[HN Gopher] Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51%...
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Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack
Author : michaelsbradley
Score : 451 points
Date : 2021-03-12 21:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (our.status.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (our.status.im)
| nafizh wrote:
| Not quite related. What's the best way to start trading
| cryptocurrencies for a beginner considering ease of use, security
| etc?
| jules-jules wrote:
| Surprised that there hasn't been a mention of how the merge to
| Ethereum 2.0, PoS will reduce energy consumption by 99%.
|
| A great background article going into some of the details here
|
| https://consensys.net/blog/ethereum-2-0/proof-of-stake-is-co...
| dastx wrote:
| I suppose the issue in this scenario isn't necessarily energy,
| but that it's miners are at odds with Ethereum devs to the
| point where they're willing to attack the network itself.
| Either way, I'm all for PoS because of the reduced energy
| consumption, and if it puts a middle finger in the face of the
| miners, who are partially to blame for shortages of consoles
| and GPUs, then I'm even more for it.
| Bluestein wrote:
| This could get really ugly.
|
| (Not only per se, but, also, as it really shows how "centralized"
| these suposedly decentralized systems are ...
|
| ... and -this- could have consequences.)
| hanniabu wrote:
| They are decentralized. This move is more of a risk mitigation
| strategy than risk of a 51% attack. There's also certain risks
| from miners at the transition block because they know the exact
| block it will happen at.
| mempko wrote:
| it's centralized in both directions. Small development team and
| small group of powerful miners.
| hanniabu wrote:
| What are you talking about, it has the most developers of any
| project.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| ETH, and any cryptocurrency for that matter, has never been
| "decentralized" in terms of development. There are always a few
| guys making all major decisions, and it's hard to oppose them
| other than making a forked currency.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| This is not true. I am one of the maintainers of
| https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, one of the main
| client implementations of eth2 today. My team is unaffiliated
| with the Ethereum Foundation. There are also 3 other client
| implementations of the protocol that are very robust and done
| by independent teams in different parts of the world. We also
| can't force users to accept all our changes, and development
| on ETH's infrastructure has indeed been trending towards more
| decentralization. There are few blockchains out there today
| with more than 1, production-quality client implementation.
| cachvico wrote:
| How many people get to vote on EIPs, out of curiosity?
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I think schisms are healthy, democratic strategies that lead to
| resiliency over time. It requires interest groups to play their
| cards, some will succeed independently, some will fail, and often
| the schism won't last (the groups will reconcile and merge back
| together). Others see conflict, and label that as "bad," but this
| just seems like democracy at work. Democracy is messy and looks
| chaotic to the uninitiated, but all order looks like chaos to the
| uninitiated.
|
| With that, I don't see blockchain governance as necessarily
| "decentralized," but anarchistic (non-pejoratively). Anarchistic
| governance can lead to complex institutions and centralization,
| the difference between it and traditional central organization is
| that participation is always completely voluntary. Most people
| are OK with letting the Ethereum foundation run the show most of
| the time, and that's totally compatible with decentralization.
| When people disagree, they typically organize into interest
| groups to either convince the current guard to consider their
| interests, or they schism (in this case).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Looking at ETH in terms of wallets interacting with dapps, NFT,
| uniswap, etc it all honestly feels like magic.
|
| Obviously the high gas makes it feel a lot less like magic when
| every button click is 30-100$ but really this all gives me so
| much hope for a better post-mobile app based internet.
|
| I was so cynical for a long time about where tech was heading but
| this gives me hope that in 10 years we might be in a better place
| owned by the people and with better monetization outside of
| megacorps.
| Rapzid wrote:
| It's amazing but yeah, 40 dollars to swap tokens... You could
| almost imagine it all being kept track of on paper or punch
| cards with people manually carrying out every transaction for
| that price LOL.
|
| I'm looking forward to smart contracts costing pennies per
| transaction. It's going to be a game changer for the utility of
| it all.
| thekyle wrote:
| Are the high gas fees something that proof of stake will
| solve?
| Rapzid wrote:
| I would recommend reading about ETH 2.0. There are a few
| aspects to it that increase scalability and drive down gas
| prices. Unless I'm mistaken proof of stake will contribute
| to this as the "work" is done away with.
|
| Eth 2.0 has been slow and a long time coming, but it's the
| future and inevitable IMHO.
| casi wrote:
| The general idea is Layer 2s solve high gas. Most users
| will be using apps that run on a layer 2 and will make rare
| trips to the mainnet. The next thing being worked on is
| onboarding users direct to layer 2, and layer2
| interoperability so you can move from one l2 to another
|
| You can already use an L2 DEX to exchange tokens (and have
| been able to for about a year)
| https://exchange.loopring.io/
|
| You can send L2 payments with https://zksync.io/
|
| But those are limited to their applications. General
| purpose L2s arrive this month! with Optimism
| https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ and to be followed later
| this year by https://aztec.network/ and others.
|
| With those we can redeploy code from mainnet to layer 2.
| With the apps on layer 2 the transaction fees will be
| fractions of cents and almost instant and a lot of the
| programs we have dreamed about but not been able to make
| become possible at scale.
|
| Its an exciting time!
| crazypython wrote:
| The issue here seems to be that instead of giving miners the
| fees, they are destroyed, creating a deflationary spiral, which
| helps speculators' wallets (who want the money supply to shrink),
| while hurting miners' wallets. It helps ETH holders.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Not trying to be snarky but Vitalik itself is ETH's 51% attack
| ...
|
| What's the point of decentralized cryptocurrency when it falls
| down on the hands of one person.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| It's not really in the hands of one person, though. If the
| community diverges, two chains will be created, and the one
| will the most value will be considered the 'real' chain.
|
| This already happened once, and the less-popular chain became
| known as 'Ethereum Classic.' It's still around.
| cachvico wrote:
| Less-popular and original, interestingly in this case.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| "original" is a matter of debate. For example, which chain
| is the original Bitcoin: BTC or BCH? Prior to the fork,
| they both share the same history. The community aligned
| more behind BTC but surely there's a fork of the multiverse
| somewhere in the space-time continuum where the community
| rallied behind BCH and gave it more hashing power.
| jobigoud wrote:
| For ETC I don't think there is much debate. The original
| Ethereum paper and protocol still describes ETC whereas
| if you want to implement an ETH node that verifies the
| blockchain you need to write special code to introduce
| the block containing the collection of transactions
| reverting the hack.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Both have forked numerous times from when the whitepaper
| was written.
| cesarb wrote:
| > For example, which chain is the original Bitcoin: BTC
| or BCH? Prior to the fork, they both share the same
| history.
|
| That one is easy to answer: if you get a node running
| code from before the BTC/BCH split, which chain would it
| follow? AFAIK, that old node would follow the BTC side,
| since BCH changed the proof-of-work parameters in a way
| that wouldn't be accepted by older nodes, while BTC only
| changed some validation parameters in a way that would
| still be accepted by older nodes (the older nodes might
| accept some things which newer nodes would reject, but
| the older nodes would not reject anything newer nodes
| would accept, so the current BTC chain should still be
| seen as valid by older nodes).
| DennisP wrote:
| At this point Vitalik is one researcher among many. He's taken
| care to remove himself from the "benevolent dictator" role he
| had at first.
|
| He is very productive though, and the other researchers and
| devs tend to find his ideas convincing.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| If you look at what Pieter Wuelle is doing, he's also doing
| amazing work, but when it comes to make decisions, he goes to
| the background even if he has an opinion.
|
| I don't see the same thing happening to Vitalik. I'm not
| saying it's a problem, as Ethereum is a different network
| with different advantages and disadvantages, but he still
| looks like the final decision maker to me at this point
| (which is OK for me).
| hanniabu wrote:
| I disagree in factually but I agree in optics and I think
| him being so active makes it easy to get that impression.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Can you give me an example where he purposefully declined
| to give his opinion to make sure that people are
| impartial?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Nope, and simply I don't believe that matters. If you
| have a meeting with 100 people that doesn't mean you
| shouldn't talk just because you organized it. Everyone
| has a voice and an opportunity to state their ideas and
| concerns.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Does this happen in other open source software projects?
| My understanding is that Linus Torvalds was pretty
| opinionated as well. Linux is better off for it.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Yes, but Bitcoin is special in that it aims to be as
| decentralized as possible. Ethereum aims to move fast,
| that's why it needs a leader. Both are great projects,
| and both approaches have tradeoffs.
| DennisP wrote:
| Does Bitcoin still have one main implementation, which is
| considered the standard in place of a spec? Because ETH2
| has four production implementations, developed by
| different teams in different languages. ETH1 has two in
| common use, one written in Go and one in Rust. All open
| source of course.
|
| If Bitcoin still runs on a single implementation then I'd
| argue its development is more centralized.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Great response
| moralestapia wrote:
| "A group of researchers" still doesn't feel like
| decentralized to me.
| hanniabu wrote:
| You're pulling threads here. There's a lot of people
| involved. And then they still need to convince wallet
| developers and miners. And then once there's the move to
| PoS they'll also need to convince the users and stakers
| (miners removed from equation).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| "A single species" doesn't feel decentralised, either.
| You're pumping your intuition rather than considering
| reality directly.
| snissn wrote:
| miners vs coders is very decentralized to me :) let the
| miners have their own chain!
| nodesocket wrote:
| From my point of view, burning of transaction fees seems like a
| good solution and idea. Miners are just being babies. There are
| risks in all businesses, and miners should be aware and account
| for such risks. When things don't work out your way, your
| solution should not be to take down the entire infrastructure
| that fed you.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| I am one of the maintainers of one of the main implementations
| of eth2 https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, which runs a
| large portion of the current network. We are not affiliated
| with the Ethereum Foundation. Any ideas or changes need to be
| implemented into code and shipped to users. Development is
| decentralized, as there are 4 client implementations of eth2
| today. Vitalik does not control our code, of course.
| casi wrote:
| This is a tired take, Vitaliks position is not any greater than
| anyone else and there is nothing stopping anyone who has
| contributions from having the same level of participation. It
| is much easier to participate than any other open source
| project i have been involved in.
|
| Vitalik just happens to be very good at his job, consistently
| insightful, and a wonderful clear communicator. He contributes
| a lot because he has a lot to contribute.
| Sargos wrote:
| Vitalik is very popular because he is heavily respected. Even
| with that said he cannot get people to make a controversial
| change as the overall Ethereum community, not just the miners
| and core devs, decides whether a new proposal is safe enough.
| michaelgiba wrote:
| Blockchain is totally trustless. All you have to do is trust the
| source code maintainers, inventor, anonymous miners and hackers
| reading your smart contract code all at once. After that it's
| 100% trustless.
| antpls wrote:
| Doesn't Vitalik/the dev team own the "Ethereum" name, which means
| they decide what get called "Ethereum" ?
|
| If there are two versions of the chain, because of a 51% attack
| or a fork, there always will be only one dev-approved chain
| called "Ethereum" on the exchanges, and that's what the users
| will buy.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| I think the Ethereum Foundation owns the trademark.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Decentralized 51% attack...
|
| Not the first very profound eth conflict.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Anybody remember Eth Classic, etc.?
| moralestapia wrote:
| That "little thing" when they rolled out contracts and pretty
| much showed how easy it was to manipulate the currency at
| their whim ...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| (This new) code is (the new) law.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Indeed. (You can really tell this is the
| case the minute "contracts" - IRL backed by "law" and all
| its affordances - actually became backed by -code- within
| this new paradigm ...
|
| ... wherein, incidentally, the VM running the on-chain
| contract has become the "judge", come to notice.)
| Bluestein wrote:
| You know. Just a pesky detail.
| gus_massa wrote:
| If the fee are going to be (partially) burned, can the miners
| just ask that everyone pays the fees by a side channel? Perhaps
| make a smart contract that holds the same value of the fee until
| the transaction is included. The miners can just ensure to
| include both or neither, and get paid.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| You can still tip a miner if you want to. Only thing burned is
| the "base fee".
| gus_massa wrote:
| So it's as easy as adding `if $tip >= $base` somewhere in
| source code of the program they are running in the nodes.
| (You can call it a soft fork if you wish.)
| drcode wrote:
| The game theory with the EIP1559 changes is that there will be
| ample space in blocks to put in transactions, and there will
| (roughly, under normal circumstances) be just enough
| transactions in the pool to fill each block. So the miner only
| has the options of either (A) filling the block with
| transactions to earn tips or (B) chose to be hostile and
| generate an empty block, just to have the next miner put the
| most profitable transactions in the followup block.
| latchkey wrote:
| The blocks will be variable sized and can still fill up.
|
| Point #1 and #10 from the image here:
|
| https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm.
| ..
| drcode wrote:
| Sure, nothing you said really disagrees with my summary.
| latchkey wrote:
| Do all replies have to be a disagreement or can they just
| attempt to be informative?
| gus_massa wrote:
| After a few years, I realize that by default comments are
| interpreted as disagreement, so for this kind of comments
| I start my reply with " _I agree_ " or " _Just
| nitpicking_ ".
|
| [It's most tricky when I agree with most of the comment,
| but the rest is totally nuts, but I don't want to start
| an argument about that.]
| johndoe42377 wrote:
| It is a disgrace to even mention this narcissistic clown here.
|
| If we remove all the hype and worshipping he is technically
| illiterate, the code is a spaghetti crap, which defeats all the
| principles of Go, and there is no rigorous research, only Twitter
| bullshitting.
| guiomie wrote:
| It's interesting that miners are protesting EIP-1559 proposal,
| which is burning away transaction fees as opposed to giving them
| to miners, while for the last years Eth has focused on completely
| eliminating miners with proof of stake. Why not protest the
| latter? What am I missing?
|
| Regardless, I sold all my mining equipment 2 years ago when it
| was clear that Eth was moving to PoS, mining alt-coins wasnt
| something I was interested in, since except for ETH and BTC, I
| believe all these chains are inferior.
| olouv wrote:
| One theory is that they have planned to fork when POS does
| arrive but don't want to have to rollback upgrades like
| EIP-1559 as it would negatively impact optics vs. keeping alive
| the "true original" ETH.
| drcode wrote:
| Oh, there will definitely be an ugly fight once we get close to
| removing POW altogether. This is part of the reason ethereum
| has an "ice age" which means the blockchain essentially stops
| working after a year if the community doesn't approve each new
| upgrade.
|
| But despite this, there will certainly be an "ethereum classic
| 2" in the near future.
| lifeformed wrote:
| > they have even went as far as creating a website
|
| Wow, things are getting serious.
| ur-whale wrote:
| /s
|
| there, fixed it for you
| Cypher wrote:
| A hard fork isn't going to work when all community and devs don't
| come along...
| typest wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but if 51% of the _existing hashpower_ doesn
| 't want a change, it sounds less a 51% attack and more like
| miners voting against something that isn't in their interest. The
| whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are supposed to
| be aligned between miners and users. If that isn't the case here,
| it sounds like a problem.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > it sounds less a 51% attack and more like miners voting
| against something that isn't in their interest
|
| We also used to call this situation a potential "fork" (as in,
| the thing with two prongs) before the word "fork" was somehow
| redefined to mean "protocol update everyone agrees on, with a
| linear history without any prongs".
| viraptor wrote:
| It's still a fork in both cases. One path is taken by almost
| noone, but it's still an open possibility to keep it alive.
| JAM1971 wrote:
| Yup. See: ETH Classic.
| crazypython wrote:
| Ethereum developers are hard forking Ethereum, but 51% of the
| hashpower disagrees and doesn't want to go with the hard
| fork.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yup, it's a combination of new people not understanding it
| and media slander dirtying the word that has caused it to be
| avoided because it's gained a bad connotation.
| Taek wrote:
| You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended
| to be active participants on the network, they are intended to
| provide the service of securing the network and serving the
| interests of the users of the network.
