[HN Gopher] Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-
stake
Author : sfjailbird
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-08-11 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| nodejsthrowaway wrote:
| One of Ethereum's core goals is decentralisation.
|
| How does Ethereum plan to deal Proof of Stake naturally
| monopolizing block creation and the Ether supply? In my
| estimation there are many compounding factors such as MEV and
| liquid staking with a massive economy of scale for first movers
| that combined with staking interest might make the top staking
| provider eventually hold the vast majority of Ether.
|
| If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating 99%
| of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking with
| a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next?
| redox99 wrote:
| The problem of pools getting too big (Lido, CeXes, etc) is
| worrying. I think once withdrawals are enabled (shangai fork),
| liquid staking won't be that attractive, so the situation will
| improve.
| ruuda wrote:
| > If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating
| 99% of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking
| with a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next?
|
| The company that employs most of the Lido contributors is based
| in a region where the US has little influence. But aside from
| that, the Lido node operators (who operate the validators)
| consist of more than a dozen companies, registered in various
| countries, using servers in different locations. Diversity of
| jurisdictions is an explicit criterion for node operator
| selection. Possibly some of them could be forced to censor
| transactions, but I think it's not the lowest hanging fruit
| (going after the client software developers might be a more
| impactful avenue, there are fewer of those than validators,
| though fortunately Ethereum has multiple client
| implementations).
|
| But suppose somehow 99% of the blocks are produced by
| validators who censor certain actors. Then it depends a bit on
| how far-reaching the censorship is.
|
| If validators refuse to include certain transactions in their
| blocks, but still accept other's blocks for consensus, then I
| expect that blacklisted actors will find it more difficult and
| more expensive to get their transactions included, but it would
| still be possible. If they offer a juicy transaction fee, they
| will have to wait on average 50 blocks to get their transaction
| in, but then a validator will be more than happy to include it.
|
| If validators refuse to include certain transactions in their
| blocks, and also refuse to vote on blocks that do for
| consensus, then they will be able to enforce their censorship.
| One way to think about this, is that the censorship has been
| built into the protocol, and the 1% of validators still willing
| to include the blacklisted transactions, are producing what the
| others consider invalid blocks. Consensus can tolerate 1/3 of
| the stake misbehaving.
|
| 99% is an extreme case though; if the censorship is limited to
| less than 1/3 of the stake, then the opposite happens.
| Validators who refuse to vote on certain blocks don't fulfil
| their duty of voting, which incurs a penalty. If the validator
| is not allowed to vote on even a descendant of a block that
| contains a blacklisted transaction, then effectively it will be
| prevented from ever voting again, and its stake will slowly
| evaporate due to penalties.
|
| An interesting case arises when censoring nodes control more
| than 1/3 of the stake, but less than 2/3. This could result in
| a liveness failure, where no blocks get finalized (because
| neither the censoring nor the non-censoring nodes can get the
| required 2/3 majority). This triggers an "inactivity leak",
| where the stake of the misbehaving nodes gets destroyed, until
| there is less than 1/3 of it left, and consensus can be
| achieved again. Of course, who is "misbehaving" here depends on
| your point of view, and the situation is symmetric, so this
| would lead to the chain forking into one where the censors have
| a supermajority, and one where the non-censors have a
| supermajority. The side which had most stake will be the first
| to achieve consensus again.
|
| (Because of this risk, there is an ongoing discussion in Lido
| about whether it should self-impose a limit to not control more
| than 1/3 of the stake. But it's a tough situation, because the
| way it looks right now is that that stake would instead be
| controlled by centralized exchanges who offer staking
| services.)
| sophrocyne wrote:
| Your note on Lido being responsible for validating 99% may have
| been hyperbolic, but just for reference -
| https://beaconcha.in/pools
|
| There's an argument to be made that there is a centralizing
| force in the role of the consensus/security layer for the
| chain, because the asset being earned (ETH) can be staked and
| earn further returns - However, this role and phenomenon is
| mirrored in the PoW world. The difference is that the
| centralization happens one step removed from the on-chain asset
| - PoW miners consolidate profit into further mining
| investments, such that an increasing amount of the hash rate is
| owned by the largest miners, who can acquire improved access to
| electricity and/or equipment relative to smaller miners. One
| could argue that a PoS system actually has less room for
| exploitation, however, since you can't restrict a solo-stakers
| access to ETH, while you could restrict (or provide severe
| barriers to entry) on the competition of electricity/equipment.
|
| The concern of the "top staking provider eventually holding the
| vast majority of Ether" is highly unlikely. Given that the
| asset will soon have ETH issuance cut by 90+% as part of the
| merge, and the fact that there is no mechanism by which top
| staking providers are incentivized more than the small solo-
| stakers, this would soon enter the realms of the purely
| theoretical, and seemingly take lifetimes to happen if one
| could even envision it happening at all without a reallocation
| into other investments.
|
| MEV is being democratized as well (whether a good thing or not,
| will let you be the judge), with even solo-stakers being able
| to use an MEV client alongside validation clients in order to
| benefit from additional income on block proposals (see
| Flashbots mev-boost client, releasing alongside the merge).
|
| Would love to better understand whether that better informs
| your perspectives on the subject, or what other concerns you
| still have.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| In PoW, mining has real-world ongoing costs (electricity,
| hardware) and so miners need to continually liquidate their
| earnings to stay afloat. This counterbalances the effect of
| wealth centralization. If you try to remove real-world costs
| from that equation, you lose the counterbalancing effect.
| eterps wrote:
| > This counterbalances the effect of wealth centralization
|
| Yes, this ensures a limited supply with PoW, right?
|
| > If you try to remove real-world costs from that equation,
| you lose the counterbalancing effect.
|
| I assume you can't remove real-world costs in the case of
| PoS, but yes I can see how the real-world costs will be
| much, much lower.
|
| Are you saying that there is a good reason to keep those
| real-world costs higher? (pardon my ignorance, I haven't
| looked into the principle you describe here before).
| yokem55 wrote:
| At least in Ethereum - - Stakers earn far less then miners
| since they aren't burning capital to validate. They only
| need to be paid for their opportunity cost over putting
| that capital to use elsewhere. - Their stake does not
| automatically compound. Each validator maxes out at a
| weight of 32 eth, and it takes 32 to get a new validator
| going. - Earnings have to be skimmed back to the execution
| layer in order to be manually re-staked (if there is 32 eth
| worth). Those earnings then enter the 'dominion and
| control' of the staker, so at that point taxes have to be
| paid on that income.
|
| In contrast, mining can drastically improve the return on
| capital by operating at larger and larger scales so as to
| get better and better deals on equipment and electricity.
| That kind scaling doesn't happen with proof of stake.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's the same forces which push proof of work to the same
| conclusion, so it's not made much difference to the problem.
