | josu wrote: | Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin | valuable. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 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 grow in value too | much if it sticks with PoW. | josu wrote: | If the hashrate can't keep up with the price increase | because it has exhausted all sources of available | electricity, then difficulty will adjust down. | | This doesn't limit the potential growth of Bitcoin, it | only puts an upper bound on the security per block. | OGWhales wrote: | > 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 minutes rate, but I don't | understand what the difficultly being proportional to | value has to do with 51% attacks being feasible. | pcthrowaway wrote: | I'd argue it's susceptible to 51% attack already, but as | BTC's value grows, the profitability from pulling off a | 51% grows as well. Therefore, the hashrate not scaling | with the market cap of BTC makes the prospect of funding | a 51% attack more and more appealing. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 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. | zaroth wrote: | It's not really so clear cut. | | Perhaps if a 51% attack let you fully steal coins yes. | But there are only specific things a 51% attacker can do, | and even attempting to pull off the attack has game- | theoretic impact on the price if Bitcoin. | | The more practical attacks are greedy miner type attacks | which just boost a large miners win rate. | | The 51%-esque chain rewriting, double-spending and | transaction censorship stuff is a different story. | | What you can definitely say is that economically the | profitability of the block reward and transaction fees | will drive new entrants into mining. As BTC price | increases the willingness to spend more on mining | (wasting electricity) increases. But the block reward | also halves now and then to reduce the value of new | blocks and prevent the waste from getting absurdly out of | hand. | kkielhofner wrote: | It also makes BTC positively radioactive to mainstream | adoption. There are countless examples of $CORP | announcing some bitcoin initiative or another only to | roll it back almost immediately after the outrage | expressed from a population that is increasingly aware of | and concerned about climate change. | TheDudeMan wrote: | Have you seen a graph of global energy use over time? It | goes up. | operator-name wrote: | It should be clear that a lot of Bitcoin's value is in its | established history, legacy and to some extent trust. This | is it's key differentiator to any other chain. PoW is part | of Bitcoin's history and legacy, but it isn't PoW itself | that gives bitcoin value. | josu wrote: | Thanks for expanding. | exo762 wrote: | May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing. | nowahe wrote: | 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 amount of blocks / hour, adjusting the difficulty | of the sha bruteforce, compensating for technological | improvement). | | Now, to create a bitcoin you need to mine a block | (solving the bruteforce), inherently requiring a set (on | average) amount of real world value (mostly energy) to be | irrevocably wasted. For the miners to recoup those | losses, they MUST sell the bitcoin they just created for | at least their lost value. Which in turn, guarantee the | minimum value of each bitcoin. | | And with this system, the minimum value of each bitcoin | is inversely equal to the amount of value "wasted". | sph wrote: | 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. | josu wrote: | This is a good explanation | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32583540 | unnouinceput wrote: | It costs an average of ~5k USD to mine one bitcoin. | Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner | will sell below this value due to not breaking even on | electricity. That's why also bitcoin miners go to places | where electricity cost is low, and why they undervoltage | their mining cards. | exo762 wrote: | Why does it make any difference for me (a hypothetical | BTC holder) how BTC is minted? | | > Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner | will sell below this value due to not breaking even on | electricity. | | It does not work like that. If you need to pay your bills | you will sell BTC for whatever price it is right now. | Unless you want to long BTC, but that's a different | story. | stale2002 wrote: | > Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner | will sell below this value due to not breaking even on | electricity | | You have causation reversed here. It is not that bitcoin | would not sell/be worth less than the amount to mine it. | | Instead, it is that it wouldn't be mined if it were worth | less than the cost to mine it. | | At which point, miners would drop out, and the cost to | mine it would reduce, as the difficulty goes down. | SilasX wrote: | Wait, really? It only costs $5k to mine one when they | sell for $21k? | unnouinceput wrote: | I meant electricity cost, on average, is ~ 5k USD. I | didn't factor anything else, like cost of hardware, | rent/location, living expenses etc. | petters wrote: | What cards? Bitcoin has not been mined on GPUs for a long | time and I would have thought that the ASICs used were | already optimal. | thinkmassive wrote: | ASICs are also populated onto cards, and miner firmware | handles tuning the hash rate of each chip (or card) based | on inputs like desired temperature and power consumption. | These inputs are often adjustable. | | Heat causes chips and other components to degrade, so not | everyone runs their miners at maximum output all the | time. | googlryas wrote: | Not really - being able to resolve double spends in a | decentralized cryptocurrency is what makes BTC valuable, | and PoW is just one method for doing that. I don't think | there is any evidence that PoW is _the only_ way to resolve | double spends with a decentralized cryptocurrency. | swalsh wrote: | Satoshi consensus is essentially the bible to their cultural | ideology. | | You can bridge bitcoin to another chain with faster finality, | smart contracts, and environmental consensus. | | But at the end if the day there will still be a huge amount | of people who will never deviate from the core ideology. | matheusmoreira wrote: | It's not ideology. There are pros and cons to both proof | and stake and proof of work. | | The idea behind PoW was to decentralize proofs by allowing | anyone to participate. This is a valuable property in a | cryptocurrency. Bitcoin's implementation utterly failed in | that regard. There are better projects out there, like | Monero, but Bitcoin just refuses to die. | Temasik wrote: | yyyk wrote: | If this works well enough, I wonder how long before governments | decide to straight up ban large PoW chains. | overtonwhy wrote: | And now there's a split where the miners keep mining and | everybody gets a new duplicate coin account and the grifters cash | out more? | rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: | No. | idiotsecant wrote: | In this thread: A million crypto tribalists whatabouting and | clutching pearls and absolutely nobody talking about what this is | - a pretty cool organizational and technical achievement. | | Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call | the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things | can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large | corporation of the interests or a nation-state, but on the | genuine belief in the soundness of an idea and a willingness to | work together to change the world. | hartAtWork wrote: | Amen | naltun wrote: | Nicely said. | stockpricethrow wrote: | How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major | hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the | price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up, | would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way? | joshmarlow wrote: | Even if the crypto market for GPUs dries up, the ML market only | seems to be growing. GPU manufacturers should be just fine. | jahewson wrote: | Unlikely. There are plenty of other coins out there to mine and | one of the advantages of GPU vs ASIC is that you can just | switch instantly. | anonporridge wrote: | Na. Bitcoin and Ethereum make up 60% of the total | cryptocurrency "market cap" and a good chunk of the remainder | are USD stablecoins that run on top of a base chain with no | mining itself. | | The next most valuable proof of work coin at <1% of the total | market value is dogecoin, and that's already long been using | ASIC miners like bitcoin. | | Unless Ethereum miners forcibly maintain a PoW fork or try to | pump up Ethereum Classic back into the spotlight, GPU mining | might finally be effectively dead. | | As many people have said for years, there's only room on this | planet for one proof of work chain, and it's bitcoin. All | other use cases with be proof of stake, or sidechains and | layer twos of some base chain. | jahewson wrote: | Eek, thanks for the stats, I didn't realise it was that | lopsided. Maybe I'll be able to afford a GPU again! | anonporridge wrote: | Yeah. Ethereum has been the bane of home PC gaming for | years now. | | It would have been nice if they had at least moved to | purpose made ASICs, like bitcoin had the decency to do. | drexlspivey wrote: | Nope, mining needs to be profitable too. There is not enough | margin in all altcoins combined to support the influx of GPUs | coming from ethereum. | immibis wrote: | Nvidia is down almost 50%... from its high around Jan/Dec. I | suspect people saw this coming from a mile away. If you think | the effect is likely to be stronger or weaker than the market | predicts, bet on it now. | drexlspivey wrote: | People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to | buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge | sp332 wrote: | It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't | have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting | (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners | close up shop. | johntb86 wrote: | I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for | mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat | out 24/7. I don't know how true that is. | OGWhales wrote: | Buying used in general is risky, but I'd wager buying | from a miner is not much worse than buying used from a | non-miner. | | I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards | and with running them at a constant rate, they won't | undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down | each time it gets used. | sp332 wrote: | That might be true for the chips, but the fans have | probably been run 24/7 for much longer than the comsumer- | level cards are rated for. So keep an eye out for dying | fans. | ls612 wrote: | The cores should be fine since they have usually been run | undervolted at lower temperatures, but the memory has | been more stressed than a gaming card's memory. | AlexandrB wrote: | A friend sold me a 1070 Ti he used 24/7 for a year | mining... something (zcash?). I ended up using that thing | in my gaming PC for 3 more years before I upgraded | recently. | | I'm sure the lifespan of used GPUs is reduced, but it's | hard to say by how much. There's probably a lot of | variability due to chip yield and operating conditions | (especially temperature and ESD safety). But if I could | get one at half off, I'd probably take that chance. | zionic wrote: | But HN comments assured me it was never going to | happen/will stay "6 months away". | | I sure hope those people bought mining GPUs/put their money | where their mouth is. | titaniumtown wrote: | watch ethereum classic just pick up where ethereum left off lol ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-24 23:01 UTC)