|
| If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and
| 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on
| stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a
| problem? Yes absolutely that's a problem, and probably all of
| them are going to get fired.
|
| Same sort of idea here. If the miners aren't serving the best
| interests of the network, the network has no obligation to
| continue paying the miners tens of millions of dollars per day
| (no joke, that's how much miners on Ethereum make in revenue
| right now) to continue sticking around.
| 3np wrote:
| That bodyguard narrative is yours and I think it makes little
| sense. Hash power is required to form consensus. If anything,
| non-mining full nodes run by users would be the closest to
| "body guards".
|
| Miners would be the ones who settle and publish the lineup.
| shawnz wrote:
| The point of the analogy is that they are being paid to
| provide a service, and if they have a disagreement about
| it, then their only choice is to forefit their profits and
| let someone else come in to extract them instead.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Your analogy breaks down at "because of a grudge or
| whatever." The reason the miners are pissed is because
| ethereum is proposing to stop paying them. So what if the
| bouncers shut down the event because management told them
| they're not getting paid? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
| Shoue wrote:
| That's not true, they can still join a staking pool if they
| want to continue being "paid", so really it's just the way
| they're being paid that's changing.
| Tepix wrote:
| Yes, the plan is to find a solution to make it work without
| the current bouncers
| ryebit wrote:
| Not to find a solution, it was already found. The roadmap
| plan was always to switch to PoS, the miners and PoW were
| always temporary until it was developed / ready. Now the
| beacon chain (core of PoS) is live, with around $6
| billion staked. Some of the miners (not all of them by
| far) are complaining they're no longer going to be
| needed, going so far as to make a show of "force". Others
| (like f2pool) have calmly been preparing with rest of
| Ethereum community, and are transitioning to staking
| themselves.
| ashfame wrote:
| A decentralized network doesn't care for _vision_ , it
| functions as per what its participants want. What you are
| describing, is a problem in centralised network, which
| Ethereum is. So, you are technically right, but let's not
| confuse the interests of the creator is same as the interests
| of the users of the network.
|
| Miners are not supposed to serve anyone but themselves.
| Everyone for themselves. A right system economically
| incentivize the right action by design, like in Bitcoin.
| Important to understand the first principles before judging
| any distributed system.
| warent wrote:
| > A decentralized network doesn't care for vision
|
| I'm not sure how this can be true as long as conditions are
| met:
|
| 1. original creator of decentralized network still exists
|
| 2. people still respect and give authority to creator
|
| Bitcoin is visionless because it was theorized anonymously.
| Not so with Ethereum
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No it's very much decentralized as the miners are
| threatening a fork. This is not unlike what Bitcoin went
| through in 2017 when it split between BTC and BCH. If it
| were centralized a fork wouldn't be possible.
|
| The miners are mercenaries. They have no loyalty to the
| network and the network has no loyalty to them (hence the
| push for proof of stake).
|
| For what it's worth, EIP-1559 wasn't Vitalik's idea, but
| the change is almost universally supported by the Ethereum
| application developers and users.
|
| At any rate the sooner we get off proof of work the better.
| Users are spending $20M a day on transaction fees. Let's
| put that money back into the ETH community by switching to
| proof of stake and burning the transaction fees.
| psKama wrote:
| I believe your analogy is totally ill-structured and it
| misses the very main idea behind decentralization. There is
| no security guards, there is no concert-goers and there is no
| superstar singing at the stage. There is only MH/s and every
| single MH/s is equal to other one. That's the all idea about
| the system proposed and has been used.
|
| Miners are wrong not because you believe different people
| should have different weighted power to change the system,
| they are wrong because the roadmap for PoS was well-
| established long long time ago giving them more than enough
| time to re-structure their revenue channels and invest
| accordingly. Therefore for them to say "we have been used. we
| invested a lot and now we are pushed aside" doesn't make any
| sense because the investment they had made until the roadmap
| for ETH2.0 was public has a ROI multiples times of what they
| invested already as of today.
|
| For them to say this there are 2 options.
|
| 1) They were living in a cage and missed the plans for ETH2.0
| and even after the roadmap is public they kept investing in
| mining equipment which will be useless soon. 2) They are just
| greedy and they just want to keep the same earnings although
| they have not got even a single argument for "why keeping the
| high fees is good for the ecosystem" apart from it means more
| money for them.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > more than enough time to re-structure their revenue
| channels and invest accordingly.
|
| In other words, their business just goes away, but they can
| always start some other business?
| psKama wrote:
| In other words, they have been notified 2+ years ago
| that, their business -which has been very profitable so
| far- would go away because there is a better technology
| which can be used so that the network can still run with
| less environmental impact on earth. I wish every business
| was that lucky to be notified that early against the next
| technological breakthrough which deemed them obsolete.
| malikNF wrote:
| Tbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be
| looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are
| responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can
| draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a
| miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can
| become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a
| holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should
| have the power to vote in this blockchain, if its actually
| decentralized.
|
| The problem here is with the design of eth, eth was a rushed
| blockchain from the start, now vitalik is trying to rush the
| release all of a sudden because the people managing his
| network are not happy with the up coming changes?
|
| What the hell kind of decentralization is this if vitalik can
| escalate major decisions about network? Eth is not a
| decentralized project if one individual(or a few) can decide
| to go against 51% of the stakeholders of the network.
| keymone wrote:
| Miners don't dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job -
| hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it.
|
| Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are
| also users, merchants and developers. Governance of any
| cryptocurrency is extremely touchy subject and one thing
| you don't want to do is setting a precedent for making a
| controversial change. If you justify such change by
| "majority of miners want it" - you're basically handing
| over the protocol to their hands. Nothing will prevent
| miners to adopt changes that eventually centralize currency
| control, increase rewards(inflation), etc.
| malikNF wrote:
| >> Miners don't dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job
| - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it.
|
| What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol
| rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain
| version of the consensus algorithm that makes a
| blockchain do what it does. So they are partly
| responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said
| initially it is hard to say who the actual decision
| makers of the chain are because it is not defined
| properly by eth.
|
| >>Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there
| are also users, merchants and developers.
|
| Like I mentioned in my previous comment, my whole
| disagreement with the OP of this comment chain is, their
| analogy calling miners bodyguards only, my argument is
| that its hard to tell, because anyone can play any role
| in this network, on eth the incentives are set up in such
| a way that each actor can be multiple actors, and there
| isn't any clear distinction as to who gets to decide what
| on the network.
|
| >>If you justify such change by "majority of miners want
| it" - you're basically handing over the protocol to their
| hands. Nothing will prevent miners to adopt changes that
| eventually centralize currency control, increase
| rewards(inflation), etc.
|
| I am not trying to justify it as majority miners want it,
| my criticism of the eth chain is they have done this sort
| of nonese in the past (remember the DAO hack where
| vitalik and co decided to serve their own interests and
| rolled back a blockchain? )
|
| It clearly shows eth hasn't grown or come up with a
| solution as to how to govern their blockchain in a
| decentralized manner. At the moment, a small select group
| of people, rather than the majority of its stakeholders
| get to decide what happens to the blockchain, and that to
| me doesn't look like decentralization.
|
| Whats to stop a powerful government forcing vitalik and
| co to implement or remove what they want in the future?
| darawk wrote:
| > What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol
| rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain
| version of the consensus algorithm that makes a
| blockchain do what it does. So they are partly
| responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said
| initially it is hard to say who the actual decision
| makers of the chain are because it is not defined
| properly by eth.
|
| Who dictates the rules is who controls the logic of the
| chain where the value resides. The miners can create
| their own fork, and Vitalik can create his own fork. I
| think we know where the value will go.
|
| > Who dictates the rules is who controls the logic of the
| chain where the value resides. The miners can create
| their own fork, and Vitalik can create his own fork. I
| think we know where the value will go.
|
| Vitalik only has this power because he appears to be
| choosing freely and the public agrees with him. If it
| appeared he was being forced to do something, or he did
| something that people didn't like, the value wouldn't
| follow him.
|
| It is in this economic sense, and only this economic
| sense, that crypto is democratic. The only votes that
| matter are the dollars people trade to buy Ethereum.
| xorcist wrote:
| > its is the miners agreeing to following a certain
| version of the consensus algorithm that makes a
| blockchain do what it does
|
| You have cause and effect mixed up.
|
| The miners that follow the same consensus rules that the
| merchants and exchanges do, get paid. The others do not.
|
| A majority of miners following incompatible consensus
| would look like a huge drop off in mining capacity from
| the end users perspective. Similar things have happened
| multiple times.
| akimball wrote:
| There aren't "merchants" in eth, really, there are dapps.
| Exchanges don't care about protocols beyond send and
| receive. Still, I agree with your larger point: The value
| goes where the dapps go, and many will go to eth2. (But
| some will move to more stable and sustainable platforms.)
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > But some will move to more stable and sustainable
| platforms.
|
| This is why I refuse to hold ETH... when the financial
| big boys finally start moving to blockchain rails, they
| are going to look at ETH and think "WTF is this?" and
| pass it up for more principled designs like Cardano.
| pinoli wrote:
| merchants and exchanges do not exist in blockchain terms,
| miners come first since they literally make the chain
| run. Everything flows from here.
| Vespasian wrote:
| > Governance of any cryptocurrency is extremely touchy
| subject and one thing you don't want to do is setting a
| precedent for making a controversial change
|
| This got me thinking. How likely is it that, if and when
| crypto grows into a significant financial sector, the
| actual government will take over the governance.
|
| It seems likely that the public (or their
| representatives) will grow increasingly uneasy with such
| an important matter being handled by random internet
| people and foundations. Especially if these institutions
| are not willing to include themselves into other policy
| making processes.
|
| I believe that sooner rather than later effective control
| will be wrestled away from people like Vitalik, through
| laws and regulations.
| shawnz wrote:
| If a big government seized control of a coin's
| development, it would surely lose most of its value and
| users would likely just create a fork which is not under
| that government's control.
| mjburgess wrote:
| _Miners_ would try to fork it.
|
| _Users_ would be overjoyed, and the user base would grow
| dramatically.
|
| People aren't using bitcoin day-to-day _because_ it lacks
| a government backing.
| shawnz wrote:
| I will reply to this despite the fact that it's an
| obvious troll and has nothing to do with the topic at
| hand (this thread isn't even about Bitcoin).
|
| People are actually using Bitcoin strictly because it
| lacks a government backing. For those users who _want_ an
| asset that is government-backed, there are already lots
| of options and there is little need for cryptocurrency to
| try and compete in that space.
| mratsim wrote:
| Venezuela has a government-backed cryptocurrency, the
| Petro, which failed spectacularly:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(cryptocurrency).
|
| In fact colleagues at Status went to Venezuela to check
| how payments worked there:
|
| - https://www.figma.com/community/file/780788775246577039
| ?prev...
| nootropicat wrote:
| Miners aren't stakeholders, they are hired to do one job
| and have no right to get any input. They're already coddled
| in ethereum. Everyone who actually is a stakeholder wants
| PoS. Ultimately eth buyers decide everything, as all money
| flows from them. Miners just mine what's profitable at the
| moment.
| pinoli wrote:
| sorry but no one is hired. Mining is voluntary and based
| on incentives: you remove the incentives, miners stop
| mining.
|
| it's that simple.
| akimball wrote:
| The only thing eth buyers (and sellers) are deciding is
| price. The connections between price and protocol are
| indirect and often complex, tenuous.
| lupire wrote:
| > Everyone who actually is a stakeholder wants Proof of
| Stake
|
| And everyone doing work wants Proof of Work
| zadler wrote:
| I'm tired of this argument that "this is not
| decentralized". It is meaningfully decentralized in
| multiple ways:
|
| * there is no legal entity representing the Ethereum
| blockchain because it is decentralized
|
| * the correct chain is not dictated by a single person or
| group of people
|
| What you are seeing is an implicit form of democracy or
| people acting in shared interests and in support of
| Ethereum's original developer and "leader". The moment
| vitalik loses it and the organization loses credibility,
| alternate plans will be made according to the common
| interests of the people who have a stake in the system.
| Perhaps there will be a fork, but in the end the greatest
| demand will be for the most universally accepted version
| and the other will whither into insignificance ala Ethereum
| classic.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| 51% hashpower != 51% of stakeholders, this is an important
| distinction that many comments about democracy are missing.
|
| Hence GP talking about bodyguards at a concert-- who would
| typically be a minority of persons there.
| tarsinge wrote:
| The switch to PoS was known for years, miners know they'll
| be phased out. The chain is decentralized, but that switch
| is not (it's part of the initial chain dev/vision).
| Taek wrote:
| Decentralized blockchains are entirely opt-in. If you are a
| participant in a blockchain that isn't serving your needs,
| you can opt out of that blockchain and into a new
| blockchain.
|
| A hard fork is essentially a large coordinated migration
| from one blockchain to a new blockchain, generally with a
| shared history.
|
| Vitalik does not have the sole power to go against the
| stakeholders of the network and make massive changes to
| Ethereum. The power that Vitalik has is one of leadership.
| If he attempts to coordinate a mass migration from one
| blockchain (old Eth) to another (new Eth), Vitalik actually
| needs to convince everyone that this is a good idea. He
| can't force it to happen if people disagree that it's the
| right thing to do. If Vitalik launches a hardfork and 80%
| of the network upgrades, that definitionally means that
| Vitalik had the support of 80% of the network, otherwise
| they wouldn't have followed the upgrade.
|
| Blockchains are about consent. If you don't like what's
| happening on a blockchain, make a change. A single person
| making a change in isolation isn't interesting, but a large
| group of people making a change together IS interesting,
| and can be successful even if that group is just a
| minority. You end up with two different networks, each
| capable of thriving on their own.
|
| Miners depend on the users of a blockchain for revenue. If
| a blockchain has no users, there will be no fees, and no
| revenue. The reverse is not true. If the users determine
| that they are better off selecting a different set of
| miners to build and preserve consensus, they can fork the
| network in a way that changes who is able to mine
| effectively, but does not otherwise impact daily use of the
| blockchain.
| vletal wrote:
| My grandpa lived in a building with unnecessarily
| expensive local coal heating. They never plugged into a
| heat pipe from a nearby powerplant, because the neighbor,
| who operated the local boiler always vetoed the decision.
| Why? Because he was being payed for operating it.
|
| This is pretty similar situation. Incentives of the
| miners are not aligned with those of the users.
| shawnz wrote:
| The incentives of the miners are aligned with the users:
| The miners mine and then they get paid.
|
| If the incumbent miners stop mining in protest of their
| future profits declining, then new miners will just come
| in to take the profits they are refusing to collect
| today. There is no incentive for them to conspire and
| every incentive for them to not conspire.
| lupire wrote:
| Everyone acts per their interest. Right and wrong is
| subjective.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Does something like delegated/nominated proof of stake
| solve this?
| mratsim wrote:
| Delegated proof-of-stake is worse than Proof-of-Stake or
| Proof-of-Work from a decentralization perspective as the
| "delegators" can bribe their way to stay in power.
|
| Some resources (they link to DPoS alternatives and
| discuss them):
|
| - https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html
|
| - https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/17/voting.html
|
| - https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/03/28/plutocracy.html
|
| - https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html
| discardable_dan wrote:
| The difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can
| quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum
| miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating
| with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair
| share."
|
| These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity
| keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested
| interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat currency,
| less participants make it, unfortunately, less valuable.
|
| Telling 60% of holders their currency (or income toward
| driving that currency) is not how you keep them on your side,
| just like old mining town scrip is only worthwhile if the
| mine works. The second the mine shuts down on a union strike,
| the scrip becomes paper.
|
| On a personal note, I hope the miners get their due, because
| it was the initial philosophy of Ethereum. If they don't, I
| am curious to see how Ethereum moves w/r/t proof of stake vs
| proof of work guarantees. PoS seems at odds with the initial
| platform, and possibly long-term problematic for their
| "contracts-first" architecture.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you
| are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they
| think is their "fair share."
