[HN Gopher] Mainnet Merge Announcement
___________________________________________________________________
Mainnet Merge Announcement
Author : bowsamic
Score : 485 points
Date : 2022-08-24 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ethereum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ethereum.org)
| jbaczuk wrote:
| What is the reason for this? "less energy-intensive" There is no
| a shortage of available energy we have a nuclear fusion reactor
| in the sky that provides more energy than we could ever use.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not
| clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large
| increase in energy costs or, in Europe's case, an impending
| energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| If your answer to clean energy to just use less energy, that
| seems inane. Also the increase in energy costs because of the
| war in Ukraine is directly related to dependence on foreign
| fuel which is not clean. So the problem isn't energy
| consumption, the problem is using fossil fuels.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Energy reduction is basically the best possible option.
| It's why insulating houses (in both hot and cold climates)
| is possibly one of the most effective green initiatives,
| since so much energy goes into heating. Even with a pure
| renewables grid where you have huge excess of energy at
| certain times of day and year you will have bottlenecks due
| to inflexible demands when supply is at the lowest and that
| will determine how much renewables actually need building
| (and mining is suprisingly inflexible: when capital costs
| are as large a portion of the total costs as they are,
| miners will keep mining even with quite high spikes in
| energy prices).
| jbaczuk wrote:
| > Even with a pure renewables grid where you have huge
| excess of energy at certain times of day and year you
| will have bottlenecks due to inflexible demands when
| supply is at the lowest
|
| Not with good energy storage solutions.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Lower consumption works even better than cleaner energy.
| Even wind/solar/nuclear has a carbon cost to it.
|
| PoS consumes less energy than PoW. That's a win.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| > Even wind/solar/nuclear has a carbon cost to it.
|
| Yeah, so does life.
| stale2002 wrote:
| But the point here is that if there are easy ways to
| reduce energy usage, that have few drawbacks, then that
| is a good thing to get that free lunch.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| I understand. My point is there is no reason to reduce
| energy usage. There is reason to reduce "dirty" energy
| usage. There is an abundant supply of "clean" energy.
| rglover wrote:
| survirtual wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| We've had over 50 years to transition off of oil and onto
| nuclear / electric infrastructure. Instead of that, the
| world leaders sat with their thumbs in ass on yachts, coked
| out orgies, and mc-mansions on humanities dime, slurping a
| gravy train that lasts a generation or two because "who
| cares what happens after I'm gone".
|
| Now the bell of death tolls and it is suddenly "everyone
| who has been locked up with no say"'s problem. People were
| duped and trusted greedy imbeciles with resource
| allocation, and then have to bail the same morons out.
|
| PoW binds value to unavoidable physics. Clean up your
| energy or your planet dies. Increase compute capabilities
| or you will be left behind by others that do. It forces
| progress.
|
| PoS binds value to rich people's ballsacks. It results in
| no physical value binding, and is a digital continuation of
| the incompetent making resource allocation decisions --
| leading humanity right off a cliff.
|
| I just don't get how we can have all knowledge at our
| fingertips and humanity is still this bad at decision
| making.
| marshray wrote:
| > All of the world's problems are government-created
|
| Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?
| rglover wrote:
| > Earthquakes?
|
| Earthquakes aren't the problem, zoning policies and poor
| decision making skills are.
|
| > Dandelions? Sunburn?
|
| Assuming you mean allergies, these are problems of the
| human body, not the world.
|
| > Marital infidelity?
|
| 1. Financial stress caused by government mismanagement of
| money.
|
| 2. Weakening the relational bonds of men and women and
| incentivizing infidelity via the welfare system and no-
| fault divorce.
|
| 3. The controversial one: a constant, unrelenting
| weakening of the male population via manipulation of the
| food, water, and media (incentivized by government
| meddling in private industry), rendering them genetically
| unattractive (or incapable) forcing women to
| seek...alternatives. And for the pedant that says "what
| about men that cheat," there's a good chance he's the
| alternative (and actively circumvents the system others
| willfully subject themselves to out of naivety).
| marshray wrote:
| This isn't 'controversial', it's total Alex Jones
| Infowars-type batshit.
| rglover wrote:
| It's not, that's just a convenient dismissal. Look
| around. None of what's happening is a mistake, it's just
| painful to contemplate and denial of it is easier (hence
| why politicians continue to run amok--nobody wants to
| face the truth).
| marshray wrote:
| No. Some of us do, in fact, seek the truth and attempt to
| face it.
|
| You are being dismissed out-of-hand because you make
| extraordinary, non-falsifiable claims ("None of what's
| happening is a mistake") without bothering to present any
| evidence in support of them.
| rglover wrote:
| Testosterone rates are down over the last 50 years [1].
|
| That correlates with the changes to food production to
| lower costs [2], [3].
|
| Based on your "alex jones" jab, you clearly took my
| statement to refer to a "conspiracy," when really I
| attribute these changes to a combination of:
|
| 1. Financial incentives for corner-cutting which are
| bolstered by government policies increasing regulation
| (production, safety, employment, etc) [4], leading to
| companies having to spend more for compliance and look
| for ways to corner cut, with the unfortunate choice being
| product quality, or, increased prices.
|
| 2. The government legislating to have ever-increasing
| budgets for entitlement programs [5] and other
| superfluous spending which necessitate higher taxes
| (financial pressure on working class people) and money
| printing. These, predictably, lead to inflation which
| corporations combat by increasing prices and so upward
| mobility gets knee-capped for a large chunk of the
| population.
|
| On the relationships side, divorces went up significantly
| in the 80s and were stable until the early 2010s [6] as
| marriages started to decline and single parenting
| increased [7].
|
| The greater point being, all of these changes can be
| attributed back to social changes with a root cause of
| government decision making. Like I said, look around.
| It's all there. Admittedly, it's complex and it's far too
| easy to take an irrational stance in the form of "it's
| the globalists!" but in reality, a lot of poor decision
| making and mismanagement in the government is the root of
| our woes.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7063751/
|
| [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20516261/
|
| [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21367944/
|
| [4] https://www.nahb.org/blog/2021/05/regulatory-costs-
| add-a-who...
|
| [5] https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0027_entitlement-
| programs...
|
| [6] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has-
| hit-a-50-...
|
| [7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-
| percentage-of-...
| marshray wrote:
| [1] Not impressed by this study of only Israeli men over
| 2006 to 2019.
|
| For every age range, the number of subjects went up
| during the study period. Overall, the study ended with
| about twice the number of subjects in the last period
| than the first.
|
| Look at Chart A. The error bars are noticeably smaller
| for later periods compared to the earlier periods.
|
| Something else is going on in this data that they are not
| accounting for. Probably some combination of either the
| tests were changed, or the criteria for ordering the test
| were loosened over the study period.
|
| The other stuff you wrote is just the same right-wing
| navel-gazing that I've heard over and over since the
| 1980's.
| rglover wrote:
| I knew this would be your response.
|
| You met someone who doesn't capitulate to your
| manipulation, took the time to cite things, and you're
| predictably "not impressed" even going so far as to
| refute the source I gave with "something else is going
| on" (conspiratorial thinking) or the source being "right-
| wing navel-gazing" (when all of the sources are either
| published papers, politically neutral statistics, or
| mainstream media outlets).
|
| I made a point to look at your HN profile and
| subsequently your Twitter and you're clearly
| ideologically overwhelmed.
| falcolas wrote:
| > here is no a shortage of available energy we have a nuclear
| fusion reactor in the sky that provides more energy than we
| could ever use.
|
| We can only capture a small fraction of that energy; limited by
| land space and efficiency of the capture devices. In fact, we
| capture so little that we primarily rely upon the sun's energy
| that fell on past-earth to power our world today.
|
| To take this idea to the next step, even if we could capture
| and utilize every photon to fall upon our little sphere - given
| how much of our planet's ecology is based around using that
| very same energy - we'd destroy that same ecology.
|
| Sure, we might be able to convert CO2 to Oxygen more
| efficiently than plants, but it would still take energy. Sure,
| we can heat buildings and individuals, but that would also take
| energy. We could grow food in labs, but again, energy.
|
| There's a distinct cap on how much energy we can harvest from
| the sun. Using it to perform useless calculations because you
| want to work around government controls is wasteful.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| We are not limited by land space. What do you mean "fell on
| past-earth"?
|
| And it's not wasteful if those government controls are
| harmful.
| bowsamic wrote:
| [quote]
|
| Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as
| The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain with the
| Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work chain will
| migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a specific Total
| Difficulty value.
|
| The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon
| Chain - 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022.
|
| The Terminal Total Difficulty value triggering The Merge is
| 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
|
| Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset.
| Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.
|
| [/quote]
| kkielhofner wrote:
| What surprises me most about the Ethereum ecosystem is the
| software and release engineering of the implementations,
| especially the reference (now execution layer) go-ethereum.
|
| As has been noted elsewhere "the merge" has been in progress for
| years. Here we are approximately three weeks out and just this
| morning the (allegedly) working merge ready go-ethereum client
| was released. Given that the Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled for
| 9/6 this gives the approximately 4500 Ethereum nodes (of which
| 3381 are geth)[0] 10 days to update...
|
| It also doesn't help that they botched the prior release (two
| days ago) of the geth client that had a nasty corruption issue
| that requires a little more than the update warning footnote in
| this release to fix[1]. Many people who deployed 1.10.22 are re-
| syncing from (almost) scratch.
|
| Even if you followed Prysm and the other Beacon implementations
| the deployment and configuration changes required are non-
| trivial[2] and again, the v3 release referenced in this
| announcement was only released two days ago!
|
| As someone who runs Ethereum nodes I'm a little gun shy at this
| point deploying new releases of this stack, especially given how
| things have gone the past two days. Even with our relatively
| trivial application this gives little time for any testing or
| assurance process.
|
| It's amazing to me given the stakes (value of the Ethereum chain)
| and complexity (huge) node operators are essentially in the
| position of waiting until mere days (or hours) to upgrade their
| nodes and as noted - there are thousands of us around the world.
|
| IMO this is yet another indication that the real issue with
| regard to decentralization of blockchain solutions is the fact
| that (as pointed out by Moxie and others) the vast majority of
| the real users and platforms of Ethereum interact with the chain
| via a handful of centralized node providers (Alchemy, Infura,
| etc). Who can blame them given what a mess this is?
|
| I'm also not picking on Ethereum specifically, the same things
| could be said about most of the other chains and implementations
| I've interacted with. Given the hype, promise, age, and value in
| the blockchain ecosystem the software itself makes Apache circa
| 1996 look like mature, rock solid software.
|
| BTW, the Ethereum Foundation alone holds approximately $1.6B in
| assets[3] and investors have poured tens of billions of dollars
| in this ecosystem. IMO the quality and process of the fundamental
| software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like
| they're wanting for resources to do this right.
|
| [0] - https://ethernodes.org/
|
| [1] - https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases
|
| [2] - https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prepare-for-merge
|
| [3] - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-
| founda...
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| > IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software
| enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're
| wanting for resources to do this right.
|
| If anything, this just shows how complex the system is.
| Distributed systems are hard to write.
|
| The recent Geth 1.10.22 bug only occurs on shutdown- an edge
| case I imagine they will be testing from now on.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I'm not saying it's not complex and hard. On the contrary -
| it's incredibly complex and hard but that raises another
| question: just how far from this ecosystem being ready for
| prime time are we?
|
| At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the
| internet:
|
| Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of
| $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has
| over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within
| two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted
| investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting
| a few years after the release of the web.
|
| I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was
| "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as
| successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the
| fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven
| years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly
| complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by
| comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users
| interacting with and depending on it everyday.
|
| All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain
| look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first
| thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile,
| etc.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Google wasn't "built within two years". It is a living
| software program backed by massive infrastructure. It was
| iterated on for decades and continues to be. The very first
| iteration of page rank maybe was done in two years. But
| stop implying that Sergey and Larry built it in their dorm
| and could walk away from it with zero input or assistance
| from the tens of thousands of engineers they hired in the
| ensuing years.
|
| The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on
| dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its
| wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the
| year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies
| were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow
| as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of
| employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet.
|
| Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of
| complexity and effort that went into making the modern web
| fairly solid.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| The Wayback Machine begs to differ:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.goo
| gle...
|
| I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we
| know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine
| (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it
| was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc.
|
| I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was
| skipping trips to the library for homework by 1998 (at
| the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering
| it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and
| client software, etc) were already vastly more mature
| than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent
| comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still
| works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire
| Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best)
| to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental
| protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough -
| 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0].
|
| I don't know about you but I don't remember a single
| instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the
| next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three
| decades of being on the internet.
|
| I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem
| reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked.
| Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software
| reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of
| miles and countless components of physical infrastructure
| that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of
| people by 2000?
|
| The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still
| worked. It was slow because it turns out literally
| digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and
| laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the
| least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long
| process.
|
| [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > The Wayback Machine begs to differ:
|
| Yeah, I get that the website google.com was around in
| 1998. I was around then, too, and used it too. But behind
| the scenes of that deceptively simple looking frontend,
| is a mass of data centers and a multi-million line code
| base that was (and indeed, still is) being updated and
| maintained by thousands of engineers to prevent it from
| falling apart or being abused by SEO maximizers to the
| point of being unusable.
|
| If it's so simple, please try to re-create it. It
| shouldn't take you too long. Just a wave of your hand.
|
| > if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks
| it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on
| the internet.
|
| Plenty of back-end servers with zero day exploits have to
| be patched all the time. Other incidents happen all the
| time behind the scenes that engineers are forced to fix
| on short notice to keep a massive service operational.
| I'm guessing you've never worked on call as a dev ops
| engineer.
|
| Ethereum works. It has 100% uptime since 2015. That's
| impressive. Not even Google can claim that.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I have no idea how we're still talking past each other
| but assuming good faith I can only think we're having a
| basic communication problem? I'll try to be more
| explicit.
|
| Are you claiming Google had millions of lines of code and
| thousands of engineers in 1998? It certainly didn't - as
| best I can tell from history it had less than five people
| in the entire company at that point.
|
| My point is Google went from research paper to you and I
| using it in two years with a few hundred thousand
| dollars. For the record - I couldn't do this today let
| alone then and I don't know where you got the implication
| I said I could?
|
| Yes, over 25 years later it does roughly six billion
| searches per day and is what you describe. 500 hours of
| content are uploaded per minute to YouTube alone.
|
| I also didn't say Google was simple - actually the
| opposite. Again, point is a tiny number of people with an
| accompanying tiny amount of investment (relative to
| almost anything in blockchain today) did something very
| hard and had it in the hands of you and I in two years.
|
| Back to my original point, Ethereum is seven years in
| with an army of people (808 contributors to geth alone)
| and billions of dollars. Yet, as this merge has shown so
| far the implementation is fundamentally still a mess.
|
| I'm trying to make some comparisons between the early (10
| or so) years of the web and blockchain. We don't have 30
| years of blockchain to look back on so I have no idea why
| you insist on bringing the state of Google in 2022 to the
| discussion as it has no relevance whatsoever.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I asked this in response to another comment, but how were
| (formerly) PoW testnets already upgraded to PoS if geth wasn't
| ready for PoS yet?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| node software is pretty bad
|
| but alot of us run custom clients and know there is major room
| for improvement, with Go-Ethereum being the worst one
|
| this doesn't address what you need to do for the merge
|
| but definitely look into node software thats not written in Go.
| The rust ones are 10x faster and use 90% less time and space to
| sync (an archive node) than Go-Ethereum
|
| writing node software doesnt make money so its neglected
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| Have any pointers? I've looked around plenty and all of the
| non-go clients I've tried (for mainnet and beacon) have had
| pretty serious issues - wrong/invalid data, missing blocks,
| various other weird edge cases, stability, etc.
|
| It definitely is neglected. Alchemy isn't worth $10B because
| they're just running geth... It's a vicious circle - node
| software sucks so anyone serious that needs things to "just
| work" uses a commercial node provider. Result is less
| emphasis, testing, investment, engineering, etc put into the
| available open source implementations.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| pay attention to gitcoin grants
|
| contribute code to projects like Akula and Silkworm
|
| continue raising awareness about shitty open source node
| software underpinning all of this
| api wrote:
| I have to say I'm very surprised, and I'm curious to see how this
| plays out. PoW must die, but I have a hard time seeing how this
| won't lock up a ton of currency and create its own plutocracy.
|
| Of course I suppose an argument could be made that a "least
| privilege plutocracy" with aligned interests is not as bad as
| many alternatives.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Why would this be any more plutocratic than any other
| capitalist economy? It's a mechanism where you can lock up ETH
| and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.9% today).
| Similarly the US dollar has treasury bonds where you can lock
| up USD and get paid a steady return over time (about 3.4%
| today).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| That brings up an interesting point. Would PoS rewards get
| adjusted with central bank interest rates? If not, isn't
| there a risk of validators fleeing for better returns
| elsewhere?
| rcxdude wrote:
| If they do rates will go up. So in that sense it's self-
| levelling. And the rate corresponding to the minimum secure
| number of stakers is likely extremely high.
| exo762 wrote:
| Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically
| adjusted to compensate for that.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes, they get adjusted- by the market, the best adjuster
| there is! If you can make more investing in low-risk bonds
| you will do that. If you make more investing in ETH staking
| you will do that. Eventually it will more or less look like
| the bond market in terms of value.
| AgentME wrote:
| Locking up some currency is better than a similar amount being
| continuously needlessly spent on mining hardware and
| electricity.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| So far it's locked up 32 x 416987 ETH. That's about 10% of the
| circulating supply.
|
| The number of validators probably won't grow beyond a couple
| million because the earnings/rewards per validator shrink as
| the total number of active validators grows. The effective APR
| is already down to ~4%.
| erwinh wrote:
| What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake)
| is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be
| the largest block bakers:
| https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer...
|
| With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my
| understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe
| its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that
| exchanges will market a 'stake your eth' feature.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service:
| https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co...
|
| It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize.
| So far the distribution isn't so bad:
| https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
| warkdarrior wrote:
| There are fewer staking pools in that chart than there are
| traditional banks in the US!