| Salgat wrote:
| The difference is that if a miner does nothing, eventually
| they stop making money regardless of how many coins they
| have. If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and
| collect even more indefinitely with no additional investment
| beyond running a very cheap node (or just letting someone
| else host it). Staking is just trivial in comparison, it's
| apples and oranges.
| yokem55 wrote:
| The flip side of this though is that stakers can have their
| capital burned because of misbehavior. If a staker gets too
| entrenched and the other folks in the network don't want
| them around anymore, their stake can be slashed. Proof of
| work cannot destroy the equipment of a hostile miner, only
| wipe everyone's equipment out with an algorithm change.
| ruuda wrote:
| > If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and
| collect
|
| They do, but the supply of the token also goes up, so their
| share of the supply doesn't grow as much, and relative to
| other stakers, it doesn't grow in proportion at all. It is
| true that inflation rewards effectively move value from
| non-stakers to stakers, but nothing prevents most of the
| supply from being staked, especially with liquid staking
| derivatives.
|
| > Staking is just trivial in comparison
|
| I agree that staking is, but operating the node is not!
| Operating a validator is actually more demanding than
| operating a miner. For a miner, there is no disadvantage in
| being offline except for the opportunity cost. But a
| validator has a duty, and will be penalized for downtime.
| (Granted, the requirements on Ethereum are quite lax -- on
| purpose, to make it easier for enthusiasts and other non-
| professionals to operate a node.) Operating a validator
| requires monitoring and maintenance like any other
| software. Your server will run out of disk space, your node
| will disconnect if you don't update the node software in
| time, etc. Most validators in most of the PoS networks are
| operated by professional companies with dedicated SRE teams
| because of this.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I don't have a source handy, but eventually block production
| will centralize and the protocol will allow a "block proposer"
| role which will require lower resources. The proposer will be
| able to force a producer to include specific transactions and
| if they aren't included, the producer will be punished (via
| their stake being slashed).
|
| If a centralized entity is told to include transactions by a
| proposer and they refuse for any reason, they will eventually
| lose their stake and fall out of the producer role.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| What pushes towards centralization are two factors; economies
| of scale and barriers of entry. For those mathematically
| inclined you can imagine plotting economic reward (y-axis) vs
| economic input (x-axis). Economies of scale determine the shape
| and growth of the curve while barriers of entry determine the
| cut with the y-axis. Obviously, the greater the barriers of
| entry or the higher the reward as your economic scale grows the
| bigger the push towards centralization. In the first case
| because you forbid small actors to participate in the game, in
| the second case because you reward bigger actors more
| generously.
|
| So how does this graph look for Ethereum? Pretty simple, if you
| have more than 32 ETH it's basically flat. You get the same APY
| irrespectively of your size. And if you have less than 32 ETH?
| Well, you can then stake with RocketPool (a decentralized
| staking pool) in which case your APY is 0.85 the full APY. So
| the graph for Ethereum is:
|
| - 0.85 * APY between [0 ETH, 32 ETH)
|
| - APY between [32 ETH, infty ETH)
|
| Where APY is the yield returned by the network which depends on
| total amount staked in the network and network fee revenues.
|
| This is a remarkably flat curve, which highlights that there
| are almost non-existent economies of scale in PoS as designed
| in Ethereum. If you do the same analysis for PoW you will find
| it requires significant investment in specialized HW (either
| top of the line GPU or ASICS), and there are significant
| economies of scale in the form of access to cheap or unusable
| sources of energy.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have any references to resources
| describing the theory of how economies of scale/barriers to
| entry interact?
| ruuda wrote:
| > You get the same APY irrespectively of your size
|
| On-chain, yes. But there is an off-chain cost to operating
| the validators, and there is economy of scale there. You can
| run many 32-ETH validators on a single machine using almost
| the same resources as running a single one, so the amortized
| cost of the hardware goes down. And when you do need to
| expand to multiple machines, the same applies; you don't need
| 10x the people to manage 10x the machines. Of course, you can
| pay somebody to operate the validator for you, and those
| parties benefit from economy of scale.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Indeed. So let me flesh it out a bit more. You can run a
| validator using 100W (conservative figure) of energy and an
| Intel NUC with 2 TiB SSD (you can even run it on a
| Raspberry Pi but no need to be too greedy in HW resources).
|
| That's 876 kWh in a year and 1000 $ in HW. Energy costs
| vary from place to place but let's pick 0,2 $ / kWh. Which
| results in 175 $/year in energy. The computer can easily
| last you 5 years if not more, so 200 $ per year. Let's add
| internet costs too. 30$ x 12 = 360 $ / year.
|
| Those are the operational costs. Once you have 32 ETH this
| is pretty negligible.
| ruuda wrote:
| There is also the people cost. If you're a hobbyist you
| could argue those are zero or there is only some
| opportunity cost. But for a professional validator, SRE
| salaries dwarf the hardware cost.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| True, but these are costs that affect large scale
| operators so they are not a barrier to entry. If anything
| they highlight that in some ways a small hobbyist is
| positioned to be as profitable as a large scale operator.
| ruuda wrote:
| Yeah, that's true.
| [deleted]
| Hbruz0 wrote:
| So if the graph is flat above 32eth, why not reduce that
| amount to lower the barrier of entry ?
| [deleted]
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Does this mean I can finally sell the coins I inadvertently
| locked up? After 10 plus years and no killer app I'm done
| supporting crypto. It's a scam.
| vlod wrote:
| >It's a scam.
|
| Obviously you wouldn't want to profit from that. How about
| donating your profits to a charity if you feel so strongly?
|
| Ethereum price ~10 years ago, probably less than a dollar.
|
| Ethereum price today, ~ $1900
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my
| etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale
| for that statement?
|
| Maybe I should be more clear, without ANY application or use
| for ANY crypto besides pump and dump schemes, ALL crypto,
| IMO, is a scam. Crypto has been a thing for 10 years, longer
| if you count egold and liberty cash (or whatever that was
| called).
|
| And to clarify again, my eth has been locked up in "staking"
| for what 2 years now without me being able to sell it. I'm
| looking forward to offloading it all and reap my gains,
| doesn't change how I feel about it.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof
| of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of
| ~2000 or 99.95%.
|
| You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi.
|
| Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
| rglullis wrote:
| To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of
| validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by
| them _while running_ is less than the energy consumed by
| videogame consoles around the world _while idling_.
|
| Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much
| energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to
| eat their GPUs after the merge.
| belltaco wrote:
| >"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be
| anti-crypto
|
| Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy,
| proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing
| that.
| baby wrote:
| Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin
| will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce
| their computations, or users will be required to pay a
| pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you
| have bitcoin, that's my advice
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then
| it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily
| wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to
| scrutinize Bitcoin.