|
| Unlike with employers and real world unions, the Ethereum
| network is not bound by labor laws to negotiate exclusively
| with unionized miners, or refrain from replacing them with
| non-unionized miners. Without those laws, unions are pretty
| powerless, which is why the late 19th century had such low
| unionization rates.
|
| >>I hope the miners get their due, because it was the
| initial philosophy of Ethereum.
|
| The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof of
| Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of Stake.
| Miners have already gotten much more time to earn from ETH
| issuance than was originally planned.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof
| of Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of
| Stake
|
| And that's the problem... it's a bait and switch, because
| the miners had to bear the capital costs of investing in
| mining rigs, which would suddenly lose a lot of value in
| a switch to PoS. I think this is the original sin of
| Ethereum, and the network will be forever plagued by
| conflict because of it.
| nvlr wrote:
| Not really a bait of switch though since Ethereum has
| always been very clear that this is the plan. Anyone who
| bought a rig should have known that they had a limited
| investment horizon.
| cachvico wrote:
| The miners do not give Ethereum its value; the market does.
| arcticbull wrote:
| It has no value without security and transactibility
| which is what the miners provide.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Not in proof of stake (which provides it through stakers
| instead), which is what this whole thing is about.
| shawnz wrote:
| They are paid fairly in exchange for providing it. If the
| current set of miners decide that they don't like
| Ethereum anymore then those profits are sitting on the
| table for anyone to take.
| woah wrote:
| You think that proof of work mining was the initial
| philosophy of Ethereum? It's the exact opposite. Ethereum
| was always intended to be proof of stake, they just
| couldn't get it shipped in time to launch, and then the
| schedule slipped a bunch more.
| shawnz wrote:
| If the current group of Ethereum miners decide to stop
| mining, why wouldn't new parties come in to take the
| profits they are leaving behind?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| It's not like there's a giant pool of mining hardware
| waiting in the wings to take over... I think we can
| assume that all hardware is always in use mining
| _something_ as long as marginal revenue exceeds marginal
| cost.
| shawnz wrote:
| Ethereum is typically mined on GPUs so I would argue
| there really is a giant pool of hardware waiting to take
| over. On Bitcoin where ASIC mining is common that is
| indeed a concern, but consider even then, each hardware
| owner has stronger incentives to just lie about
| participating in such a strike while keeping the
| increased profits for themselves.
| pinoli wrote:
| mmh doesn't make a lot of sense. Miners do actually provide
| the infrastructure for the network to function properly: no
| miners, no coins, no blocks, no transactions, no network.
|
| I know it's tempting to discard miners' concerns, but it
| would be a great mistake. Miners need incentives, without
| incentives we'll start allocating capital and resources
| somewhere else.
|
| We are not greedy, not crazy, not confrontational: we are
| just rational.
|
| If someone don't like us, then could do without us.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| As of 01 Dec 2020, there is already another Ethereum
| mainnet chain (Eth2 Phase 0) running in parallel with and
| dependent upon the Eth1 mainnet chain:
|
| https://beaconcha.in/
|
| https://beaconscan.com/
|
| https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/tree/dev/specs/pha
| s...
|
| Vitalik is proposing a role reversal to take place earlier
| than it was previously planned (not completely accurate in
| a technical sense re: previous plans, but effectively the
| same):
|
| Eth1 mainnet will hand-off _consensus responsibility_ to
| Eth2 mainnet (PoW - > PoS), while Eth1 nodes continue to
| "run the code" that executes smart contracts / processes
| transactions.
|
| If the plan is put into motion, and as long as _some_
| miners / mining pools don't yank the plug on their mining
| nodes in the canonical Eth1 mainnet, then the canonical
| mainnet -- per consensus among the Ethereum Foundation and
| aligned developers, Eth2 validator operators,
| orgs/companies/exchanges/etc -- will transition suddenly
| from Eth1 (PoW) to Eth2 (PoS). And that will be the end of
| all mining on the canonical Ethereum mainnet.
|
| Miners/pools who find it impractical or undesirable to
| reallocate resources from mining to staking may band
| together to continue running an alternate mainnet chain
| based on PoW (ETW?); market forces would then decide
| whether that chain is viable, as well deciding the fate of
| the evolved (PoS) Ethereum mainnet chain.
| maxerickson wrote:
| _The whole point of blockchains is that the incentives are
| supposed to be aligned between miners and users._
|
| If this were obviously true, there wouldn't be a problem. I
| think a better formulation talks about distributed ledgers
| working better when the interests of users and miners are
| aligned.
|
| And of course they never quite are (miners want profit, users
| want minimal transaction costs with high security).
| jki275 wrote:
| Precisely. Vitalik wants to fork ETH (as he's done before when
| they rolled back the DAO hack) to make a new version of ETH
| that is proof of stake.
|
| The miners, as I've predicted here before, disagree, because
| this fork obliterates their entire business model. Shocking.
| olouv wrote:
| ETH2 is the ETH main roadmap, not a fork.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| As an ETH user and holder (and former miner), I want Ethereum
| 2.0. Describing it as a fork is ridiculous. Proof of stake is
| the future and miners have known that for years. Proof of
| work is a dead end that ends with a Dyson sphere harvesting
| all power from the sun to process a few transactions.
|
| If miners want to make another Ethereum Classic dead chain
| let them do so. The innovation, the users, and all the
| developers will be on Ethereum 2.0.
| [deleted]
| FDSGSG wrote:
| >Describing it as a fork is ridiculous
|
| Why? It's a fork.
|
| Monero has pre-planned hardforks every 6 months or so, is
| it ridiculous to describe them as forks?
| jki275 wrote:
| ETH is a fork, ETC was the original chain. ETH 2.0 is a
| proposed fork.
|
| Describing things accurately should be the norm.
| ryanlol wrote:
| Did Ethereum never have breaking updates before the ETC
| split? If no, it's pretty disingenious to describe ETC as
| the "original" chain.
| jki275 wrote:
| What are you talking about?
|
| The fork that left ETC as the original chain was a
| rollback of the chain that destroyed the concept of its
| immutability for the purpose of fixing a massive
| financial mistake.
|
| There were no other chains left as a result of such a
| fork. It _is_ a fork, and ETC _is_ the original chain.
| Those are facts.
| ryanlol wrote:
| ETC is not the original chain as the homestead hardfork
| predates it.
| jki275 wrote:
| Which chain was left as the result of that fork? If the
| earlier chain is abandoned, then the new chain by default
| becomes the valid chain.
| panarky wrote:
| _> ends with a Dyson sphere ..._
|
| Just because too much of a thing is bad doesn't mean the
| thing is bad in lower quantities.
|
| Drinking ten liters of water in an hour is bad. That
| doesn't mean you shouldn't drink any water.
| theon144 wrote:
| That's the plan for PoS, no? It's not that mining gets
| eliminated altogether, but doesn't play as much of a
| central role.
| jki275 wrote:
| No, mining is gone in a proof of stake chain.
| svara wrote:
| The point is that ever increasing hash power is a
| consequence of the design of the system.
| ptrincr wrote:
| This isn't strictly true.
|
| The protocol ensures that there is on average a block
| produced every 10 minutes.
|
| As hash rates increase, and blocks are found slightly
| faster, the difficulty is adjusted upwards to ensure that
| the 1 block per 10 minutes is maintained.
|
| We've seen difficulty drop in the past, it doesn't
| necessarily rise forever. It only makes sense to increase
| when it's still profitable to mine at the current
| difficulty.
|
| If the difficulty rises to a certain level and the price
| falls, and it becomes unprofitable to mine for some
| miners, they switch off their rigs and the difficulty
| adjusts downwards after a period of time to compensate.
|
| Over the years we have seen the price rise and hash
| optimizations made, which have both driven the difficulty
| upwards.
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| It's every 15 seconds for Ethereum blocks.
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/blocks/
| viraptor wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how the situation develops if
| they really do attempt to fork and if normal users want to use
| ETH2. Miners could potentially want to keep the blockchain
| going and the value could be artificially high, but with
| transactions falling down and holders migrating, they couldn't
| keep it up forever... <insert "dis gon' be good" gif>
| arbol wrote:
| There will almost certainly be a split chain that continues
| to run on pow. Eventually it will die off, like Eth classic
| georgyo wrote:
| Crypto miners and and crypto users are aligned in the same way
| banks and customers are aligned.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| It is a problem. That's a big reason for moving from proof-of-
| work to proof-of-stake- to more directly make the _holders_ of
| Ethereum in charge of the chain.
|
| It's a difficult thing to do, though. Hashpower based mining is
| easier to get going. Proof of stake has issues like the
| nothing-at-stake problem, where theoretically you could stake-
| mine on multiple chains:
| https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2402/what-exact...
| DennisP wrote:
| Nothing-at-stake is a solved problem in Ethereum's PoS.
|
| The basic idea is that stakers' deposits act as security
| bonds. If a staker commits to two conflicting chains, any
| other staker can see that they did so, and get rewarded for
| publishing a proof of that. Then the cheating staker gets
| their stake destroyed on both chains.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| There is a deeper problem with PoS, which is about where
| the value of the staked token comes from in the first
| place. PoW ties this to the burning of real-world value,
| specifically electricity which is about as close to
| distilled economic value as you can get. Ethereum is trying
| to bootstrap value with PoW and then switch, but I have
| strong doubts that this is a sustainable solution.
| DennisP wrote:
| Coin value is not based on electricity usage in PoW. Due
| to difficulty adjustment, electricity usage is an effect
| of coin value, not a cause. If coin value goes up, mining
| becomes more profitable, more miners jump in, and
| electricity usage goes up. If coin value drops, the
| opposite happens.
| mratsim wrote:
| It's the same when currencies around the world stopped
| using the gold standard and became floating across each
| other.
|
| I'd say the value of currencies is that you have to pay
| your taxes in one that is legal tender. In that case, the
| value of Eth is that you have to pay transaction fees in
| Eth. You decided how valuable those transactions are.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| Imagine if you owned a billion dollars, and that allowed you
| to say if someone spent 10 dollars at the gas station.
| gverrilla wrote:
| can you tell us more? what are you refering to?
| arbol wrote:
| Are you suggesting censorship might be an issue?
| hertzrat wrote:
| Isn't half of our current money supply controlled by 1% of
| people? If the asset holders controlled things, why wouldn't
| they just demand everyone else hand over their cash?
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-
| more-...
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Here's a couple of reasons why it probably wouldn't go this
| way:
|
| 1) Ethereum already has a market cap of $73B [0]. That's a
| lot of money.
|
| 2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the
| value of it to drop [1].
|
| So you'd spend a lot of money to control Ethereum and then
| end up with something that's far less valuable than it was
| before you took control. Not really sure what you'd get out
| of doing that.
|
| [0] https://en.ethereumworldnews.com/ethereums-market-cap-
| is-big...
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-
| mechanisms...
| gruez wrote:
| >2) Controlling 51% of Ethereum would probably cause the
| value of it to drop [1].
|
| I think you're misinterpreting the paragraph. It's not
| that controlling 51% will cause the value to drop (it
| won't, see bitcoin miner control), it's that controlling
| 51% and trying to pull off an attack will cause it to
| drop.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _To do so, you 'd need to control 51% of the staked
| ETH. Not only is this a lot of money but it would
| probably cause ETH's value to drop_
|
| To me "it" is pretty clearly referring to controlling 51%
| of staked ETH.
|
| I don't know about the economics behind whether that
| would cause the value of ETH to decrease, but Bitcoin
| seems like a different situation altogether since miners
| don't control the the cryptocurrency itself.
| gruez wrote:
| And how does the ethereum network differentiate two
| people with different wallets and one person with two
| wallets? Short of attaching some sort of real world
| identity to ethereum wallets it's impossible to tell
| whether someone controls 51% of staked ETH because it's
| trivial to split that up.
| drcode wrote:
| (1) even a 51% attack can't generate fake transactions to
| transfer that money
|
| (2) social power with blockchains (i.e. having people's
| ears on the social networks) is far more important than $$
| power: If nobody wants to install and use your blockchain,
| no amount of $$ can fix that.
| akimball wrote:
| Re (1): True, in that the committed transactions would
| not be fake. But calling eth "money" is...not accurate.
| It has value but lacks moneyness.
| belltaco wrote:
| Because the 1% isn't homogenous and a lot of them will want
| to keep the system working instead of killing the goose
| that lays the golden egg. The 1% is about 1.5 million
| people. Good luck getting most of them organized for a
| certain cause that will result in destruction of wealth mid
| term at the latest.
| carlob wrote:
| The 1% Is 1.5 millions iff the 100% is 150 millions,
| which is what population exactly?
| belltaco wrote:
| The people that file tax returns in the US
| https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-
| for-we...
|
| I picked that because I didn't think if babies and non-
| earners were included when calculating the top 1% of
| highest earners.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Bangladesh? (160 mln actually)
|
| I think they could mean a total number of crypto users,
| recently estimated to be over 100 mln.
| bluecalm wrote:
| The article is about wealth, not money supply. Those are
| completely different concept. There could theoretically be
| a lot of wealth and very little money (if no one wants to
| trade there isn't much needed) or not so much wealth and a
| lot of money (a lot of people need loans to trade and build
| wealth).
|
| It's convenient to measure wealth in dollars in a "how much
| you could get if you still it" way and it's possible
| because dollars are very stable but there is very little
| reason for the amount of dollars circulating to represent
| existing wealth.
| jerf wrote:
| That's a good question.
|
| Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all
| the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person
| community rather than the whole world.
|
| One thing that would _have_ to happen is everyone else
| would develop their own money /currency, which would turn
| mean that the one person with all the money is no longer
| the one person with all the money.
|
| A thing quite likely to happen is that everyone would
| decide that whatever the money is that the one person has,
| everybody would decide it is not money.
|
| It isn't entirely dissimilar from me claiming I have all
| the Jerfoleans on the world, and what the world is really
| doing about that currency right now. They're worth a zero
| so zero-y that even an infinite number of them is still
| worth a flat zero. Someone who has "all the money" might
| find themselves in a similar boat.
| d0mine wrote:
| More likely the one person would hire some people to
| convince the rest that it in their best interests that
| all money belong to the one person or even more likely to
| provide to the people some distraction, destroy the
| notion of the facts, so they wouldn't even know to ask
| inconvenient questions.
| [deleted]
| Dolores12 wrote:
| Money used to represent the value backed up by gold in
| bank storage. Nowadays its just a paper, so indeed its
| easy to create new money.
| jwolfe wrote:
| Not that gold has a massive magical intrinsic value. That
| was also arbitrary.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It is hard to mine and hard to find.
|
| If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the
| world, you are proving that you have done some known --
| or at least bounded -- amount of work.
|
| In gold's case, that work is gas, electricity, and human
| labor. If someone shows up with gold that cost less to
| produce, the price goes down.
| vincnetas wrote:
| And exactly that happened to aluminium. After its
| discovery its cost was bigger than gold. Until more
| effective ways to ectract it were discovered. That does
| not mean that aluminium is useless.
| panarky wrote:
| _> proving that you have done some known -- or at least
| bounded -- amount of work_
|
| Work for the sake of work is not valuable.
|
| You could record video proving that you dug a hole 20
| feet deep with your bare hands and then filled it up
| again.
|
| That's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be valuable to
| anyone, except maybe as comedy.
| justushamalaine wrote:
| Well cards against humanity did that and the hole was
| worth over 100k!