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/184536/number-of-fdic-
| in...
| zeroclip wrote:
| There's already a bunch of delegated staking options for ETH2,
| including Lido, RocketPool and Coinbase.[1]
|
| Once withdraws are enabled this landscape may change. There is
| a lot more work that needs to be done to improve decentralized
| staking pools, if they continue to expand they can consume
| large percentage of the total staked Eth with less concern than
| centralized staking services like Coinbase.
|
| One of the big problems with Tezos is that the governance is
| tied to the stake. This means in practice most users will not
| have much of a say in governance because the largest stakers
| will consume most of the votes. The only thing that has stopped
| this so far is that large CEX stakers are voting Pass, but this
| act of goodwill may not always be the case in the future.
|
| [1] https://research.paradigm.xyz/staking
| zionic wrote:
| ETH PoS includes offline penalties proportional to the % of the
| network that goes down.
|
| If your home RasPi validator drops you don't lose much. If 25%
| of users stake on coinbase and _they_ go down the penalties are
| much higher.
|
| So there's an incentive to validate on your own
| hardware/connection.
| mattnewton wrote:
| If that were true why wouldn't coinbase just stake through a
| few hundred different vms on servers instead of one block of
| nodes? Or is there some mechanism that ties it to a legal
| person / corporation?
| [deleted]
| aliljet wrote:
| I've been eagerly waiting for this to happen for a while. Here's
| picking up GPUs at fire sales for months and maybe years to come.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| I predict that many of these GPUs will continue to mine just on
| different chains.
| wmf wrote:
| The rewards on other chains aren't enough to sustain all the
| GPUs.
| TheMaskedCoder wrote:
| But would you _want_ a GPU that had a former life as a
| cryptominer? Running all those computations 24/7 probably takes
| a bit out of the life expectancy.
| ajaimk wrote:
| Actually yes. Gpu miners undervolt their cards these days and
| mining is a consistent load on the cards.
|
| The mining cards experience less stress and wear compared to
| gaming.
| haunter wrote:
| You can replace the fans and repaste the die.
|
| I'm curious about the prices though like don't expect
| anything firesale-y
| factorialboy wrote:
| Isn't the whole point that outrageous processing power is no
| longer a prerequisite.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yep. So now you may be able to pick up GPUs for MSRP, unlike
| the last few years.
| ru552 wrote:
| Yes, and all of the GPUs currently being used will be
| available at fire sale prices.
| tingletech wrote:
| right, so presumably there will be a lot of idle GPUs that
| miners will sell / less demand for new GPUs?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Does staking make Etherium deflationary? (or make it more
| deflationary if it already is)
| everfree wrote:
| According to ultrasound.money, Ethereum's current 30d inflation
| rate is 4.1% annualized. If the merge were already behind us
| (flip the "simulate merge" switch), inflation would be 0.1%.
|
| So, not quite deflationary but pretty close. If Ethereum
| network usage picks up again like it did in 2021, Ethereum will
| experience long stretches of time where it is deflationary.
|
| https://ultrasound.money/
| dsimmons wrote:
| This. Based on current activity, it gets close, but if/once
| fees rise again, there's a threshold above which it becomes
| net deflationary.
| coolspot wrote:
| Not sure this is correct.
|
| PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year, which can be offset with
| burn rate, but it is at 0.5% now.
|
| The site projects that in 200 years, burn and issuance will
| be at equilibrium.
| everfree wrote:
| > PoS issuance rewards are 4.6%/year
|
| PoS issuance is 4.6%/year _per staked ETH_.
|
| Only 14M of the total 120M ETH are staked right now, making
| the real issuance only 0.5%/year when taken as a percentage
| of total ETH supply.
|
| Subtract the 0.5% burn rate from that 0.5% real issuance
| rate (with rounding errors), and that's how you get
| Ethereum's current situation of being "pretty close" to
| deflationary.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| You can check running stats at https://etherchain.org/burn
| zelag wrote:
| I have a question, why was 32 ETH chosen for one to become a
| validator? Also, would this number change if value of ETH were to
| plummet?
| drewp41 wrote:
| It's basically the minimum amount of ETH needed to ensure there
| are a lot of validators all in sync. If it was less than 32
| ETH, there would be way more validators and it would be very
| difficult for them to all sync to the correct block every 12
| seconds.
| olalonde wrote:
| https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationa...
| typingmonkey wrote:
| Originally it was 3200 eth, but the price has risen too much.
| drewp41 wrote:
| Not exactly. The main reason they reduced it to 32 ETH was
| because of BLS signatures, so a lot more validators could be
| in sync with each other
|
| But yeah, 32 ETH at the time of the Beacon chain starting was
| only a few thousand dollars
| hartAtWork wrote:
| Can I unstake my staked eth after this merge?
| wmf wrote:
| No, you have to wait for a future protocol upgrade.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| Nope.
| nailer wrote:
| If you were wondering:
|
| "The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion
| of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. "
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
| AgentME wrote:
| There are some old articles that get this wrong, because years
| ago it was planned that sharding support would get added at the
| same time as the shift to PoS (in an upgraded called "Eth2"),
| and sharding support would result in lower gas fees. Some
| articles mixed up the benefits of sharding and PoS with each
| other. But now sharding has been delayed so that the move to
| PoS could be prioritized.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _The Merge_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535059 -
| Aug 2022 (387 comments)
|
| _Proof-of-Stake is better than Proof-of-Work; the Merge won't
| fix other problems_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32531655 - Aug 2022 (44
| comments)
|
| _"The Merge," the biggest change in Ethereum history_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523763 - Aug 2022 (15
| comments)
|
| _The Merge_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519340 -
| Aug 2022 (175 comments)
|
| _Ethereum merge on schedule after successful Goerli test merge_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429380 - Aug 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-
| of-stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32427992 - Aug
| 2022 (310 comments)
|
| _Will GPU mining end after the Merge (formerly called ETH 2.0)?_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048468 - July 2022 (35
| comments)
|
| _Ethereum Proof-of-Stake_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012352 - July 2022 (326
| comments)
|
| _Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31772418 - June 2022 (23
| comments)
|
| _Why Proof of Stake?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006793 - Nov 2020 (35
| comments)
|
| _Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814409 - Jan 2019 (11
| comments)
|
| _Proof of Stake or Proof of Work, What 's the Difference?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369593 - Nov 2018 (107
| comments)
|
| _Ethereum Foundation Releases Alpha Casper Proof of Stake
| Testnet_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16042070 - Dec
| 2017 (199 comments)
|
| _Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054903 - Aug 2017 (120
| comments)
|
| _Proof of Stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13001511
| - Nov 2016 (77 comments)
|
| _Long Read: Alternatives for Proof of Work, Part 1: Proof of
| Stake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091773 - Aug 2015
| (3 comments)
| sfjailbird wrote:
| The news here is that there is now a (sort of) fixed date (next
| month!). Not really related to general stories about the merge
| or proof-of-stake, imho.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty
| impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes
| away.
| coolspot wrote:
| Ethernet? 12 GW?
|
| Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards.
| yuan43 wrote:
| It's a brilliant plan really. First, the Ethereum foundation
| premines the entire supply of ether, then distributes some of it
| to the "public" through a sale and the rest to miners. Eventually
| the Foundation produces an upgrade that replaces mining with
| validators posting collateral in the form of the very token that
| was premined.
|
| What the announcement doesn't say is how similar Ethereum will
| become to Ripple post-merge. Yes Ripple doesn't have anywhere
| near the fancy contract capabilities of Ethereum, nor does it
| have the concept of validators posting collateral or getting
| rewards. But in terms of where the power resides and the
| existence of major chokepoints, they're both very similar.
| everfree wrote:
| > distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale
|
| Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in
| 2015?
| revskill wrote:
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| What's the benefit of a low-cost global consensus system...?
|
| Is this sarcasm? Or are you getting caught up in some version
| of politics?
| swalsh wrote:
| I think focusing on the technology of blockchain is a
| mistake. A lot of web2 people look at blockchain like its a
| capability they csn integrate into their enterprise
| architecture. That's not really what it is.
|
| What modern crypto has become is a new digital economy. You
| can build a digital economy without blockchain (most people
| here probably work in one), but what blockchain is bringing
| is sovereignty to the economy.
|
| This distinction is important. Tech people keep talking about
| technical solutions to recent problems, but this isn't a
| problem caused by tech and its not a problem solved by tech.
| The conversation about things like tornado cash is one of
| foreign policy.
|
| A self sovereign digital economy has autonomy, but it relies
| on imported compute, which means it needs friendly
| relationships with foreign governments.
| codesnik wrote:
| is it low cost, though?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Low cost as in energy and computation, but the cost of
| transactions are still higher and transactions are still
| slower than some of the alternatives as far as I'm aware
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Compared to similarly functioning systems that are
| decentralized and distributed? Yes.
| cowtools wrote:
| Bitcoin and Etherium are probably amongst the most
| inefficient cryptocurrencies on the market.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| There are much cheaper ways to achieve consensus, so long
| as you don't care very much about that consensus being
| real.
| exo762 wrote:
| Is this analysis based on technical details of protocols?
| Or their economics? If latter, then I must object. Tx on
| one chain is not the same as tx on other chain. They are
| not interchangeable.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Consensus on what, is the question. Cryptos have a billion
| solutions for moving stuff around in crypto space, not very
| many for actually linking it with the real world, which is in
| fact what a very large fraction of the existing financial
| infrastructure is built to do. For the length of time crypto
| has been promising to change everything, it's really lacking
| in killer applications (basically the only value I actually
| see is private/censorship-resistant transactions, but the
| chains which actually focus on that tend not to be seeing
| anywhere near as much interest, and there's a bunch of
| baggage associated with that because it's most useful for
| enabling harmful activities and money laundering).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Consensus in this case has a very specific technical
| meaning. You're trying to start some kind of philosophical
| discussion but you're not using the right words.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I know what the technical meaning is, but if you're going
| to argue for the usefulness of crypto you need to argue
| why the consensus that crypto achieves is actually
| useful, instead of just acting as if this is obvious.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| No, you don't need to demonstrate that at all. This could
| just as easily be a decentralized database for counting
| the number of jellybeans that exist on pluto and that
| word would still mean the same thing.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Yes you do. If you wish to argue that 'if crypto then
| useful', and you want to use the proposition 'if crypto
| then consensus', then you also need to provide something
| to support the proposition 'if consensus then useful'.
| You can substitude jellybeans on pluto or whatever else
| you want in the middle, the point is there are two steps
| necessary to the argument and only one is actually well
| supported.
| cowtools wrote:
| etherium is hardly low-cost
| everfree wrote:
| It's low-cost to maintain (post-merge). The high prices to
| use it are a result of users crowding around a limited
| amount of product (block space).
| Zamicol wrote:
| It's currently about $.02 to send Ethereum on an Ethereum
| L2 (Loopring): https://l2fees.info
|
| Ethereum at the moment isn't too bad with a fee of ~$0.83.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| lucasyvas wrote:
| With such a tone I wouldn't expect an answer. Do your own
| research.
| leashless wrote:
| In 2015 I wrote the Ethereum Foundation blog post detailing the
| phases of the release. In those days the Proof of State
| transition was known as Serenity.
|
| https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process...
| here is the blog post.
| proto-n wrote:
| Any details on what changed since serenity?
| RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote:
| Could you perhaps please answer this Ask HN thread I have
| posted:
|
| "Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a
| post-Merge client?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172
|
| _TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you 'll need 2
| pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and
| "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed by
| the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are
| only developed by various seemingly commercial entities._
| jacobn wrote:
| Has there been any resolution to the issues raised in
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1560070819518234624.html ?
|
| My reading of the concerns is that USDC has effective fork veto,
| and that with PoS the chain would be subject to OFAC, which would
| effectively destroy it.
|
| (my reading may well be incorrect / the concerns irrelevant)
| jcfrei wrote:
| If the majority of validators adhere to OFAC regulations then
| your chance of getting a transaction approved that violates
| OFAC drops. Anybody can be a validator but if the majority of
| validators choose to adhere to these rules then that's what you
| end up with. Crypto isn't successful because it creates some
| anarcho-capitalist alternative universe (though that was the
| initial impetus). And the die-hard bitcoin followers who
| believe so are slowly seeing their market cap falling below
| that of ether.
| [deleted]
| sbierwagen wrote:
| If being subject to OFAC oversight would "destroy" Ethereum,
| then Ethereum should be destroyed.
| capableweb wrote:
| Why is that? OFAC is a US government agency, Ethereum is not
| a US-based organization. Why should they be forced to follow
| US laws? There are plenty of us outside of the US who do not
| care about what's illegal in the US or not.
| brobinson wrote:
| You're misunderstanding his post. He's saying that if such
| a US-centric thing threatens the entire system, the system
| shouldn't exist at all. It will have failed at its mission
| to be decentralized and thus has no reason to exist.
| IncRnd wrote:
| If anyone wonders why many "regular people" are uncertain about
| doing anything with cryptocurrencies, look at the top of this
| article for the reason. It's not that people are incapable of
| understanding the subject, but that the purveyors of the subject
| constantly coin new words and meanings. *
| Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake! The transition, known as
| The Merge, must first be activated on the Beacon Chain
| with the Bellatrix upgrade. After this, the proof-of-work
| chain will migrate to proof-of-stake upon hitting a
| specific Total Difficulty value. * The Bellatrix upgrade is
| scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain -
| 11:34:47am UTC on Sept 6, 2022. * The Terminal Total
| Difficulty value triggering The Merge is
| 58750000000000000000000, expected between Sept 10-20, 2022.
| * Note: as announced earlier, the Kiln testnet is being sunset.
| Operators will shut down on September 6, 2022.
| dsimmons wrote:
| To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH
| ecosystem developers specifically).
|
| While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem
| (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would
| largely just interact with an application without needing to
| know any of this.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog
| page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one
| seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to
| understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would
| look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using
| etherium.
|
| Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every
| page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up
| jargon? That's the issue that I see here.
| beambot wrote:
| Spot on: This underlying infrastructure isn't meant for
| "regular people", it's meant for the people who directly
| build atop it. By way of example from TradFi, the news
| updates from SWIFT about ISO-20022 is similarly laden with
| jargon:
|
| https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/iso-20022-bytes-
| payme...
| tdaltonc wrote:
| I think that the coinages are mostly reasonable.
| Finance/accounting have a thick lexicon. So does computer
| science. So does devops. And those lexicons are all mostly non-
| overlapping. Granted the crypto lexicon is a lot more
| playful/childish. Stuff like "HODL" is just shibboleth but
| that's a minority of the jargon. The stuff that grinds me is
| when crypto totally redefines a word and doesn't realize it or
| expects everyone to follow along. "Inflationary" in crypto-
| speak has only a passing resemblance to the concept by the same
| name in economics.
| simpleblend wrote:
| 1. This is mostly for developers 2. The iPhone was once new.
| Electric vehicles were once new. People will adapt.
| unixbane wrote:
| This. The wikipedia page for years seemed (not looking at it
| again, lol) to be written by people of the same ilk, who
| introduce a bunch of terminology without explaining what any of
| it means. When I read the wiki in 2020 it was literally
| impossible to understand, knowing already at the time how
| Bitcoin and a few other alt coins worked, as well as someone
| being into smart contracts well before even Bitcoin was
| created. And Ethereum is literally just a Bitcoin + smart
| contracts. There is no other core, fundamental concept to
| understand in it (until now: PoS). Also yes, as someone who has
| used hundreds of cryptocurrency products, this applies to
| basically anything related to cryptocurrency like you said.
|
| One absolutely obnoxious practice is how they all make their
| own fancy names for millicoins microcoins, etc.
| rvz wrote:
| > Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake has been a loooong time
| coming. Thank you to everyone who contributed to researching,
| specifying, developing, analyzing, testing, breaking, fixing, or
| explaining everything that got us to The Merge.
|
| At least now it has a hard deadline which will silence the
| parroting critics on 'burning up the planet', 'The merge will
| NEVER happen', 'repeated delays', etc.
