[HN Gopher] Ethereum just activated its 'London' hard fork
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum just activated its 'London' hard fork
Author : alexrustic
Score : 224 points
Date : 2021-08-05 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| jyu wrote:
| I asked this months ago and did not get any convincing answers.
|
| Ethereum is currently decentralized because of the initial POW
| distribution. Won't there be centralized aggregators of eth so
| some point in the future a handful of POS nodes control a
| disproportionate amount of power? Is it so hard to imagine that
| coinbase or some other exchange accumulates enough eth to sway
| transaction validation?
|
| Seriously, please answer if this is wrong!
| leesec wrote:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
|
| >For certain kinds of 51% attacks (particularly, reverting
| finalized blocks), there is a built-in "slashing" mechanism in
| the proof of stake consensus by which a large portion of the
| attacker's stake (and no one else's stake) can get
| automatically destroyed.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| To be honest, even without the actual 51% attacks happening,
| it would really suck to live in a world where just one entity
| had more than half ownership of a currency used by the
| people.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> it would really suck to live in a world where just one
| entity had more than half ownership of a currency used by
| the people._
|
| You mean, kinda like in the real world?
|
| [1]:https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-
| billionaires-...
|
| [2]:https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-shocking-facts-about-
| extreme-glob...
| gglon wrote:
| As I understand it a one way to disincentivise centralization
| is that when your node loses access to the network you lose
| more money if at the same time many other nodes/stake do not
| have access to the network. So it would be profitable to have
| an independent server and internet access.
| echopurity wrote:
| Congrats to the ETH development crew for another smooth upgrade.
| Good luck and please be careful with the transition to POS!
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I hope this eases the demand for graphics cards somewhat.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That won't happen until the merge to proof of stake, which is
| supposed to happen early 2022.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I'm theory London could because it reduces the mining
| reward, but MEV has really thrown a wrench into that plan
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| MEV?
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| Miner extracted value.
|
| https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-
| forest/
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I think the demand for graphics will stay bit you will also
| be unable to buy hard drives
| DaftDank wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how PoS is _not_ centralized? The whole
| point of crypto and the blockchain is decentralization, no? I
| feel like crypto /blockchain will end up looking nothing like how
| it was intended, and be regulated to the point that it's just the
| next iteration of the traditional banking system, where the
| current power holders continue holding the power. Maybe I was
| naive to ever think it would be any different.
| bgroat wrote:
| The answer is that it isn't, and none of these systems ever
| were.
|
| They're distributed, not decentralized. And this distinction,
| and the refusal to acknowledge it is what put me off crypto
| entirely.
| Ceezy wrote:
| It helps that most people don't know the difference between
| peer to peer and decentralized...
| exo762 wrote:
| May I ask you to elaborate a bit? What is they are
| centralized around? Capital? Misbehaving capital can easily
| be destroyed in PoS by a fork. Please see Steem/Hive case.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| I really wish the current global monetary system based on
| the US dollar would be this simple to change as just
| creating a fork. Wait, it's actually the US military (which
| is still the largest in the world) that's backing the whole
| monetary system? Ah, shucks.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| So we are going to fork(splinter) at the first sign of
| disagreement. I see a plate of forks coming up.
| tux3 wrote:
| I think the idea is that if piles of money grow
| proportionally to their size, the biggest pile of money
| will grow the fastest, effectively becoming the central
| point where power is concentrated.
|
| With proof of work, the same effect exists, thought it
| involves a loop where hashrate is exchanged for money,
| which is converted into more efficient hashrate at a TSMC
| fab.
|
| An actor that openly attacks the network will quickly be
| blacklisted in either system, but when you control a
| majority of the money there are other ways to influence the
| system that don't involve breaking a formal rule.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't have the faintest clue what I'm talking
| about. I only have passing familiarity with
| cryptocurrencies, and I've read one or two of their
| whitepapers.
| marcusverus wrote:
| >...effectively becoming the central point where power is
| concentrated.
|
| More ETH/= more power. In my understanding, an attacker
| would need to control half of all staked ETH to stage a
| 51% attack, which would require many billions of dollars.
| But actually exercising this control by attacking the
| network would undermine the network's security/utility,
| potentially sending ETH to zero and obliterating the
| wealth of the attacker.
|
| This is, supposedly, a strength of PoS: the more ETH you
| have, the less incentive you have to attack/destroy the
| system.
| tux3 wrote:
| Right, though I think I address that in my comment.
|
| Trying to cheat through the protocol is uninteresting.
| You don't destroy the system by breaking L1 rules, any
| such attack if successful would just get rolled back by
| hardfork (and nevermind the 'staked money is lost if
| cheating is detected' system, no one would willingly
| trigger it).
|
| More ETH is automatically equal to more power, because
| that's exactly what money is defined to be. We trade it
| as power.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| They wouldn't necessarily attack the system to destroy
| it. Can they modify it to make it more favourable to
| incumbents. Consolidate power?
| everfree wrote:
| I don't believe they could - the protocol has some
| mitigations against this including an
| inactivity/censorship fee that applies equally to every
| staker.
| everfree wrote:
| In addition, certain classes of attack will cause the
| attacker's stake to be automatically forfeit via
| slashing. So in that case not only is the wealth of the
| attacker obliterated, but their stake itself is destroyed
| and the network can continue onward as if their stake
| never existed.
|
| In such a situation, the price effect of the negative
| news from the attack would be partially canceled out by
| the jarring reduction in ETH supply.
| voidnullnil wrote:
| Cryptocurrency: - My money is secured by a
| private key and nobody can touch it ever unless they get my
| private key. I can simply be cautious about my private key
| and I know there is no other way anyone can ever get my money
| - I can fill out a text box with the amount I want to send
| and press send - I don't have to deal with some
| harebrained naming system. I can literally just send to
| someone's public key. This is literally how cryptography is
| inteded to work. It's up to _me_ how I obtain his public key.