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-
| aga...
| _flux wrote:
| The video wouldn't be valuable, because it's trivial to
| duplicate.
|
| However, should it be impossible to copy videos and the
| only way to do a video would be to capture the events as
| they happen, then perhaps your video would have value.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm surprised there aren't a ton of NFTs for videos of
| people digging holes and filling them up, riffing on both
| "proof of work" and keynesian ideas.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Why do actual work when you can just sell somebody elses
| as your own?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you make a fresh piece of gold and show it to the
| world, you are proving that you have done some known --
| or at least bounded -- amount of work_
|
| Making origami pirate ships also requires a certain
| amount of work. That doesn't give it value.
| stonesweep wrote:
| Much like Ethereum, gold has an actual use post
| discovery/creation but your origami crane does not
| (outside of artistic value and testing for replicants) -
| GP did not go into the details, but they chose an
| appropriate analogy - origami cranes, not so much. Fun
| trivia: NASA uses a bunch of gold
| https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1997/hm2.html
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Value density is the differentiator. The amount of work
| required to produce a single ounce of gold is many orders
| of magnitude greater than the ancillary costs of storing
| or transporting that ounce.
| capableweb wrote:
| > why wouldn't they just demand everyone else hand over
| their cash?
|
| Because it's not in their best interest. If the 1% pulled
| something like that off, the price would drop a lot and
| therefore their ETH would be worth less.
|
| It's one of the core pillars of any blockchain, that the
| incentives are aligned in a way so the best outcome for
| people is the one where the gain the most, so it forces
| them to go for that way.
| gonational wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| That's what they do. That's what inflation is. We work hard
| and save up $100,000, they (the 1%) turn that into $25,000
| in 25 years.
| incrudible wrote:
| Nobody forces you to hold cash for 25 years. In fact, you
| are given many incentives to invest it, inflation being
| just one.
| gonational wrote:
| This is true.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I actually like all things crypto, but why does this tech have to
| suck so much
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's getting there, just growing pains as it goes through
| cycles of innovation and improvements.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Because this tech is not just about tech, but also game theory,
| consensus and economic incentives to align completely
| disconnected parties with completely different motives in a
| trustless manner.
| Fede_V wrote:
| I've been moderately interested in crypto, but, I've held off on
| touching them in any form until a real ecofriendly alternative is
| in play - and I emphasize _real_ (not a few obviously paid shills
| /imbecilles talking about how crypto is actually good for
| environment because it allocates capitol efficiently/thorium
| reactors etc etc).
|
| If eth switches to proof of stake in a meaningful way, I'll
| definitely take a serious look and possibly start investing in
| that ecosystem.
| Fede_V wrote:
| Beyond naked self interest - it's also completely unclear to me
| how it's possible to defend mining. It's literally useless work
| that ruins our beautiful planet to accumulate wealth. How is
| that in any way defensible? It's far less ethical than
| investing in weapons manufacturing.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Satoshi said "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1
| was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of
| its lifetime."[1]
|
| Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense for any crypto
| electronic cash currency because people can not trust it if core
| design changes from time to time. Vitalik will probably come back
| again to POW after miners calm down.
|
| [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611
| drcode wrote:
| Yes, and Vitalik announced long before Ethereum 0.1 was
| released that it would switch to POS in the future.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be
| a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just
| to initially mine a distribute coins?
|
| Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of
| proof of stake:
|
| "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of
| stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional
| to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the
| discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is
| beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that
| both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a
| cryptocurrency."
|
| And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if
| it is so good.
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
| drcode wrote:
| Proof of stake technology wasn't good enough in 2014, so
| POW was the only option.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| More transactions are happening on BSC. Most traders only care
| about low fees.
| everfree wrote:
| Vitalik announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even
| finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be
| a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just
| to initially mine a distribute coins?
|
| Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of
| proof of stake:
|
| "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of
| stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional
| to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the
| discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is
| beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that
| both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a
| cryptocurrency."
|
| And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if
| it is so good.
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
| everfree wrote:
| Both didn't start with PoS because it's much more difficult
| to come up with a practical PoS design than a practical PoW
| design. I consider Casper CBC to be the first robust PoS
| design, and it took many years of research for it to
| developed. Look at peercoin for an example of an early PoS
| design that was fundamentally flawed.
|
| PoW was ready back then, PoS tech was not there yet.
| viklove wrote:
| > Vitalik going from POW to POS is nonsense
|
| Being able to change for the better is not nonsense, it's vital
| to the survival and stability of a coin. The #1 complaint about
| Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its excessive use of power.
| Moving to POS solves this problem. Moving to POS allows ETH to
| scale transaction processing where BTC cannot.
|
| Miners are obviously angry because they spent millions
| (probably billions) on GPUs in warehouses to mine ETH, and this
| is threatening their profits. They're not the significant party
| when it comes to talking about ETH though. The users and larger
| ecosystem make up the significant parties.
|
| POS _will_ happen. ETH 2.0 _will_ happen. This is why ETH is
| better than BTC -- it has a leader like Vitalik who is open to
| changes and knows how to lead implementation. If miners want to
| throw a tantrum in the process, so be it. We 'll just leave
| them behind.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >The #1 complaint about Bitcoin (especially on HN) is its
| excessive use of power.
|
| And how much power does Google or Facebook consume? How much
| power does each Google and Facebook click take?
|
| There are good power sources like renewables and nuclear.
| Power is not a problem.
|
| And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi
| would've used it or would've switched to it.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >And how much power does Google or Facebook consume?
|
| In the case of google, almost an order of magnitude less
| than bitcoin, and it's 100% from buying renewable
| electricity (though because of the way energy markets work
| it's not quite like they don't depend on non-renewable
| sources). Renewable energy is in the minority of bitcoin
| energy usage (coal makes up a large fraction of this).
|
| > And I'm not sure POS is a good solution because Satoshi
| would've used it or would've switched to it.
|
| Satoshi is not omniscient. Just because Satoshi didn't come
| up with it doesn't mean it's a bad idea (in fact many of
| the ideas now integrated in bitcoin did not come from him).
| mrkramer wrote:
| Then devs should research and develop PoW which is more
| efficient and takes less energy and come up with solution
| that does additional useful work on top of verifying
| transactions.
| wmf wrote:
| If relativity is such a good theory, why didn't Newton use
| it?
| drdeca wrote:
| Is it not plausible that developing the math to get a
| stable version of PoS, could take longer than Satoshi had
| before he dropped off the face of the interwebs?
|
| It's not like he's God .
| anaganisk wrote:
| Doesn't Vitalik defeat the purpose of Decentralisation? One
| man trying to push his agenda thru?
| gruez wrote:
| >Moving to POS allows ETH to scale transaction processing
| where BTC cannot.
|
| proof of stake vs proof of work is totally orthogonal to
| transaction processing volume.
| dannyw wrote:
| Not entirely true. PoW's centralisation risk increases as
| bigger blocks mean longer network propagation and hence
| higher orphan rates.
|
| PoS determine the list of proposers in advance, meaning no
| orphan risks.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| All of these miners are the reason why, if you bought a graphics
| card 2 years ago, you can sell it for a profit today. So of
| course, they don't want a system that invalidates their
| investments in GPUs.
|
| The beauty of this system though is that they don't really get a
| choice. If Vitalik forks ETH into a PoS system, and enough people
| get behind it - it doesn't matter what the miners say.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The nature of a fork is that the old system doesn't really go
| away. It's just that most of the economic activity that made it
| valuable (presumably) is going to move to the new system; so
| staying behind is kind of pointless. Of course the assumption
| here is that its current value had anything to do with economic
| activity (other than people gambling on the price of eth and
| other tokens). That's about to be validated in the real world.
|
| I've been more than a bit underwhelmed by ethereum, which if
| you separate out the speculative transactions actually doesn't
| have a whole lot going on in terms of people actually using it
| for real things. There's a little bit of that but mostly it's
| just people trying to get rich quickly. Lots of smart contracts
| idling and generally not doing what they were designed to do,
| games not really getting played, etc.
| omginternets wrote:
| Why is it a good thing to make ETH deflationary? Don't you want
| people to spend it?
| Sargos wrote:
| People are never going to be using ETH as a currency. They
| would use stablecoins like DAI pegged to USD or a basket of
| assets.
|
| A high price of ETH as an asset creates a higher security level
| for Ethereum the blockchain. The ecosystem of projects, apps,
| protocols, organizations, etc on Ethereum is healthier when the
| blockchain is guaranteed secure and stable for everyone to use.
| meowkit wrote:
| One of the biggest mistakes of cryptocurrency was calling it
| cryptocurrency.
|
| Distributed Ledgers have multitudes of use cases. One of them
| is as a currency, but you don't need the base layer to be a
| currency. ETH doesn't need to be spent as much as its needed to
| act as a quantitative measure of ownership and buy in. You can
| build a currency on the second layer, which has been done.
| omginternets wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Doesn't ETH on some
| level have to change hands for work to get done?
| [deleted]
| tom_mellior wrote:
| [removed incorrect post, thanks for the correction]
| rawtxapp wrote:
| I think you're confusing deflationary with depreciation.
|
| Deflationary currency means over time, there's less of it, so
| if the demand stays stable, you'd expect the price to go up.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's not about making it deflationary, that's just a side
| effect of needing to burn the fees for the fee stabilization
| mechanism. I forget the details exactly, but if you don't burn
| them then miners can still do funny business.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It sounds like the Ethereum "community" is about decide whether
| it believes in proof of work or the cult of Vitalik.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The Ethereum community consists of thousands of application
| developers, tens of thousands of ETH2 proof of stake validators
| (who have been operational since December), and millions of
| users. There's no debate in the ETH community about the shift
| to proof of stake. It's already half done. We just need to
| finish the job faster since miners have gotten greedy and fat
| on $20M a day in transaction fees.
| everfree wrote:
| The Ethereum dev team has been publicly committed to a PoS
| transition since the day Ethereum was launched. Anybody not
| aligned with this switch shouldn't have become a stakeholder in
| the protocol.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| I'm one of the maintainers of one of the implementations of eth2
| live today (https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and can help
| offer more context on this. Ethereum proof of stake has been live
| since December 1st and it currently secures over 6 billion USD
| worth of value https://beaconcha.in/. Currently, this is a chain
| that lives in parallel to the proof of work chain we know as
| Ethereum today. The idea is that over this coming year, the
| entire state of Ethereum will be "merged" into this new chain
| that uses proof of stake consensus via a docking process.
| "Escalating the eth2 merge" means there is more expedited work
| from researchers and developers when it comes to performing this
| critical decision. Since eth2 consensus is already live and
| running correctly with a large set of validators, miners cannot
| censor this new chain and therefore cannot really stop the merge.
| 3np wrote:
| Do you think the headline is correct in labeling this as a 51%
| attack? The other argument would be that developers are trying
| to push through a contentious fork (mostly but not only
| contested by miners and mining pools), and mining nodes are
| planning to not adopt the proposed change?
| proto-n wrote:
| Afaik there's no plan to attack, they are planning a "show of
| force", i.e. get more then 51% in a pool for a while without
| doing anything with the power. This is separate from either
| adapting or not adapting the fork itself and happens before
| the fork.
|
| The original chain has to be forked either way, with or
| without eip 1559 because the "ice age" coded into the current
| version (it's in there for this exact reason). So if the
| change goes through and some miners decide to block it,
| there's not going to be an "original chain" and a "fork", but
| two forks, one supported by devs and minority of miners, and
| one supported by miner majority.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| "We're not going to 51% attack the network. We're just
| going to allocate 51% of the hashrate into a single pool to
| demonstrate that we _could_ 51% attack the network "
|
| Why should this threat of violence be treated differently
| than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one
| thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent.
| They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces,
| instead of enjoying another year or so of profitability
| lupire wrote:
| "attack" is a misnomer. 51% is a majority vote.
| Spivak wrote:
| Because whether it's an attack or not is more to do with
| the framing than act. If you get all the miners together
| and can amass 51% of the hash power then you have
| consensus and have enough control of the network to
| simply not accept the EIP.
|
| If something like this isn't possible and you don't
| actually need consensus to push through changes then the
| whole "distributed" part is just a fiction and we're
| really talking about a centrally controlled network.
| Miners are just basically threatening to vote against the
| EIP if it comes to it.
|
| Threatening to vote against a bill if it reaches the
| floor in its current form isn't an attack or violence.
| It's just a message that if you want it to pass you
| should probably change it.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Calling it a 51% "attack" is like saying Biden "stole"
| the election by getting at least 51% of the votes. The
| whole point of a cryptocurrency is that there is no
| central authority. Vitalik can provide a vision, but he
| doesn't, and shouldn't want, to control it. If the
| compute power disagrees with him, then that's just how
| it's gonna be.
| IFoundBiden wrote:
| I wish you were Biden man. Have my babies have my ass,
| expertly told. Consider a career in writing. Or being
| oiled up. Good show dude.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| What really surprises me is how in bad faith the PoW miners are
| acting. Ethereum was, from day one, planning to transition to
| PoS once the research and proof-of-concept was working. If
| anything the Ethereum PoW miners have been very lucky in that
| Ethereum is kinda late on its roadmap to switch to PoS (at
| least compared to when first announced).
| morelisp wrote:
| You're saying a significant number of people who gathered
| behind the maxim "code is law" for money may have signed onto
| what the code was doing and not what the long-term social
| plan was? Quelle surprise!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Excellent work on prysmatic! Can you clarify about this "quick
| merge" proposal? Would the idea be to shift "ETH1" validation
| to the ETH2 Beacon nodes? At first two chains would be running
| and be validated by the same nodes but then much later the
| final merge of Beacon and ETH1 chains would occur? Is that the
| plan?
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| How did those 6 Billion USD worth of value move to the beacon
| chain while it is not connected to the old chain?
| tantaman wrote:
| you intentionally stake your ETH on the new chain. So 6
| billion from individuals and organizations that intentionally
| "moved" their coins.
| delaaxe wrote:
| They were burned on the old chain
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I see how that is possible. Anybody can probably burn ETH
| they own by sending it to an invalid address or something.
|
| And how was it created on the beacon chain? Was it simiply
| hard programmed into the software "We start with a bunch of
| ether at the following address: ..."?
| hjorthjort wrote:
| You send your ETH to a specific contract, from which it
| can't be moved (whether you want to call that "burning"
| is up to you, but it's probably a bit confusing). Each
| validator must also run an Eth full node, and uses the
| state of that contract to determine who can act as a
| validator on the Beacon chain.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Are there any plans to do staking Polkadot/Cardano style?
| I'd like to stake my ETH but have no interest in running
| a full validator
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| Already possible
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| It's possible. See, for example, Rocket Pool:
|
| https://www.rocketpool.net/
| 177tcca wrote:
| This is the first time I've seen someone praising Cardano
| without me looking for it.
|
| Could you elaborate?
| cfcosta wrote:
| Not OP, but I can give some elaboration on why Cardano is
| a really interesting project:
|
| 1. Staking in Cardano does not lock up your funds, and is
| really decentralized, getting more every day. Because of
| that, more than 70% of all coins are currently staked.
| This brings less volatility to the price and ensure
| longevity of the chain. The interest is not too big too,
| everything seems as sustainable as it can be.
|
| 2. Cardano supports assets natively instead of having
| them just being backed by smart contracts (this is/will
| be still possible though), which means that there are no
| extra gas fees to send/receive stablecoins or assets
| other than Ada.
|
| 3. Babel fees are part of 2, it means that the
| transaction fees can be paid by native tokens, not only
| ada. This is a huge improvement from the BSC or Eth,
| where you need BNB/ETH to pay transaction fees even if
| you're only dealing in stablecoins.
|
| 4. Smart contracts are finally coming in Q2, which will
| bring DeFi to Cardano (this explains the price mooning in
| late feb, early march, because of the mary hardfork).
|
| 5. Forks and updates in the chain are painless, last one
| I didn't even had to send money to a new wallet or
| anything like that.
|
| 6. New developments and features to the chain and
| ecosystem are being "baked into the protocol", in a
| sense. Project Catalyst is the first step for this,
| financing some projects, but in their roadmap they plan
| on giving away all control of the direction of the coin,
| and only work as a service provider to the ecosystem
| using the same infrastructure as all the other projects.
|
| I'm really bullish on this coin, not only on price but
| also on the kinds of problems it can solve. Can answer
| more questions if you have any :)
| longngn wrote:
| Is Project Catalyst a Cardano's version of The DAO? I'm
| newbie in crypto.