|
| But I imagine that they will invent new problems and the critics
| will hastefully rush in with their low effort hot takes. The
| crypto supporters also need to hold their horses a bit on their
| claims of this 'taking over the current system' which is
| extremely unlikely to happen.
|
| Which ever side or view you are on in regards to crypto, The
| Merge seems to be undeniably a great spectacle of software
| architecture and this event has gone through a very regimented
| process and checks in upgrading components that handle billions
| of dollars worth of money.
|
| I await to see what happens next.
| DanHulton wrote:
| That has hardly ever been the ONLY problem crypto has had, ands
| acting as if solving this one problem should silence all
| dissenters lest they be considered unserious is disingenuous.
| Look at the comments for literally any popular article about
| crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one and
| you'll probably find plenty.
|
| I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a
| massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying
| amounts of electricity and hardware, but that is about as
| positive as I can be about this news.
| rvz wrote:
| > That has hardly ever been the ONLY problem crypto has had,
|
| Where did I say it was the only problem? Why are you
| strawmaning my comment with such anger?
|
| > ands acting as if solving this one problem should silence
| all dissenters lest they be considered unserious is
| disingenuous.
|
| Another strawman and this rhetoric sounds like defeat and
| denial and my point was (if you've properly read my comment
| instead of misconstruing it) as soon as it moves to proof-of-
| stake, there will be _no_ argument on the environmental
| issues in Ethereum, which was regularly parroted by the
| critics.
|
| > Look at the comments for literally any popular article
| about crypto on this site, hell, keep scrolling on this one
| and you'll probably find plenty.
|
| Look at what? I see no comments about the environmental
| issues in Ethereum anymore, which proves my point. I already
| recognise that there are scams, ponzis, etc happening in
| Ethereum which the regulators will step in and crackdown on
| them anyway.
|
| > I, for one, am happy that enabling art theft and fraud on a
| massive scale will shortly no longer ALSO consume terrifying
| amounts of electricity and hardware
|
| Exactly. All the fraud and scams are visible on a public
| blockchain which is easily traceable for everyone including
| the SEC, CFTC and the FBI to see.
| DanHulton wrote:
| If your line: "But I imagine that they will invent new
| problems and the critics will hastefully rush in with their
| low effort hot takes" was _only_ intended to refer to
| "inventing new problems about environmental issues" and
| "low effort hot takes about environmental issues", you have
| not achieved the clarity in communication you were looking
| for.
|
| Also, it's kind of a weird stance to take? I haven't seen
| anyone claiming that PoS wouldn't do exactly what it set
| out to do, that is fix the energy waste issue inherent in
| PoW-based blockchains. Maybe we just run in different
| circles, but the main criticism I see of PoS is that it
| doesn't _matter._ It doesn't make blockchains or defi any
| more useful or moral, and it just highlights the other
| externalities more clearly.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Honestly I think the biggest problem with crypto is how it
| has mainly been used either to scam people or to further
| centralise wealth towards the richest. I have seen very
| little morally good outcomes of crypto yet, but a vast number
| of morally bad ones.
| rvz wrote:
| So given we all know that there are indeed scams on
| Ethereum, does that mean that all of crypto will go away
| entirely as a result of this 100%?
|
| I know precisely that I see the same old arguments against
| crypto time after time, but somehow despite all of these
| scams, carnage, etc. it still refuses to die somehow.
|
| Maybe companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe,
| Monegram, and even the regulators want it to succeed? If
| not, they would have banned all the exchanges, coins, and
| removed all wallets off of the apps stores a long time ago.
|
| So I'm afraid that it is here to stay, with some survivors
| existing for a long time under certain compliance
| requirements and other crypto projects withering away.
| leppr wrote:
| The wealth centralization effect is not an inherent aspect
| of crypto, it was nothing more than a result of the
| liquidity injections from central banks.
|
| The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that
| rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock
| market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize
| wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the
| reduced cost of debt, which naturally favors the
| wealthiest, which reflects in the price of what wealthy
| people buy when they have too much money (scarce assets).
|
| The base concept of cryptocurrency is enabling free market
| economies by bypassing government regulation, and at least
| in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, regulating inflation
| by setting it in code, instead of being opaquely decided by
| a few wealthy people (some of them convicted of insider-
| trading[1]). Those two things tend to favor bottom-up
| wealth creation, rather than the trickle-down model fiat
| currencies encourage. That's a wealth decentralization
| force, not centralization like you claim.
|
| [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-timeline-of-the-
| federal-res...
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't really care I'm just saying how it looks from the
| outside
| leppr wrote:
| We all know the pedestrian outsider opinions about
| cryptocurrency, they are repeated ad-nauseam here on HN
| and everywhere else. Adding informed color to this is a
| good thing, I would think.
| immibis wrote:
| Crypto has the same wealth centralization problem as all
| currencies (so far) - it's not immune, at all. It's not
| because of central bank activity. Wealth just
| centralizes. Free market economics lead to this emergent
| outcome.
|
| In principle, inflationary currencies have a force
| pushing away from wealth centralization, while
| deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it,
| which is why everyone who thinks they'll have the
| centralized wealth likes deflationary currencies.
| leppr wrote:
| _> In principle, inflationary currencies have a force
| pushing away from wealth centralization_
|
| That depends entirely where the new money gets injected.
| If it gets injected at the top, like with our current
| fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth-
| decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1]
|
| Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever
| mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the
| current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the
| case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing
| mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least
| mitigated.
|
| [1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the-
| cantillo...
| Balladeer wrote:
| > Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to
| whoever mines them, which could be anyone
|
| While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with
| the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus
| receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the
| cycle of centralization continues.
|
| That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it?
| muglug wrote:
| As long as Bitcoin is still around crypto will have a heavy
| environmental asterisk attached to it.
|
| But, at least to me, this will make ethereum-based NFTs of
| interesting art a more morally-justifiable purchase.
| swalsh wrote:
| You can bridge bitcoin natively to Avalanche (look up btc.b)
| and then you can trade bitcoin with low fees, fast finality,
| get smart contracts, use it in defi.... oh, and it's proof of
| stake already so more environmental.
|
| Just saying :)
| colinsane wrote:
| that just makes the environmental asterisk bigger. you buy
| bitcoin you wouldn't have bought otherwise (or would have
| sold otherwise), bridge it, lock it up on a different
| network. these actions marginally push the price of bitcoin
| up. higher price means (temporarily) more profitable
| mining, means miners divert more power to mining.
| gfodor wrote:
| No, I think once ethereum goes PoS, average people will stop
| caring about the energy use of crypto because the public at
| large won't be able to digest the nuance.
| muglug wrote:
| The average person with a computer in the US (just taking
| the country I live in) has never heard the words "proof of
| stake" or Ethereum.
|
| All the average person knows is that there were a bunch of
| Super Bowl commercials about "crypto", and their cousin who
| spends a lot of time on the computer lost a lot of his
| parents money investing in a thing called "Bitcoin" last
| year.
| paulmd wrote:
| the existence of ethereum as proof-of-stake makes it
| impossible to stop proof-of-work coins via exchange
| regulation/etc. It's trivial to run exchanges on ethereum and
| therefore they largely exist outside any possibility of
| regulation. Previously you could sorta leverage this in via
| the exchanges/etc but now there is no possibility of ever
| banning the environmentally-harmful PoW coins.
| exo762 wrote:
| Your post makes many assumptions. One - existence of
| trustless bridges from PoW chain to Ethereum (trustful
| bridges are rather easy to kill). Second, regulation can be
| achieved in a way OFAC does it - "anyone who holds/buys
| this token is a felon". This drives money away from the
| chain, reducing its PoW budget.
|
| And I really suspect that Ethereum will win the race
| anyway. At least until something really juicy appears (like
| private contracts, chain-managed secrets, etc).
| davidy123 wrote:
| Oh funny, I just, inspired by Stable Diffusion, ordered a 3090 ti
| at what I thought was a good price. Well, I have 30 days to see
| what happens... There could be an interesting ripple effect if
| GPUs become more widely available in general. <<Simple division
| yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on
| April 16 2021.>> (from
| https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...)
| camjw wrote:
| Off-topic but have you got any recommendations on stuff to read
| to set up a GPU at home to run stable diffusion?
| fleddr wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99WBrs1D3g
| OGWhales wrote:
| I found this reddit post that has a guide on how to set it
| up. I recommend reading through the comments as well:
|
| https://reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/wvr23n/d_how_t.
| ..
| stavros wrote:
| If you have a GPU that has more than 4 GB VRAM, you should be
| able to easily run it:
|
| https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion
|
| I didn't manage to run it on mine, as it segfaults, but I've
| heard of people running it fine on an old 1060 (which I have
| too).
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Are you running the scripts in the optimizedSD folder
| instead of the scripts folder? For me a 512x512 image uses
| 3.7GB of VRAM. You can reduce the resolution to use less
| (to a point, the model needs a fixed amount).
| stavros wrote:
| I am, yes. I don't think it's the memory because it
| segfaults immediately, even if I try 64x64... It's very
| odd, I'm running Ubuntu 22.04, I'm not sure if the CUDA
| version is somehow wrong.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Oh damn that's weird. Any chance the segfault is on the
| CPU side? When I try to generate too large of an image I
| get an allocation error rather than a segfault.
|
| Also crazy idea but could it be related to open source /
| proprietary driver differences? I haven't done nvidia on
| Linux in a long time so I don't know if that's in a more
| reasonable place yet.
| stavros wrote:
| Hmm, thanks for the info, it might be a CPU error!
| There's zero information in the error, it just says
| "error SIGSEGV" or something similar. I don't think it's
| an open source driver issue, I'm using nVidia's
| proprietary one...
|
| It's so odd, it just dies outright. Maybe it is a CPU
| error, as you say, I think I'll investigate there.
| yreg wrote:
| Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't believe there's anything OS specific for it, just
| most guides are for Windows for simplicity.
|
| However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are
| generally AMD or integrated gpus.
| benreesman wrote:
| Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People
| Who Hate Crypto but Won't Stop Talking About It
| sph wrote:
| I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing
| messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage.
| pearjuice wrote:
| Are there known cases of miners or other organizations resisting
| this transition? Will there be people left mining the old proof-
| of-work chain? Something like Ethereum Classic but for PoW.
| dboreham wrote:
| Yes. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-pow/
| xyst wrote:
| bullish outlook. Heavily loaded up when ETH was at <$1K.
| arez wrote:
| nobody cares what you bought
| stiltzkin wrote:
| neither your comment.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Thank goodness. I have been waiting for this to happen so I can
| consider building a couple of GPU powered machines at non-
| outrageous prices, and it seems that savvy miners have already
| begun selling part of their gear early.
| Linda703 wrote:
| targ65 wrote:
| What are the chances that this doesn't end in disaster? Honest
| question.
| dsimmons wrote:
| Many/most people "in the know" peg it somewhere in the ballpark
| of ~90-95% chance of success from what I've seen.
| everfree wrote:
| Chances are high that it will not end in disaster, in my
| opinion.
|
| They've simulated the switchover dozens of times on a diverse
| set of networks, including development ("shadow") forks of the
| main network itself.
| endorphine wrote:
| Can you provide some examples?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized
| with some extra steps?
|
| Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it
| works is because there's just a small number of validators, which
| is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends.
|
| edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on
| topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32
| eth to validate nodes. I am talking about the class of people
| with the ability to declare that the people with stakes did not
| validate correctly and therefore lose their stakes. My
| understanding is that this is a very small number of people and
| is mostly just the ethereum foundation.
|
| edit edit: The term for this class is apparently called slashers,
| not validators.
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| One way or another we are going to find out...
|
| What a time to be alive :)
|
| Whether the project dies or continues forward the innovation
| coming from the space is pretty amazing.
| dmichulke wrote:
| Let's say it like this:
|
| In the near future the rules are made by the people with the
| most ETH
|
| and soon after the most ETHs will be earned by the people who
| make the rules.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| The rules have always been made by the ethereum foundation
| and friends. How many rollbacks and forks have they done at
| this point?
| 3np wrote:
| Just the one I think? Sure there have been network and
| client issues at times but that goes for Bitcoin as well.
| cesarb wrote:
| I believe there were more than that one. From what I've
| read some time ago, to prevent the Ethereum 1 (proof-of-
| work) chain from continuing to exist after the migration
| to the Ethereum 2 (proof-of-stake) chain, the Ethereum 1
| protocol has a built-in "difficulty bomb" which
| dramatically increases the proof-of-work difficulty after
| some time. But since the migration to Ethereum 2 has been
| delayed for so long, they've had to reset that
| "difficulty bomb" more than once (making it trigger
| later), which AFAIK requires a hard fork (and updating
| all nodes with the new rules).
| 3np wrote:
| This was always (well, long enough) a part of the plan
| and openly communicated. Dropping or changing difficulty
| bomb does not depend on the EF or the client software
| maintainers. Dropping or extending it preemptively would
| be trivial and would have been done already if there
| weren't consensus to keep it in place. It's in everyone's
| interest that nodes stay up to date if the network is to
| evolve and without it there would probably be a couple of
| years more until the merge that is scheduled for next
| month.
|
| The first difficulty bomb was never set with the
| intention that this would be the move to PoS. It's a
| conscious choice to introduce regular hard forks in order
| to keep the protocol and network evolving.
|
| It looks very likely that some percentage of node
| operators and miners will patch out the bomb this time,
| which will result in the PoW side of the fork staying
| alive. Which side of the chain retains monetary value in
| their tokens is up to social consensus. It will probably
| differ from protocol to protocol. So far industry and
| most major exchanges have been aligned with the rest of
| the Ethereum community here.
|
| What you're saying is mostly correct but seems taken out
| of context. I've only ever seen people looking in from
| the outside have strong opinions on this particular
| point, not from the actual stakeholders involved.
| tylersmith wrote:
| That's not true. Stakers don't make the rules any more than
| miners make Bitcoin rules.
| eterm wrote:
| Miners do make Bitcoin rules though, the entire protocol is
| a consensus protocol driven by the miners.
| tylersmith wrote:
| They do not, they simply produce blocks. If they produce
| blocks that don't comply your nodes rules you'll ignore
| them and it would simply be a liveness fault and not a
| safety one.
| tromp wrote:
| Wrong; if miners deviate from the rules, then their
| blocks are simply ignored by everyone else.
| Spivak wrote:
| If a group of miners with minority compute power deviate
| from the rules they are ignored. If a group of miners
| with majority of compute power deviate from the rules,
| they become the rules.
|
| This process is how all changes to Bitcoin get rolled
| out.
| tylersmith wrote:
| If a majority of miners implements new rules that the
| validating nodes don't support, then the blocks are just
| ignored. They may as well be mining Bitcoin Cash or
| Litecoin blocks.
|
| The majority of miners implementing new rules only has an
| effect on which rules the validating nodes will start
| enforcing if those nodes implemented them and allowed
| miners to signal when to start.
| sph wrote:
| Indeed, in Bitcoin it's "one CPU one vote", and by CPU it
| means any validating Bitcoin client.
|
| A big miner has the same voting power as you with the
| client running on an RPi.
| garydevenay wrote:
| The rules of the Bitcoin network are not validated by
| miners, they are validated by nodes. The miners have no
| control over nodes and unless their mining work is
| accepted by the consensus rules of the nodes they receive
| no mining reward.
| marshray wrote:
| > On 21 July 2017, bitcoin _miners_ locked-in a software
| upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)
| 91
|
| > By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of
| the bitcoin _mining pools_ signaled support
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit#Activation
| tylersmith wrote:
| That's signaling, built into the end users fully-
| validating nodes, to coordinate between the miners
| producing blocks and nodes validating them. The
| validating nodes are the ones that offered up and then
| accepted the signaling.
| garydevenay wrote:
| Signalling is not consensus I'm afraid...
| Spivak wrote:
| Miners and nodes have to be in agreement, when they're
| not you're right they've essentially fork BTC but I think
| you're wrong about who really holds the power and which
| chain would end up being the authoritative one after such
| an event.
| exo762 wrote:
| Rules of the system are implemented in the software
| validating the block, in so called "full nodes". It does
| not matter how much hashing power miner has - if they
| will produce invalid block, this block will get rejected
| by nodes. Miners have very limited powers: they decide
| which transactions are included (this is why we need many
| miners) and they decide in which order transactions are
| included. Users decide which token they hold (BTC or BTC
| Cash or Eth), which node software they run. Miners are
| low-margin workers.
| dmichulke wrote:
| The rules who to include in the block. Imagine 51% of
| validators exclude people who use Tornado cash (as an
| example of addresses that somehow relate to a smart
| contract)
|
| The rest has to agree otherwise their stake is slashed.
|
| This can't happen in bitcoin.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong.
| exo762 wrote:
| In scenario when 51% coalition is censoring everyone else
| (block producers / validators that don't belong to
| coalition), the way out is via UASF - user-activated soft
| fork. This will cause slashing of attackers via
| "inactivity leak mechanism".
|
| Source:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| dmichulke wrote:
| Thanks. To me it seems this would greatly damage the
| value of the assets (like the blockchain wars but for
| ETH) but yes, it can be recovered from.