| rglullis wrote:
| Then it is an issue of _bitcoin_ and all the PoW
| blockchains, not of crypto in general.
|
| You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin,
| you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to
| environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped
| generalizing and became more specific about their
| arguments.
| belltaco wrote:
| Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and
| was also the first successful one.
| rglullis wrote:
| And Friendster was once the largest social network and
| the first successful one. Your point?
|
| Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a
| failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the
| "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the
| first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only
| correlated with other stock prices.
|
| It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction
| volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of
| nodes participating in block validation) and so on.
| Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin
| than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really
| want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin _today_
| is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
| belltaco wrote:
| Friendster isn't currently the largest social network.
| The point is that people associate the biggest product of
| the category with the category itself. Like web search is
| synonymous with Google.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| Android has a far larger market share than iOS. And yet
| people still voice their dislike of Android without
| dismissing smartphones in general.
| rglullis wrote:
| Ether market cap _alone_ is about 50% of Bitcoin 's (~230
| vs ~470 billion USD).
|
| Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top
| 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go
| ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still
| another ~$100B there.
|
| Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to
| believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an
| ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening
| will come fast.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a
| tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until
| bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.
| rglullis wrote:
| Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of
| people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away
| when we build an alternative that has (most) of its
| (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks.
|
| IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on
| criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments,
| otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican
| standoff and you will never get the support to win the
| good fight.
| bilsbie wrote:
| So proof of stake isn't a holy grail? It's completely achievable
| technology?
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, PoS has been running safely for 1-2 years. (Ethereum isn't
| the first working PoS chain but it will be the largest one by
| far.)
| 0x64 wrote:
| There's a massive difference in the decentralization of
| Ethereum's PoS implementation vs. Cardano, which uses
| delegated PoS.
| wmf wrote:
| If only there were other PoS chains.
| skizm wrote:
| Random brain dump of questions: Does proof-of-stake generally
| mean the more money you have the more influence you get over the
| consensus? If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor
| had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? Could they
| theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line
| and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? How does this
| affect mining pools? Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different?
| sschueller wrote:
| Doesn't the same apply to PoW? The more money you have the more
| HW you can buy/rent to mine.
| latchkey wrote:
| As someone with a huge number of GPUs and many megawatts of
| power mining ETH for many years now... it isn't that easy.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, protocol changes are not affected by the amount of ETH
| staked.
|
| > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different?
|
| Harder. With Ethereum's consensus, you need 2/3 of the
| validators conspiring to produce an attack on the chain.
| ruuda wrote:
| You can halt the chain with 1/3 of the stake though. In
| Ethereum, that would trigger an inactivity leak that eats
| away your stake until it's less than 1/3 of the stake, and
| consensus can be achieved again.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Will try to answer some of the questions.
|
| > Does proof-of-stake generally mean the more money you have
| the more influence you get over the consensus?
|
| Ethereum does not have on-chain governance, so having more
| stake doesn't grant you more influence over the network or the
| rules of its consensus algorithm. What it gives you is a higher
| probability to be called to do your duty as a validator and get
| rewarded for it. But what that duty entails is defined in the
| protocol and implemented in code.
|
| > If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a
| lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain?
|
| You would need to get 33% or 66% of the total stake to be able
| to do some damage. With 33% you can prevent the network from
| finalizing, i.e. agreeing that a block is part of the forever
| history of the network. With 66% you could write wrong blocks
| and make them part of the forever history of the network. The
| protocol has on-chain mechanisms to deal with the first
| situation but there are no on-chain mechanisms to deal with the
| second one and a solution would require social consensus off-
| chain.
|
| > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the
| front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own
| transactions?
|
| Anyone creating a block is free to order the transaction
| however they please and decide which ones are included. You
| cannot not charge fees, though. To use the network you have to
| pay certain amount of ETH and this amount gets spent or burnt
| as it's also referred, it simply disappears from existence.
|
| > How does this affect mining pools?
|
| They disappear, there is no more mining.
|
| > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different?
|
| Different and harder. Different for some of the explanations
| above (the % necessary are different and what can be done at
| this thresholds also changes). Harder because it's much much
| more expensive to acquire the stake necessary to attack, so the
| chain is more secure. But also because an attacker will get its
| stake slashed (destroyed) and will not be able to do it again.
| While in PoW, once you have the hashrate you can keep attacking
| the network ad infinitum or until the rest of the network gets
| more hashrate than you. It's as if an attacker in PoS would
| gets mining rigs burnt. PoW cannot do that because it delegates
| its security to an activity outside the chain (burn energy with
| specialized HW), but in PoS the stake is on-chain so there are
| more tools to deal with nefarious actors.
| ruuda wrote:
| > If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a
| lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain?
|
| With the current price of ETH, it's unlikely that a single
| entity could gain enough of the supply to do anything like
| this, but it is a valid concern for smaller chains.
|
| > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the
| front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own
| transactions?
|
| Block proposers can already do this. How often you get to be
| block proposer, is proportional to the amount of stake you
| have.
| ayoubbhihi wrote:
| There is growing confidence that the Ethereum Merge, scheduled
| for mid-September, won't be postponed after the Goerli merge went
| smoothly.
| jl6 wrote:
| Clearly there is some group of people with the power and
| influence to make this decision. How does that group compare to,
| say, US central bankers, in terms of transparency and democratic
| accountability?
|
| Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about banking operations, I'm
| talking about decision making by central bank leadership. One of
| the purported benefits of crypto is independence from the shadowy
| cabals that run the US dollar.
|
| Except the Treasury isn't actually all that shadowy - the staff
| have names, and are appointed through an ultimately democratic
| process. Whereas I really have no idea who is pulling the strings
| behind crypto and who they are accountable to. The original
| vision was for decentralized finance where _nobody_ could pull
| the strings, but the level of coordination on display here in the
| PoW-to-PoS switch makes it obvious that strings exist and they
| are capable of being pulled.
| jakswa wrote:
| At first bluff, I'd expect a ton of example and implementation
| code to be open-sourced. I still don't know what nightmare code
| is crawling CSV/ZIP (forget which) files daily doing ACH
| transfers, but afaik that's still how electronic banking is
| done? Would love to learn I'm outdated there.
| mattdesl wrote:
| The development is in the open, happening through PRs on GitHub
| and across several independent client teams. You can join the
| R&D discord (I'm there as a casual observer) and watch or
| engage in technical discussions. You can propose EIPs or make
| suggestions about how the chain should work, and everybody can
| collectively decide it is a good or bad idea for the protocol.
|
| Overall it's very open, although they do have to draw the line
| somewhere and I assume the core dev's weekly zoom calls and
| standups are not open to everybody to join lest it degrade into
| madness (these devs work across a range of independent
| companies and orgs fwiw). Even these calls and notes are shared
| btw.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Who will implement the final decision?
| woah wrote:
| Users and exchanges who choose to recognize the token of
| this new chain as "real eth"
| tomhallett wrote:
| From my very limited understanding, with Bitcoin the separation
| of powers comes from the miners ability to reject an update.
| With ETH Proof of stake, that is less clear - can the people
| staking refuse to accept a new protocol version/update?
| ruuda wrote:
| The people who run the validators can, but validators on the
| old version will be incompatible with the rest of the network
| (if the rest of the network did update), and they will not be
| able to sync. It's no different from Bitcoin in that sense.
| [deleted]
| bilsbie wrote:
| Will existing coins be moved over automatically?
| wmf wrote:
| Yes. (There's actually no "over" since it's a continuation of
| the same blockchain just with different consensus rules.)