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| There is a well-thought out and well-designed process for
| all stages of this. You can read up on that on the
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Been poking around for a while but did not find the part
| where it explains how ETH moves from the old chain to the
| new prior to the merge.
|
| Do you know where it is described?
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| It involves something called the staking deposit
| contract:
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
|
| https://launchpad.ethereum.org/overview/
|
| Picking any active validator on the Beacon Chain, we can
| see that there is an Eth1 deposit and a corresponding
| Eth2 deposit:
|
| https://beaconcha.in/validator/91676#deposits
|
| https://beaconscan.com/validator/91676#deposits
|
| If you're interested in the technical details, see:
|
| https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/tree/dev/specs/p
| has...
| 6nf wrote:
| Question: Will there be a chain split - will we end up with
| 'ETH classic' and 'ETH proof of stake' after the upgrade or how
| does it work?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Yes but there is already an 'ETH classic'. So there will be
| three, and the names should actually be 'ETH' (proof of
| stake), 'ETH for Miners' (proof of work), and 'ETH classic'
| (existing, for another group that didn't like a previous
| important change).
| kozak wrote:
| Reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism#/medi
| a/File:Christianit...
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| I think this is guaranteed.
|
| As long as one person keeps running the old software, the old
| chain is alive.
|
| Even if nobody does it, somebody could start running it again
| at any time.
|
| The different chains will have different market caps. And the
| general public will forget about chains that have
| sufficiently small market caps.
|
| I wonder what will happen to Ether that is in custody. Like
| in the Greyscale Ethereum Trust or the 21Shares Ethereum ETP.
|
| Has anybody ever checked the TOS of these companies on what
| will happen if multiple forks carry significant value?
| ThePowerOfDirge wrote:
| False, the difficulty bomb will kill off eth1.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the difficulty bomb will kill off eth1_
|
| Wouldn't it make sense for miners to switch to a new
| Ethereum chain _without_ the bomb?
| dylkil wrote:
| Then they will be on a fork of a fork of a fork (ETC ->
| ETH -> ETH_POW -> ETH_POW minus Difficulty bomb)
|
| who will take this chain seriously
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Stuff like this is exactly why I have chosen to allocate
| 0% of my cryptocurrency investments into Ethereum. Such a
| cluster
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| How would they be on a fork, if the "original" dies
| because of the difficulty bomb? Since the fork that
| wasn't bombed would survive, it would be considered the
| original, wouldn't it?
|
| How is it defined? Like somebody releases a new version
| with the bomb removed. Most miners adapt it. Why is it
| then a fork? Because the bomb is a major feature?
| Otherwise, wouldn't ever software upgrade be considered a
| fork?
| lupire wrote:
| "original" and "fork" have no meaning inside the ETH
| universe. These terms are used in the outside social
| milieu.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| If I understood the conversation from the last dev call
| correctly, they're talking about combining EIP-1559 and
| the difficulty bomb fix into the same fork specifically
| to avoid this
| gus_massa wrote:
| The Difficulty Bomb has been delayed at least once, so
| delaying it once again or defusing it, it not
| unimaginable.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _who will take this chain seriously_
|
| If it has 51% of Ethereum's current hashpower, somebody.
| (Ethereum Proof of Stake is the same number of forks away
| from Ethereum Classic.)
| __tmk__ wrote:
| Yes, miners can turn off the bomb, but that requires that
| they coordinate and determine a schedule for the hardfork
| that turns off the bomb (you need a hardfork to turn it
| off).
|
| This scenario is definitely possible, but it requires a
| little more work than "one guy keeps running an old eth1
| node".
| gge wrote:
| Nope, wont happen. https://medium.com/dragonfly-
| research/ethereum-is-now-unfork...
| DJBunnies wrote:
| This will not be the first time this has happened to eth.
| Tepix wrote:
| They manage to avoid it most of the time via time bombs in
| the code
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Vitalik and friends can just sell their coins on the proof of
| work chain and thus make it unattractive.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Do they have enough ETH to run a 51% attack with a PoS
| system?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| However you could change the protocol / software and block
| the addresses of people who don't support the PoW chain.
|
| It would be a bit messy.
|
| However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining rig,
| you would like to do something with your hardware.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| So one can ask. Who has the biggest say in a
| cryptocurrency?
|
| The owners of the coins, the developers, the miners?
|
| Actually I would argue it would be the exchanges: What
| the major exchanges choose to trade as Ethereum is what
| will continue.
| dwild wrote:
| > However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining
| rig, you would like to do something with your hardware.
|
| You would like to profit from your hardware*.
|
| That's an important distinction, as what make you profit
| from your hardware, isn't running it on ETH in
| particular, it's running it on a cryptocurrency which is
| used. They could run it on ETC currently if they want to
| keep mining, but they don't as ETH represents more value.
| So whether they keep running on the fork is more about
| whether the cash will be there to mine on it and my
| impression is that it won't be there.
|
| Currently there's quite a big smear campaign on the
| environment impact of cryptocurrency on the world. This
| is important for many people, thus will impact whatever
| they decide to do.
|
| There was also always a preference toward the forks
| supported by the official developers. It's normal, as
| long as we have no reason to doubt their decisions, why
| change? In this case this is even more true as it's not
| questioning the decision, the intention is clear that
| it's about the miner hardware.
|
| Let not forget also that this fork will be supported by
| peoples that proved that they could orchestrate a 51%
| attack for their own gains... which is pretty much the
| fear that was always there on cryptocurrencies...
|
| There's no reason to believe people would go toward a
| fork, thus there won't be much value in mining on that
| fork versus any alternative cryptocurrency. If I was a
| miner, I would start selling my graphic cards... they are
| still sold for quite a bit of money currently and it's
| just a matter of time before the price crash and it
| become easy again to buy a new graphic card.
| kerng wrote:
| If I understand right the ETH chain will be integrated as a
| shard. This would mean it would just live on inside the new
| Ethereum ecosystem until it is ice aged - so one could say
| it's not a fork but a wrap of some sort.
|
| Unfortunately not a single resource I found actually
| describes this process in an easy to understand fashion -
| pretty amazing considering we are talking about $200+ billion
| dollars....
| flarex wrote:
| Unlikely as there is an ice age built-in to eth1 which will
| steadily increase the time between blocks until none are
| produced. There should also be a hard fork which includes
| code which just stops the old chain on block x. Anyone that
| wanted to continue with the old chain would need an
| additional hard fork.
| DennisP wrote:
| It would be more difficult these days to get much marketcap
| on the minority chain, now that Ethereum hosts tokens
| representing a variety of off-chain resources like fiat money
| and bitcoins. Those things will have to pick one chain whose
| claims will be honored. Same for some NFT projects. Anything
| involving data feeds won't necessarily support the minority
| chain either, though in principle they could.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| How does this effect the viability of L2 side chain solutions?
| mratsim wrote:
| L2 can scale Eth2 as well. In fact Vitalik mentions often
| that scaling can go 100x with Eth2 and 100x with L2 for
| 10000x total scaling.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Eth2 and L2 are independent solutions that are both
| happening. After Eth2, low tx throughput on Ethereum will
| likely still cause transactions to be expensive enough that
| users strongly prefer to use L2.
| rullelito wrote:
| What? There are political risks with cryptos, and it is not the
| perfect system? I'm shocked!
| chucknthem wrote:
| Reminds me of the bitcoin cash fork and segwit drama in 2017.
| dnprock wrote:
| Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of
| people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making
| ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and
| want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to
| advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are
| pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and
| decentralization.
|
| The problem with crypto is volatility. The whole market moves in
| one direction or another, usually with Bitcoin. Scarcity is not
| the only thing that makes up the economy. We need also need
| inflation. Stop engaging in these ideological wars. Let's fix the
| problem and drive adoption.
|
| https://bitflate.org/post/2020/04/26/we-need-inflationary-cr...
| seibelj wrote:
| What does "worship" mean? I am a believer of the Austrian
| theory of economics. Are Keynesian / Monetarists also
| "worshippers" of a theory? Modern economics is not that old. I
| fundamentally believe printing as much money as we are across
| the rich world is going to lead to disaster, just as it has
| time and again in the developing world (see Venezuela,
| Zimbabwe, Argentina, Brazil, etc.).
|
| If anything, Austrian economics is a reversion to the standard
| theory of economics for thousands of years. The "innovation" of
| Keynesian economics is one of the greatest evils ever
| perpetuated on society. But again - what do I know - I don't
| have a PhD from an Ivy. I just protect my assets in a zero-
| interest world by avoiding government threat.
| wmf wrote:
| _Austrian economics is a reversion to the standard theory of
| economics for thousands of years._
|
| Thousands of incredibly poor years by today's standards.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| The gold standard's deflation was associated with pretty
| good results:
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w10329
|
| In any case, in a multi-currency world with low-friction
| electronic exchanges available, it stands to reason that
| deflation is less likely to be damaging, since the
| switching costs to more inflationary currencies are low.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| >I fundamentally believe printing as much money as we are
| across the rich world is going to lead to disaster
|
| You are fundamentally wrong. Austrian has worshippers because
| it's a cult. It has no basis in reality.
| dnprock wrote:
| Keynesians think money grows on tree. It is true in some
| senses. Apples grow on tree. At the extreme, they think money
| is imaginary. They can print as much as they want.
|
| Austrians think money grows from hard money. It is also true
| in some senses. Money is made from money. It's circular and
| Ponzi-like. It requires you to believe in what hard money is.
| Austrian thinking leads to some cult-like behaviors. At the
| extreme, they'd be rent-seeking their precious Store of
| Value. It's just as evil as the Keynesians.
|
| Money is data (Keynesian) with some kind of illusions
| (Austrian). The money that we need is between the Keynesians
| and Austrians.
| zionic wrote:
| Are you unaware of stable coins such as DAI that run on ETH?
| csomar wrote:
| > We need also need inflation.
|
| Why?
| kubanczyk wrote:
| You don't need inflation with gold but you do need inflation
| to run the economy.
|
| Because no one sane lends money at 0%. Or at -1%, with
| deflation.
|
| Lack of lending brings investements down.
|
| Lack of investments brings growth down.
|
| The old companies keep grinding old way. The rich pocket
| money as a super safe way to get even richer. Stagnation.
|
| See: Keynes
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Because people incur nominal debt contracts which causes
| wages to be sticky downwards --> they can go up more easily
| than down. With inflation, if wages are too high, you can let
| inflation eat away at them. If there were no inflation, the
| downward stickiness would lead to a lot of market failures
| (bankruptcies and unemployment) when wages were too high.
|
| But then why do people incur nominal debt contracts? Because
| production occurs throughout time but must be settled in some
| medium. The farmer needs to know how much he will get for his
| wheat, the shipper needs to know, so someone needs to promise
| to buy wheat next year for $X and for that contract to be
| useful, everything else needs to be priced in terms of $ as
| well, so that the farmer can buy fertilizer for $ today, and
| agree to hire workers to work the field for $ from today to
| harvest time, etc. In this way, the farmer can estimate what
| he will get next year, what he will pay throughout the year,
| and what investments he needs to make right now. It is
| nothing special about the dollar -- if everyone used bitcoin
| for real contracts then wages would be downward sticky in
| terms of bitcoin, too. But as there is no way of expanding
| the supply of bitcoin, this downward stickiness would lead to
| a lot more market failures, and thus a lot more unemployment.
| We would then be effectively back on the gold standard, but
| at least with the gold standard, you'd occasionally find lots
| of gold in a mountain and this would stimulate the economy
| and increase employment. With BTC, you'd have all the
| financial crises of sticky prices but without the occasional
| gold discovery.
| whitepaint wrote:
| > The problem with crypto is volatility.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency)
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion
| that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are effectively
| useless as a means of exchange and as a primary tool to run an
| economy then you should just ditch decentralized currencies
| altogether because then you also get rid of the meaningless
| complications around mining, energy efficiency or user-
| friendliness and go to a digital central-bank currency directly
| which actually has the proper tools to do monetary policy and
| all you need is a database.
| wmf wrote:
| I do think CBDCs are the digital cash that most people want
| but a decentralized implementation of Keynesian monetary
| policy would be interesting to see (for the half-dozen people
| who care).
| gruez wrote:
| >If you already come to the very sane and correct conclusion
| that deflationary and volatile cryptocurrencies are
| effectively useless as a means of exchange and as a primary
| tool to run an economy then [...]
|
| What about as a store of value? Gold is still around despite
| being heavy and hard to transact with.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Wanna store value? Buy actual value - that is things that
| make the wealth. Stocks in major companies, real estate,
| land in places people want to live in. The concept that
| buying promises is a good way to store value is a bizarre
| concept to me.
| from wrote:
| This has always perplexed me too. There's a nice Buffett
| quote on this
| (https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf):
|
| "Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric
| tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would
| form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it
| fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750
| per ounce - gold's price as I write this - its value
| would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
|
| Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For
| that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres
| with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16
| Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one
| earning more than $40 billion annually). After these
| purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for
| walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after
| this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6
| trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
|
| Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock
| of gold, current prices make today's annual production of
| gold command about $160 billion. Buyers - whether jewelry
| and industrial users, frightened individuals, or
| speculators - must continually absorb this additional
| supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present
| prices.
|
| A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will
| have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton,
| and other crops - and will continue to produce that
| valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon
| Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars
| in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets
| worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16
| Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in
| size and still incapable of producing anything. You can
| fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
|
| Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful,
| it's likely many will still rush to gold. I'm confident,
| however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile
| A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior
| to that achieved by pile B."
|
| I have noticed that people who advocate for this "store
| of value" idea have this tendency to insinuate that cash
| is the only alternative to gold or bitcoin or whatever it
| is. There has always been alternatives to letting your
| savings be eroded by inflation (stocks, bonds, etc) and
| part of the reason for inflation is to incentivize people
| to invest their money in these productive things.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Gold held it's value before we started counting the years
| from the death of christ.
|
| It was valuable when britain was pairing criminals and
| prostitutes in handcuffs and shipping them to the US to
| populate the damn place.
|
| It is valuable even today when there are people willing
| to risk death just to reach its shore..
|
| I am willing to bet it will remain being valuable even
| when America becomes an irrelevant once-was in a few
| decades..
|
| I want to know which asset class will survive the
| collapse of the US dollar and the fall of US
| influence...?
|
| If your answer to that question is, "that's just absurd,
| never going to happen in my lifetime.." I can just smile
| and wish you all the best..
| delaaxe wrote:
| > britain was pairing criminals and prostitutes in
| handcuffs and shipping them to the US to populate the
| damn place
|
| What can I Google to know more about this? I though it
| was also the case about Australia
| cachvico wrote:
| Fantastic post.
| d0gbread wrote:
| Share this quote with someone in Venezuela with a
| straight face. Or the countless unbanked that have access
| to a divisible digital gold but not stocks, bonds, gold,
| or enough to direct invest.
| from wrote:
| I can definitely agree that Bitcoin is a step in the
| right direction for expanding access to the financial
| system and I think the whole DeFi space on Ethereum is
| pretty incredible too (Uniswap, Curve, etc). It's
| outrageous that there are hundreds of millions of people
| who can't even open a bank account because they have no
| form of ID. I recognize that theoretically everyone can
| have a Bitcoin address and obviously there is tremendous
| value in that. But it's unlikely that these people will
| have real access to Bitcoin either when you consider that
| most Bitcoin users get it through centralized exchanges
| like Coinbase who must comply with whatever AMC/KYC
| garbage FINCEN and the rest of the American regulatory
| apparatus put out.