|
| I think the problem here is centralization and this can
| be more easily avoided in PoW (because of energy costs
| rising a lot if all miners go in one place) instead of
| PoS (there are no physical restraints, so in theory all
| staking pools could be in Switzerland).
|
| So politically it's much harder to censor a more
| decentralized chain.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The flip side is it's virtually impossible to hide a
| large-scale mining operation. The meatspace footprint is
| just gigantic. By contrast a validator node, even one
| securing billions of value, can run on consumer hardware
| sitting behind a VPN or TOR gateway.
| exo762 wrote:
| > To me it seems this would greatly damage the value of
| the assets but it can be recovered from.
|
| Why? I see this as an event that would skyrocket the
| price. It at the same time affirms commitment of the
| community to its stated values and decreases the supply
| greatly.
| immibis wrote:
| And then the ETH becomes worthless, and despite having all
| the ETH, those people have no real-world money.
| spraveenitpro wrote:
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| Yes, it is correct. It was already much more centralized than
| for instance bitcoin, due to the difficulty in having a
| validator node, but now it is just managed by the big holders
| and that's that. Furthermore, they will censor transactions
| according to US laws at least, and if you try to validate and
| not censor, you will get your staked coins taken from you by
| the protocol (as opposed to PoW, where you just fail to get
| your block in the chain), so this is another nail in the coffin
| of this project imo.
| [deleted]
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, it's the opposite. Proof of work is more centralised than
| proof of stake, because the former has an economy of scale:
| it's cheaper to add a single miner if you are a big mining
| operation vs a small mining operation. On the other hand,
| staking 1 eth is always staking 1 eth.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Another article pointed out that the economics of staking
| are completely different than those of mining. With mining,
| some of the earned coins need to be sold to pay for
| electricity. With staking, the biggest holders just sit
| there and collect coins with few operational costs.
|
| To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful
| snowball effect than mining and the gap between the
| wealthiest ETH participants and everyone else will increase
| faster under PoS.
| landemva wrote:
| There is some legitimate concern here. On the other hand,
| PoS looks to be more accessible to hobby miners/stakers
| because they don't have to convert their coin into ASICs
| or GPUs.
| DennisP wrote:
| Costs are lower, but the rewards are also lower, at about
| 10% of Ethereum's mining rewards.
|
| Last I saw, ETH mining was about 33% profitable. With
| mining rewards ten times higher than staking rewards,
| that means miners take home about three times more on
| their investment than stakers.
| mcdee wrote:
| > With staking, the biggest holders just sit there and
| collect coins with few operational costs.
|
| _Every_ holder who is staking is rewarded for staking,
| in proportion to their stake.
|
| > To me it sounds like staking has a much more powerful
| snowball effect than mining
|
| No, because issuance under proof of stake is much lower
| than that under proof of work.
|
| The point of validating is to secure the chain, not to
| get rich. The more validators that are active, the lower
| the per-validator rewards, reducing compounding effects.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| It is much cheaper to run a staking operation but not
| 0-cost. You still need an internet connection to pay and
| a bit of energy to run your validator. You may owe taxes
| on staking rewards, etc... So there is likely to be some
| selling by validators. Rewards are also much lower,
| issuance of ETH is cut by 90%, for example.
|
| Also you lock-up capital which has an opportunity cost
| and must competes with every other investable asset. As
| the barriers to entry staking are negligible (just
| acquiring a liquid staking derivative like rETH, for
| example) it means that everyone willing to stake will
| likely do so which drops the returns lower, which may
| push some stakers out as they see better investing
| opportunities. So staking is likely going to have thin
| margins in the future and will give a rate of return that
| is fairly priced given its risk adjusted returns.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| Running a small validator is much riskier than being a
| small miner. If you're running a validator and have network
| downtime or any operational issues, you risk losing funds
| (the inactivity leak[1]). If you're mining and you have
| downtime, your only downside is the opportunity cost of not
| mining any blocks while you're offline.
|
| [1]:
| https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity
| landemva wrote:
| And the opportunity cost of the funds used to purchase
| (er, stake?) the expensive ASIC which loses resale value.
| Acres of silicon boat anchors.
|
| In PoS you still have the staking tokens.
| exo762 wrote:
| Inactivity leak for a solo validator going offline is
| very cheap, and it is by design. People are expected to
| run validator nodes on home connections and be
| profitable.
| drog wrote:
| No.
|
| Inactivity leak is an emergency measure to restore
| liveness when the network stops finalizing blocks. It
| happens when >33% of validators are offline(WW3
| scenario), major bug in widespread implementation, etc.
|
| Your link explains that.
|
| ETH2 is friendly to home stackers - you may lose some
| profit by being offline sometimes, and in the worst case
| minor penalties are applied.
|
| EDIT: If you are interested in a much better description
| of what happens if you are offline, see this:
|
| https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/penalties
|
| Some points from the link:
|
| - penalties =/= slashing
|
| - If you are online > 42.5% of the sime - you are earning
| profits
| thesz wrote:
| One of the attacks on PBFT protocol is to split network
| in half, send block to one half, do not send anything to
| other half and the proposer wents offline and restore
| connectivity between the rest of the nodes.
|
| In that case, without any stakes, half of nodes will be
| locked to NIL, half - to a valid block.
|
| In case of stakes, byzantine proposer (it is only one
| node that is really byzantine, but it can control how
| network is split) can partition network according to a
| proportion of stakes, so that neither half gets
| prevalence.
|
| The algorithm in the link you provided does nothing in
| that case. The only node that will be punished is a
| byzantine validator which does not care.
|
| The system will be in no-progress-possible state
| indefinitely.
| [deleted]
| zyphr wrote:
| You can't stake 1 eth yourself. You need to at least 32
| eth. Plus you need to make an investment to run your own a
| validator.
| programmarchy wrote:
| There are staking pools, just like there were mining
| pools.
| joosters wrote:
| If you join a staking pool, then by definition you are
| increasing the centralization of the network.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| There are decentralized staking pools.
| https://rocketpool.net/
| usrusrusrusr wrote:
| You can mine with one GPU, pool or no.
|
| Stake pooling also eliminates one of the supposed
| benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency - you have to
| trust someone else with your currency.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| If I understand correctly, you are not trusting
| "someone", u are trusting the network itself. Imo no
| different than any other operation on the network. Any
| operation on the network requires trust that the network
| will do what it agreed it will do.
| usrusrusrusr wrote:
| Staking pools are not part of the Ethereum network
| protocol - they are a third party that you need to trust
| with your Eth. You are lending your Eth to this third
| party, who will then participate in the Eth network on
| your behalf, and who is also under no particular
| requirement to do what they say they will.
|
| If I have to give my currency to a third party who will
| then invest it for me, then why bother with decentralised
| cryptos at all?
|
| >any operation on the network requires trust that the
| network will do what it agreed it will do.
|
| If I were an Eth apologist, I would explain how the code
| that defines the network operations is fully open and
| inspectable, so no trust needed.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| 32 eth is such a small investment that it isn't that
| meaningfully different than 1 eth.
| pawelduda wrote:
| Yeah, taking $4k (price it reached in the recent bull
| market).
|
| $4k vs $128k
|
| Literally the same numbers.
| SilasX wrote:
| Right, parent is overstating it, and that's fair to call
| out, but it's still a low barrier to entry (even without
| the staking pools). At the current price (where anyone
| can get in), it's ~$1660, so 32 ETH would be ~$53k. How
| many "paycheck-to-paycheck" households blew that much on
| a fancy new pickup truck? Or home remodel? Or extra
| interest charges on the lifetime of a home loan from
| stretching their budget?
| jagger27 wrote:
| You're joking right?
| SilasX wrote:
| Am I joking about the quantities of money that working
| families will spend on unnecessary stuff instead of
| investments while complaining about the inability to
| secure their financial futures? I am not.
| [deleted]
| bowsamic wrote:
| For the scales usually considered in the crypto scene
| these would be considered incidental
| 735409264082 wrote:
| If they try that Ethereum will fork and I (and everyone I
| have any interest in interacting with) will be on the non-
| censored fork.
|
| With the old system, miners could try to sabotage our fork if
| most hashing power were to be on the censored fork. With this
| update, that would not be possible as the censors would lose
| their money on the non-censored fork and therefore be unable
| to stake. The relative power of the forks no longer matter as
| they cannot attack each other anymore.
|
| Ethereum is becoming more decentralized and permissionless as
| a result of this change.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| This is quite far from true
|
| > but now it is just managed by the big holders
|
| To have any influence during the proof of work days you
| needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small
| elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| It's incorrect to say PoW miners can censor transactions.
|
| With PoS, the big players control the small players. If the
| minority doesn't play along, their funds will be slashed by
| the procotol. If 66% of validators censor you, your
| transaction will never be finalized.
|
| With PoW, the big players cannot coerce the small players
| in any way. Everyone independently controls their own
| blocks. If 66% of miners censor you, your transaction will
| merely take 3x as long to be confirmed.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > With PoW, the big players cannot coerce the small
| players in any way. Everyone independently controls their
| own blocks. If 66% of miners censor you, your transaction
| will merely take 3x as long to be confirmed.
|
| This is false. If miners controlling 66% of hash power
| decide to censor you, they can ignore any blocks produced
| by the minority who include your transaction.
| immibis wrote:
| The part about PoW is falase. If 66% of miners really
| want to censor you, they will also censor the other 34%
| of miners if those miners choose to mine a block
| including your transactions.
|
| If <50% of miners want to censor you, they can make it
| take longer for your transactions to be processed. If
| it's >50% (or thereabouts) they can prevent your
| transactions from every getting confirmed. Sure, the 34%
| could collude until they happen to produce 6 blocks in a
| row, but each individual member of that group would make
| more money by going along with the censorship and not
| being censored themselves.
|
| I believe it's similar with PoS, but with somewhat
| different incentive magnitudes.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| I suppose that is possible, but we're thinking of two
| different incentive structures.
|
| If 66% of miners censor their own blocks to comply with
| OFAC, then eventually the transaction will get in.
|
| If 66% of miners not only censor their own blocks, but
| also collude to continually reorg the chain, then
| obviously all bets are off, the project has failed, and
| the exchange rate is headed to 0.
|
| I think the former is infinitely more likely than the
| latter.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > If 66% of miners not only censor their own blocks, but
| also collude to continually reorg the chain, then
| obviously all bets are off, the project has failed, and
| the exchange rate is headed to 0.
|
| Is it though? If crypto ever becomes a common currency
| people will still want to transact in it regardless of
| corruption/collusion among miners. Most are not going to
| stop using it for ideological reasons like "miners are
| altering the chain" unless it negatively impacts their
| own transactions.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Everyone independently controls their own blocks.
|
| I believe the point is that there's no prerequisite that
| all miners are independent, and will definitely collude.
| PoW or PoS this is the case, as blockchains cannot
| prevent IRL agreements.
| KallDrexx wrote:
| > To have any influence during the proof of work days you
| needed a server farm. This was also restricted to a small
| elite who could, if they wished, censor transactions.
|
| Legitimate question because I don't know.
|
| When I'm mining eth on my GPU while part of a mining pool,
| my understanding is that my GPU is racing to try and find
| the hash that works to start the next block. If I find it,
| _I_ then am able to put transactions into the block and cap
| it off, but the reward doesn 't go to me because I was part
| of a pool, so the pool shares the reward with everyone
| involved.
|
| Are you saying I only find the answer to the block but the
| pool itself stuffs the block with transactions?
| redox99 wrote:
| You are spreading false information. Besides the
| "centralization" thing that was already replied, the part of
|
| > and if you try to validate and not censor, you will get
| your staked coins taken from you by the protocol (as opposed
| to PoW, where you just fail to get your block in the chain)
|
| Is outright false. It is the same as PoW. You choose what
| transactions you include in your block. So some people may
| choose to not include some transactions (Ethermine is already
| doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash). But there is no
| mechanism that slashes your staked coins because the other
| validators didn't like what transactions you included. At
| most your block will not get attested. Slashing can only
| happen for other reasons (proposing twice, attesting twice,
| attesting something that surrounds something else).
|
| PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can
| kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork that
| slashes their stake. In PoW if 51% of miners are malicious
| there's nothing you can do, you can't slash their hardware.
| [deleted]
| tboyd47 wrote:
| This 51% attack thing is such a canard. If 51% of Bitcoin
| miners are malicious, the most harm they can do is fail to
| include your valid transaction in their blocks.
|
| So, your transaction will be confirmed in the next block
| mined by one of the other 49% of miners. Big whoop.
| ithinkso wrote:
| 51% _is_ Bitcoin. That 's what decentralized means
| remram wrote:
| 51% can do double-spend in Bitcoin, e.g. they can undo
| entire blocks of transactions and spend that money again.
|
| They can also prevent you from getting your transaction
| in _ever_. The 49% cannot prevent this because they
| cannot make a longer chain, that is the entire point of
| proof-of-work.
| [deleted]
| tboyd47 wrote:
| Adding the double-spend concept into it makes it even
| more silly. If you are changing the validation rules of
| Bitcoin to allow double-spend, then your block is
| rejected by the entire network and you must fork, even if
| you had 99% of the hashpower.
| ahtihn wrote:
| You don't need to change the validation rules to double
| spend.
|
| What you do is this:
|
| - spend btc with a transaction and get it included in the
| chain.
|
| - start mining blocks starting from before your
| transaction _in secret_
|
| - include a trnasaction to a different address in the
| secret chain
|
| - broadcast the secret chain once it's longer than the
| "official" one
|
| - since your chain is longer, your chain is now the
| official one. All the transactions in the other chain are
| now discarded
| remram wrote:
| I'm describing an attack. An attack happens when the
| attacker doesn't play by the rules, while the rest tries
| to.
|
| Here an attacker controlling 51% of mining power decides
| to not play by the rules; we are considering what that
| means for everybody else. For Bitcoin it means they can
| block transactions forever, and they can double-spend.
|
| Obviously if the attacker plays by the rules there is no
| attack.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 51% attack on a proof of stake network would be a truly
| "I just want to watch the world burn" scenario, since
| you'd have to control 51% of the currency, why even
| bother. You control most of the money, why risk losing it
| with a takeover attempt?
| proto-n wrote:
| Not correct, they can choose to not accept any blocks
| containing banned transactions, and still have the
| longest chain (statistically speaking). That's why the
| 51% number is significant.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| That assumes the other 49% won't accept the bad guys'
| blocks in their chain. Those blocks are valid, so the 49%
| will accept them and build off of them.
|
| At any point there is still a 49% chance the next block
| will be mined by a good guy.
|
| If the bad guys decide not to accept the good guys'
| blocks, then they are hard forking Bitcoin and will end
| up just like Bitcoin Cash: irrelevant.
|
| This is the exact problem PoW was designed to solve, and
| it works very well, which is why a 51% attack has never
| succeeded or even been attempted against Bitcoin, and
| never will.
| proto-n wrote:
| They are not hard-forking, it will be compatible with the
| original chain and original rules. There will be two
| competing forks, one censored, one not censored, and the
| censored one is longer (because 51%). Consensus rules say
| longer chain is valid. So it _is_ the official "bitcoin",
| according to consensus rules.
|
| The 51% attack is not some made up thing.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| If 51% of miners decide to totally ignore the other 49%
| then their chain will most definitely not be the longest
| chain for any more than 30 minutes. Because the 49% are
| still using 100% of miners' work.
|
| The only way they can maintain that chain is by a hard
| fork.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's easier to explain a 66% attract. The censored chain
| produce the double of blocks of the censored one. Each
| time the uncensored chain produce a block it's ignored by
| the censored one.
|
| So after a time, they are behind and have to jump to the
| other chain and ignore their own old blocks. Something
| like this graph:
|
| Censored blocks: -
|
| Uncensored Fork blocks: \
|
| Uncensored Normal blocks: * Censored:
| *-------------------------- Uncensored: \** \*
| \*** \** \*
| tboyd47 wrote:
| So, now that I've obliterated the 51% attack idea, shall
| we move on to 66% attack?
|
| It doesn't matter if it's a 90% attack. The minority
| miners are constantly receiving and using the majority's
| blocks. So it is not 66% vs. 33%, or 90% vs. 10%; it is
| 60% vs. 100% and 90% vs. 100%.
|
| All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to mine
| two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced the
| majority's more restrictive chain.
| gus_massa wrote:
| They are not block, they are chained blocks.
| Oversimplifiying, each block has 3 parts:
|
| 1) The hash of the old block.
|
| 2) The new transactions.
|
| 3) A number that must be bruteforced until you get a hash
| of all the block with a lot of zeros.
|
| If you try to copy one block in the other chain/fork,
| then the hash of the previos block is invalid. If you
| change just that part of the block, you must bruteforce a
| new number until you get a new hash of all the block with
| a lot of zeros, that has the same cost of creating a new
| block from scratch.
|
| You can copy the info of the transactions from one chain
| to the other, but you must create a new block to put
| them. You can't just copy the block.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The minority miners are constantly receiving and using
| the majority's blocks.
|
| They can use the majority blocks _at the cost of
| discarding their earlier blocks_. Every time they accept
| a block from the majority, they undo all the work they
| had done earlier.