| - Monero etc exists (admittedly, not sure if it still works
| when someone has all the mining/stake power) - Some guy
| is getting rich because he owns more miners or stake
|
| Fiat: - My password is 8 digits (this is not
| even an exaggeration, some of the biggest banks in my country
| do this) - The bank might give all my money away if
| someone knows where I ate KFC last - My money may be
| stolen for other reasons, because the bank wont tell me what
| data I need to keep private to avoid having someone transact
| as me - The ID they use for authentication was also
| given to some 30 other e-commerce platforms and cannot be
| considered secure - There is almost certainly a way to
| get into my account without the password - I have to be
| paranoid and try to keep random trivia private such as how
| much I payed on an electricity bill - I have to type
| codes from insecure SMS on a phone that I do not want in the
| first place, because the bank and all e-commerce platforms
| considers me an idiot and does not even give me an option to
| turn that shit off - If I transfer from one country to
| another, my transaction may be blocked - If I transfer
| some certain amount, my transfer may be blocked - If I
| use a certain IP address, my transfer may be blocked -
| If I transact at a certain time, my transfer may be blocked
| - If I update Firefox too fast or too slow, my transfer may
| be blocked - If I click buttons to fast or too slow, my
| transfer may be blocked - Someone might hack my
| computer because it has a Big 4 web browser and the giant
| stack of software required to support that, instead of a
| hypothetical OS where people care about security and don't
| use C, at the cost of some microseconds. - If I change
| my email address (which I don't want associated to banking in
| the first place) for some reason, my transfer may be blocked
| - When I call the bank, I have to be polite and try to avoid
| saying anything suspicious (in their own mind) that will make
| them hold my money yet longer. I will have to supply them
| will all kinds of nonsense like where I ate KFC last, more
| ID, and a "phone password" - My transactions may be
| permanently blocked and there's nothing I can do about it
| because the bank reps just talk to a black box "risk
| analysis" machine and at some point there's no way to
| override its decisions - Money I receive can be
| "reversed" for all kinds of bogus, emotional, and/or "risk
| analysis" reasons - The bank can just take my money and
| claim I was hacked. They have N pieces of my photo ID,
| address, phone number, email, and much more, and so they can
| choose a few people they don't like and do this to only them
| - I have to interact with my bank through web pages that
| crash every 3 button clicks, and PDF files that may or may
| not render correctly (or snail mail, which is equally full of
| bad security) - Some guy is getting rich because he's
| positioned a certain way with the bank
|
| TL;DR even if the top cryptocurrencies were effectively
| centralized by one entity controlling all miner/staking
| power, I would still want to use them at least for
| transacting, just so I can have a sane interface to money.
| neatze wrote:
| Same here, market(s) over time will be cornered without
| control policies that counter monopoly.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| This is why I think XRP will ultimately be a winner. No
| mining, no staking, just validating transactions.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I think XRP will go down as history as the earliest
| notable shitcoin.
|
| I wrote it off years ago. Is it doing anything with real
| utility yet?
| fidesomnes wrote:
| As a currency exchange handling $800m in transactions in
| the last day it seems to be doing just fine
| https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/ surely that is no real
| utility for you but for someone out there, it is a whole
| lot of value.
| [deleted]
| elliekelly wrote:
| Is there a law of the internet describing the phenomenon
| whereby any comment criticising cryptocurrency will
| promptly elicit a response comment proffering a
| cryptocurrency that's somehow different and "not like
| those _other_ cryptos "?
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| If not, you should name it yourself. The Ellie Kelly
| effect - whereby any mention of a flaw in a
| cryptocurrency is met with a rebuttal of the one true
| cryptocurrency, usually obscure and with little traction.
| bliteben wrote:
| If only the transaction confirmations were as fast as
| these responses usually are.
| edoceo wrote:
| Ellie Kelly Crypto Comment Effect
|
| Has a nice sound. Good job team.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| +1 for "Ellie Kelly effect" -- a wonderfully rhyming and
| memorable name for the phenomenon. :)
| voldacar wrote:
| But "control policies" require by definiton the market to
| already be cornered by whoever is trying to control it.
| Without being cornered the market will be cornered?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Yes, but ideally that thing is "society".
|
| As opposed to "a bunch of dodgy rich people"
| DennisP wrote:
| Ethereum's PoS supports up to a million or so independent full-
| fledged stakers. That seems fairly decentralized to me.
| ithinkinstereo wrote:
| Centralization issues come along with liquid staking
| solutions like Lido.
| dogman144 wrote:
| How many stakers actually have enough to win blocks though.
|
| What is the impact of shorting on PoS - what happens when I
| borrow enough ETH to win blocks, deliberately mis-verify TXs,
| and screw up consensus.
|
| I know Ethereum has planned recovery for situations like
| this, but PoS introduces risks that will never be as present
| in PoW bc the latter has built-in latency to how easy it is
| to aggregate resources which increase market power and
| centralize around certain miners (ie buy asics and build a
| data center takes time, so you just have to watch mining
| pools for liquid malicious hash rates for equivalent risks in
| PoW).
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ...what happens when I borrow enough ETH to win blocks,
| deliberately mis-verify TX...
|
| Ethereum already "slashes" the staked ETHs of those who try
| to game the system (Ethereum already has one chain on PoS):
| the coins of stakes who try to cheat the system are not
| even confiscated, they're destroyed (making every other
| holder a little bit richer).
|
| I don't know if this shall work or not, but that's their
| plan to keep bad actors from trying to attack the system.
| fogof wrote:
| > How many stakers actually have enough to win blocks
| though.
|
| Just as in PoW miners make blocks in proportion to their
| hashpower, PoS stakers win blocks in proportion to their
| stake
|
| > What is the impact of shorting on PoS - what happens when
| I borrow enough ETH to win blocks, deliberately mis-verify
| TXs, and screw up consensus.
|
| Well, you can't "mis-verify TXs", everyone can check your
| work to see that all of the transactions you put in your
| block verify. If you reached 1/3 of the total stake on the
| network, you would be able to screw up consensus and make
| conflicting blocks both appear to be finalized, just as a
| 51% attack on a PoW currency can revert a block that it
| treated as final by client software.
|
| The ETH2 block explorer https://beaconscan.com/ tells me
| that there is about 6.5 million ether staked, which would
| be worth about 16 Billion USD, so you would need to borrow
| around 5 billion USD in order to make this attack work.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Semantics on "mis-verify," maliciously verify same-nonce
| transactions if you prefer.
|
| Using the below language to discuss a threat model vs.
| implications of my tinfoil hat existing or not...
|
| 5B USD for an attack isn't a major barrier though to an
| actor looking to attack ETH, though. Are you implying
| that it is?
|
| For reference, some of the crypto-lenders have around 15B
| USD-equiv under deposit, and they're fairly small stakes
| wrt capitalization of possible attackers of ETH.
|
| The issue I point out and don't hear discussion on except
| stuff like you've posted is that it's significantly
| easier to acquire 5B USD to DoS a PoS network, than it is
| to acquire enough hash rate and lag time due to physical
| data center constraints to do something equivalent POW.
| PoS might be secure-enough, but it's not just a clean,
| environmentally better but security equivalent swap out
| for PoW.