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I confess deep ignorance, here, but: Why would miners go along
| with this switch, given it's going to eliminate their profits?
| Why wouldn't they just fork the chain and continue to run a PoW
| version? What would force people to switch to the new PoS
| version?
| TGIF wrote:
| They almost certainly will, as has happened before (see
| Ethereum classic) but the Ethereum foundation and thus most of
| the users will continue on to the proof of stake chain.
| rawrmaan wrote:
| There will be forks, but only the PoS one will have stablecoins
| with actual backing (e.g. any value at all):
| https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-p...
| toinewx wrote:
| justin sun has said his "stable" coin usdd will support the
| pow fork
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| This made me chuckle. How anyone thinks Sun has any
| interest in anything besides enriching himself is
| delusional. Pro pump and dumper, thats all. He is an artist
| at the top of his game, I'll give him that!
| DennisP wrote:
| USDD has a market cap of $745 million. By comparison, USDC
| is at $54 billion, USDT is $67 billion, and both are only
| supporting PoS.
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-
| confi...
| baby wrote:
| What an ass
| ruuda wrote:
| I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC
| providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc.,
| wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It
| might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value,
| similar to Ethereum Classic.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| The world has changed a lot since then.
|
| If the crypto crash has demonstrated anything, it's that
| there's an enormously incestuous relationship between these
| organizations. We have exchanges running mining operations,
| market participants investing in crypto mining companies,
| etc.
|
| A massive economic implosion in the mining community is going
| to have knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem, and I can
| imagine market participants not wanting that to happen.
|
| In the end I suspect you're right, but I don't think it's
| safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving
| the status quo, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion
| that a major PoW-based fork won't live on and divide the
| ecosystem.
| eterps wrote:
| > but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners
| are interested in preserving the status quo
|
| I also am sure the miners will keep the PoW based chain
| alive. But I have trouble finding reasons why users,
| developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain
| in the long term.
| WJW wrote:
| From a user perspective it doesn't matter all that much
| whether it's PoW or PoS, right? I see equally little
| reason for a user to choose the PoS chain over the PoW
| one.
| DennisP wrote:
| Usability is a little better on the PoS chain. Blocks
| come out every 12 seconds, instead of randomly with just
| an average time of 13 seconds.
|
| The PoS chain takes less than a minute to converge to a
| state where it's very unlikely for your transaction to
| revert, and in 12 minutes your transaction is finalized,
| meaning it _can 't_ revert without destroying a large
| percentage of staked ETH.
|
| PoS ETH will have the researcher and dev community
| building on top of it for another decade or so. There's a
| long list of further improvements in the roadmap,
| including major increases in scalability.
|
| Most of the ecosystem is moving to PoS. The popular
| rollups will be connected to the PoS chain, not to PoW.
| Major stablecoins backed by off-chain assets have already
| said they'll be backing the PoS chain, not PoW. Etc.
| eterps wrote:
| You're right, if users disregard the difference in energy
| consumption there is little reason for them to choose the
| PoS chain over the PoW one. For devs and businesses the
| PoS one seems to matter though, I think it is likely the
| activity and innovation will be there in the end.
|
| Also a user would have to make an effort to keep using
| the PoW one AFAIK.
| ruuda wrote:
| Another reason that I've seen brought up is that miners
| aren't so coordinated. Somebody will have to actually
| fork the code, remove the difficulty bomb, change the
| magic parameters to not interfere with the PoS P2P
| network, etc. Then they have to get enough miners on
| board to use _that_ particular fork. I think it's a weak
| argument, but so far I haven't seen any coordinated
| effort to continue mining after the Merge, so it could be
| a factor.
|
| I think it boils down to a coordination/signalling
| problem again. Miners want to mine on the fork that they
| expect to succeed, but it will only succeed if it gets
| listed on exchanges, exchanges will only list it after it
| gains serious adoption, but it will only get serious
| adoption if miners agree on a fork, etc.
|
| A historical example of this is SegWit2x in Bitcoin. It
| was originally proposed as a protocol upgrade, seemed to
| gain broad support, but miners and exchanges weren't
| universally signalling that they would adopt it, and in
| the end everybody chickened out, and the change failed to
| be adopted.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > But I have trouble finding reasons why users,
| developers and businesses would support the PoW based
| chain in the long term.
|
| I explained why: Cross-investment within the ecosystem.
|
| If, I dunno, say Coinbase has a large investment in a
| mining operation (and I'm completely making this up, to
| be clear), they're not gonna want a move to PoS because
| it'll destroy that investment.
|
| We know for a fact that there's a ton of this type of
| cross-investment in the ecosystem, as evidenced by the
| ripple effects from the collapse of organizations like
| 3AC. It's not at all unreasonable to conclude that
| similar relationships could create incentives to keep the
| miners solvent.
| DennisP wrote:
| Fwiw, Coinbase and Kraken both hold large amounts of
| staked ETH for their customers, and skim off a percentage
| of the staking rewards. They won't be able to access
| those profits until about six months after the merge. So
| they both have an interest in the PoS chain doing well.
|
| Anyone in the community who's been paying attention has
| been well aware that staking was coming. The staking
| network has been running in parallel since December 2020,
| and about 12% of the current supply of ETH is deposited
| on it.
| tylersmith wrote:
| Nothing forces people to follow any set of consensus rules.
| There will be a fork that continues on with PoW, but most users
| will choose to follow PoS because that's where all the business
| and developer support is.
| [deleted]
| paconbork wrote:
| Ultimately it would be the community deciding to value the PoS
| fork as "real Ethereum". Something similar happened with ETH
| and Ethereum Classic, where classic is the unforked version
| that nobody cares about. A PoW fork will almost certainly
| exist, but that doesn't mean anyone has to use it and indeed
| some major players like Chainlink have already announced that
| they will not support a PoW fork
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Classic is the one that didn't rollback transactions after
| the DAO scam right?