|
| > All it takes is for the less-restrictive minority to
| mine two blocks in a row and they've permanently outpaced
| the majority's more restrictive chain.
|
| All it takes then is for the majority to mine three
| blocks in a row. The probability is always on their side.
| proto-n wrote:
| Let me make sure I get this right: if you have two
| chains, one is mined by 49% hash power, the other is
| mined by 51% hash power, you think the 51% one won't be
| the longer one?
| tboyd47 wrote:
| As I've explained in nearly every comment, one is mined
| by 100% hashpower, the other is mined by 51% hashpower.
| The 49% are still using the other blocks, too.
| simiones wrote:
| This is where your mistake is: they can't be using the
| other blocks as well, because they are erasing their own
| (uncensored) transactions by doing so.
|
| Let's say that MiningPoolA controls 51% of hashpower, and
| MiningPoolB controls 49%. MiningPoolA is refusing to mine
| transactions from/to some wallet W. Time
| T1: MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W)
| MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) still
| in progress Any client will accept the chain
| with Block1 (no transactions from/to W) Time
| T2 - if MiningPoolB tries to compete MiningPoolA:
| OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W)
| MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1'(W receives 1BTC) --
| Block2' (parent=Block1') still in progress
| Any client will accept the chain with Block1 (no
| transactions from/to W), and MiningPoolB will never be
| able to catch up Time T2 - if MiningPoolB
| decides to accept MiningPoolA's chain, but add the
| transaction in the second block:
| MiningPoolA: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2 (no W)
| MiningPoolB: OldChain -- Block1(no W) -- Block2'
| (parent=Block1, adds transaction W receives 1BTC) still
| in progress Any client will accept the
| chain with Block1 (no transactions from/to W), and
| MiningPoolB will never be able to catch up
|
| If a mining pool had 51+% of hashpower, they would always
| be mining the longest chain, no one would be able to
| compete with them and publish another block (in
| principle, at least; in practice, since mining is not
| entirely deterministic, someone else will occasionally
| win the lottery and propose a new block faster).
| lupire wrote:
| It's a block _chain_ , not a block _bag_.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| It would depend on how close the attack is to 51/49%. If
| it's close, the 49% chain should be able to keep ahead,
| making the attack take a long time and thus be very
| expensive... but there would be constant block
| reorganisations.
|
| The 51% chain is mined with 51% of the total mining
| power, while the 49% chain will contain 100% of the
| mining power (as the 49% miners are more than happy to
| build off the 51% chain, while the 51% miners will only
| building off the chain without the censored
| transactions).
|
| They are correct in asserting that a 51% attack to censor
| transaction is largely just a nuisance to the users and
| that all transactions should eventually end up on the
| longest chain (the 49%).
| simiones wrote:
| Any block you are working on has a reference to the
| latest block in the network. So, every miner starts from
| scratch once a new block is added - the 49% pool doesn't
| have any advantage compared to the 51% pool.
|
| Each miner takes a bunch of transactions and chooses a
| previous block B1 to build on, then starts hashing. If
| some other minerB advertises a new block B2 based on B1
| that includes different transactions before minerA, then
| minerA can throw away all the work it did, and start from
| scratch on B3 based on B2. But minerB will probably
| already be working on its own B3 - and has every chance
| to win again.
| remram wrote:
| If the 49% mine a block, the 51% can ignore it and will
| eventually surpass the 49%'s chain's length long term, no
| matter how lucky they are short-term.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| The 51% can ignore the 49%'s blocks, but there is no way
| the 51% can force the 49% to ignore THEIR blocks.
|
| The only way 51% of miners can fork the blockchain and
| actually overtake the other 49% with more restrictive
| rules is if they have a hidden nuclear reactor dedicated
| to mining Bitcoin that produces hashpower equal or more
| than 49% of the network and they flip it on at the moment
| they fork.
|
| Again, it doesn't matter how many people are convinced a
| 51% attack is possible on Bitcoin. It's never even been
| tried once. So the burden of proof is on you all. I'm
| just trying to help explain why this concept has never
| been proven.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > The 51% can ignore the 49%'s blocks, but there is no
| way the 51% can force the 49% to ignore THEIR blocks.
|
| If the 51% can ignore the blocks from the 49%, then why
| does it matter what the 49% is doing?
|
| Occasionally the 49% will be able to mine a block and
| temporarily create the longest chain, but the 51% can
| always just ignore that block and continue mining off of
| the one before it - eventually their chain will be the
| longest and the block(s) from the 49% will be lost.
|
| Really this isn't theoretical, it happens all the time by
| accident when two blocks get mined off of the same
| previous block. When that happens one of the two blocks
| gets lost, and the only difference with this scenario is
| that the 51% have enough hash power to ensure that their
| blocks are the ones that always (eventually) win and the
| 49% blocks are always lost.
| samkon wrote:
| Except that blocks are not "finalized", like you're
| imagining. With 51% of mining power, I can mine faster
| than the rest of the network, for an arbitrary number of
| blocks. The 51% attacker will have the longest chain for
| as long as they keep mining their chain because they're
| chain will always (eventually) be the longest one.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| 51% < 100%
|
| The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks in
| their work. There is no way 51% of miners can stay ahead
| of the combined hashpower of the entire Bitcoin mining
| population.
| [deleted]
| cesarb wrote:
| > The other 49% are still incorporating the 51%'s blocks
| in their work.
|
| It's not that simple. That block from the 49% will be
| ignored by the 51% (since it contains "banned"
| transactions), which will continue the chain on the
| previous block (the "51% chain". Now the 49% has two
| options. If they continue to build the chain on top of
| that 49% block (the "49% chain"), after a while the 51%
| chain will be longer (because that side has the most hash
| power). The other option is to build again on top of the
| 51% chain, as you suggested (and AFAIK that's what
| unmodified Bitcoin software will do after a while); but
| to do that, they have to _discard_ that block they had
| included earlier (since it 's not in the 51% chain).
|
| That is: yes, the 49% _can_ include "banned"
| transactions, but that inclusion will be undone later.
| They can include these transactions again, but that
| inclusion will be undone again. They can never get far
| enough for these blocks with the "banned" transactions to
| be permanent.
|
| > Again, a 51% attack has never even been attempted on
| the Bitcoin network despite huge potential monetary
| upside if it succeeds.
|
| First, this is not the "traditional" 51% attack, which
| involves mining an alternative longer chain _in secret_.
| Second, the most a 51% attack can do is double spend
| coins (or prevent them from being spent); converting that
| into real money requires spending the coin twice (for
| instance, sending coins to an exchange, withdrawing the
| resulting money, and then undoing the sending to the
| exchange so the attacker keeps the coins), and the
| monetary upside isn 't that big in most scenarios. Third,
| the cost for doing that is not as small as you're
| thinking (start with the cost to obtain enough miners to
| have 51% of the hash power), which is why it hasn't AFAIK
| been attempted on Bitcoin (but AFAIK, it has been
| attempted on less popular networks which have small total
| hash power). And if you fail the attack, you have wasted
| all that cost.
| stale2002 wrote:
| You have this wrong.
|
| As soon as the chain diverges, they are seperate chains.
|
| Yes, if you have a minority of the hashpower, you can
| hardfork yourself off the main chain, and continue to
| follow your smaller chain, regardless.
|
| But you don't get a longer chain than the main one. So
| you'd continuously be behind, and would not get the work
| of the main chain, and likely most exchanges would not
| accept your smaller fork coin, and you would end up like
| bitcoin cash.
| redox99 wrote:
| Not true. If 51% of bitcoin miners are malicious they can
| reorg as often as they'd like, so your transaction will
| never be included.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash
|
| This only proves that ether is already too centralized.
|
| FWIW. I used to mine eth on a small scale so I am obviously
| biased.
| redox99 wrote:
| That doesn't prove anything. You can solo mine with a
| single GPU and choose to censor whoever you want. Any
| miner no matter how small can censor their own blocks.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| What you say is true in the same way like saying that
| taking a cup of water out of the ocean lowers the ocean
| level a little. It is true, but it is not significant.
| The moment the mining is moved to mostly non-solo miners
| ( and even now non-solo miners seem to vastly outnumber
| in sheer mining power established solo miners ).
|
| Basically, concentration of power means that eth will
| quickly become everything the banks are.. only worse (
| because with banks you at least have some regulation to
| back you up ):P
| lesuorac wrote:
| Isn't eth's power already concentrated more than banks
| are?
|
| Like 4 pools control 51% of the hashrate so they already
| can easily bully solo-miners.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| You appear to have contradicted yourself?
|
| >So some people may choose to not include some transactions
| (Ethermine is already doing this on PoW with Tornado Cash).
| But there is no mechanism that slashes your staked coins
| because the other validators didn't like what transactions
| you included.
|
| >PoS is in fact even more resistant because in PoS you can
| kick out the malicious validators by doing a social fork
| that slashes their stake.
|
| If a group of validators don't agree with your particular
| arrangement of transactions in the block, they can engineer
| a "social fork" that slashes your stake.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| What I think he means is that there is no in-protocol
| mechanism for slashing a censoring validator.
|
| But you can reach a social consensus (i.e. outside the
| protocol) and decide to slash the censors. At that point
| there would be effectively two different chains, the
| censored one and an uncensored one. The worth of each
| chain would be decided by market dynamics.
| 735409264082 wrote:
| > If a group of validators don't agree with your
| particular arrangement of transactions in the block, they
| can engineer a "social fork" that slashes your stake.
|
| Why would I want to be on their fork? They can have their
| censored fork, but they can't do anything to anymore who
| doesn't want to be a part of it.
| redox99 wrote:
| Social fork here means running some other software
| basically. Imagine Vitalik saying "Ok, since coinbase is
| being evil, let's all move to a new Ethereum-without-cb
| that is a copy of Ethereum but their ETH is removed. To
| do so download the following software that follows a new
| Ethereum-without-cb chain instead of the Ethereum chain.
| And if enough people agree, we'll probably just call that
| just Ethereum (like the original Ethereum is now called
| Ethereum classic, and the current Ethereum is actually
| forked).
| sph wrote:
| How is this a good thing, that a "charismatic leader" can
| censor transactions?
|
| It's absolutely terrible. Wasn't the goal to create
| digital money no one can control? I might as well use the
| US dollar then.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| No 'they dont take your coins/stake'. That is just plain
| false.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Already happening - the biggest miner refused to include
| Tornado Cash transactions in the mining pool.
|
| Stick a fork in it. Ethereum is done.
|
| With that degree of centralization, might as well just run a
| database and call it a day.
| rmujica wrote:
| AFAIK in any network (including Bitcoin), any miner can
| select any transaction in the mempool.
|
| There will always be a miner (or validator in PoS) that
| will be willing to take Tornado Cash fees.
| sph wrote:
| A miner can choose whatever fork they want, but if the
| other clients don't accept it it's effectively useless.
|
| There is only one Bitcoin, and it's basically the chain
| the most clients are following. If you decide to follow
| another chain, you have created a new "coin", but Bitcoin
| is unaffected.
| samkon wrote:
| Except that these transactions do eventually go through.
| It's a relatively soft form of censorship - and doesn't
| actually achieve the goal of preventing the transactions.
|
| IMO - this behavior is a blip. As soon as it becomes clear
| that "censorship" isn't effective, it will become less
| popular for validators to do it at all.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| some salty crypto tribalists ITT, I expected better of you
| HN.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Waiting you run a big central database as Ethereum with the
| same marketcap.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Why should the marketcap be of any concern to me?
|
| Is that how you evaluate technologies? By their
| marketcap?
| exo762 wrote:
| Since blockchains are specifically built with idea of
| censorship resistance in mind, and Ethermine not including
| TC transactions can't actually prevent other miners from
| including them... I'm struggling to understand the point
| you are trying to make.
|
| Are you talking about lack of ideological purity of
| Ethermine?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| > lack of ideological purity of Ethermine?
|
| Yes, and the fact that everyone in the Ethereum community
| has largely glossed this over in their enthusiasm for the
| "merge" and what it will do the price of their assets.
|
| Cryptocurrencies that embrace the centralization and
| censorship of fiat currencies are completely unnecessary
| and have no real utility. Tornado Cash and Ethermine
| should have been a line in the sand, a hard boundary for
| what's acceptable and what's not.
|
| But the fact that no one even cares tells me that the
| community will be happy to accept even more censorship as
| long as their bags keep going up. Pathetic, really.
| miloignis wrote:
| Apologies if I get this incorrect, I'm an amateur, but I have
| read about the design - the slashers will likely be few and
| centralized, but that's not disastrous because the slashers
| must provide proof of wrong doing to cause someone's ETH to get
| "slashed". That is, they're likely to be centralized (though
| they don't have to be! I believe anyone can be one) but they
| have to prove to everyone that something should be slashed in
| order to do so, so you don't have to trust the centralized
| part. Does that make sense?
| codegladiator wrote:
| Sounds like the police.
|
| Also do they prove before or after slashing?
| rictic wrote:
| Prove in a machine legible sense, picture a transaction
| like: "here are two contradictory blocks validated by
| validator ABC, including ABC's signature, therefore ABC's
| stake is slashed". (at least, that's how it worked last
| time I looked into it)
| redox99 wrote:
| So it works like this:
|
| - If you detect some wrongdoing, like somebody attesting
| twice, you can get a reward for whistleblowing (free money!)
|
| - However to claim this reward, you have to include it in a
| block. Therefore if everybody is aware of this wrongdoing,
| the next block will get the rewards for
| slashing/whistleblowing.
|
| - Therefore it's economically advantageous to keep this info
| to yourself, until you get to propose a block, and only then
| slash and get the rewards.
|
| - There are also what are called altruistic whistleblowers,
| that as soon as they find wrongdoing, they'll broadcast it
| (instead of keeping it to themselves) so next block proposer
| will slash the wrongdoer. These kind of whistleblowers will
| most likely be run by the Ethereum Foundation
|
| - In practice even if there were no altruistic
| whistleblowers, it wouldn't really matter because the same
| software that validators run can also detect wrongdoing, so
| in practice even with no altruistic whistleblowers, the next
| block is almost guaranteed to slash the wrongdoer anyway
| (free money!).
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > they have to prove to everyone that something should be
| slashed in order to do so
|
| Who is everyone? Because obviously it can't include the
| people who just colluded to deceive the network.
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| Wouldn't it be a percentage of the people? So > 51%?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| But you already have 51% of people lying for their own
| benefit in this scenario.
| pkulak wrote:
| Wait, I'm confused. Why exactly is this low-effort FUD post
| pinned to the top?
| seydor wrote:
| tangentially, how can one profit from ETH becoming more
| centralized?
| drawingthesun wrote:
| Not sure how Ethereum does it, but on Tezos any node can submit
| proof another node has misbehaved and be awarded a certain
| amount of the misbehaving nodes deposit.
|
| All of this works via code and no human intervention is needed.
|
| I assume Ethereum has something similar, as there isn't much
| gain in restricting those who are allowed to submit a proof
| that a node/validator is up to no good.
| drcode wrote:
| Totally wrong. Anybody has the ability to declare "the people
| with stakes did not validate correctly"
|
| In this context, what it means is that a person posted
| conflicting validation messages on different parts of the
| network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such
| conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a
| reward, and the offending validator gets slashed.
|
| (There are also other ways you can get slashed, read the POS
| documentation if you want to learn the details) All methods of
| slashing are fully decentralized.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I should point out that because Ethereum is a dark forest[0],
| slashers will collapse to a subset of stakers. More
| specifically, anyone who is _not_ a staker is at the mercy of
| the mempool[1] to broadcast their slashing transaction and at
| the mercy of other stakers to correctly record it. There is
| no economic incentive to do so, and no way to constrain the
| software such that stakers cannot manipulate the slashing
| message to take the payout for themselves. And since regular
| users who slash _don 't get rewarded for it_, there is less
| incentive to actually bother watching the watchmen.
|
| [0] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-
| forest
|
| [1] No clue if this has a different name in Ethereum
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I feel like I'm going insane you're literally just quoting
| Scifi bull shit. This is money we're talking about.
| dannyw wrote:
| This isn't exactly correct:
|
| 1. Every full node is part of this dark forest, maintains
| its own mempool, and gossips the mempool to others. You do
| not have to be a validator or miner to run a full node;
| just run an Ethereum client.
|
| 2. There are indirect economic incentives to 'watch the
| watchmen': a slashable staking violation that doesn't get
| slashed breaks the Ethereum security model, and is expected
| to be an extremely rare event (if it ever happens). With a
| network that has a market cap in the hundreds of billions;
| someone is watching and it only takes one to sound the
| horn.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Every full node can still manipulate the transaction to
| make it look like _they_ are slashing rather than the
| person who originally reported the fraud. This is also a
| "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive.
|
| I do agree that there probably will be altruistic
| validators in some cases, but the economic incentives
| work against them. The history of cryptocurrency has
| trended towards doing the minimum amount of validation
| work that satisfies network consensus[0]. It's entirely
| possible that the market just shrugs its shoulders and
| says that a violation of the Ethereum security model just
| isn't actually that bad. Consider the relative lack of
| concern over MEV[1] and automated arbitrage bots, and the
| fact that the valuation of the coin is entirely
| unconnected to any security issues it may or may not
| have. It may just wind up being the case that the network
| just... tolerates a handful of people getting screwed.