|
| The assumptions seem to be that the attacker would want
| to do it to take over and their coins will be deleted
| when caught, that there are protocols in place to recover
| consensus if this happens based on community involvement,
| and lastly that an acquisition of that much ETH would be
| noticed before an attack. Take these together, and
| security risks of PoS are controlled.
|
| But that's fairly narrow minded wrt adequate risk
| controls and actually considering the threat model
|
| - Cost to do it: 5B to DoS ETH into a consensus-rebuild
| isn't a high barrier to entry.
|
| - Goals of an attack: There are plenty of attackers that
| would be happy just DoS'ing it vs. winning consensus on
| their chain version for DSs or what have you.
|
| - Has this been done: there's more than enough precedent
| out there of acquiring 5B covertly, especially with a
| derivatives market in place. Easy example is across
| multiple crypto lenders aggregate enough ETH derivatives
| that can be converted to the underlying, convert in
| unison, and 5B of ETH suddenly lands. This is already
| sort of how it's done in normal corporate finance.
|
| - Community involvement in a recovery: I'm really
| skeptical of the community-driven recovery mechanism.
| Tezos/EOS and similar already had a lot of trouble making
| this approach to consensus fixes work because of basic
| voter participation challenges. It sounds more like a few
| key nodes will drive a fix like in the DAO, and then this
| starts to look fairly centralized. Not a bad thing as it
| will fix chain problems, but again not a clean 1:1 swap
| for PoW security guarantees.
|
| Final point - "well there must be someone thinking of the
| risk modeling here in PoS and accounting for it, Ethereum
| has smart people working on it" The reality is that
| protocol-level security research beyond the 51% consensus
| research and strong cryptography is really, really
| lightly done. This was a main topic of MIT Bitcoin Expo's
| Keynote this year, actually. PoW took 30 years of
| research and some luck during BTC's early days to
| identify that it could actually secure a chain. PoS does
| not have that history yet.
|
| The edit - when I ref 5B USD, I'm implying the ability to
| convert it into equiv ETH. This is still doable as the
| market isn't that illiquid, and if you spread out the
| balance over a N-nodes until you aggregate for the
| attack, attributing that to a single attacker is very
| hard to do.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > so you would need to borrow around 5 billion USD in
| order to make this attack work.
|
| If you were about to find someone to sell you $5B in ETH
| at spot price. In reality you would need much more than
| this.
| fogof wrote:
| Indeed, this is true. I was also assuming you would be
| buying the ETH from other stakers (if not, you would need
| $8B in ETH at spot price) and that you as an attacker
| have the ability to make the network desynchronous (if
| not, you would actually need 1/2 the total stake rather
| than 1/3). These are just generous assumptions that give
| us a lower bound on how much money it would actually take
| to attack the network.
| Ceezy wrote:
| But that's not peer to peer. And people compare bitcoin/
| ethereum to gold, but you can't really exchange ethereum
| without a centralised authority when you use POS. If these
| people refuse to process your payment, there is not much you
| can do about it.
| sigmar wrote:
| What does it matter what the technology supports if it
| incentivizes the community to consolidate? Penalties for
| being offline and slashing (for misconfigured nodes) are a
| massive incentive for nodes to centralize
| pa7x1 wrote:
| On the contrary, penalties are higher the more nodes go out
| at the same time. If you centralize you expose yourself to
| higher penalties if something goes awry. The incentives of
| the system are designed to prevent centralization.
| sigmar wrote:
| So if a large state like Texas loses power for days/weeks
| all validators inside it suffers more? Why shouldn't I
| give my keys to a business that can operate multi-
| location operations? Would save me huge headaches in
| terms of keeping my node maintained...
| pa7x1 wrote:
| The stakers of even an entire state like Texas represent
| a rather small percentage of all ETH stakers. So the
| extra punishment is rather small. It will likely be much
| bigger if you use Coinbase/Kraken/... or any other
| centralized staking service and it goes down (including
| any possible failovers that they have set in place). I
| don't have the specific numbers in front of me but you
| should think of the extra penalties for centralization to
| scale with the risk of the network not being able to
| function properly, so of the order of 30-40% validators
| going down for them to kick in hard.
|
| Also, staking redundancy/failover is hard to do. You
| never want to have two nodes validating with the same
| keys, the punishment in case there are two validators
| with the same keys at the same time are very harsh. While
| not being up, is barely above the cost of opportunity of
| the reward that you could have gotten.
|
| Roughly speaking:
|
| Your node goes down: roughly cost of opportunity (you
| don't get what you could have gotten if online)
|
| You and your neighbors, city, state going down: Roughly
| above of cost of opportunity
|
| Centralized service validating for a large percentage of
| the network going down: Above cost of opportunity
| penalties.
|
| Double-validation: Risk total loss of capital.
| exo762 wrote:
| Capital is capital, be it in the form of money or hardware.
| Putting the onus on capital in a form of hardware is just
| making it harder for smaller guys. I can throw 32 ETH into
| staking. It's way beyond my capability to mine - wrong
| geography, electricity prices, accommodation situation etc.
| jlokier wrote:
| Just a reminder that smaller guys don't have 32 ETH to spare.
| That's $88,603 USD. Not much for the levels.fyi crowd, but a
| fortune to most people.
|
| Which means, whether you can stake is very dependent on your
| personal situation - especially geography - much like whether
| you can profitably mine.
|
| Of course staking is still better than mining for many
| reasons. But it's a somewhat rich person's game.
| alimbada wrote:
| Staking will still be accessible to those with less than 32
| ETH via pooled staking, e.g. Rocket Pool:
| https://www.rocketpool.net/
| casi wrote:
| You can join a staking pool with as little as you have.
| Just like joining a mining pool with your laptop.
|
| And you can get eth with gasless minting of nfts. Draw a
| picture and sell it. Don't have to spend any money.
|
| I much prefer this to burning up electricity which
| basically hands the network to energy suppliers and asic
| manufacturers.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| London does not bring PoS. The switch to PoS will be happening
| in a later hard fork.
| jl2718 wrote:
| The first stocks ever sold to the public were claims on land in
| a new world, an escape from servitude to kings. Turns out they
| were just being swindled by a bankrupt crown to keep their own
| oppressors in power. But there was a new world, and people did
| escape.
| MuirsGhost wrote:
| People don't escape, they toil for a new master, on new
| ground.
|
| From sea to shining sea, the new world's plundered resources
| eventually turned into Bitcoin.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Very melodramatic, but inaccurate. The American portion of
| the New World offered significantly higher hourly wages for
| unskilled labor than the industrial heartland of Europe, by
| the late 1800s.
|
| And these wages grew at record rates all through the latter
| decades of the 1800s, in the midst of the largest influx of
| penniless workers in US history (causing the foreign born
| portion of the US population to reach 15% by 1890).