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Correct.
| yokem55 wrote:
| To be pedantic - mainnet Ethereum didn't 'roll-back' those
| hack transactions either. They are still there on etherscan
| if you want to look for them. The DAO hard fork introduced
| an unsigned transaction that moved the hacker's funds to a
| refund to a refund contract.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I found about this fairly recently. You seem
| knowledgeable about the topic. Can I ask you how did the
| community react to this/what do they think of this
| episode today? Because having full control over the coins
| is one of the big reasons why proponents are against
| regular banks and state-issued currency, yet here there
| was a clear breach of that control.
| yokem55 wrote:
| The developers don't have full control like that. They
| were only able to execute TheDAO hard fork because the
| community was very small at the time and was reasonably
| united behind the developers in carrying it out. It was
| something of a unicorn of circumstances that it was even
| possible because the funds were still locked up for a
| period of time and the hacker couldn't sell them, which
| meant there was only a single loser in the fork (the
| hacker), and a large community of winners or people who
| weren't directly effected either way. I personally think
| the refund stage of things should not have happened and
| the funds should have been burned instead, simply as a
| means to make sure the investors learned that risks of
| interacting with ethereum contracts were still very real.
| But that said I wasn't involved in crypto at all then,
| so, what do I know...
| prepend wrote:
| The market cap of ethereum classic is $6B with $2B in daily
| transactions. [0]
|
| Not as big as "real ethereum" but I wouldn't say no one
| cares.
|
| [0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-classic/
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Market cap doesn't mean anything when it comes to
| cryptocurrency, especially when it comes to shitcoins.
| the_duke wrote:
| 33% of the market cap changing hands each day sounds
| incredibly high. How does that happen?
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Morons buy, miners sell.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| ETC has been pumped lately by former eth miners. I know
| because I've participated in this scam as a miner. ETC is
| one of the more volatile top 50 "coins" or "cypto",
| constantly being pumped and dumped, there is nothing
| actively being "developed" for it and there never will be.
| Just read the associated forums if you don't believe me,
| it's a pump and dump. Simple as.
|
| Yes I've profited and no I won't give it to charity.
|
| My opinion will never change, it's all a scam for pump and
| dumps schemes. There will never be a killer app attached to
| crypto. NEVER.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The only fork that matters is the one Jeremy Allaire and
| Paolo Ardoino back.
| leashless wrote:
| I introduced the Serenity (proof of stake) step of the Ethereum
| release process in this 2015 blog post for the Foundation. You
| might find it interesting to look back and see how we got here.
|
| https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process...
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| Interesting choice to name it after a Berlin park known for being
| full of drug dealers, muggers and ne'er-do-wells.
| rglullis wrote:
| Gorli is also close to FullNode[0], the office building where
| plenty of blockchain projects were based.
|
| [0] https://www.fullnode.berlin/
| gemduster wrote:
| Oh please. Give me a break. As if the park doesn't have a
| richer history than that.
| morelisp wrote:
| It, uh, kind of doesn't? For most of its life post-WW2 it was
| a coal depot. The park was built ~1990 and by ~2005 it was
| known for its drug culture.
|
| ETA: A defense of the "rich history" of Gorli is what finally
| got you to comment after 3 years?!
| alkonaut wrote:
| Rinkeby is pretty rough, and has basically no other
| reputation than being dodgy either. So someone likes to pick
| the rougher spots. Maybe someone who likes rap and they are
| mentioned in lyrics or something like that.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Names of the Ethereum testnets were chosen after Metro
| stations. Ropsten, Sepolia, Goerli, Rinkeby, Kovan...
| gemduster wrote:
| [deleted]
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| For anyone curious what the merge means, in my limited
| understanding:
|
| 1. Transactions will get slightly cheaper, but only because
| they're increasing the block rate from every 13 seconds to every
| 12 seconds, not anything specific to the other cool stuff in the
| merge
|
| 2. The network will switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake,
| meaning that there will no longer be GPU demand or substantial
| energy consumption attributable to the Ethereum network.
|
| 3. For a cryptocurrency to be secure there has to be some barrier
| to participating in consensus. Now, instead of having to have a
| fancy GPU to run an Ethereum validator, the barrier will be that
| you instead have to "stake" 32 Ethereum (and risk losing it if
| your validator misbehaves). A staking reward of (I think) 5% a
| year will be issued for your trouble.
|
| 4. The Ethereum network will be more resistant to "short-range"
| forks, that is, forks that diverged from the proper chain
| "recently". (More resistant in the sense that it will be more
| expensive to execute an attack like that.)
|
| 5. Once you've staked your 32 Ethereum, you currently can't
| "unstake" it. The ability to withdraw your stake will be added in
| a future eth fork. It will have to be gated by some delay (maybe
| you can only withdraw your stake 6 months after you staked it).
| Attacking the chain via a "long-range" fork, that is, a fork that
| diverges from the proper chain longer ago than the withdrawal
| period, will be much cheaper or possibly even free.
|
| 6. Ethereum will still favor liveness over consistency. An
| attacker can't stop the chain, but they can prevent it from
| finalizing for a time (at expense to themselves).
|
| 7. Token issuance will go down, probably to below the burn rate,
| so the base Ethereum supply will go down over time
|
| 8. The chain will get deterministic finality after some number of
| blocks (I think something like a day's worth). That means that,
| once a block is finalized, it will never be rewritten. Network
| outages or attacks can prevent blocks from finalizing.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Is the staking reward locked together with the stake as
| described in 5.?
| latchkey wrote:
| 1. Transactions won't change noticeably since the gas costs
| won't change and the network won't have more capacity.
|
| 2. The 'demand' from mining for GPUs is over-rated. It was a
| brief problem years ago. You are correct that energy usage for
| validation will go down.
|
| 3. One difference between bitcoin and eth... ethash is a memory
| hard algo so it doesn't require the fastest GPU. 4-5 year old
| GPUs are more ROI efficient. Everything is bound in the speed
| of the memory controller.
|
| 4. To be seen.
|
| 5. 'staking' today is just depositing ETH into an ETH1 contract
| that doesn't have a withdraw function. It will require forks to
| add that functionality.
|
| 6. Correct.
|
| 7. Correct. Although this likely won't have an impact on price
| like people think.
|
| 8. A fork could always change things.
| [deleted]
| tomhallett wrote:
| Honest question - if you get deterministic finality in a day
| (#8), then how can you attack the chain with a "long-range"
| fork (#5). Doesn't #8 solve #5?
| Geee wrote:
| Long-range fork is possible if network participants are
| manipulated or forced to switch to another fork. In practice,
| the correct fork is communicated from entities who control
| the majority stake, such as exchanges. In the case of network
| disruptions, there might be multiple valid forks, and
| choosing the correct one is arbitrary, because there isn't
| one. There's no objective consensus similar to proof-of-work.