|
| [0] For example, Bitcoin miners accept new blocks by
| literally joining other mining pools purely to steal
| their previous block hash. It's significantly faster than
| waiting for a full 4MB block to get P2P gossiped around
| the world, but the downside is that you can't actually
| validate any of the data in that block. This effectively
| means that miners _aren 't full nodes anymore_, and the
| result has been _several_ long chainsplits and reorgs
| whenever a softfork occurs.
|
| [1] Miner Extractable Value
| xur17 wrote:
| > Every full node can still manipulate the transaction to
| make it look like they are slashing rather than the
| person who originally reported the fraud. This is also a
| "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive.
|
| Following this logic, stakers themselves are incentivized
| to just run the software to submit a slashing tx
| themselves (free money), at which point just having
| stakers running slashing software is sufficient. And if
| they aren't someone else will submit it to the mempool.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| What if they then show bogus evidence
| Zetaphor wrote:
| This would require forging the existence of an invalid
| block signed with the key of the validator you're claiming
| should be slashed, which is not possible
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| There's no such thing as bogus evidence. Block signatures
| are validated cryptographically
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| But all evidence needs to be voted on. Even it's just a
| divine truth bool, the network still needs to vote on a
| consensus of whether or not it says TRUE.
|
| edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M. You
| say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it wasn't
| a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get x% of
| validators to agree with you.
|
| As far as I can tell, you cannot get slashed for your
| vote on a slash. So lying is ok.
| DennisP wrote:
| > submit a slasher report that says it wasn't a valid
| transaction...offer enough money to get x% of validators
| to agree
|
| That's not how this works at all.
|
| Slashing happens under a very specific circumstance: a
| staker submits contradictory messages. Those
| circumstances are testable with built-in code that's part
| of the protocol. To get someone slashed, you send a
| transaction including their contradictory signed
| messages. When your transaction is included in a block,
| the staker gets slashed by the protocol rules hardcoded
| in all the consensus clients.
|
| The only other thing that can cause a staker to lose
| stake is the "inactivity leak," where an active staking
| node doesn't send the messages they're supposed to send.
| That's completely automatic.
| exo762 wrote:
| I'm sorry. There seems to be a fundamental
| misunderstanding of what slashing is. Slashing is just a
| tx. It is included (or not) just as any other tx. There
| is no magical dance, there is no voting process.
|
| You are basically stating that slashing is impossible in
| certain conditions because network is not censorship
| resistant.
|
| There is one avenue where network can censor. It is a 51%
| coalition that orphans blocks that contains slashing
| txes. This coalition is dealt with UASF (user activated
| soft fork), since this type of behavior goes against core
| principals of the network and convincing people to do it
| will be really easy.
| Zamicol wrote:
| If a network "votes down" cryptographic proof, that
| itself becomes cryptographic proof of dishonesty.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| And... so what? Is there a mechanism to punish validators
| for not being honest on slasher votes?
| 735409264082 wrote:
| You don't recognise their actions and let them fork of
| into a useless chain. This happens automatically, just as
| when a miner would mine an invalid block.
| spicybright wrote:
| It's a shame you're being downvoted as your post has
| substance. This is a genuine issue worth discussing.
|
| Validators are run by people who fully control if a
| transaction is valid or not. You either need a ton of
| GPUs (currently) or a ton of money to have tangible
| influence over translations.
|
| This isn't even a hypothetical, there's a few massive
| wallets that are hoarding a ton of eth that will be given
| more power from the POS transition.
|
| We're relying on "the goodness of their hearts" validator
| operators and crossing our fingers validators run the
| same software with the same rules.
|
| Even if you call out sketchy transactions that are close
| to 50/50 consensus, nothing will happen unless a ton of
| people have a ton of money on the line like the DAO
| split.
|
| We need more discussion on how incentives of each party
| should be to give the most stable network possible.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| > there's a few massive wallets that are hoarding a ton
| of eth that will be given more power from the POS
| transition
|
| It's not as if they're automatically given more power.
| Such hoards of ETH would need to be deposited in units of
| 32 ETH to activate unique validators. You could have a
| large number of validators that are actually a single
| computer program participating in the Beacon chain, but
| that doesn't make too much difference.
|
| At the bottom layer, we're talking about the application
| of an open p2p protocol on the Internet. People can and
| will analyze the traffic for that protocol, and it will
| be possible to identify rough shapes and sizes of players
| in the network. And such analyses won't be long in coming
| to public blog posts, etc. following the Merge.
|
| If decentralization in the network seems at risk, there
| will be efforts to remedy the situation. Whether they can
| succeed is another question.
| 735409264082 wrote:
| > edit: for an example. you get hacked and lose $100M.
| You say fuck it, submit a slasher report that says it
| wasn't a valid transaction. you offer enough money to get
| x% of validators to agree with you.
|
| That's not what slashing is supposed to be used for, but
| if that situation happened again, Ethereum would fork
| again, just as last time when Ethereum classic didn't
| agree to freeze the Ether from the DAO hack. PoS makes it
| a little easier to fork (which is good imo), but doesn't
| change anything fundamental. Everyone still needs to be
| in complete agreement about the rules and history for
| Ethereum to work.
| leppr wrote:
| Then the software will automatically discard the evidence.
|
| I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and
| read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you
| to.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's a simple question. No need for ad hom.
| Karunamon wrote:
| What GP posted is not an ad hom; they did not argue for
| or against anything, and even if they did it wasn't based
| on the characteristics of the speaker.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment
| section and read the introductory articles people
| helpfully linked you to._
| Karunamon wrote:
| Yep, this is what was said. It is not an argument for or
| against any point under discussion.
|
| Ad hominem is "you are wrong because you (fill in the
| blank)". It is not "go read the articles given to you".
|
| "You are wrong because you are an idiot" is ad hominem.
|
| "You are wrong" is denial.
|
| "You are an idiot" is insult.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| "You are spamming the HN comments and didn't read links,
| therefore your question is invalid, because of who asked
| it" is ad hominem.
|
| It's easy enough not to reply. No need to get an attitude
| about it.
| leppr wrote:
| Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the OP
| is not asking this in good faith. Their first comment is
| not in the form of a neutral question, but a prejudiced
| assumption based on a false idea that nothing in the
| linked article could lead one to believe.
|
| _> Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely
| centralized with some extra steps?
|
| > Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only
| reason it works is because there's just a small number of
| validators, which is just going to be the ethereum
| foundation and friends._
|
| I know Cunningham's Law is a valid discussion strategy,
| but the topics of cryptocurrency on HN already tends to
| attract enough flamewars and misinformation as it is.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Yes, this was ad-hominem because it seems obvious the
| OP is not asking this in good faith.
|
| There's nothing here that was done in bad faith and I
| should not need to defend myself for asking a question in
| a tech forum. Assuming I'm not asking in good faith is
| bad faith.
|
| The reason I asked was a description pasted a short while
| ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535409
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535912
|
| Which included this line:
|
| > Slashing is not meant to profitable, and the
| whistleblower reward is quite small. We don't need a
| million slashers, in fact, we could operate with just
| one... expect the Eth Foundation to run them, among other
| large players who can spare the resources.
|
| Which sure sounds like a decentralized process that is
| ultimately just centralized around the ETH foundation at
| the end of the day.
|
| Honestly I've learned a lot from the responses here. And
| I think people who assumed I was doing anything other
| than just asking questions because the idea I was asking
| about offended them are asshole. So yeah. Go pound sand.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The evidence isn't like a Youtube video.
| MR4D wrote:
| Who slashes the Slashers? (with apologies to The Watchmen)
|
| EDIT: Clarification - once a slasher posts the violation, who
| removes the ether?
| drcode wrote:
| To answer "who removes the ether":
|
| The value in a staking account is calculated on the
| blockchain as "amount staked minus slashing penalties", and
| this violation is automatically recorded as a slashing
| penalty, so the answer is "everybody"
| dannyw wrote:
| Every Ethereum client (whether you are a staker or not; you
| can run a full node without staking!) recognises slashing
| transactions, and debits the balance of the misbehaving
| staker in their records.
|
| In other words, the blockchain; in the same way that it's
| not _miners_ / stakers who process transactions on bitcoin
| or ethereum ; miners / stakers only decide _ordering_ but
| everyone who runs an Ethereum client is processing and
| verifying every transaction; the same way your browser
| checks a TLS certificate.
| MR4D wrote:
| So, since the client is debiting the slasher, then THAT
| transaction is an ether transaction on the chain, and it
| gets reviewed just like any other transaction as well?
|
| Thanks for your answer!
| anderspitman wrote:
| As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads
| here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to
| create a technology so complicated that proponents can't
| concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why
| it doesn't.
| codeflo wrote:
| As Tony Hoare already wrote in the 80s: "There are two ways
| of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so
| simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the
| other way is to make it so complicated that there are no
| obvious deficiencies."
| rcxdude wrote:
| To be fair, you'll find the same problem with PoW, except
| people are more confident in their misunderstandings.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I feel like PoS has always had this problem, it will be
| interesting to see how this goes. Certainly PoW has some
| hairy details as well, but the backbone of "you can only run
| computations so fast" makes it simpler to reason about.
|
| The question being asked is also a harder one to answer than
| just explaining PoS. Similar to a PoW scheme where only one
| or two people control all of the hashing power, it could be
| decentralized in theory but not actually in practice, and it
| doesn't seem like there are any super hard numbers on this
| aspect.
| AgentME wrote:
| The previous post is completely making up the concept of
| slashers being an exclusive role. People should not be coming
| to any conclusions from a thread that starts off so wildly
| disconnected from reality.
| serverholic wrote:
| Please explain the tcp/ip protocol or the paxos algorithm
| concisely.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Aren't there loads of things where you can't concisely
| explain how it works? Fundamentally this is a hard problem,
| we shouldn't be too surprised if the solution does not fit in
| a hackernews comment. (Especially when so many people on this
| site seem desperate to misunderstand anything related to
| cryptocurrencies).
| rglullis wrote:
| > I am talking about the class of people with the ability to
| declare that the people with stakes did not validate correctly
| and therefore lose their stakes. My understanding is that this
| is a very small number of people and is mostly just the
| ethereum foundation.
|
| There is no such thing as "separate slashers", and there is no
| such thing as distinct classes of validators. Whoever told you
| that is spreading baseless FUD.
| Baopab wrote:
| [deleted]
| drog wrote:
| There is no designated class of slashers.
|
| Slashing is part of the protocol and to slash somebody you have
| to prove it to the protocol that they broke rules of slashing.
| One of the rules is that you can't create two different blocks
| in the same slot (block number) i.e. you can't deliberately
| fork.
|
| There is a designated place in the block of the beacon chain
| where you can put signatures of the different blocks in the
| same slot as a proof and nodes will slash validator that
| produced that signatures (update his balance). Anyone can find
| these signatures, and block proposers of the new blocks will
| include them into the chain.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| You know this will be hacked right? 2 layers of jargon,
| billion dollars? It'll be a "hack"
| 3np wrote:
| Thank you. Given all the other radical changes in PoS plans
| that have slipped by during the years, that one threw me off
| (:
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| I am one of the maintainers of the Go implementation of
| Ethereum proof-of-stake, called Prysm
| (github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and also implemented a
| "slasher" in Go that can be used to slash malicious
| validators. Anyone can run a slasher and you don't need to
| have 32 ETH to do so. As long as your slasher software can
| prove that a validator committed a slashable offense, you can
| submit this proof to any full node to proceed with slashing
| the malicious actor. It is permissionless, global, and we
| only need a few honest slashers in the world for the system
| to work correctly
| plq wrote:
| By "A few", how much do you mean? Or is that a dynamic
| number? How does it get defined? Who can change it later,
| if it's mutable?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Security is maintained with at least one slasher.
|
| And there is no upper limit on the number of slashers.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| In fact, here are the instructions anyone can use to run a
| slasher at home https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-
| usage/slasher
| HenriTEL wrote:
| You can run the slasher this way but won't get the
| associated reward.
| usrusrusrusr wrote:
| >There is no designated class of slashers.
|
| Not true. In your defence, I also only learned this today.
|
| https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
| https://lighthouse-book.sigmaprime.io/slasher.html
| 735409264082 wrote:
| Your links contradicts your statement. It's absolutely true
| that there is no designated class of slashers. Who do you
| think designates slashers?
|
| Anyone can be a slasher, just as anyone can be a staker (as
| long as you have 32 Ether).
| darawk wrote:
| Your links do not say that there is a designated class of
| slashers. They just say that it is resource intensive
| relative to its rewards, so not everyone will want to be
| one. Anyone who chooses to, however, can be one.
| drog wrote:
| I know about that but thanks for your comment - I'll
| clarify what I mean.
|
| It's just the specifics of how this works - slashing is
| part of the protocol in the sense that I described: when
| you are chosen to create a new block and you have proof
| that someone violated the rules then you include this proof
| in your proposed block and update balance. Any validator
| can do it including the smallest of home stakers.
|
| More details here. https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-
| spec/blob/master/phase...
|
| Here we have slashing fields in the block body where you
| insert your proofs of slashable offense. There are
| functions with a "slash" in the name that describes precise
| state transition.
|
| The hard part of slashing is finding these proofs because
| you have to do more work than necessary to detect slashing
| and produce proofs - that's what this software does. It's
| more expensive to run a slasher but you need only one and
| it does not matter who runs it, anyone can run it. The link
| that you sent says that this slasher broadcasts proofs by
| default - that way anyone can include it.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Slashing is only detrimental to the bad actor if the fork
| fails. If the fork succeeds, then there is no penalty for
| a malicious fork.
|
| This is why they are limiting the number of validators.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| I think it will become centralized, but not in the way that you
| think. We're likely to see base-layer transaction censorship,
| since nodes are no longer allowed to disagree with each other
| (or they'll be slashed), and far more than 33% of staked value
| is in the USA (and subject to OFAC compliance).
|
| I explained in more detail here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532604
| cesarb wrote:
| There's a third option you didn't mention in your comment:
| instead of signing the block with these banned transactions
| (option 1), or signing an alternate block with other
| transactions (option 2), the node could pretend to be offline
| for that block (option 3). Instead of being slashed, the node
| would then be subject only to the much smaller inactivity
| leak for these blocks.
|
| The only question then is how indirect these sanctions can
| be. The node might not be allowed to validate a block with
| banned transactions, but what about the _next_ block, which
| does not include these blocked transactions, only a pointer
| to a block with these banned transactions? What about the
| _second next_ block, which has only a pointer to a block with
| a pointer to a block with these banned transactions? How many
| blocks until the link is tenuous enough that the validators
| under USA jurisdiction could validate again without fear?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that Ethereum is nothing but a
| network of computers passing messages to each other. Those
| messages are considered speech from a Constitutional
| perspective. Same as you sending a text message to your
| friend. Therefore normal free speech protections almost
| certainly apply, and most relevantly _the Brandenburg test_
| for imminent lawless action.
|
| Suppose Tony texts Paulie and tells him to wack a guy.
| That's illegal, unprotected speech, because it directly
| leads to imminent lawless action. Similarly the wallet
| owner who signs and broadcasts an Ethereum transaction to
| send money to North Korea would bass the Brandenburg test
| because it obviously leads to imminent lawless action.
|
| The validator who builds the block that includes an illegal
| transaction is an interesting question. On the one hand by
| building the block, one could argue that they're
| instrumental in putting carrying out the illegal
| transaction. OTOH one might argue that if the transaction
| is in the network (and priced appropriately) it almost
| certainly will get included on-chain eventually. Therefore
| the validator might argue that it's activity doesn't create
| any imminent lawless activity, because the transaction
| being in the mempool is already fait accompli. The
| validator is more like the reporter writing about a crime
| in the newspaper.
|
| But what I'm nearly certain of is that building on top of a
| chain with a previously finalized illegal transaction is
| okay. It's certainly not illegal to talk about a crime
| that's already happened. The further a block gets away from
| the initial block, then the less imminent the illegal
| action becomes. SCOTUS has historically held a very high
| standard for Brandenburg, which is why it's not even
| illegal to advocate for genocide or the violent overthrow
| of the American government.
| codeflo wrote:
| > Those messages are considered speech from a
| Constitutional perspective.
|
| I have no reason to doubt that your credentials as a
| constitutional lawyer are impeccable.
|
| > The further a block gets away from the initial block,
| then the less imminent the illegal action becomes.
|
| This very plausible legal theory inspires incredible
| confidence.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Who gets to decide if something should be slashed
| jsheard wrote:
| It's determined by the majority of validators. There's two
| ways this can go - either the majority of validators
| enforce OFAC sanctions, effectively giving OFAC authority
| over the entire Ethereum network since validators who go
| against it will be slashed, or the majority of validators
| don't enforce sanctions, in which case validators with any
| presence in the US must put themselves in legal jeopardy to
| avoid getting slashed.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| So if I acquire 51% of validation power, and you catch me
| cheating, the person who gets to decide if I get punished
| is me?