|
| That wages grew as fast as they did, with such a massive
| increase in the supply side of the supply and demand
| equation for labor, is testament to the opportunities that
| the principal nation of the New World was generating.
| mftb wrote:
| Both you're points and the gp's are good, but yours
| aren't refuting his, only pointing out that the master
| grew more generous.
|
| What's worth refuting in gp's post is the notion that
| humanity is "plundering" nature. Humanity is nature,
| that's what there's no escaping, unless you believe in
| the supernature.
|
| I really don't think PoS or PoW are going to change what
| you guys are talking about.
| arberx wrote:
| Distribution has had 4-5 years to distribute with PoW (ETH
| specifically). Moving to PoS now makes sense.
|
| All these points for/against PoS/PoW are technicalities at this
| point given that "decentralization" is a spectrum.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I really recommend listening to Vlad Zamfir, who has
| interesting things to say about crypto in general:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/vlad-zamf...
|
| This is not a rant for or against Bitcoin or Etherium. It's
| more to point out the persuasive and idealistic rhetoric of
| crypto gets confused with what may happen in the real world as
| people work on use cases.
| pkulak wrote:
| Because anyone in the world can participate in validation. It
| may be costly to do so, or whatever other hoops, but there's no
| "central" authority managing participation.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| In practice PoW is pretty centralized also. Most of the mining
| is done by those who have the capital to set up massive
| ASIC/GPU farms.
| cody8295 wrote:
| There are coins like Monero that are ASIC-resistant and can
| only be mined with CPU, not GPU.
| WJW wrote:
| Can you explain how this does not benefit people who have
| the capital to set up massive CPU farms, with all the
| advantages of scale that that implies? After all, you can
| get discounts on both power and CPUs if you buy in bulk so
| anyone who starts off with enough capital will only get
| further ahead.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Incorrect. Monero can be mined using GPUs, and that is the
| dominant way it is mined.
|
| Source : Mined Monero on an R9 290X until a few months ago.
| selsta wrote:
| Monero's PoW algorithm is RandomX [1], which is optimized
| for CPU mining. While it is possible to mine with GPUs,
| it is significantly slower and unprofitable.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/de
| sign.md
| newobj wrote:
| for proofs of "whatever", where whatever is something that can
| be accrued with money, then it's proof of money, and money is
| centralized, or at least reallllllly spikily concentrated, so,
| yeah
| littlestymaar wrote:
| PoS is decentralized as soon as you have a big number of
| stakers. The hard thing being _"how do you know that there are
| in fact a big number of people and not just a bunch of guys
| hidden behind a huge number of aliases"_ (the Sybil attack
| problem) and this is for this exact problem that proof of work
| helps (contrary to popular belief, Proof of work has nothing to
| do with double spending).
|
| For this reason you cannot build a trust-less distributed
| network with proof of stake alone: you'll need some kind of
| proof of waste to bootstrap it.
| Tepix wrote:
| Right, for example Avalanche now has more than 1000
| validators which is the most that i've seen for a PoS
| blockchain.
| lorenzq wrote:
| There are >1000 Algorand validators[1] and >2000 Cardano
| validators[2]
|
| [1] https://metrics.algorand.org/
|
| [2] https://pooltool.io/
| pa7x1 wrote:
| How is it more centralized than PoW? I see multiple factors
| that hamper decentralization:
|
| - Fixed costs that act as barrier of entry
|
| - Economies of scale that lead to centralization
|
| - Geographic factors (operation costs being different in
| different parts of the world, regulation/taxation, supply
| chain...)
|
| This is how I see each factor playing out in both scenarios:
|
| - Fixed costs: PoS runs on consumer-grade hardware, while PoW
| requires specific HW (ASICs or high-grade GPUs). PoS requires a
| minimum amount of stake but there are pooling solutions, which
| effectively make this minimum non existent. All in all PoS is
| at advantage here, unless you want to insist on solo staking in
| which case PoW is at advantage.
|
| Analogy: This would be equivalent to flat fees to open a
| savings account or a minimum amount balance required to open
| it.
|
| - Economies of scale: In PoS they are almost non-existent. You
| don't stake more efficiently by having a more powerful machine.
| You just get to reuse the same HW for more nodes but since
| fixed costs are low this has a very small impact. In PoW there
| are economies of scale, though, better/more expensive ASICs can
| mine more efficiently than smaller/cheaper ones. Same with
| GPUs. Someone with more initial capital can get ahead faster in
| PoW, while in PoS earns at a same rate as everyone else.
|
| Analogy: This would be equivalent to the interest rate you get
| in your savings account being dependent on how much money you
| have. In PoW, the richer you are the higher interest rate you
| get from your bank, in PoS everyone gets the same.
|
| - Geographic factors: Cheap access to energy has a large impact
| on PoW as it dictates most of your OpEx. In PoS this is largely
| irrelevant (PoS is 99.95% more energy efficient than PoW).
| Taxation/regulation would need its own analysis but I imagine
| is equally spread across both alternatives. Supply chain is
| again in favor of PoS as it can run on general-purpose HW,
| while ASICs are heavily centralized around a single
| manufacturer.
|
| Analogy: This would be equivalent to different geographic
| locations resulting in different conditions for maintaining
| open your bank account or taxing your accrued interest.
| spottybanana wrote:
| In practice exchanges end up holding most of the crypto, and
| they will decide how to use the crypto in PoS. With PoW it
| looks like miners/pools will quite rarely work as exchanges,
| so the powers tend to be separated. With PoS, it looks like
| exchanges will basically run Ethereum, and it look something
| like Blockstream Liquid, where group of exchanges basically
| mint the blocks.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| This is exactly right. Too many folks assume PoW is more
| decentralized because it's not tied to money, but what's the
| difference if mining requires money? As you note, PoS lowers
| the barrier to entry and actually creates a more egalitarian
| system, despite with Bitcoin maximalists think.
| j_walter wrote:
| PoS doesn't exactly lower the barrier to entry. Anyone with
| a GPU can mine (very unlikely to be profitable as a stand
| alone miner)...but staking 32ETH is a pretty high cost
| right now ($90Kish).
|
| However both can be overcome by pooling money or hash
| power...but then again that doesn't lead to more
| decentralization.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Decentralized pools like Rocketpool do lead to more
| decentralization and are almost not affected by the
| economies of scale issue mentioned above (there is a
| small commission to pay to the operator).
|
| While pooling hashpower doesn't solve the economies of
| scale mentioned above. If your hashrate per kW is bad you
| will get a very poor yield on your investment. There is
| also a commission to pay to the pool operator. Pooling in
| PoW serves only to receive a more consistent revenue
| stream.