| baby wrote:
| By the way I was under the impression that Ethereum will
| still have forks, and thus probabilistic finality
| narush wrote:
| If you're running a node, and it finalizes a block, that
| means your node will refuse to ever revert that block.
|
| A long-range attack is when a validator withdrawals their
| stake, waits the withdrawal period (e.g. the 6 month delay
| delay mentions above), and then creates a fake chain starting
| from before they withdrew their staked eth.
|
| Because in the "real" history (e.g. the ones that most nodes
| have seen over the past 6 months) the validator doesn't have
| Eth locked up still, there's no way to punish them. Thus,
| these long range attacks get very cheap (you could even
| imagine someone who pays validators for old keys -- aka, you
| don't even need to be a validator yourself).
|
| These two facts together mean that PoS blockchains require
| some "weak subjectivity" - which pretty much means when you
| download and start syncing your node, you need to know a
| "finalized" block hash from the past 6 months (or within the
| withdrawal delay). This ensures you won't get tricked by a
| cheap long-range attack.
|
| In practice, I don't think this will be much of a problem -
| clients can just do a new release with a new block has every
| few months for new users!
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| The answer as I understand it, is that anyone who's
| continuously running a node won't be confused by such a fork,
| but someone who just joined the network has no way of telling
| which fork is the true one.
|
| Put another way, if you know the true chain at time T, you
| also know it at time T+1. But if you're just joining the
| network, or you went offline for a bit, that means you don't
| know which chain is the true one and need some outside-of-
| protocol way of determining which fork to trust.
| clemensley wrote:
| What can users do to get certainty over which one is the
| correct fork? In POW you can check the POW. Is there a
| trustless solution for this in POS? Or is the only solution
| essentially to ask around and hope that people aren't lying
| to you?
| DennisP wrote:
| In practice, it's the same as with Bitcoin: you have to
| get the correct, current software. It's just that the
| software will include a block hash from a few months
| back.
|
| You might argue that Bitcoin is defined as the chain with
| the most hashpower, period. That would remove all
| subjectivity from Bitcoin, but it would mean that a 51%
| attacker could arbitrarily change the rules and steal
| people's funds. That's not how it actually works; a 51%
| attacker still has to follow the rules of the protocol
| for their blocks to be accepted by the non-mining nodes,
| and that means there's social consensus on the correct
| software to run the protocol.
| baby wrote:
| It's the same as with Bitcoin:
|
| - wait a bit to make sure that you can talk to different
| people on the network and see what each of them see
|
| - check checkpoints on twitter or websites like etherscan
| (are they seeing the same thing I'm seeing?)
|
| In projects like Mina, since you do not download the
| history of the chain (there's a single zero knowledge
| proof of a few kB that covers the whole history) you must
| rely on a marker for "chain quality " to differentiate
| potential forks.
|
| Note that there was also some research on how to get
| signal from the transactions you see that you're on the
| correct fork (from some ex colleagues working on libra):
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1440.pdf
| tromp wrote:
| > to be secure there has to be some barrier to running a
| validator
|
| There only has to be a barrier for receiving rewards. Bitcoin
| full nodes validate everything but receive no rewards, and need
| no barriers.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| True, my phrasing was misleading (I used the Ethereum
| terminology, where a validator is not just any node that
| validates the chain, but one that participates in consensus).
| Edited my comment accordingly
| getcrunk wrote:
| Thanks for this. Can you further explain the part about forking
| being easier from point 5?
| yokem55 wrote:
| In theory, a very large staker could run a large share of the
| network, exit (either normally or get slashed), then rewind
| the chain prior to the exit, run it on their own
| independently, and then pop up after a while with a competing
| fork. This makes syncing from the beacon chain's genesis
| risky because you could end up following the attacker's fork.
|
| To make up for this risk, Ethereum then relies on
| distributing recent 'weak subjectivity' snapshots (through
| other known nodes, block exploers, baked into client
| releases, etc) to make sure new folks can join the legitimate
| network and ignore an attacker's. Those snapshots basically
| rely on social legitimacy to help folks get going with the
| 'legitimate' chain. It is a trust assumption.
|
| In contrast (at least in theory), in a proof of work network
| you can 'objectively' determine which of competing forks of a
| chain is the legitimate one by a simple metric, the 'longest
| chain with the highest difficulty'. The presumption made here
| though is that you will have an open internet and honest
| client software that will not censor the legitimate chain. A
| trust assumption is still made that those that introduce you
| to the p2p network aren't hiding a longer chain from you.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Something to keep in mind is that you already mostly need
| such trust.
|
| You are using that "social legitimacy" to know you are
| downloading the legitimate software, or viewing the
| legitimate source code, or documentation.
|
| Your computer can't calculate if ethereum.org is the
| legitimate "Ethereum", or it's ethereum.io (just making it
| up).
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| For sure. In this comment I'll be using "validators" to mean
| "nodes participating in consensus".
|
| The "true" chain according to the new protocol is the one
| that has more signatories. Validators sign blocks as they're
| produced, and when a block gets more than 2/3rds of the
| signatures, it's finalized on the chain and won't be
| rewritten. (Well, it's much more complicated than that, but
| that's the general intuition.) When you sign a block, you get
| a reward on that chain, to incentivize people to participate
| in consensus.
|
| So the question is, when there's a fork, what stops people
| from just signing blocks on both forks so they get the
| signing reward no matter which fork "wins"?
|
| The protocol disincentivizes this by requiring validators to
| put up a stake of 32 eth, that gets "slashed" if you do that.
| Put another way, if there's a fork and you sign blocks on
| both sides of the fork, you lose part of your stake.
|
| But that threat only works if you actually have a stake to
| lose. If it's been ${withdrawal_delay} months and you no
| longer have any eth staked, you can start signing blocks from
| a long time ago and the protocol can't slash you as
| punishment. So a group of 2/3rds of the former-validators
| could freely start a fork from ${withdrawal_delay} months
| ago, sign a bunch of blocks on it, and if their fork loses
| they'd face no penalty. Someone currently participating in
| consensus can see this is happening and won't be confused,
| but someone just joining the network will be.
|
| The solution is pretty easy, if inelegant. When entering the
| network for the first time, if there are multiple competing
| forks, you'll just find someone you trust IRL and ask them
| which chain is the real one. If you've been offline for less
| than ${withdrawal_delay} months, you won't have to worry
| about this, but it is a problem for fresh users.
|
| If you set ${withdrawal_delay} to infinity, this isn't a
| problem, but probably you don't want to do that. Once
| withdraws are enabled, there'll be some tooling to make it
| easy to figure out which chain is the real one, but I don't
| expect there'll be many forks that are remotely convincing.
| olouv wrote:
| Regarding unstaking it will be capped by a queue of around
| 900/day similar to what is used for staking. There won't be an
| arbitrary delay.
| mFixman wrote:
| Is there anywhere I can read a technical version of how proof-
| of-stake work?