| jsheard wrote:
| Technically yes, but I think the idea is that it would be
| incredibly expensive and unproductive to pull off such an
| attack. You'd first have to acquire billions of dollars
| worth of Ethereum, and then launching that attack would
| torpedo any trust in the network and send the value of
| Ethereum to zero, lighting your billions of dollars on
| fire. The theory is that it's too expensive to
| realistically do for the lulz or out of spite, and it
| wouldn't make economic sense to do it for profit.
|
| As for how that theory will interact with reality, who
| knows.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| Or you could be a government with billions staked in your
| jurisdiction, and bureaucratic indifference to the
| outcome of your regulatory actions.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| A government spending billions of taxpayer dollars on an
| attack which can be reversed in an afternoon with a new
| software update is more likely to be an existential
| threat to that government than to Ethereum.
|
| The sort of software update I'm imagining is one which
| just zeroes the holdings of the government wallet(s), and
| continues the chain from just before they launched their
| attack.
| Geee wrote:
| It is not "incredibly expensive". Top 4 exchanges already
| hold > 50% of stake. Users give away their coins for
| free. For users, it's more expensive to run their own
| validator nodes than staking on a centralized service.
| lupire wrote:
| Exchanges make money from transactions. If they destroy
| the network for their users, they lose all their cash
| flow.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| So what happens if I instead submit a billion slasher
| reports that claim the eth foundation nodes have all
| lied, none of which contain valid evidence, and continue
| to do so every second. If there's no gatekeeper for these
| reports, then they're all valid. And they still need to
| be voted on, right?
| Zetaphor wrote:
| Nothing, nothing happens. You can't just lie about
| slashing, the term "proof" is being used in the
| computational sense.
|
| The submission you're describing requires a cryptographic
| proof of that validator submitting two or more existing
| invalid blocks that they signed. You can't just falsify
| that without their private keys, so what you're
| suggesting is not possible.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Sorry that's not correct. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582316
| [deleted]
| cypress66 wrote:
| It's baked into the protocol. A single validator can
| cryptographically prove that some other validator did
| something not allowed, and generate a special transaction
| that slashes that validator and gives you some ETH as a
| reward.
|
| A common misconception here is that slashing happens based
| on what transactions you include or not. False. Slashing
| happens because of things such as proposing or attesting
| twice.
| davidgerard wrote:
| > Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely
| centralized with some extra steps?
|
| no, that's right. It's now a chain where you make money (fresh
| coins) by a procedure controlled by the Ethereum Foundation.
|
| What happens if something goes fatally wrong? The EF will step
| in and fix it.
|
| This has (for a few years now) raised serious questions as to
| whether the new network will constitute an offering of
| securities - EF sets rules to run a validator and get paid in
| ETH.
| remram wrote:
| I was always wondering about this. From the start it seemed
| like "blockchain" could be easily replaced by a few trusted
| validators run by independent organizations, the same way
| certificate transparency logs are operated, for example. The
| value in Bitcoin and proof-of-work was that everyone could
| contribute to the security of the log.
|
| As soon as mining pools appeared, and now even more with proof-
| of-stake, we are back with a few parties being the trusted
| validators. The fact that they get their powers from on-chain
| tokens rather than community decision... is it really a good
| thing?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Yes it is incorrect.
|
| https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png
|
| Ethereum will be more decentralized after proof of stake. No
| longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and insider
| access to gpu or asic manufacturers.
| luma wrote:
| Instead you just need a massive amount of eth
| Zamicol wrote:
| Wouldn't those with ownership in a system be best trusted
| with the self-interest of such a system? That seems to be
| the best alignment of incentives.
| luma wrote:
| Sure, and Regular Money is best governed by billionaires.
| Incentives line up nicely if you're already rich.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have
| the system you describe with fiat currency and
| traditional banks.
| landemva wrote:
| There are additional goals including in part censorship
| resistance and it can't be seized without the keys.
| 735409264082 wrote:
| 32 Ether or mining equipment is nothing compared to what
| you need to have any real influence over fiat money.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| This is not the question I am asking. You can have many
| people putting up their 32 ETH. Sure that's "decentralized".
|
| But what if most of the stakers collude to double spend
| tokens? My understanding is that there is an additional layer
| of validators that have the power to force them to give up
| their stake as a penalty. Hence "proof of stake". And that
| there are very few validators. And it's really just the
| ethereum foundation.
| chippiewill wrote:
| Coordinating and attempting an attack is seriously
| expensive in proof of stake if something goes wrong due to
| the slashing
| zaptrem wrote:
| You're mistaken, validators and stakers are one and the
| same. A 51% attack becomes unbelievably more expensive in a
| proof of stake system, especially because at the end of it
| all of your money is burned (whereas with POW you get to
| keep the GPUs unless they change the algo).
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| stakers/validators vs. slashers
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| There is no defined role called a "slasher". There are
| randomly-decided committees that are regularly updated as
| part of Ethereum PoS consensus that play different roles.
| Your validator could be in any one of those roles (or in
| a pending state) at any time.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an
| optional, expensive seeming process.
|
| e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-
| usage/slasher
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| You're misunderstanding. Enabling the "slasher feature"
| on your validators is an option that any validator can
| do, not something that only "approved" validators can do.
|
| There's no one gate keeping your ability to become a
| slasher as long as you run a validator, and there's no
| centralized entity deciding whether or not to slash
| someone's stake.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Running a slasher is not meant to be profitable.
| Slashing is meant to be rare and whistleblower rewards
| are purposefully low. Running a slasher is meant to be an
| altruistic action, and as stated, only a single, honest,
| properly functioning slasher needs to be active in the
| network to catch slashable offenses.
|
| Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic
| enforcement in a network built around economic
| incentives. What if the altruistic slashers are simply
| paid money to turn off their nodes?
| exo762 wrote:
| How can you detect that people are NOT running slasher
| nodes?
|
| This model assumes that 1/n is honest. This is almost as
| safe as it gets.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Depends how big "n" is. It's certainly not the number of
| ETH users. Running a slasher currently requires 1TB of
| SSD among other things[1]. I assume these requirements
| will grow with the popularity of ETH? If so, in a world
| where 100TB of SSD space is required the number of
| individuals who can run slashers drops rapidly. In the
| extreme case, aren't we looking at a small(er) number of
| well-funded organizations doing all the slashing?
|
| [1] https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
|
| > However, home stakers are advised not to run a slasher
| on personal hardware, as it is a tremendously resource-
| hungry process. Slasher is very heavy on database access
| and disk usage, and the slasher.db will quickly grow to
| 1TB or more when running on mainnet.
| NavinF wrote:
| A 1TB SSD is like $50. I put one in a small USB-C M.2
| case and use it as a flash drive.
|
| I'm pretty sure hardware costs will always be a rounding
| error compared to the $50k that "home stakers" need if
| they want to run their own validator.
| [deleted]
| overtonwhy wrote:
| What about a DDoS attack?
| mypastself wrote:
| What happens if the majority of infrastructure is
| provided by a small number of cloud computing services?
| An attacker with access to those services needn't stake
| their own funds, and an "attack" might simply entail
| complying with local laws.
| lupire wrote:
| The 51% is staked coins, not computers.
| [deleted]
| bowsamic wrote:
| What if most of the miners collude to double spend tokens?
| The problem is the same.
|
| The difference is that proof of work automatically tends to
| centralisation due to its economy of scale: it's cheaper to
| add one more miner to your pool if you already have a big
| mining operation, but staking 1 eth is always staking 1
| eth.
|
| Both PoS and PoW have the problem where you can buy out the
| majority if you have the power to do so.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The problem is not the same. In proof of work, it just
| breaks and you can double spend. In this proof of stake
| setup, you can double spend, but then the ethereum
| foundation can punish you with its slashers.
| howinteresting wrote:
| If most of the miners collude like that than ETH will
| lose most of its value. The game theoretic aspect of PoS
| is an important part of its overall security.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is only true if ETH remains a niche security and not
| a widespread currency. A large population won't drop a
| commonly used currency because of ideological concerns
| like miner collusion. Indeed, they'll have massive
| incentive to keep using it since their saving may be
| denominated in it.
| camjw wrote:
| I don't understand this comment: "but staking 1eth is
| always staking 1eth".
|
| If I have 100 GPUs and I buy one more can't I turn around
| and say "But buying one more GPU is just buying one more
| GPU"? Even if your point is that electricity bills are
| lower per additional GPU, surely humans discount the
| value of incremental money after some point so for those
| with lots of eth incremental eth isn't worth as much?
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's cheaper to run 1 more GPU when you are already
| running 100
|
| It's the same price to add 1 eth when you own 100 eth as
| when you own 1 eth
| camjw wrote:
| Kind of, but doesn't that assume a linear utility
| function for holding eth which I think seems unrealistic?
| Plus, there are costs associated with holding eth (cold
| storage etc) which seem fixed, so its cheaper to securely
| stake 1 additional eth when you're already staking 100eth
| than when you're not running any. Plus fixed costs of
| actually running a staking business (by analogy with a
| mining business).
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yes, the utility function is linear for PoS, and wildly
| non linear for PoW
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-
| mechanisms...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
|
| Start here.
|
| "The threat of a 51% attack still exists on proof-of-stake
| as it does on proof-of-work, but it's even riskier for the
| attackers. A attacker would need 51% of the staked ETH
| (about $15,000,000,000 USD)."
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm pretty much just asking the same question on every
| thread now. How does something get slashed? These
| articles say nothing about it. There are many docs saying
| all you need is 1 honest slasher node. Well, what happens
| if you have a dishonest slasher node?
| pa7x1 wrote:
| There is no separate notion of slasher, every staker is
| potentially a slasher. Slashing evidence can be included
| when you make a block. Doing so is rewarded, so you are
| economically incentivized to report slashable offenses if
| you find them. Blocks are validated and "attested" by
| everyone else. Failing to produce a block that everyone
| else accepts (edit: everyone else meaning at least 2/3
| which is the quorum used) has at best the economic
| opportunity cost of what you could have earned and missed
| on and at worst (if someone else reports a slashable
| offense on your part that is accepted) a slashing penalty
| plus you get kicked out of the validators.
|
| The rest is game theory. Dishonest validators win the
| game being dishonest if they are over 2/3 of the
| validator set. Then they can enforce their bad blocks
| into everyone else. Otherwise they get slashed or suffer
| other kind of penalties (inactivity leak if they manage
| to prevent the network from reaching consensus for a
| while).
|
| So if you manage to bribe or buy 2/3 of the staked ETH
| then you can attack the network. There is of course a
| very significant economic cost to it. More interestingly
| at that point you are strongly aligned with the network
| itself as you represent a huge % of its value so you
| would be attacking yourself in a way. This is a notable
| difference with PoW where miners are not necessarily
| aligned in economic incentives with token-holders or
| users.
| programmarchy wrote:
| The slashing can only occur if the validator can be
| proven to break certain rules e.g. double voting. The
| reports are evaluated by the network.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > The reports are evaluated by the network.
|
| The network which was just shown to be 51% malicious
| actors? And how is it evaluated? What if the slasher is
| dishonest? What if it sends trillions of fake requests?
| drdeca wrote:
| Evaluated in the same way that "does this address have
| enough to send to this much to this other address" is
| evaluated? If it isn't valid, then a block containing it
| isn't valid, and this is a thing which any client can
| automatically check.
|
| What happens if you try to send trillions of invalid
| transactions in any sensible chain?
| Zamicol wrote:
| To whatever node your client is talking to, the invalid
| transactions should not be relayed. This is more of a
| DDOS situation than anything novelly technical. Like all
| computer systems, DDOS is a technical challenge that
| requires careful consideration.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Normally there's a fee to try and send such things to
| prevent such behavior. I haven't seen anything suggesting
| thats the case for slasher reports.
|
| The thing here is that the validators don't need to be
| honest when responding to a slasher report.
| rekoil wrote:
| 51% is possible, but if it happens someone has wasted (at
| current valuations) ~$15B gaining a majority stake in a
| network they are torpedoing. It would be pretty dumb to
| do something like that to your own investment.
| vntok wrote:
| So Elon Musk alone could do it on a whim, for the lolz?
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| What you are referring to is an old problem (arguably now
| solved) called "nothing at stake." Short, bastardized
| answer is that something built into the consensus code
| called "slashing" keeps the validators/shakers from trying
| to stake two versions of a block.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Who gets to run a slasher node and who gets to agree that
| its valid to slash a block?
| immibis wrote:
| I don't know the specific rules for Ethereum, but in
| general PoS systems, anyone can slash. All you have to do
| is submit two different headers for the same block signed
| by the same validator. This proves the validator is
| cheating. The person who submits the proof may get to
| keep some of the validator's slashed money, which is a
| good incentive to run slashing nodes as this can amount
| to thousands of dollars per slash, and a good incentive
| not to double-validate as this can amount to thousands of
| dollars per time you are caught.
|
| Perversely, since double-validation happens rarely, since
| it is expensive, the actual interface for slashing on
| e.g. BSC is not well-documented or user-friendly.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > This proves the validator is cheating.
|
| To whom? Who gets to decide to slash the funds?
|
| I caught you cheating and can prove it. You don't give a
| shit and control 51% of the network. How do you get
| punished?
| tromp wrote:
| You're right that for a slash to be publicly verifiable,
| the cheating evidence has to appear on-chain. So indeed
| there is the question of whether this evidence can be
| censored...
| rglullis wrote:
| If you control 51% of the network (actually, with
| Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the
| validators to control consensus) and people know you are
| malicious, people will abandon the network and you will
| lose your investment because no one is interested in
| participating in a network controlled by a crook.
|
| It's no different from what would happen in PoW. Can you
| please stop with the concern trolling?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > If you control 51% of the network (actually, with
| Ethereum PoS that number is 67%, as you need 2/3 of the
| validators to control consensus) and people know you are
| malicious, people will abandon the network and you will
| lose your investment because no one is interested in
| participating in a network controlled by a crook.
|
| If that 67% is also true of the slasher voting protocol,
| then that means you just need 33% of the network to avoid
| being slashed. Is that wrong?
|
| > Can you please stop with the concern trolling?
|
| Can you please stop trying to claim a moral high ground
| for no reason?
| rglullis wrote:
| > just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is
| that wrong?
|
| Yes, it is wrong.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| How is it wrong? If you need 67% consensus to approve a
| transaction, and slashing is a transaction, then you can
| prevent slashing with 33%. What's incorrect about that
| reasoning?
| rglullis wrote:
| You won't be prevent slashing with 1/3, you will be
| merely delaying the block production each time is is
| proposed. Every time your 1/3 of the nodes attempt
| maliciously delays of production of a valid block, _you_
| will be slashed, and then you won 't have 1/3 of the
| required funds at stake anymore.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| But... you can't be slashed unless a block gets processed
| that supports your slashing, correct?
| rglullis wrote:
| Yes, but what is your point? You will be slashed no
| matter how hard you try to avoid it, unless you have 2/3
| of the validators. The closer you are to 2/3, the faster
| you will be slashed. The system is self-estabilizing.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| There is an inactivity leak that gets triggered if you
| prevent with over 1/3 of your votes from the network
| reaching consensus. Inactive validators start to leak ETH
| from their stake until they become less than 1/3 of the
| total stake and cannot prevent consensus again.
|
| https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/incentives/inactivity
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Does the network recognize a difference between being
| inactive/offline and actively voting no?
| pa7x1 wrote:
| There is no difference as far as I know. The network is
| supposed to finalize blocks that are almost 13 minutes
| old. If it's not able to do that because there is not
| sufficient quorum then it starts the inactivity leak
| phase and the penalties associated.
|
| By the way, there is a bug bounty program. You can earn
| up to 1M USD per critical bug either in the protocol or
| its implementations.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| The people you are discussing this with clearly have no
| idea how the system actually works and are far out of
| their depth as far as considering the ways malicious
| actors interact with it.
| bhaak wrote:
| Social slashing. The honest parts of the community would
| organize and fork you away.
|
| If you were following the current events on Ethereum,
| this question has just arisen in the last weeks when the
| US sanctioned the privacy oriented Tornado Cash contract.
| addaon wrote:
| In a general PoS system like you describe, what prevents
| a bistable situation from emerging? If there is any
| significant level of cheating, then running a slasher is
| profitable, which makes cheating very unprofitable,
| driving it to zero. But in the absence of cheating,
| what's the motivation to develop, maintain, test, and
| operate a slasher node? Isn't this prone to long periods
| of time with negligible cheating where all the slashers
| die out, followed by one big malicious attack that isn't
| caught promptly?
| Zamicol wrote:
| 1. Energy production and 2. specialized chip production
|
| are both centralized, with the later being highly
| centralized. The move to PoS removes both of these
| centralized targets.
| falcolas wrote:
| > No longer do you need massive amounts of electricity and
| insider access to gpu or asic manufacturers.
|
| No, you _just_ need money, 32 eth is only around $50000.