| j_walter wrote:
| Pooling in PoW still means the pool operators are the
| ones to vote on proposals through the block mining. That
| is the whole point of decentralization...if one or two
| large pools (Ethermine and Sparkpool) get too big then
| they can sway proposals almost single handedly (they have
| 45% of ETH hash rate now).
| nybble41 wrote:
| > That is the whole point of decentralization...if one or
| two large pools (Ethermine and Sparkpool) get too big
| then they can sway proposals almost single handedly...
|
| If the pool operators don't actually own the mining
| hardware then their power is limited to what the
| participants in the pool, who do own the hardware, allow
| them to do. If as an individual miner you don't like what
| your pool operator is doing you can always switch to
| another pool and take your delegated influence with you.
| Most proposals require supporting votes in many blocks
| before they take effect, so you have time to choose a
| more representative operator.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Concerning economies of scale, usually AFAIK the more coins
| you stake, the more of a say you have in how blocks are
| propagated.
|
| That's to me similar, if not worse than with PoW.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Stakers in a PoS system are incentivized to do what's best
| for the network. It wouldn't make sense for them to stake
| large amounts of funds and do something that could make
| Ethereum less valuable. The current marketcap of Ethereum
| is $325B, so a 51% attack in a PoS system means the
| attacker would need $165B. Even if a really bad attack
| occurred, the majority of validators can decide to fork (eg
| DAO fork). The social layer of Ethereum is a hidden force
| and I believe the majority are honest actors that would
| support any Ethereum improvement proposals that make the
| network more fair and decentralized.
| voidnullnil wrote:
| Can't you just stake more coins in PoS and receive more
| income? I though this was how PoS coins worked. How else
| would you even have a notion of people requried to satisfy
| the condition "all people get the same amount"? Surely not
| photo ID?
| everfree wrote:
| Everyone gets the same percentage, not the same amount in
| absolute terms.
| seanhunter wrote:
| PoS should be less centralized than PoW as I understand it. At
| least in Ethereum if you stake your 32 ETH then you get
| transactions to validate assigned to you randomly. You don't
| need a purpose-built rig with a ton of hash power to compete so
| smaller players are incentivized to participate, leading to a
| far greater incentive to run a node.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Different strategies. ETH PoS is about distributing a
| consensus state. Bitcoin PoW is about hardening a
| deterministic state.
| fouric wrote:
| > You don't need a purpose-built rig with a ton of hash power
| to compete
|
| But you do need ETH in the first place, and the more the
| better. This seems like it still disincentivizes smaller
| players.
| dyndos wrote:
| The key distinction is that PoW is permissionless, whereas PoS
| is permissioned.
|
| Bitcoin is secured by hashpower, which is produced by physical
| capital outside the network. Nobody needs to ask for permission
| to start hashing and trade kilowatts for sats.
|
| PoS networks are secured by on-chain assets. This means you
| can't "mine" it without first buying tokens from someone who
| already owns them. You need permission from an existing player
| in order to start participating.
|
| Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for PoW,
| but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks. If a
| single entity ever accumulates more than half the tokens on a
| PoS network, they are unassailable.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Ya I wonder if we'll start seeing attempts to corner the
| market in PoS.
| krobbn wrote:
| Computing power is just a proxy for capital/resources. Why
| not be more efficient and use the capital directly and save
| power in the meanwhile.
|
| Current market cap of ETH is ~$324B, thus getting 50.1% of
| ETH would require $162.3B in capital. However, as soon as
| you start acquiring ETH the price will increase, especially
| at those large volumes.
|
| It would be insanely hard to come up with enough resources
| to buy enough ETH in a POS world to take over the network.
| Never mind the fact that as soon as it's become evident
| you've taken over the network the value of the network is
| essentially worthless and you've just destroyed billions of
| dollars worth of capital in the process.
| majormajor wrote:
| I wonder if a state actor could pull it off more cheaply.
| Start buying large amounts while letting it leak that
| you're going to take over the network. See if enough
| people will panic-sell on the leak to drop the price of
| your takeover.
|
| It's kinda like taking over a condo building on a much
| larger scale: the people you buy out first can charge a
| premium; by the end, you set the terms.
| jude- wrote:
| Why assume a state actor? Given the sorry state of DeFi
| contract security, it's far more likely that an
| enterprising hacker can gain a dominant staking position
| by pillaging and then staking ETH from buggy contracts.
| krobbn wrote:
| Think of it this way, if another company announces
| they're planning to buy a publicly traded company, what
| happens to the value of the shares?
|
| The price goes up, you've just made it more expensive for
| yourself to take over the network.
|
| If you were to attempt to take over you'd be better to do
| so in silence. However, it would be hard to hide that
| kind of control and wealth when every information on the
| network is publicly available.
| majormajor wrote:
| In a public company, though, having been taken over
| doesn't defeat the purpose of the company.
|
| If you're intentionally trying to take things down,
| sellers have a huge incentive to not be left in the 49%
| who hold something that's now lost its value - as you
| say, "as it's become evident you've taken over the
| network the value of the network is essentially
| worthless." I think you could get the value to go to
| worthless well before actually hitting 51% on intent
| alone, if you're a big enough power.
| QTnqs6C5 wrote:
| Why would people sell rather than fork to a version of
| the network where those ETH did not exist? One of the
| benefits of POS is that when you fork away from a
| malicious actor, they have to start over from the
| beginning while in POW, they can just point their
| hardware to your new chain unless you change the mining
| algorithm and screw over all the other miners.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| This is exactly what happened with Ethereum in the early
| days when a bad actor was able to exploit a third-party
| contract to the tune of 5% of all ETH.
|
| The Ethereum everyone talks about today is the fork, due
| to the Ethereum Foundation which owns the trademark
| leading the fork.
|
| The Ethereum blockchain with the unaltered history is
| called Ethereum Classic
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic#The_DAO_ba
| ilo...
| dyndos wrote:
| Note that the way this fork was pulled off was very ad-
| hoc.
|
| Ethereum devs were unable to create a legitimate
| transaction reverting the DAO funds because they do not
| have access to the hackers' private key. The reversion
| was done with a "surgical state change" hardcoded into
| the client itself.
| dyndos wrote:
| >Computing power is just a proxy for capital/resources.
| Why not be more efficient and use the capital directly
| and save power in the meanwhile.
|
| Anyone can create new capital independently.
|
| Nobody can create new tokens outside of the chain rules.
|
| This means any newcomer can build up power in a PoW
| network, but "old money" is privileged in a PoS network.