|
| I'm still confused at what happens if you create a valid block
| with the Ethereum you stake and then that block doesn't end up
| being part of the main branch.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| You get assigned by a random number generator to create the
| next block. If you fail to create it your only penalty is the
| opportunity cost (i.e., you miss on the reward that you would
| have gotten for creating one).
|
| So at any given time only one validator is going to create a
| block. If you create it, it's going to be included in the
| blockchain. If you don't create it (or you create but due to
| network problems fail to communicate it), then the blockchain
| skips a beat and someone else will create the next one.
|
| If you want a user friendly introduction I recommend you Ben
| Edgington's book (WIP): https://eth2book.info/altair/
|
| Or straight from the source:
| https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs
| baby wrote:
| In proof of work the leader election (the thing that decides
| who gets to write the next page/block of the ledger) is based
| on how much money you can put in computing power or how big
| your mining pool is. The more computing power, the more
| lottery tickets you get to write the next block.
|
| In proof of stake, the more crypto tokens you have, the more
| lottery tickets you get to win the right to write the next
| block.
|
| In PoW the lottery is solving puzzles, that's the energy
| inefficiency, in PoS the lottery is decided like a real
| lottery: with a random number generator (a distributed one at
| that, so that people agree that it was generated honestly)
| mavu wrote:
| I am looking forward to the moment, when all the people who
| consider this the 2nd coming of christ equivalent for the crypto
| world realize that it's just business as usual.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm excited about this.
|
| Bitcoin and crypto use an obscene amount of energy and are
| basically impossible to ban. A working proof-of-stake system in
| a non-shitcoin will pile pressure on all cryptocurrencies to
| move to that system to use less energy.
| wmf wrote:
| IMO the Merge will "prove" that PoS works and thus bring a lot
| of pressure to bear on PoW coins for being obviously wasteful.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Hasn't Cardano already shown that POS works and it did not
| have the effect that you predict? I'm afraid most people in
| the crypto world don't care one bit about the carbon foot
| print of these technologies.
| cypress66 wrote:
| I don't agree that stopping gigawatts of power from being
| "wasted", same with GPUs, is business as usual.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I read the Bitcoin whitepaper+some other technical document (I
| think) and have a real solid grasp on how that works. Ethereum,
| although I have used defi/erc20/uniswap/etc, I've got no idea how
| it works. Validators, shards, miners... is there a single source
| I can go to to learn it all? I've got a pretty high technical
| threshold so if it gets mathy I'm not intimidated. I just want to
| finally know how it works.
| mattdesl wrote:
| There are _many_ parts to Ethereum and it's PoS system so I
| don't think you will be able to grasp it all in a short read.
| This is a good start:
|
| https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__forewor...
| [deleted]
| asteroidb612 wrote:
| This is a recent guide that attempts to cover everything in
| depth: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-
| hitchhikers-gui...
| DennisP wrote:
| If you really want to dig in, here are the key papers on the
| PoS algorithm:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052
|
| To learn about the sharding plan and various other stuff in the
| roadmap, this is a great technical overview:
|
| https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...
| LittlePeter wrote:
| Off-topic. What's up with that giant meaningless Ethereum logo
| image occupying 90% of my screen. Why are websites doing this?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Are you using NoScript or an adblocker? It is probably blocking
| a third-party script from loading that the site needs to render
| the rest of the page.
| upupandup wrote:
| who builds on Ethereum that doesn't involve pump and dumping or
| some elaborate ponzi scheme? I fail to see any significant
| adoption after a decade and Solidity and Smart Contracts simply
| isn't used as widely as its proponents have argued for.
|
| I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head hunters
| increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on
| resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto is souring.
| During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether
| they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being
| blacklisted.
| carlosdp wrote:
| There's a whole ecosystem of devs working on interesting stuff
| that have nothing to do with finance, they just don't get
| mainstream headlines today.
|
| Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some
| projects to check out:
|
| - Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation:
| https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top
| of Polygon.
|
| - Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes
| a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless
| identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently
| decentralized" way.
|
| - ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system.
|
| - Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for
| tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc.
|
| - Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github
| basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git
| HEAD of a "project" essentially.
|
| - Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently
| using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has
| secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
| yardstick wrote:
| " Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently
| using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network
| has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory."
|
| 2 issues spring to mind:
|
| - What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg
| child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not
| censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot
| expunge data like this won't be around for long.
|
| - Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have
| they got financing arranged (and already in trust
| funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this
| storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next
| 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute
| resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious,
| irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years,
| what's the odds that I will still be able to access them?
| bsamuels wrote:
| RE the first point: you don't have to store/host 100% of
| the data, content can be blocklisted based on hash or other
| attributes so your node doesn't replicate or retransmit it.
| The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1
| node on the network willing to host your content.
|
| RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the
| arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing
| mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next
| 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec
| plans for 200).
| carlosdp wrote:
| > dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).
|
| The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe.
| seibelj wrote:
| It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters,
| it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?"
|
| You can't argue in good faith with people who don't want to
| learn.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto
| haters, it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?"
|
| We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good
| answer.
| cdiddy2 wrote:
| When Vitalik goes to Argentina this is the response. http
| s://twitter.com/OctaBidegain/status/1473508689101348868
|
| Just because you come from a place of great financial
| privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have
| no use for a censorship resistant form of money.
|
| Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-
| afghanistan-sanct...
|
| Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
|
| Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-
| ally-urges-dono...
|
| Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-
| currency-yout...
|
| Nigeria:
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-
| shut...
|
| Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-
| to-poland-wi...
|
| https://www.financialinclusion.tech/
| pa7x1 wrote:
| You can think of Ethereum as a DB+VM existing in the
| extreme end of the High Availability spectrum and whose
| operation is uncensorable and unstoppable by any actor.
| Obviously many use cases do not require this kind of
| characteristics but it's very hard to argue that these
| properties serve no use for any use case.
|
| A global financial system could very likely be built on
| top of a system like this. A global identity/credentials
| system could also benefit from such kind of properties.
|
| If you disagree it would then be interesting you
| explained where you put the cut-off, i.e. define how many
| sigmas should be enough for any use case and define who
| should we be willing to trust the operation.
| seibelj wrote:
| Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with
| promise, but again, the HN crypto hater doesn't care.
|
| USDC is over $50 billion -
| https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly
| the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on
| crypto rails.
|
| But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS
| HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting
| to try and argue.
| pram wrote:
| We just had a $30B PoS coin/stablecoin platform evaporate
| into thin air this year, don't even need to bring up Visa
| lol
| seibelj wrote:
| And Deutsch Bank laundered hundreds of billions of euros
| for drug lords. What system is flawed again?