|
| I would guess that Venezuelans mostly want a stable
| currency. There's plenty of reports
| (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-
| economy/dollars...,
| https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807488229/use-of-u-s-
| dollar-i...,
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/there-
| are...) of Venezuelans using USD and there are plenty of
| other developing countries (Lebanon, Zimbabwe, etc) that
| have a widespread black market for dollars. From Feb 21
| to Feb 27 Bitcoin's dollar value dropped by 25%. From Feb
| 27 to today Bitcoin's value has increased by almost 30%.
| Even with all the inflation fear going on now safe-haven
| currencies like the Swiss Franc do not have this level of
| volatility. If you just want to avoid hyperinflation
| there are much safer (and [accessible](https://assets.bwb
| x.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iaETafdC5WN...)) places to
| park your savings.
| dnprock wrote:
| I don't think cryptocurrencies will replace fiat completely.
| They're still crypto. They have fixed rules. We still need
| currency "bridge" between crypto and the real world.
| Cryptocurrencies offer decentralized options which can
| address problems with money distribution.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Why can't they replace fiat? Why can't crypto be minted to
| represent real world assets (like batches of nuts or
| nickel, not magic pieces of paper)?
| dnprock wrote:
| Because real world assets don't get minted like crypto.
| They are tied to physical world. They are volatile.
| Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes. It's a fairly
| precise schedule. On the other hand, real world assets
| grow and contract at unpredictable rates. Even gold
| mining fluctuates. The real world is volatile. The BTCUSD
| peg is free floating. It's also volatile.
|
| Crypto is rigid. Real world is volatile. It's hard to
| create a stable peg between crypto and the real world. So
| some kinds of bridge currencies are necessary. Fiat or
| some forms of digital fiat will continue to exist.
|
| Bitcoin is a deflationary (disinflationary) asset. The
| BTCUSD peg is volatile. We need better money instruments
| to reduce volatility. I think an inflationary crypto can
| help.
| delaaxe wrote:
| BTCUSD is a pair, not a "peg"
| dnprock wrote:
| Sorry, it's not a guaranteed peg. It's more like a
| conversion.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I'm not saying it will be an exact peg. I am saying that
| colored coins can represent specific batches of a real
| world asset. For example gold mined from a specific mine
| by a specific company from date x to date y. That company
| would also create the colored coins that represent a
| claim to the gold mined. They could even mint the coins
| ahead of time and they would act as futures on the output
| of the mine during that time.
| dnprock wrote:
| It's difficult to build layers on top of the Bitcoin
| blockchain. The base asset, Bitcoin, is volatile. Its
| volatility affects the assets on 2nd layers. There isn't
| a one-one peg between the 2nd layer and the base chain.
| You'd need to trust an oracle. In your gold example,
| you'd need to trust the miner for authenticity and their
| books. For use-cases with oracles, it's more efficient to
| use a database. There's no need to use a blockchain.
|
| Some projects on Ethereum, like DAI, have explored these
| use-cases. I think they have not been successful. DAI
| requires high reserve ratio (1-1.5) to manage the
| volatility of the base chain. You're using 1.5 USD to get
| 1 USDDAI. It's not very efficient. I'm less excited about
| assets on blockchain. I think the market is not ready. We
| need to reduce volatility first.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| Lookup mutual credit cryptocurrencies (eg what Holochain
| plans to do with the HOT swap).
|
| In that model supply breathes directly instep with underlying
| demand. The users themselves are the agents that cause the
| supply to expand or contract.
|
| Tada: maximum velocity with no incentive to hoard.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I really hope to see some cheap 6800xt's on eBay soon.
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices,
| different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users...
|
| Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and
| its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary)
| wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a
| world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still,
| people are just starting to realize its potential. This month a
| layer-2 solution called optimism will launch a virtual machine
| called OVM (optimism vm) on top of ethereum smart contracts that
| can solve most of the current scalability issues (and there are
| other solutions being tested in parallel: zkrollups...). We are
| also starting to realize the potential of Dex and Defi
| (distributed exchanges and finance), DAOs (distributed
| organizations), NFT (non-fungible tokens) and a bunch of things
| more that 7 years after are appearing out of thin air. So even if
| Ethereum wasn't updated at all (although, we probably all agree
| that PoW is not environmental friendly and should be replaced
| with a better alternative: PoS) it could still thrive in the long
| term thanks to its most fundamental design choices (turing-
| complete...). I am truly amazed by this technology and Vitalik. I
| wish I knew a little bit more of the underlying fundamentals.
| What do you think?
| Sargos wrote:
| It really is amazing when you understand the capabilities and
| speed of iterations of the growing use cases of this new shared
| trust machine. DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, so many different ecosystems
| currently being built cooperatively by hundreds of different
| companies and project teams. It's almost a force of nature.
| keymone wrote:
| Sorry, plopping JavaScript on top of blockchain is not
| something I would call visionary. Smart contracts were there
| long before eth. Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of
| promises and very little delivery. It's got nice PR, but it's
| really the PHP of cryptocurrencies. But of course almost
| everything else except bitcoin is much worse.
|
| Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It's an
| anti-feature. You shouldn't want it. It's a model of evaluation
| where halting problem exists.
|
| But hey, it's a nice buzzword for script kiddies. Great
| foundation for financial system, right? :)
| whitepaint wrote:
| > Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and
| very little delivery.
|
| You really should visit https://ethereum.org/
| everfree wrote:
| Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas"
| model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas
| before the program returns.
|
| If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that
| puts it in a great spot for adoption.
| keymone wrote:
| In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas
| it requires to complete because that's what it means - to
| solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your
| financial system handling all people's economic
| interactions. What can possibly go wrong.
|
| I'll stick with deterministic bitcoin script,
| thankyouverymuch.
| mvanaltvorst wrote:
| You don't have to know how much gas it requires to
| /complete/, you can just run the program and check
| whether it runs out of gas before it exits. You do not
| need to solve the halting problem. Actually, it's pretty
| trivial to implement this and this model has scaled quite
| well considering the size of Ethereum today.
| throwingduck001 wrote:
| Determining whether a Turing machine halts within k steps
| is computable:
| https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-
| pro...
|
| If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the
| problem is NP-complete:
| https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html
| dsco wrote:
| JavaScript powers much of the Internet today, and PHP too.
| When evaluating the effect of any given system or protocol -
| do you only analyze the design of its language - or its
| outcome?
| keymone wrote:
| Cool, I just don't want it to power any of my financial
| future.
| dsco wrote:
| You don't have to, that's the beauty of having a choice.
|
| Now that HN knows that you're so opinionated about the
| tech stack of your bank - can you detail down what type
| of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so
| good? Or is that just something you assume since you
| basically have zero knowledge about what traditional
| finance uses as back-ends?
| gruez wrote:
| >can you detail down what type of infrastructure your
| current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just
| something you assume since you basically have zero
| knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-
| ends?
|
| It doesn't really matter what backend my bank uses
| because there's regulatory backstops (eg. FDIC) to
| protect me if something goes wrong. The same can't be
| said for crytpo.
| keymone wrote:
| I know a lot about it which is why I trust simple and
| stable systems like bitcoin. Banks are archaic, ethereum
| is Wild West with script kiddies "building" the future,
| bitcoin is just right for me.
| herbst wrote:
| I few years ago i sold all my eth because i did not get the
| hype. Years later ETH sparked my interest and i agree that the
| technic is very likely the greatest crypto innovation since
| bitcoin. And the thing Bitcoin should have been to begin with.
| seibelj wrote:
| There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger
| blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career
| and wealth in this space. What you won't find are tons of
| people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic
| reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative
| attitude towards this industry.
|
| I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried
| so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently
| against what I have devoted my life to. It's very sad. My
| conclusions are numerous, but I think it's death by a thousand
| cuts.
| nwatson wrote:
| I hope to understand the ecosystem better ... and imagine
| that at some point the greener operation and greater utility
| of Ethereum ETH 2.0 will beat out Bitcoin.
|
| Will this lead to better returns for Ethereum over Bitcoin
| medium- or long-term, eventually? When will that switchover
| happen (if not already)?
| dmichulke wrote:
| My take is you have to understand finance, central banking,
| its abuse by banks and governments, and so on in order to
| _see_ the utility of the crypto industry.
|
| If you never got lost, you might not see the value of GPS.
|
| Others don't _need_ to get lost, but they are better at
| seeing the economic implications like increased efficiency
| when navigating roads, waterways, airspace, ...
|
| Instead, the disbeliefers consider it expensive,
| unecological, and related company stocks as in a bubble.
| herbst wrote:
| Same here. Crypto literally is the best thing that happened
| carrier wise to my life. From the wild wild west in the early
| days that allowed anyone to make some beermoney then (and be
| rich today if they holded) to the immense community we have
| today that turn simple products/dapps/whatever into millions
| strong businesses over night.
|
| Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the
| people (for a while at least) its sad to hear such a negative
| attudide from a otherwise forward thinking community
| willis936 wrote:
| The issue is that exact story is "get rich quick". A good
| predictor on how jaded you are towards your reaction to it
| is "did you get rich?"
| CrackpotGonzo wrote:
| Where would you tell a crypto noob to start today?
| Sargos wrote:
| This is the go-to guide for anyone new to crypto today.
| It goes over the why and how and provides links for
| further reading.
| https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-1-starting-
| with-b...
| heliodor wrote:
| Where do the crypto folks hang out?
| seibelj wrote:
| Everything is organized around coins and projects. For
| example if you are into eth core then you are in eth
| magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org
|
| The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord.
| Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some
| decent subreddits but it isn't the primary place.
|
| This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through
| contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in
| the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you
| are serious. Etc.
| fock wrote:
| sound a lot like the mob
| dmingod666 wrote:
| It doesn't help that the shadiest of people use crypto and
| ICOs to cheat and steal from gullible people. The suspicion
| and guard is up because the stakes are different. Let's say
| you write an opensource logging library for your language and
| promote it on HN - the stakes are low for everyone involved.
|
| Let's say you're trying to launch rabbit token that's going
| to be the next only-fans replacement. You have a ton of
| motivation to hard sell your product and for this reason
| people are going to be equally not so exited and will have
| their guards up. I think it'd be naive to expect a OpenSource
| launch like happy reaction...
|
| So it's 1) bad guys in that industry that have the wrong
| motivation giving the industry a partial deserved bad name.
|
| 2) A recognition that people espousing a technology are not
| purely talking about those technologies but have a vested
| interest in those assets having a positive view in other
| people's perception.
|
| Ofcourse it comes with the territory. Like if a lawyer says,
| wonder "why is my profession, not universally loved?"
|
| "Its just the 80% of the corrupt politicians giving the rest
| of the 20% a bad name."
|
| Not passing judgement or moral judgement but I don't think
| crypto is going to shake-off the suspicion for quite a while.
|
| This is because there is a knowledge gap between the masses
| and the people that know how things work. Till you have that
| gap there will be opportunists that will want to cash out on
| the knowledge arbitrage.
|
| Its actually not just with crypto. Look at products that talk
| about AI enhanced this and AI enhanced that. Those guys are
| viewed with suspicion as well. Just slap-on an AI label to
| your PPT and bang your product is now cutting edge. Everyone
| see through that BS..
| mratsim wrote:
| It's likely that the shadiest people use cash though.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I'm positive about Bitcoin valuation over the long term.
|
| I'm negative about Bitcoins utility.
|
| I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM
| and their valuation over the long term.
|
| I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage.
| It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes.
|
| I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved
| within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs,
| don't come up much here at all.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he
| created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design
| supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types
| that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded
| contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature,
| etc."[1]
|
| [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611
| casi wrote:
| Most of the ethereum devs I know were bitcoin people first.
| Bitcoin is cool but you simply can't do what you can do on
| ethereum. Remember Vitalik himself worked for bitcoin
| magazine and pushed hard for updates that would make his
| ideas possible on bitcoin, but they were repeatedly rejected.
| So we had to build ethereum instead. Now with ethereums
| success we are seeing people go back and say "bitcoin does
| this too" but it simply doesn't. And a side chain, that isn't
| inheriting security from layer one isn't good enough.
|
| There is a lot more bitcoin wrapped onto ethereum that there
| is on lightning. (Now 1% of total supply). Ethereum is eating
| bitcoin.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing
| complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps
| like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.
| keymone wrote:
| Turing completeness is an anti feature in financial system
| like bitcoin. And pretty much zero contracts currently
| deployed to ethereum require Turing completeness. It's just
| a buzzword to sell you this gigantic pre-mine scam.
| everfree wrote:
| I can't think of a single Ethereum dapp that could be
| implemented without an expressive scripting language.
| keymone wrote:
| Well, you're misguided. It's not the language, it's
| platform features like kv store attached to blockchain
| that make these dapps possible to implement. And none of
| them require Turing completeness.
| everfree wrote:
| They may not require turing completeness in the strictest
| sense, but they do require branching logic and loops.
| keymone wrote:
| Branching and looping are constructs that you can have in
| non-Turing complete language with some limitations that
| don't matter in practice for the purpose of ethereum or
| bitcoin scripts.
| riffraff wrote:
| a non-turing complete language can still be useful and
| "expressive" in a loose sense.
|
| SPARK[0] isn't Turing complete but it's still pretty
| useful, and likely a better language than Solidity.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_lang
| uage)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Bitcoin is deliberately and wisely not Turing complete.
| That gives a lot of power and mischief-making ability to
| anonymous entities in an adversarial environment.
|
| It's partly why Bitcoin is 5x Ethereum's market cap,
| despite technically being less capable. It's less capable
| of losing money, of DAO attacks, or other serious failures
| too.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Bitcoin is five times the price of Etherium because it
| was the first cryptocurrency and everyone knows its name.
| It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of
| either.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I generally agree with this. But Ethereum is "less
| finished" than Bitcoin. I feel like this situation might
| be different in a year or two once ETH2 is fully rolled
| out. Right now, ETH is a bit more risky. There's no doubt
| that more economic activity is happening on the ETH
| chain, though
| garmaine wrote:
| That's not a limitation. There is absolutely no reason to
| have a Turing-complete language in bitcoin.
|
| This can even be proved from first principles: bitcoin, and
| blockchains generally exist to validate the execution of
| contracts which have already occurred in meat-space.
| Basically you and I agree to conditions under which some
| money is transferred from me to you and vice-versa, which
| is the actual contract, then write a program (the "smart"
| contract) which validates that those rules were faithfully
| executed. It can be shown though that any Turing-complete
| contract rules can be _validated_ using a non-Turing-
| complete language like Bitcoin script (ignoring runtime
| limits). The block chain doesn 't need to run every
| contract, it just needs to validate that every contract ran
| correctly. A different problem, for which Turing
| completeness is not required.
|
| Edit: For the down-voters, show me a Turing-complete
| contract that can't have its execution trace validated in a
| non-Turing complete language. In the 10 years I've been in
| this space I've yet to encounter a single one.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I'm not an expert in Computer Theory but other people
| proved Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script are Turing Complete:
|
| [1]
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279
|
| [2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-
| scryp...