| WJW wrote:
| There's an interesting academic paper that I can't find
| anymore where the authors analyze the game theoretic edges
| of PoS systems. Basically: since the thing you need to mine
| is the same thing that gets mined the optimal strategy for
| anyone holding a majority of a PoS coin is to never spend
| more than half of your mining reward so that even someone
| who manages to buy all the coins that become available on
| the market can never catch up to you.
|
| Of course, this does omit some real-life considerations
| like people needing money for other reasons (to pay taxes,
| when they die, to buy a house, etc) but the basic principle
| stands: any initial whale in a PoS coin will basically
| never be dislodged if they play the optimal strategy.
| everfree wrote:
| Due to the sheer amount of ETH that is off-market and
| unavailable for sale, I doubt one entity would be able to
| acquire a majority of it.
|
| If they can acquire a majority of only the active, staking
| ETH, then other big ETH holders can start chipping in stake
| to tip the scales back.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| What's the point? Once people realise that you control all
| transactions those tokens you've hoarded immediately become
| worthless.
|
| You've destroyed other people's "money" at the expense of
| your own.
| fogof wrote:
| > You need permission from an existing player in order to
| start participating.
|
| This is an incorrect explanation of what a permissioned
| blockchain is. A permissioned blockchain is one in which the
| ability to add blocks is limited to a certain collection of
| entities whose public keys are hard coded into the
| blockchain's consensus mechanism. We don't say that needing
| to buy tokens constitutes needing "permission" any more than
| you need permission from a chip manufacturer to buy ASICs to
| mine a PoW cryptocurrency.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| The inability for anyone to modify the hard coded public
| keys makes it permissioned.
| dyndos wrote:
| Manufacturing ASICs from scratch requires a lot of capital,
| but it is fundamentally possible. There is no way to
| acquire a permanent, unassailable monopoly over ASIC
| hardware in general.
|
| It is possible to acquire an unassailable monopoly over PoS
| tokens. You might be able to buy scraps from random
| traders, but will the >51% whale be willing to sell their
| core holdings when they can simply live off their staking
| yield?
|
| >A permissioned blockchain is one in which the ability to
| add blocks is limited to a certain collection of entities
|
| I agree. Ripple is an example of a chain which explicitly
| follows that model. PoS regresses to something like this
| because a 51% majority attacker can control consensus.
| lottin wrote:
| > There is no way to acquire a permanent, unassailable
| monopoly over ASIC hardware in general.
|
| Is ASIC hardware made of silicon? In that case, an entity
| who owns the entire supply of silicon has a "permanent,
| unassailable monopoly over ASIC hardware in general".
| samatman wrote:
| I hope you're joking?
|
| Silicon is the second most abundant element in the
| Earth's crust, after oxygen: and only because there are
| two oxygens in silicon dioxide.
|
| If someone corners the market on silicon, Bitcoin
| dominance is the least of our problems.
| lottin wrote:
| OP's argument is that PoS is a problem because the supply
| of tokens is finite, and that PoW doesn't have the same
| problem because it relies on physical capital instead.
|
| But physical capital is also finite.
| ptx wrote:
| What are the advantages of a permissioned blockchain over
| the same collection of entities without the blockchain? If
| you have a set of trusted entitites that sign and publish
| the data, why do they need the blockchain part?
| pa7ch wrote:
| I also generally understood permissionless to mean sybil
| attack resistant without closed membership which is the
| unique property of pow and pos systems.
| skybrian wrote:
| It seems like this argument proves too much for your
| purposes, in the sense that it can be used to show that
| neither algorithm is any good as far as distributed
| governance is concerned.
|
| While it's true that you can't buy Bitcoin (for example)
| unless someone else is selling, most people aren't concerned
| about market liquidity for buyers due to whales being
| unwilling to sell. The permission to buy doesn't seem hard to
| get?
|
| Also, for the most part, people are happy when the price goes
| up, which is what happens when there are more buyers than
| sellers.
|
| I guess in theory, money drops could distribute ownership
| more widely and that would be more equitable, but this sort
| of inequality (some people have a lot more Bitcoin than
| others) isn't normally considered too much of a problem.
|
| But if you're going to take distributed governance seriously,
| neither proof-of-work nor proof-of-stake give ordinary people
| much of a say in how things go. In this way it's similar to
| the stock market, where we're told our votes are meaningful
| but in practice they aren't unless you have a huge amount of
| shares. Participating in governance is usually an illusion
| and it's not normally why you invest, unless you're a
| corporate raider or something.
|
| Similarly for mining. It's done to make money.
| dyndos wrote:
| It's not about distributed governance; it's about abusing a
| dominant role in consensus. PoS is easier to capture,
| allowing the dominant party to censor and manipulate the
| settlement chain.
|
| As for governance, with Bitcoin everyone is equally
| powerless to dictate how things should go. If you
| appreciate the fixed ruleset, you can choose to
| participate.
|
| Ethereum is far more nebulous, being piloted by a
| foundation which hardforks the protocol at will.
| skybrian wrote:
| Okay, but in practice you're going to trade on an
| exchange, which can... do whatever it wants?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>PoS networks are secured by on-chain assets. This means you
| can't "mine" it without first buying tokens from someone who
| already owns them. You need permission from an existing
| player in order to start participating.
|
| Only in the most pedantic sense of 'permission'. There will
| always be thousands of disparate parties, across numerous
| markets, with offers to sell their ETH. It will never be
| harder to procure ETH than to procure hash-generation
| hardware.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for
| PoW
|
| You can switch the protocol once. Making ASICs useless. But
| you can't do it twice.
|
| > but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks.
|
| This is false in both theory and practice. It is true that
| PoS does not offer in-protocol solution for the problem. But
| there is a historical precedent of people forking away money
| of Justin Sun in Steem project, creating Hive. Community has
| followed the fork, basically destroying Justin's Sun funds.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| The incredibly illuminating thing about cryptocurrency hard
| forks, is that it reveals that money is just a numeric
| measure of the social relationships people have towards
| each other, and as a result the ledger and its rules can be
| dynamically changed according to the needs and desires of
| the people (in constrast to what many naive metallists say
| that money is and should be a fixed store of value such as
| gold). I think crypto people have been generally focusing
| too much about the ideal, technical aspects of absolute
| distributed, immutable ledgers, and focused less about the
| social, political aspects of their work.