| whaaswijk wrote:
| Is there a mechanism in place to stop people from
| laundering money with ethereum? This is a serious
| question, I'm a total noob when it comes to crypto.
| seibelj wrote:
| You can't stop crime, otherwise murder wouldn't happen.
| If you give people a modicum of freedom then some amount
| of them will act with criminal intent.
|
| Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting
| money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial
| system.
| pram wrote:
| I can think both are bad.
| 10hr wrote:
| The other side of the table is so clearly entrenched in
| their viewpoint that I just laugh now.
|
| Someone asking me at the bar "but what's the value?" when
| they are an experienced technologist does not get my
| engagement. They haven't done enough homework to even
| propose a potential answer to the question they're
| nongenuinely asking
|
| It has been interesting. The liberal technology community
| is so emboldened by "muh environment" FUD this cycle that
| they're actually more blind to the growing sector than
| ever before.
|
| Ultimately, for the finance-minded developer, there is a
| gargantuan shortage of web3/crypto devs. I'm not talking
| about scammy VC web3. I'm referring to the people capable
| of building what's coming. Overnight, every company is
| gonna need devs and the shortage will be exaggerated.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's all optics, their supposed "progressive" view.
| Wealthy people angry that GPUs got so expensive,
| overpowered energy suckers they'd gladly use for high-end
| gaming whilst having the AC on full blast. Nobody cares
| one bit about high energy use. Calling out crypto is a
| great distraction though to virtue signal that you're "on
| the good side".
|
| As was the case with the Mozilla incident. Mozilla had
| been accepting crypto donations for many years. Until
| somehow this got back into the news and some influential
| "progressives" applied the very typical mob pressure,
| forcing Mozilla to stop.
|
| And all is right again in the world. Except that people
| willing to give crypto (which is a form of money) now
| won't or can't. Less income for Mozilla whilst crypto in
| itself is in absolutely no way harmed. It's still there,
| same energy use, I guess it will now be spent elsewhere.
|
| That's the new progressive. Obsessively cleaning your
| self-image, whilst outcomes are completely ignored or
| achieve the exact opposite.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with
| promise
|
| We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be
| nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to
| "projects that lived up to their promises".
|
| So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling
| and a truly astonishing amount of fraud.
|
| So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five
| more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the
| faith is unshakeable?
| seibelj wrote:
| It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal
| posts never stop moving.
|
| Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd
| thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth
| hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not
| backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This
| alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN
| crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of
| "success" is constantly moving.
|
| Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot
| of applications built on digital financial rails
| (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation,
| derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist
| that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely
| Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.
|
| One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe
| is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first,
| yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability
| to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of
| course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to
| put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing
| incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and
| cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on
| pure computer science and economic principles created by
| mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the
| goal posts never stop moving.
|
| I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're
| the one who described them as having "promise", not me.
|
| If there's some projects out there that have lived up to
| their promises and aren't just gambling enablement,
| please, list them!
|
| I'll take a quick crack at a few:
|
| Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a
| real-world impacting product? Fraud.
|
| NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug
| manufacture (not in the textile sense).
|
| Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of
| gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers.
|
| Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like
| Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some
| way. All failures, some comically so.
|
| Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc.
|
| Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile.
|
| Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions?
| Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc).
|
| And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of
| my head.
|
| The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a
| massively speculative market during a period of
| historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of
| wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will
| always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of
| actual _value_ or _success_ , unless your measure of
| success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a
| lot of losers".
|
| So what am I missing?
| enlyth wrote:
| It's hard to argue with them because they have a
| financial stake in the system, it's in their interest to
| spread it as far and wide as possible because it will
| enrich them. Money clouds judgement. The hope for global
| adoption just means "I got in first so I deserve to be
| rewarded". An honest answer would be that no one care
| about all the technology as long as number goes up. Now
| as they usually say, cope and seethe, nocoiner.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| > You can't argue in good faith with people who don't want
| to learn.
|
| You can't argue in good faith with people who don't agree
| with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a
| "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for
| primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm
| here for the ideas and the possibility of a different
| world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and
| SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They
| simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is
| offering developers/users.
| kanzure wrote:
| > It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto
| haters, it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?"
|
| (plug warning)
|
| Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat
| positive to me at least:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| have you been paying attention at all?
| crypto_mogul wrote:
| Indeed, according to our colleagues from The Block, several
| assumptions have been made by Ethereum developers regarding
| the tentative timeframes for The Merge's implementation.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| there is plenty of work within web3, at least for the engineers
| and advisors. support staff and marketing personnel are the
| ones being laid off with less prospects, from what I can tell.
|
| its also pretty common to form a resume for the job you want,
| omiting less helpful or unrelated things.
|
| I went the whole decade never telling any web2 startup I worked
| for about crypto, who cares if its another bear market and
| people are yet again souring on it
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether
| they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being
| blacklisted.
|
| Good. Nature is healing.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| I can't wait until engineers go back to working on tracking
| and ads, just as nature intended.
| dangerwill wrote:
| "I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on
| a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted." - If
| widespread this is the best sign of health for the tech
| industry I have seen in years
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| > I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head
| hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain
| keywords on resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto
| is souring. During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes
| to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects
| being blacklisted.
|
| Some of the best engineers and researchers I've ever worked
| with were in the blockchain space. Companies that do this are
| shooting themselves in the foot. I work for a pretty cool
| startup in the defense sector that appreciated the experience
| I've had in distributed systems from my several years working
| on projects like Cardano.
| Ferrotin wrote:
| The guy you're replying to is just making this up. One of
| many accounts trying to foment sentiment against working for
| certain employers.
| upupandup wrote:
| > Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot.
|
| Not companies that care about PR and want to distance
| themselves from crypto space. Those engineers and researchers
| unfortunately have been tricked into thinking that crypto
| would be here to stay as were the hundreds and thousands of
| investors that were duped into an elaborate Rube Goldberg
| machine that serves no real purpose other than the monetary
| incentives of a closed few.
| xur17 wrote:
| Crypto prices have gone down a bit from their peak, but it
| sure seems like crypto is here to stay. In fact, I'd be
| happy to make a bet that the crypto industry will exist in
| 10 years, and will have a larger market cap than it does
| today.
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| What companies are those? I can see people who worked at
| Terra Labs having issues but I don't know if it'll be any
| harder for them to find work than say those at Theranos
| when it closed - high profile fraud will impact you sure.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _> HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity
| /Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes_
|
| I am about as bearish on crypto as it gets but I have a very
| hard time believing this. It's definitely not true at the major
| tech companies.
| rglullis wrote:
| Please tell me which companies are doing that, I also would
| like to put them on a "places I never want to work" list.
| carlosdp wrote:
| For those interested, this is a site that predicts when the merge
| will happen based on the current hash-rate. Currently looking
| like September 15! https://bordel.wtf/
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