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Craig Wright is a moron and a fraud.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| These are deliberate redefinitions of the term "Turing
| complete". The reasonable interpretation is that
| evaluating a single block can involve an arbitrary
| computation (if given enough gas). Ethereum has this
| property, Bitcoin doesn't.
|
| These redefinitions say that you can take a few
| computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state
| such that a later block can take a few more steps, so
| over time, very slowly, spread out over many blocks,
| Bitcoin can also implement an arbitrary computation. This
| is theoretically cute but otherwise useless.
| antimatter15 wrote:
| Ethereum blocks have a gas limit so it wouldn't be Turing
| complete under your definition either.
| jude- wrote:
| The EVM is TC in that you cannot determine if a snippet
| of code will halt, given sufficient gas. EVM code is
| undecidable, whereas Bitcoin script is not.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| The universe is finite so no Turing complete computing
| devices can ever exist.
|
| Ethereum has a Turing complete _language_ that is only
| limited in practice by external constraints like the gas
| limit. Bitcoin doesn 't have such a language.
| jki275 wrote:
| I believe that was disabled in the protocol long ago because
| it was deemed to be a security risk.
| gruez wrote:
| Some opcodes were disabled but most of them remain.
| https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| Yeah -- they totally butchered it.
|
| The removed op codes are the ones essential to make cool
| things:
|
| Arithmetic, string manipulation, and bit manipulation.
|
| The remaining ones are _substantially_ less useful... and
| why I'm long in ETH rather than BTC.
| 3np wrote:
| If by the document you mean the original Ethereum yellow paper
| that first formalized it, the main author was actually Gavin
| Wood, not Vitalik :)
|
| Both were crucial in laying down the technical and theoretical
| foundation of Ethereum.
|
| Gavin is working on other things now. Vitalik is not the
| thought-leader he was in the early days (which is a good thing
| as he's not a SPoF and decision making is more decentralized)
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Am I the only one who thinks
|
| No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there
| promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing
| legitimate concerns.
|
| First, you have to understand that at least half of the
| concepts you're talking about have completely not broken
| through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain
| community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the
| first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs.
|
| That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of
| the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with
| quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing
| revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details.
|
| Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks
| - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But
| Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A
| salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most
| of us.
|
| I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius.
| Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction
| most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the
| glee with which boosters like you allow it to be.
|
| The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the
| technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is
| NFTs.
|
| You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no
| familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from
| what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling
| ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as
| a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for
| income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for
| the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the
| environmental impact.
|
| So....that's what I think.
| iamwil wrote:
| > Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by
| geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But
| Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A
| salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for
| most of us.
|
| No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest.
| So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time
| looking into it.
|
| But it sounds like you've at least looked at Vitalik's
| writings. The Eth core has plenty of hard core tech in
| various corners of crypto. It's just that they're organized
| by project, and not all in one place.
| starfallg wrote:
| >No, that's not true. It's just those types are the
| loudest.
|
| In order to make it in the crypto market this is the way
| they have to behave, because the measure of success is the
| coin price, which is directly tied to the number of people
| buying into their coin (the vast majority know nothing of
| the underlying technical details and don't care). It's a
| race to the bottom and a real problem with the industry,
| reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but I think far more
| pervasive in crypto. This is also why crypto will keep
| experiencing popping bubbles until it finds enough use
| cases with actual advantageous compared to existing
| solutions.
| iamwil wrote:
| While true, that's a separate point about marketing on
| the internet today. The person I was replying to was
| saying how traditional tech is allergic to crypto because
| of the hype machine.
|
| I'm saying, if you dig beyond the hype machine, you'll
| find plenty of hard core tech and tech adopters that you
| found in previous platforms, like PC and internet.
|
| OP apparently cares about the underlying technical
| details. I'm saying if he/she looks deeper, they'll find
| what they're looking for.
| pgsimp wrote:
| The point of Ethereum is not really to be a distributed
| computer. It also seems misleading to describe it that way, as
| it doesn't distribute computations. Every node computes the
| same thing.
| derefr wrote:
| Yes, _Ethereum Mainnet_ isn't much of a distributed computer
| in the Mosix sense (it's more of a decentralized computer);
| but a private /protected PoA EVM blockchain very much _would_
| work to truly distribute computation.
|
| Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust
| each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no
| redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then
| Ethereum does in fact allow N computers to work on pieces of
| N subproblems in parallel and use the state trie as a
| blackboard for syncing/linearization between those
| subproblems. (The actual heavy computation would have to
| occur outside the chain, in oracle sibling processes, but
| they could at least load their binaries from the state trie.
| Think of it like AI bot-clients cooperatively playing a MOO
| where users can define object code.) Essentially, Ethereum is
| a distributed database with Turing-complete CRDTs.
|
| Mind you, nobody's _using_ Ethereum that way, but that
| doesn't mean the underlying tech isn't natively capable of
| being used that way. (Just like, say, oldschool fixed-
| function-pipeline GPUs _could_ be used as GPGPUs, if you
| could translate your linear-algebra problem into an
| equivalent scene-geometry rendering problem.)
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I've never understood Oracles as a concept. They seem
| fundamentally untrustworthy.
|
| ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the
| trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin.
|
| But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of
| couldn't compute any meaningful logic without requiring an
| absurd amount of resources from the main net.
|
| If you're making a distributed computer, it's like you're
| scaling silicon circuits up to the network level. So any
| operation using those circuits will of course be more
| expensive. That means that many computations on the main
| net are cost prohibitive.
|
| I would like to learn more about the trade-offs and risks
| of a blockchain relying on Oracles as a source of truth.
| derefr wrote:
| Like I said, Ethereum can be used as a distributed
| computer _presuming an complete web of 100% trust between
| nodes_. E.g. when the nodes are all run by a single
| corporation, with the node operators being different
| employees in different locations. In that case, the
| oracles (= native processes interacting with the
| blockchain nodes) would be presumed-trustworthy just as
| much as the nodes themselves are. The only question would
| be whether the out-of-chain computations of the oracles
| are able to _move the state forward in a deterministic,
| linearizable manner_ as if they were on-chain
| computations -- which is totally possible _if_ you make
| your blockchain into a collection of arbitrary-CRDT
| smart-contracts and only interact with shared data
| through them.
|
| But to directly address your statement, in general,
| oracles as a concept are "trustworthy" iff 1. they rely
| solely on public information as input; or 2. are run by a
| centralized entity, which is the same entity that has
| sole ownership of the resource being modified by the
| oracle; or 3. the system is built such that any oracles
| can submit a cryptographic proof of X, and as soon as
| _any_ oracle does so, the condition is triggered.
|
| Re: case 1, just as you can re-compute the transactions
| of a blockchain to arrive at the same consensus state,
| you _should_ be able to grab a copy of the oracle's code
| yourself and run it in a proper "context", whereupon it
| will re-assert all the same transactions it ever
| originally asserted to the chain. This requires that all
| APIs the oracle deduces its assertions from have
| historical-data variants.
|
| Re: case 2, the oracle is basically just standing in for
| a human. If you trust a human to do X, then you trust an
| oracle to do X.
|
| Re: case 3, this is what on-chain prediction markets do.
| Rather than the win-condition for a prediction being
| something a human watches for and then enters, many
| private individuals (bettors) are incentivized to each
| have their own oracle running that watches for the win-
| condition however they like, and then -- as soon as that
| condition attains -- _proves_ to the smart contract that
| the condition attains. The smart contract doesn't have to
| care which oracle submitted the proof, only that there is
| now such a proof.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Oracles are always going to be less decentralized than a
| distributed blockchain VM. Chainlink's (oracle platform)
| approach to this is to have oracle nodes post a bond that
| can get slashed if the computation is deemed invalid. But
| most Chainlink oracles have 21 or fewer nodes. This is
| fine for supplemental data but would be vulnerable to all
| the same attacks that DPOS chains have suffered if used
| as base layer consensus.
| viraptor wrote:
| It also barely computes anything. It's closer to distributed
| consensus. (Distributed tricky consensus? - I acknowledge
| there's a tiny bit of logic)
| cachvico wrote:
| It can compute anything you want it to compute.
| keymone wrote:
| No, it really can't. Unless you mean it in a sense that
| Minecraft is a Turing complete machine and can compute
| anything you want it to compute. Good luck computing
| anything non trivial.
| TobyBrull wrote:
| It's not obvious that Turing-complete smart contracts are a
| good long term decision. I agree that Ethereum is fascinating
| tech, but with great power comes a great many ways to shoot
| yourselves in the foot. For financial institutions, being
| boring is to some degree a feature and not just a bug.
| samvher wrote:
| I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting,
| and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels
| with the early days of the internet.
|
| I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the
| potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream
| yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not
| seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It
| seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!
|
| There are other issues that still stop me from investing in
| this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I
| don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that
| the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point
| of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and
| I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It
| could be that these technologies are just paving the way for
| something much cleaner down the road.
|
| Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make
| sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about
| cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make
| sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be
| the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply
| doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a
| currency should roughly scale with the productive output that
| it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation.
| Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early
| adopters.
|
| I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I
| think, has a much better understanding of economics than the
| crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed
| here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the
| world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a
| significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving
| my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or
| Ethereum.)
| kubanczyk wrote:
| The existing banking system? Goliath was better than David at
| fighting and he was not keen to learn rock-slinging. (I'm not
| implying David will always win though. It's unlikely.)
| samvher wrote:
| Plenty of central banks seem interested in launching
| digital currencies. For me the main selling points of
| cryptocurrencies are programmability, easy international
| transactions, and potentially easy micro-transactions.
| Personally I don't care much about the fact that they are
| decentralized, and while I'm happy for my bank to see my
| transaction history I'm not that keen on having it public.
|
| If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided
| by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can
| be stored in something like special drawing rights rather
| than euros.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Agree. The blockchain is the tape; amazing! I'm a bit late to
| the party, but have invested a reasonable amount into it
| recently. I'm on the side of ETH 2.0 and massive scalability
| and lower gas prices(even though I currently mine liquidity) so
| the true potential of smart contracts and DeFi can be realized.
|
| The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more:
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .
| martamorena943 wrote:
| I don't think it was visionary. Ever since, blockchain has
| struggled to find a real-world use case. We know how blockchain
| works, the concept is thousands of years old. This problem
| existed in the past (coordinating in an environment where no
| one trusts anyone). However if this was a real problem in the
| real world, companies would have built blockchains long ago.
|
| This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some
| straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions
| go-nowhere projects just as likely.
|
| I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we
| are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary
| gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain
| these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value
| proposition. We can do pretty much everything without
| blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness
| helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's
| not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows
| directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the
| fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves
| that the problem actually doesn't really exist.
| herbst wrote:
| I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of
| fees, have additional security and because it is simply
| comfortable and fast.
|
| Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any
| other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from
| ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee.
|
| Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even
| paypal or paysafe for example.
|
| Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it
| generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a
| loss game valued against ex. CHF.
|
| I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains
| anymore.
| fock wrote:
| do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving
| anyone your name :)?
| willis936 wrote:
| _IRS has entered the chat._
|
| Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I've just
| been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.
| bhjgh777 wrote:
| The EVM is a natural extension of bitcoin's scripting system.
| Here's the original Ethereum whitepaper, Vitalik cites all
| sorts of pre-Ethereum work:
|
| https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al...
|
| There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on
| Bitcoin before ETH was launched.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. That's
| what powers the Tether network. It's far from decentralized
| though. It's a cartel of exchanges that operate the network.
|
| Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in
| practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is
| far too limiting to build expansive applications on.
| bhjgh777 wrote:
| >Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC.
|
| This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at
| the top of their website:
|
| https://www.omnilayer.org/
|
| >That's what powers the Tether network.
|
| Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum,
| and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed
| here:
|
| https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
|
| >Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive
| applications on.
|
| My original point was that weak smart contract features on
| Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on
| the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's
| proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.
| Proven wrote:
| > Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC.
|
| Complete nonsense.
|
| a) https://www.omnilayer.org/ - it says "Built in top of
| the Bitcoin Blockchain" right there on the home page
|
| b) Usually a separate database with an index of overlay
| transactions is created to enable faster and easier access
| to overlay transactions in Bitcoin blocks
| numbsafari wrote:
| Never underestimate the efficiency with which money launderers
| and organized crime are able to innovate and adapt.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's easy to spot the people not knowledgeable in crypto when
| they just parrot the media's fear mongering narratives.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's easier for me to see the utility in any given random
| HN post, than in any form of cryptocurrency.
| tcgv wrote:
| I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto
| space from the outside for the past few years.
|
| Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too
| risky / speculative for my taste.
|
| It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi
| (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow,
| instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this
| really has a lot of potential.
|
| So I started investing my free time for building an
| experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to
| develop myself / become qualified in this field.
|
| Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that
| never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and
| some new friends.
|
| [1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions
| cachvico wrote:
| Impressive!
| [deleted]
| tcgv wrote:
| Thanks!
| soupsranjan wrote:
| Amazing, love this idea!
| tcgv wrote:
| Thanks man!
| abledon wrote:
| > 1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions
|
| so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?
| kizer wrote:
| Still have limited understanding of Cryptocurrency and blockchain
| in general :(
|
| I need a good book on it all.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Every time I read about anything related to cryptocurrency it
| reads like a high-school opera. With several orders of magnitude
| more money involved.
|
| I really don't like this whole industry, and I cannot see how
| anyone would. It's like a cult.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > I really don't like this whole industry
|
| Yet, you're here, reading the article and commenting.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Well, I like HN, and I keep hoping that this time, things
| will be different.
| Magodo wrote:
| You seem to have described nations and religions as well. It
| applies to anything with a large number of interest groups
| involved
| Aeolun wrote:
| To some extend, sure, but it's much worse in Crypto (in my
| opinion, of course).
| sect2k wrote:
| You are absolutely right, Bitcoin is a like religion, you
| need to let go of rational thought and have faith, HODL!
| ur-whale wrote:
| Just read Vitalik's note and - interestingly enough - there isn't
| a single word about the potential damage to the miners, only how
| they could attack the proposal.
|
| In other words, he's simply considering them an enemy when
| they've in fact been investing blood and treasure for the past 8
| years supporting his brainchild.
|
| People may call him a genius, but when they do, they're clearly
| not talking about his empathy abilities and leadership skills.
| darawk wrote:
| They've been investing money to make money. They're running a
| business, not a charity. Changes like these are part of the
| process of improvement, this is exactly what they signed up
| for.
| ur-whale wrote:
| You're missing my point: yes, they have benefited from the
| whole thing, no doubt there.
|
| But a responsible leader at the very least tries to address
| the fact that his proposal will throw a major chunk of the
| ecosystem under the bus _and_ what 's worse, on a completely
| unplanned timeline.
|
| And maybe propose mitigating solutions.
|
| Instead he immediately paints them as the enemy.
|
| Some leader you got there.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I don't know much about Vitalik but I saw him supporting a
| carbon tax. It might be that he sees mining as a necessary
| evil to transition from.
| andxor wrote:
| > they've in fact been investing blood and treasure
|
| They have made a tremendous amount of money by investing in his
| "brainchild". How are they victims?
| rawtxapp wrote:
| As someone who uses both BTC and ETH and who likes both, this is
| one of the reason why people prefer Bitcoin over Ethereum.
|
| The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin
| blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is
| important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly.
|
| While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the
| reverse of that coin is that the developers have very significant
| control on the blockchain which is far from ideal.
| undefined1 wrote:
| is this also an issue with Ethereum competitors like Cardano?
| jki275 wrote:
| Not with ADA or Tezos.
|
| Bottom line, ADA is a proof of stake chain. It is upgraded in
| place based on proposals and consensus of stake pools.
|
| Same thing with Tezos.
|
| ADA hasn't fully rolled out all the features of the ETH
| blockchain yet -- I believe we're a couple of months away
| from the smart contract upgrade.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Cardano is a whole slew of different issues lol
| gruez wrote:
| elaborate?
| DennisP wrote:
| Developers can't do anything the users don't want. They can't
| make people adopt the new software. The miners are losing here
| because everybody else in the ecosystem wants proof-of-stake
| and 1559, including users, ETH holders, and app developers.
| chillacy wrote:
| Absolutely, all the stuff built on ETH (defi, automated
| exchanges, nfts) can't truly take off when gas fees can cost
| 20-80 USD per action. There's already a blockchain that acts
| as a store of value, the world doesn't need a second bitcoin.
| hanniabu wrote:
| L2 (second layer) solutions like Optimism will fix the
| scaling issue. It's live with a limited Synthetix release
| now and will be open to the general public on the 15th.
| Many large projects including Uniswap, Compound, and
| Chainlink have said they will be migrating to Optimism L2.
| It's very simple to do (little to no changes needed) and
| with big names committing it seems to be the L2 of choice.
| WalletConnect, Metamask, and Coinbase have also said
| they'll be supporting it with Metamask and WalletConnect
| integration complete and WalletConnect in beta testing.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It seems to me that MATIC is making a good play as well.
| casi wrote:
| Matic is not an L2 though, it is a side chain. The reason
| L2s like optimism are exciting is because they inherit
| the security of ethereum mainnet. (matic has its own
| consensus mechanisms).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Matic Polygon is a L2 aggregator.
| https://www.coindesk.com/matic-network-polygon-targets-
| ether...
| hanniabu wrote:
| Optimism also isn't rent seeking with their own coin. All
| gas is still paid in ETH.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The 51% attack here is only because PoW hasn't been completely
| eliminated yet... once ETH is on PoS, this attack won't be
| possible.
| jki275 wrote:
| Sure it will. It will just involve 51% of the stake pools
| instead of 51% of the miners.
| bibabaloo wrote:
| It's a little different with proof of stake. If there's a
| minority group that holds a large stake that "attacks" the
| blockchain against the majority's wishes, the majority
| group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority
| group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in
| this same way.
| trhway wrote:
| >the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist
| the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist
| hash power in this same way.
|
| and that is supposedly advantage of pos over pow?
|
| In philosophical view the pow -> pos means taking power
| away from the more technical and giving it to the more
| business oriented group/approach. That has happened to
| Internet for example, and I just personally dont like
| such transitions.
| jki275 wrote:
| That's not how it works.
|
| The people who hold the majority of the stake are the
| majority, not the minority.
| casi wrote:
| There is a difference (with the introduction of slashing
| and user activated soft forks) in 51% attacks that revert
| finalized blocks. In PoW this type of attack would become
| cheaper as it persists, in PoS we have some defense that
| keeps making this attack expensive.
|
| On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in
| PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin
| with.