|
| It is this aspect that I view the current Ethereum hard
| fork as one of the most important test the crypto scene had
| in a while - it's more of a _political_ test than a
| _technical_ one. I 'm assuming that there will be quite
| some friction between the miners and the owners - and I'm
| interested in how it would turn out. Those two groups are
| dependent of each other for their existence, and the rift
| between them would potentially be the demise of the
| project. Will the project succeed in establishing a
| governance structure that would address both the needs and
| desires of both groups? Or will the project go into tyranny
| with one group dominating over the other (which would
| eventually lead to everyone's downfall)? In other words,
| this will be more of a test of governance than about
| technology. I don't have high hopes for the miners though,
| since there's just too much investor pressure from all the
| crypto craze that hasn't really been stopped since the
| coronavirus, and the miners doesn't seem to have a strong
| enough coordinated willpower to land an effective strike.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| That's pretty cool. The community can decide if something
| is corruption and take steps to fix it.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| If somebody does a 51% attack his tokens would be worth
| nothing the next day. Might be plausible if you target smart
| contracts that are worth a lot more than the coin itself.
|
| Otherwise this is just a nonissue.
| decentralised wrote:
| >Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for
| PoW, but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks.
| If a single entity ever accumulates more than half the tokens
| on a PoS network, they are unassailable.
|
| This is not true. PoS has many design flavours and the one
| Ethereum is planning on implementing includes random
| selection of validators and the amount staked has no
| influence on the inclusion or the vote "weight".
|
| Also with PoS an attacker will always incur economic losses
| similar to having your mining rig burning down if you were to
| try to foce a bad block through. In PoW networks attackers
| can keep on mixing attacks with producing normal blocks and
| remain profitable
| null0pointer wrote:
| If amount staked has no influence on inclusion or vote
| weight then what's to stop a large ETH holder from
| splitting their wallet into several smaller wallets with
| the minimum staking balance and just gaining vote weight
| that way?
| shoulderfake wrote:
| Because the validators are chosen randomly by the
| network.
| grlass wrote:
| Random doesn't mean unweighted. Choose a number at random
| from this list [5, 10, 5, 12, 8, 5].
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Not to mention that Ethereum has shown willingness to hard
| fork to punish/reward specific actors.
|
| If an actor pulled off a 51% attack on Ethereum I'd be
| surprised if there wasn't an effort to just hard fork them
| out of their resources.
| everfree wrote:
| IIRC they have written blog posts in the past saying just
| as much.
|
| Without losing their stake to slashing penalties, though,
| the worst kind of attack 66% (not 51% iirc) can do
| anyways is a censorship or denial of service attack.
| Which is bad, but at least they can't revert transactions
| or double-spend like in a PoW model.
| polyomino wrote:
| The whole network is a political facade, EEA controls the
| morals of the system so they can and will do whatever
| they want.
| newobj wrote:
| don't you suspect that in practice they are self-assailing
| because a known-to-be-taken-over network will immediately go
| into hyper deflation?
| theknocker wrote:
| By changing the definition of centralized and fuding about
| energy costs.
| Havoc wrote:
| To me in a way the big news here is a major news website (cnbc)
| reporting on this near live.
|
| That's a pretty solid "sht is about to get real" in my books
| [deleted]
| BTCOG wrote:
| It's centralized, it's basically a CBDC 1.0.
|
| It's worse than fiat.
| dleslie wrote:
| So I have some ETH; is there anything I should be doing?
| __s wrote:
| No
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| No, if you're just an owner. If you're a miner though...
| that's a whole different story.
| moralestapia wrote:
| If you have ETH but not use any wallet, should you do
| something?
| everfree wrote:
| No.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Not a miner but I'm curious. What should miners be doing
| differently?
| fogof wrote:
| I don't think there's anything miners really have to do
| differently because of this. The only big thing would be
| to make sure to upgrade your software to the version that
| has the code for the hard fork (though at this point the
| hard fork has already happened, so you would be a bit
| late). But regular users should upgrade their hardware
| too so that their clients track the correct chain,
| otherwise they might not see the right balance.
| thebean11 wrote:
| sudo apt upgrade geth
| Fiahil wrote:
| Update their running software.
| drdrey wrote:
| Upgrading their nodes
| marcasey wrote:
| This will encourage users to transact in ETH compared to before
| because of its excessive transaction fees. I think that this
| upgrade will truly create a sense of urgency as every transaction
| will have some ETH burned.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| What are the current best estimates for the timeline of the
| proof-of-stake transition?
| everfree wrote:
| December 2021 is the optimistic estimate, Q1-Q2 2022 is the
| more realistic one, and the one I've been hearing lately from
| some people involved in the process.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| The next hard fork/upgrade has to happen before December 2021,
| that's when the difficulty bomb needs to be moved again.
|
| It's unlikely that it'll happen that early, but iirc PoS is now
| the biggest priority
| voz_ wrote:
| Same as always, a solution with no real problems to solve. Crypto
| is a big, useless, bubble.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| How long can this go on until you stop believing it's a bubble?
| voz_ wrote:
| Do bubbles become less of a bubble a certain point? What
| problems does it solve? It has no real use.
| everfree wrote:
| Here is a list of problems the blockchain space has
| improved, according to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/oac9lc/the_charl
| e...
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| If Ethereum can hard fork like this, it stands to reason as well
| that the 21 Million Bitcoin limit is a lot more changeable than
| Bitcoin proponents would say.
|
| Or the opposite is true - and Ethereum is under heavily
| centralized control.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| All blockchains are controlled by rough consensus. There's
| already like half a dozen Bitcoin forks in the wild (Bitcoin
| Cash, BSV, etc). When Bitcoin Cash forked off from the main
| chain in 2017, the community ultimately decided which chain was
| the "legitimate" one.
|
| Of course Bitcoin could decide to increase the issuance. In
| doing so, however, it would inevitably lead to a fork (with the
| 21M holdouts in one camp and the inflationists in another) and
| the community would ultimately need to decide which one to
| support.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Good explanation.
|
| Imo the block size wars was the beginning of the end for
| Bitcoin. I chose the chain most hashed and it's only now that
| I realize that Bitcoin gave up on growing and improving at
| that point.
|
| Bch is a joke, PoW just doesn't work unless you're the
| biggest game in town. BTC is shackled to staying incredibly
| conservative.
| azim2344 wrote:
| You could also increase the 21M cap through soft-fork and the
| existing chain wouldn't have to split.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I agree with all of this - but the conclusion I reach is that
| proponents of Bitcoin are lying when they say it's
| unchangeable and certainly deflationary, or digital gold.
| It's changeable if people want it to change.
| alasano wrote:
| Anything is technically possible. In reality no one wants
| this to change the limit on the 21 million number and any
| proposal to modify this particular aspect of Bitcoin will
| get shot down immediately.
|
| Lying would mean they know what they're saying isn't true.