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| jki275 wrote:
| Vitalik and company have zero history in the proof of
| stake game, and what little security history they do have
| is pretty much awful. So I'm not too worried about what
| they have to say about things. If it's not something he
| copied from Tezos or ADA, I wouldn't consider it relevant
| to the discussion at all.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > that the developers have very significant control on the
| blockchain
|
| The case for BTC in this regard is no different from ETH. In
| both cases developers put together an upgrade, then miners can
| either upgrade or not.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Except in this case, this is going against presumably 51% of
| the miners _and_ changes take much longer to implement and
| activate on Bitcoin (taproot activation for example will be
| done over a very long period and needs a very high
| threshold).
|
| Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty
| aggressive no matter how you look at it. As a user, I really
| hope it works out without major issues.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > and changes take much longer to implement and activate on
| Bitcoin
|
| That's a funny way of saying BTC doesn't innovate.
|
| > Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty
| aggressive no matter how you look at it.
|
| It's been the plan for years. I first heard of it in 2017
| and if I'm not mistaken I think it was also in the
| whitepaper. So it's neither coming out of the blue or an
| aggressive timeframe.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| > That's a funny way of saying BTC doesn't innovate.
|
| Or another way of saying you can expect some stability
| (and majority consensus) when there's more than a
| trillion dollars worth of value at stake.
|
| It's been discussed for a longtime, yes, but the
| expectation is that it would roll out in phases over the
| next year or two, not rushed out because of a potential
| 51% attack.
| hanniabu wrote:
| You say rushed but it's not rushed at all. It's simply
| just a priority change.
| DennisP wrote:
| Bear in mind the PoS network is already running, with
| 100,000 validators and $6 billion staked, after years of
| R&D. This last bit is relatively simple.
| jude- wrote:
| In Bitcoin decisions are made on the principle of one CPU,
| one vote. Rules only change with overwhelming hash power.
| Developers take a back seat.
|
| In Ethereum, developers run the show. They decide what gets
| pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Miners chase the chain the market decides. They can in
| theory mine the less profitable chain, but in practise they
| don't. The markets are the ultimate deciders of the rule
| changes. This is true of bitcoin and etherium and all other
| cryptocurrencies alike (anyone can always change the rules
| and try to get others to use the new rules. Who the market
| actually pays any attention to is the main question).
| hanniabu wrote:
| > In Bitcoin decisions are made on the principle of one
| CPU, one vote
|
| This is how it works in Ethereum as well
|
| > They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core
| Devs call.
|
| Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different.
| jude- wrote:
| > This is how it works in Ethereum as well
|
| So is Ethereum _not_ going to PoS if miners say no?
|
| > Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different.
|
| Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers
| provide the code, but it only activates with miner
| consent.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > So is Ethereum not going to PoS if miners say no?
|
| Correct
|
| > Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers
| provide the code, but it only activates with miner
| consent.
|
| Again, it's the same process with Ethereum.
|
| Not sure if this is just a misunderstanding or if you're
| reading something that says this isn't the case, but if
| it's the latter then I suggest taking a good hard look at
| continuing to use this source for information.
| 015a wrote:
| You say "miners" like they're a union with a
| spokesperson. They're not; they're thousands of people
| spread across the world, with different agendas.
|
| Miners who refuse to adopt the new PoS system have the
| right to not upgrade to it. At that point, the system
| "forks" (the article calls it a 51% attack, but I think
| that's a little inflammatory). This literally already
| happened with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic; Bitcoin and
| Bitcoin Cash. It isn't a new situation.
|
| The reason why some miners are dissenting this change is,
| first and obviously, because they disagree with it. So,
| why not just fork? Because no one talks about Bitcoin
| Cash; they talk about Bitcoin. They want to stay on PoW
| because it will return the best revenue for their mining
| operation, but if they're busy mining a coin that has
| little value, that also hurts their revenue. In other
| words, the only way for them to win is to get the
| community against the change, which is a losing bet
| because the change is widely supported.
| jude- wrote:
| So I guess Ethereum is, in fact, a developer-run show.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| > There are a wide variety of benefits to this proposal, such as
| potentially making Ethereum deflationary
|
| Interesting that this is framed as a benefit.
| Sargos wrote:
| A high price of ETH as an asset creates a higher security level
| for Ethereum the blockchain. The ecosystem of projects, apps,
| protocols, organizations, etc on Ethereum is healthier when the
| blockchain is guaranteed secure and stable for everyone to use.
| It's a benefit to everyone.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| That has been repeated many times but is not true, the price
| of an arbitrary unit of currency or crypto has no
| relationship to its security. That price going up or down has
| no relationship on the "security level" of the blockchain.
| hanklazard wrote:
| I'm not so sure. Currently each validator has about 60k usd
| (32 eth) staked. They are disincentivized from misbehaving
| / attacking the network by the threat of their eth being
| slashed (and there are clear rules about how this happens).
|
| To me, it seems that as the value of that ether increases,
| they have more incentive to behave, rather than risk the
| loss of their investment + large capital gain.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| Okay, so imagine a fictional universe in which the
| exchange rate USD to ETH was 100 times greater. The stake
| could be... 0.32 eth and it would be equivalent for the
| purpose of the protocol.
|
| Consider the reverse, the exchange rate for USD to ETH is
| one one hundredth. So the stake is just 3,200 eth, and
| again, same thing.
| hanklazard wrote:
| I agree with your math, but that doesn't address my
| point. What I'm saying is that the relative value of eth
| to usd (for example) matters. The validators don't want
| to get slashed and the more value eth has, the less
| likely validators are to misbehave (ie, the network is
| more secure). I'm not certain that it plays out that way
| but that's the theory as I understand it.
| Sargos wrote:
| Look up Proof of Stake which is what Ethereum is moving to
| later this year. In Proof of Stake validators put up an ETH
| bond in order to randomly get picked to help create blocks
| in the network. The higher the price of ETH the more
| expensive it becomes to attack the network.
| 542458 wrote:
| But isn't that "the higher the market cap of ETH, the
| harder it is to attack"? Does the price of a single unit
| actually matter here, market cap being held equal?
| Sargos wrote:
| The thing that matters is how valuable the 32ETH stake
| the validators put up is as that is the amount of penalty
| for trying any attack. The theoretical attacks on Proof
| of Stake are well known and discussed but generally
| require 33% - 51% of all staked ETH for various annoying
| attacks on the blockchain but not actually killing it.
|
| 3,491,906 ETH is currently staked right now which is
| actually way lower than will eventually be staked when
| PoS goes live later this year. 33% of this is 1,152,329
| ETH which at current prices of $1,776 puts a minor attack
| at over $2billion. This is without considering that after
| the attack the network could easily fork and remove the
| attacker's ETH from existence so it's hard to see
| economics working in the attackers favor.
|
| A high price of ETH means it costs an increasingly
| astronomical amount to attack the network and pretty much
| no way to do it profitably.
| dlubarov wrote:
| > The thing that matters is how valuable the 32ETH stake
| the validators put up is as that is the amount of penalty
| for trying any attack.
|
| Well, there wouldn't be much point in attempting an
| attack if the attacker didn't have the ~1/3 voting power
| to successfully execute it, right?
| terhechte wrote:
| But acquiring ~1/3 voting power is much easier when 32
| ETH are worth ~$3.2 vs when they're $60k
|
| Also: People stake ETH under the expectation that the ETH
| they generate are worth just as much or more as the ETH
| they staked. If the price would continuously go down,
| less and less people would stake. The less people stake,
| the easier it is to buy 1/3 of voting power.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| They could just require a higher stake, the price of eth
| is irrelevant.
|
| Let's say hypothetically one eth was worth about a
| Satoshi, 0.05 cents or so. So they could just require
| 1,000,000 eth as a stake. Or ten times that. Or a hundred
| times that.
|
| It's irrelevant what the price is, the choice of the
| stake amount is. If eth was inflationary, they could
| inflate the stake proportionally.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| That's not true, those are two different things.
| Requiring 100x the total number of possible stakers is
| 100x lower. Versus if the price increases 100x, that
| means the same number of possible stakers is possible,
| but it's now 100x more expensive to do a 51% (or whatever
| the PoS % needed is) attack.
| [deleted]
| AaronFriel wrote:
| The ethereum protocol can choose whatever stake amount
| (in equivalent USD when they decide the bond to stake)
| they want. The currency being deflationary or not is
| irrelevant - the stake could be adjusted. The currency
| going up in down in value relative to ETH could be
| adjusted.
|
| They could choose to require one gwei, one ETH, or one
| million ETH. That's your protection. The exchange rate
| from USD to ETH is irrelevant.
| dlubarov wrote:
| Would you agree that attacking Eth2's consensus requires
| a certain percentage [1] of total voting power? If so,
| then by extension, it requires a certain (somewhat
| different) percentage of the total Eth supply.
|
| > The exchange rate from USD to ETH is irrelevant.
|
| Unless the attacker already has a large enough portion of
| the Eth supply to execute an attack, they'll have to pay
| to acquire it.
|
| [1] 1/3 voting power would theoretically let an attacker
| double spend by getting two conflicting forks committed;
| 2/3 would let them commit invalid and/or unavailable
| state.
| olouv wrote:
| This is just not true for a proof of stake blockchain. The
| higher the price of Ether is, the harder it gets to loan
| enough ether to stake to attack the network. And attacking
| the network or misbehaving does cost you a lot more dollar
| money.
| dorgo wrote:
| >The higher the price of Ether is, the harder it gets to
| loan enough ether to stake to attack the network.
|
| On the other hand, the higher the price of Ether is, the
| higher the incentive to do so. The return on investment
| of an attack is independent of the price of Ether
| (assuming one can actually gain something from attacking
| a POS chain).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Except people who want to use ETH as a currency, rather than
| an asset. If we're going to have inflation or deflation, pick
| inflation; that way, you can actually _spend_ the stuff
| without FOMO.
| jcfrei wrote:
| I don't think anybody who's informed about crypto economics
| (especially coin supply) will honestly claim that BTC or
| ETH should ever be used as a currency rather than a store
| of value or a utility token.
| Sargos wrote:
| ETH is money but it's not currency. It's not meant to be
| used to buy everyday goods and services.
| ntr-- wrote:
| It _is_ meant to be spent as gas in order to compensate
| for the energy costs of the computations in its smart-
| contracts.
|
| Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing
| products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to
| go up?
|
| Additionally, ease of spending drives up adoption which
| is a clear benefit to any currency.
| yokem55 wrote:
| Because while the fee burn does act as a deflationary
| force on the eth economy, there is still the inflationary
| force of the staking rewards. If transaction volume falls
| too much, then the staking rewards will outpace the fees
| burned and the eth economy will see overall inflation. At
| some point (insert hand-waivium here) an equilibrium will
| be reached between transaction demand, eth asset price,
| and staking demand (as more eth is staked, individual
| staking returns will fall, but overall inflation goes
| up).
| Sargos wrote:
| >Why expend some amount of ETH building and executing
| products when you can just HODL and wait for the price to
| go up?
|
| Most people aren't going to have a choice. ETH is
| required to be spent when making transactions and using
| dapps, NFTs, etc. Even L2s like Optimism, zkSync, etc
| will be spending ETH when writing to the L1 even if the
| end users are shielded from that. There is a built in
| economy that burns ETH so demand won't be a problem.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Yes, but that's exactly the problem.
|
| With any currency, spending happens when you see
| something that is worth more to you in sum over the
| future than the value of the currency. So when the value
| of the currency gets lower, you are eager to jump on
| opportunities; conversely, when the value of the currency
| gets higher, you are reluctant to jump on opportunities.
| To a first approximation, you spend inflationary money as
| early as you can, but deflationary money as late as you
| can. And that's the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem you get
| with a deflationary ETH - an ecosystem where everybody
| spends as late as they can. Does that sound like it will
| lead to a vibrant offering of services to you, cause it
| doesn't to me.
|
| This is also why I never got into Bitcoin. Why would I
| ever spend a bitcoin? As a currency it's near worthless,
| ironically; people who spend it will in the long run
| always be outcompeted by people who buy and hold. (Before
| the bubble bursts, anyways.) The medium of transaction
| should not be an investment vehicle; those purposes are
| _directly opposed_.
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| A higher market cap can be more secure in a PoS system but
| burning ETH doesn't increase the market cap. Like stock
| buybacks, burning coins increases the price without
| necessarily creating new overall value.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| If one wants higher security, one shouldn't be pissing off
| the miners who provide that security.
| wmf wrote:
| The point of this proposal is that Ethereum no longer needs
| miners and they know it, so there's kind of a race between
| the miners trying to take Ethereum hostage and the
| developers kicking miners off the island before they can do
| it.
| wmf wrote:
| Crypto has been completely captured by get-rich-quick goldbugs.
| missedthecue wrote:
| That was most of the crypto community back in 2012. It's not
| a recent development.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, some people were hoping Ethereum would be different.
| But no, number gotta go up.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Improving the store of value functionality of the Ethereum base
| currency will drive more demand for it, which increases its
| market cap and thus improves Ethereum's Proof of Stake
| security, makes more capital available to the DeFi system,
| where ETH is the primary form of collateral, and allows more
| inflationary currency that's backed by ETH, like DAI, to be
| issued.
|
| Also, most Ethereum based projects depend on ETH reserves to
| fund their operations, so ETH appreciation provides more
| resources to develop Ethereum applications.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Is anyone using Status? Do they release monthly active user
| stats?
| wyldfire wrote:
| Once a miner makes a capital investment in a particular PoW,
| their interests are now more diverse than the general interests
| of the coin. They're vested in that particular PoW.
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