| Practically speaking it's completely true.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Ethereum is so enthusiastic about hard forks (or in ETH speak,
| upgrades) that they have the difficulty bomb which works like
| the debt ceiling. It's necessary to do a hard fork/upgrade
| every so often.
|
| Meanwhile bitcoin is so against hard forks/upgrades that they
| can basically only do soft forks and currently do that by a 90%
| voting agreement by miners.
|
| Bitcoin can not even increase the blocksize, the sure as hell
| aren't going to change the emission. Some day far down the line
| the block subsidy might be low enough that lots of miners go
| dark. At that point they'll need to choose between 21 million
| bitcoins and network security.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| So the personal beliefs of users decide the technical future
| of the project. Personal beliefs and culture can change
| rapidly, or become overshadowed by new users.
|
| It just means that Bitcoin is only unchangeable because of
| the current whims of current users - nothing fundamental.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| In my view the Bitcoin community has only further
| entrenched their position as they taken on new users in a
| toxic Eternal September.
| alasano wrote:
| It was never meant to be fundamentally unchangeable.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Humans decide the technical future of every project. The
| difference is which specific humans, how many, how they are
| selected, how they are incentivized etc.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I disagree with this - bitcoin is advertised as
| mathematically unbreakable (which it currently
| practically is, on a technical level, due to the
| cryptography) - but this level of bulletproof security is
| promoted as extended to all properties of the blockchain
| - which isn't, on a technical level, true.
| thebean11 wrote:
| I disagree that's how it's promoted. You could make this
| argument about any piece of software (change the code to
| make it insecure, now look at the security hole!).
|
| If someone were to do this with Bitcoin, users can decide
| whether to use the old chain or the new chain. Unlike a
| centralized service, no individual (or even group of
| people) can prevent you from using the version of the
| network you and your peers want to participate in.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| The lead eth developer Vitalik has an excellent blog post
| addressing what it takes to fork a blockchain-
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
|
| The key takeaway is that yes, it's ultimately just controlled
| by majority agreement between users.
| alasano wrote:
| > _it stands to reason_
|
| No it doesn't. You're comparing something with no advantage to
| the people who are invested in Bitcoin to something which is
| meant to objectively improve Ethereum and a majority can agree
| upon.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I always heard it explained that it's full-node wallet users
| who tend to control the future direction of a blockchain, not
| just those invested or mining.
|
| I would like the 21M limit to be increased so I can stand to
| make some profit mining! Currently that's impossible for me.
| I'd like it to change.
| bugzz wrote:
| Here you can track how much Eth has been burned so far:
| https://ethburned.info/
| [deleted]
| jlokier wrote:
| Currently burning at a rate of USD $16M per day.
| mmmeff wrote:
| What does it mean for Eth to be burned?
| [deleted]
| bugzz wrote:
| This change burns the "base fee" instead of giving it to
| miners, which means it goes to nobody and is gone forever
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| If it goes to nobody, is it really "gone forever"? Did it
| even exist in the first place?
|
| The confusions arise from thinking cryptocurrency tokens as
| material things (like gold). Money is just a numeric
| representation of the social relationship people have with
| each other, and the rules of the monetary system is just an
| technical agreement on how we should have relationships
| with others. This is a change of rules for the relationship
| between miners and owners: nothing is "lost" or "burned".
| Whether you agree upon that change of contract is up to
| yours, but the actual "disappearing" of money isn't an
| issue in the slightest here.
| xur17 wrote:
| > If it goes to nobody, is it really "gone forever"? Did
| it even exist in the first place?
|
| Yes? Isn't "going to nobody" the very definition of "gone
| forever"? Previously miners received the ETH spent on
| fees, and either kept it, or traded it for cash. Since
| they will be receiving less, they will have less that
| they can sell, which should result in less selling
| pressure.
| GZJOHN wrote:
| Confidently incorrect and took a lot of words to do it.
| Bravo!
| bugzz wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you are saying. I don't think
| there's any problem with the money being burned.
|
| > nothing is "lost" or "burned"
|
| That "specific" Eth is gone. I say "specific" because of
| course it's fungible, except for its transaction history.
| drdrey wrote:
| It goes from the wallet of people issuing transactions to
| no one. So it was actual value that people could spend,
| and that value is removed from circulation, reducing
| inflation
| thegabez wrote:
| Whats the incentive for miners to continue to mine? They
| now just rely on tips? Won't they all just bail if they're
| not receiving enough tips to be profitable?
| bugzz wrote:
| Each block still mints 2 new eth, in addition to tips
| (which should always remain small, even as base fee
| rises).
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Not to mention MEV
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's still profitable
| remir wrote:
| Gas fees becoming more predictable is nice, but the fact they can
| get so large for small transactions is quite frustrating.
|
| I wanted to swap a bunch of coins worth 8$ into another token and
| the gas fees were around 28$, which is just insane.
| arberx wrote:
| Most clients haven't updated to the new fee model. Once they do
| you'll see similar if not less gas fees (strictly due to better
| prediction).
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately the main chain will likely be this bad
| until all the shards are executing shards. You'll need to go to
| an L2 until that happens
| Sargos wrote:
| Note that execution shards are not really on the roadmap
| anymore as sharding is planned to be data only and serve as a
| scaling factor for L2 rollups.
|
| In just a few years the only usage of the L1 will be security
| and data availability for rollups and a settlement layer for
| international organizations and state level actors with the
| vast majority of normal activity happening on various L2s.
| arberx wrote:
| Rolling/live update of a $300B consensus layer holding over $50B
| of assets, and moving much much more everyday.
|
| Pretty impressive.
| exo762 wrote:
| "Shadowy super-coders", as Elizabeth Warren famously said.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| There isnt anything shadowy. It all open sourced unlike some
| of the work that bankers do.
| nwsm wrote:
| Thoughts on crypto as viable currencies aside, I have always
| been impressed by the engineering.
| lottin wrote:
| Does that mean Ethereum is no longer an environmental disaster?
| jstx1 wrote:
| No, the move away from proof of work is another fork scheduled
| for a few months from now.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| No, this change just makes fees less volatile. The
| environmental fix is expected to come sometime next year-
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I am just praying this means I can finally afford an RTX 3070.
| potiuper wrote:
| Is there a site like https://ethernodes.org/london, but also with
| a % of the hashpower? An anti-EIP 1559 mining cartel made an
| attempt to fork Ethereum and it would be interesting to know how
| close they came. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-mining-pools-
| threaten-cont...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I don't think that threat ever really materalized. MEV happened
| and then there was a suggestion by VB of switching to the PoS
| chain in response to a miner lead fork:
| https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/B1mUf6DXO
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