|
| And there's a lot of people with sufficient money to stand up
| multiple validators. And validators can also initiate/vote on
| arbitrary slash requests (which costs them nothing, as I read
| it).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Sounds like an improvement to burning an entire country's
| worth of electricity...
| falcolas wrote:
| There's a tradeoff. We need to acknowledge the tradeoff,
| and be prepared for the folks who just want to watch the
| world burn, and have the money to do so.
| newsclues wrote:
| As a not well off person with a gaming computer with power
| included in my rent, I don't have 50,000$.
|
| Shrinking the number of people with the financial means to
| contribute doesn't seem like it's going to result in
| decentralization.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Right but you can't afford to buy ASICs either so from
| your point of view the situation hasn't really changed.
| The chance of you ever being able to mine an ETH block
| with your gaming PC is negligable.
| Anunayj wrote:
| It should however be noted that Ethereum had a ICO [1] on
| launch, where you could buy ethereum for a particular price.
|
| 9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders".
| (it could however be more [2])
|
| Today it accounts for something like 59% (72m) of total
| supply (~120m). Make what you will of that.
|
| 1. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/initial-coin-offering-
| exp...
|
| 2. https://medium.com/@hasufly/ethereum-presale-dynamics-
| revisi...
| xur17 wrote:
| > 9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders"
|
| > Today it accounts for something like 59% of total supply.
| Make what you will of that.
|
| Can you help me understand what exactly this means?
| Ethereum's supply has grown since the presale, so if
| anything the 9.9% should have gotten smaller since then.
| bhaak wrote:
| OP has provided the right links but either misunderstood
| the text or phrased it very confusingly.
|
| https://messari.io/asset/ethereum/profile/launch-and-
| initial...
|
| Ethereum's crowdsale supply was 72 million ETH. Of that
| 60 million were sold for BTC in the crowdsale. 6 million
| was given to the Ethereum Foundation and 6 million to
| early contributors (overall 20% of what was sold was
| created as a pre-mine).
|
| Now Ethereum's supply is ~122 million, so the miners
| produced 50 millions new ETH.
| Anunayj wrote:
| Oh, I was a bit unclear there. The 9.9% was of the total
| money that was raised in the ICO (60m) and ended up being
| ~5.9m.
|
| The total initial premine was 72m (~59% of today's
| supply).
|
| I think someone more knowledgeable might provide a better
| breakdown of those funds, except that the article(s)
| linked covers it a lot better than my comment.
| flarex wrote:
| It should also be noted in the 7 years since launch that a
| large portion of that 59% would have been sold or lost and
| hence re-distributed to other users on the platform.
| jjulius wrote:
| I have been wondering the same thing about this, too. I'm
| fairly eye-rolly when it comes to crypto and such, so I'd be
| curious to see if this take is accurate or not.
| thebeastie wrote:
| No, the validators are anyone with a stake in the system, not
| just the Ethereum foundation and friends.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Not the people putting up the stake. The people with the
| power to declare them liars who lose their stake.
| IHLayman wrote:
| But, a stake has to be at least 32 ETH, where at $1650/ETH
| lands you at $52,800. So, the validators have to have a
| significant investment in the platform, more than your
| average investor, and far more than anyone simply owning ETH.
| While I don't necessarily agree with the centralization
| arguments, I do agree that it is a far smaller group of
| people than you'd think.
| bowsamic wrote:
| $52,800 is a pittance compared to any remotely significant
| mining operation
| shudza wrote:
| you don't need mining equipment to validate transactions
| on bitcoin, nor do you need to own it. With ETH, you need
| to own 32 ETH, obviously.
| exo762 wrote:
| There is a confusion in language used. Bitcoin has two
| types of actors: block consumers and block producers.
| Ethereum has three types of actors: block consumers,
| validators and block producers. Thing often described as
| "full node" does just that - it consumes blocks, checking
| if blocks are valid. Ethereum validators are different,
| they not only consume blocks, they also attest their
| correctness for the rest of the network.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Who validates the validators? The other validators?
| exo762 wrote:
| No. Their role is a bit different. They exist to prevent
| so called nothing-at-stake attack. If each block has to
| be signed by known parties (parties selected in a way
| attackers can't control), and those parties are bound by
| slashing rules (signing two different blocks for the same
| height is grounds for slashing), than it is very hard to
| pull off nothing-at-stake attack and create an
| alternative chain.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Absolutely not the case. You can verify the transactions
| without owning any ETH, you cannot participate in the
| reward process for your efforts though for that you need
| to be a validators and put up your stake.
|
| The parallel with Bitcoin is quite strong. You can run a
| Bitcoin node without running a miner and verify the chain
| but you don't get rewarded. You can run an Ethereum node
| without staking and verify the chain but you don't get
| rewarded.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Again, no, not the people putting up the stake.
|
| I am asking about the people with the power to declare that
| people who put up the stake were dishonest in their
| validations.
| drcode wrote:
| There is no such a power, slashing is 100% decentralized.
|
| The key innovation in modern POS systems was figuring out
| how to do this, it is a solved problem.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| The code - not the people. Trust but verify - just like
| all other FOSS.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The people who are running the slasher nodes
| drcode wrote:
| If I understand what you mean by "slasher nodes" (there
| is no such term in reality): Anybody can run a node that
| checks for conflicting validation messages and get a
| small reward by doing so. There is zero stake required to
| do this. It is not some power conferred to "vitalik and
| his friends"
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Even that isn't accurate because many groups and exchanges
| will aggregate eth from users. Then users with far less
| than 32 eth are participants in a stake through their
| chosen representative.
| tsujp wrote:
| there's just a small number of validators, which is just going
| to be the ethereum foundation and friends.
|
| There are over 415 000 validators.
|
| See: https://beaconcha.in/
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Read the edit. Slashers. Not validators.
| tyrust wrote:
| Any validator can run the slasher process.
|
| Docs from one of the validator clients:
| https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher
| olalonde wrote:
| Yes, it's incorrect to say that. Decentralisation is a spectrum
| and those extra steps are there for a reason. In terms of
| decentralisation, Ethereum probably sits somewhere between
| Bitcoin and Paypal.
| djschnei wrote:
| let's just rebrand it JPMcoin and get this charade over with
| already...
| swamp40 wrote:
| My suspicion is that Ethereum got so popular because there were
| so many ways to make money from it. Basically a cash cow for
| developers and miners.
|
| Does anyone know where the money making opportunities will shift
| to with POS? Block builders? Validators? I suspect the amount of
| money to be made through MEV will dramatically decrease.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The money making opportunities will be in waiting for the next
| bullrun, then just forking the biggest ongoing trend onto a new
| and upcoming chain.
|
| You don't have to create anything of lasting value. Just time
| the market and you can make wild money without doing any real
| work.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire
| staking with just 3 validators.
| tyrust wrote:
| This site has a calculator:
| https://www.stakingrewards.com/earn/ethereum-2-0/
|
| Running three of your own validators gets you $7,333 a year.
| You'd have to be in a pretty low cost of living area for that
| to work.
| dannyw wrote:
| 1. Yield is increasing to 7% - 12% after the merge, as
| validators will now earn transaction fees, and MEV if
| configured. This increases it to approx $18k a year.
|
| 2. This is assuming 1 ETH = $1650. If the Ethereum price
| doubles (but still under the ATH), you'd be at $36k a year;
| not enough for Cali or NYC (perhaps if you own your home?)
| but certainly fine for cheaper COL states.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How involved is running a validator? If it can just run off
| in the corner -- living somewhere cheap and doing small
| scale contracting for fun or whatever could be a neat
| lifestyle.
| pimterry wrote:
| This sets concrete trigger parameters for the switchover, which
| implies an approximate date, but not a well-defined hard
| deadline.
|
| If you're interested in the real progress, there's a helpful live
| timer tracking the countdown to that trigger & current switchover
| time estimates here: https://wenmerge.com/
| cypress66 wrote:
| There's also http://bordel.wtf which I think is more accurate
| meltyness wrote:
| If Ethereum is inflationary, and there is a minimum cost to
| staking, why would I ever begin to stake if I know that the cost
| can only go down in the future?
| rglullis wrote:
| For starters, Ethereum is not inflationary. ETH is minted and
| burned according to network activity. The more people making
| transactions (and paying for them) the less ETH will be
| created. It can even get to the point where some blocks lead to
| a net _burn_ of ETH.
|
| Why would you stake? Even if the returns were low (compared to
| what?), people like me are interested in staking merely to help
| secure the chain at a (relatively low) cost compared to PoW
| chains, and having an efficient and secure blockchain opens up
| _other_ opportunities for profit.
|
| In my case, I am less interested in speculating with tokens and
| I am more interested in seeing a blockchain that can be an
| _actual_ alternative for cross-border payments. I feel like by
| becoming a staker (and by working in projects that leverage
| layer-2 scaling networks [0]) I am contributing to that
| becoming a reality with a (relatively) low opportunity cost.
|
| [0]: https://hub20.io
| meltyness wrote:
| I won't beat around the bush. What is an ETH worth? There are
| not details about the economics, just the ecosystem, which is
| replicated across more thoughtful platforms. I personally
| prefer Cardano, since the software itself has a better
| foundation, and the fixed supply implies some urgency in
| adoption.
|
| $53,731.20 is enough USD for me to keep my t2.micro up for
| 300 years, so is there some mathematical guarantee that means
| there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > I personally prefer Cardano, since the software itself
| has a better foundation, and the fixed supply implies some
| urgency in adoption.
|
| I really liked Cardano, until I started trying to learn
| more about it and develop for it.
|
| It's _way_ behind Ethereum in developer experience. The way
| funds are shuffled around between addresses for a wallet
| also makes it much harder to reason about (even though in
| theory the UTXO model is better than account-based for
| parallel processing of transactions). In actuality, I don
| 't think it's more scalable than Ethereum, and the scaling
| solutions they're working on (which are years out IMO) are
| L2s, like with Ethereum.
|
| The tooling is also way behind Ethereum, and running a full
| wallet is incredibly resource-intensive.
|
| I'm still staking a lot of Cardano, but I think it's
| unlikely it will overtake Ethereum in value at this point.
| rglullis wrote:
| Just so you know, plenty of people locked their ETH when it
| was well below $100.
|
| And for those that are joining now, but worry that the
| investment would be too big, consider the possibility of
| pooling resources with other people and _stake using your
| own node_. This is one the things that I would like to do
| next with Hub20, to help instance operators to pool
| together resources with their friends and to manage their
| validators...
|
| > so is there some mathematical guarantee that means
| there's any value in adopting ETH immediately?
|
| Guarantee? No, of course not.
| meltyness wrote:
| What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some
| collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH-
| stability, ETH-usefulness?
| rglullis wrote:
| 1) Not specific to Ethereum, but to its goals. For me,
| turning a profit is secondary to the goal of having a
| permissionless and censorship-resistant way for cross-
| border payments. At the moment, I believe that Ethereum
| (as an ecosystem) is the closest to make that a reality
| because it has the largest developer mindshare and the
| Foundation seems to be the only one playing the long
| game.
|
| 2) I am not speaking as a "collective". I am speaking for
| myself, and I believe that there are others like me.
| meltyness wrote:
| I did some digging and the principles are elucidated by
| vitalik on his blog.[0] The principles are based on the
| fact that proof of work is antisocial, impractical or
| unrealistic. The 6 times this was discussed last year[1]
| in the ethereum devs meeting on zoom might also be of-
| interest.
|
| [0]:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2016/12/29/pos_design.html
| [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/361
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this.
|
| First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by
| this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin
| with is another story.)
|
| Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's
| a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any
| of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| If you're interested in the technical coordination part of it
| you may be interested in the client diversity ideal that
| Ethereum has. Changes to Ethereuem don't happen by implementing
| the change on a client, but by updating a spec and then the ~5
| execution clients or the ~5 consensus clients all update their
| code to become compliant.
|
| It's a really high cost to pay, but in theory (assuming that
| the mix that is run is actually diverse) can protect against
| implementation bugs. In the browser world It'd be like running
| two different browser engines and only displaying DOMs that are
| consistent with both engines, or JS engine or final render etc.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| It's a worthy ideal but it doesn't shape up in reality. 75%
| of current eth clients are one implementation[0]. Beacon is a
| little better but it looks like it could be heading that way
| (with Prysm already being well over half).
|
| I would have loved to contribute to client diversity but my
| experience with non-geth and non-prysm clients has been so
| bad I did what it looks like everyone else does - throw my
| hands up and jump on the bandwagon of what seems to actually
| work.
|
| [0] https://ethernodes.org/
| zeroclip wrote:
| Client diversity has improved in recent months,
| particularly consensus clients:
|
| https://clientdiversity.org/
| kkielhofner wrote:
| For beacon that is definitely better than the last time I
| looked. However geth is still 75% and relevant to the
| topic of the merge, roughly 88% of current clients aren't
| ready for it[0]!!!
|
| It will be interesting to see what these numbers look
| like when the merge actually happens...
|
| [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| The maintainers of geth recently published and then
| flagged (as bugged) the first release that was fully
| Merge-ready, so it's not really possible that geth
| operators could be ready at this time.
|
| I believe just today the next release was published,
| fixing the bug in the previous one:
|
| https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| If geth isn't ready for the merge, how were (formerly)
| PoW testnets upgraded to PoS already?
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Because geth was ready for those test merges.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I covered that debacle in another comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581419
|
| As noted there prysm, geth, etc have had their first
| merge-ready releases less than 48 hours ago (with one
| "oops" already) I (for one) will be waiting for what I'm
| sure will be more bugs to shake out in the next several
| days.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Yup, one of the big problems is that MEV typically happens
| on geth right now so there's a huge financial imperative to
| use geth. MEV is another topic that is quite interesting
| from a technical & game theory point of view, but some
| parts of it are pretty horrifying from a moral point of
| view (e.g. front-running, forced liquidations, sandwhich
| attacks).
|
| Right now deciding what transactions go into a block (which
| includes manufacturing your own transactions that yield
| riskless profit (called MEV)) is tightly bound to running
| geth. Flash bots is working on ways to decouple that so
| there is increased specialization and allows for
| flexibility in which client you run.
| xur17 wrote:
| FWIW, ethernodes is not an accurate source of data on this.
| They are missing a LOT of nodes (mine has been running for
| over a year and isn't listed, and others I have spoken to
| say the same thing).
| RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote:
| Is it true that the Ethereum foundation itself doesn't
| develop a fully usable set of clients anymore for the post-
| Merge network?
|
| There seem to be only 3rd-party and seemingly commercial
| entities developing the "consensus" client which is needed to
| use the PoS network?
|
| As a user it would be rather "meh" to not have an official
| client to rely on :|
|
| See:
|
| "Ask HN: Does the Ethereum foundation really not develop a
| post-Merge client?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586172
|
| _TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you 'll need
| 2 pieces of software in parallel ("execution client" and
| "consensus client"). It seems only one of those is developed
| by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one
| are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities._
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything
| by this much is pro-humanity.
|
| How long until BTC follows suit?
| sph wrote:
| Never, and that's a feature.
|
| The energy consumption has always been a red herring.
| Everything consumes energy. Humanity's goal is to optimise
| energy generation and make it as green as possible, not
| reduce total energy usage to zero. That's just an idiotic
| proposition. The problem has never been "Bitcoin draws too
| much power", the problem is "we need more energy generation,
| and cheaper, and possibly not from fossil fuels."
|
| But it certainly doesn't fit on a slogan.
| beambot wrote:
| If bitcoin _doesn 't_ find a more environmentally-conscious
| scaling mechanism, it will be challenging for any ESG-
| conscious institutional investor to remain invested. The
| capital exodus toward PoS-ETH could accelerate a sea change.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| BTC mining will be the methane reduction solution as the
| market dynamics force it to be
|
| the process generally creates some CO2, rerouting that energy
| on flare gas sites into power for miners, but thats much less
| worse than methane, and we can't let a sustainability goal of
| perfect be the enemy of good
| rglullis wrote:
| Judging by the BTC maxis on this thread and all the FUD they
| are spreading, never.
|
| If I have to make a bet, though, I think that what will
| happen is that financial institutions will start pushing for
| the idea of wrapping BTC on the Ethereum blockchain, and once
| it reaches a certain threshold (let's say 80%) they will
| campaign to drop the bitcoin PoW altogether.
|
| But this is a conversation that bitcoiners are not ready to
| have, yet.
| exo762 wrote:
| There is an amazing proposal [0] on building trustless
| bridge for BTC on Ethereum. Leona Hioki is GOAT.
|
| [0] https://ethresear.ch/t/trustless-bitcoin-bridge-
| creation-wit...
| swalsh wrote:
| Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists.
| AgentME wrote:
| The Avalanche Bridge isn't trustless. It's dependent on
| specific privileged operators to continue functioning who
| have the ability to cheat or get hacked.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Never, maxis know how much BTC will be worth when the last
| BTC is mined.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in
| comparison to other blockchain projects.
| josu wrote:
| Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin
| valuable.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's also fundamentally limits the growth potential of BTC.
| In a PoW system, the amount of work done _must_ be
| proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it
| would make 51% attacks feasible).
|
| So if BTC uses an Argentina's worth of energy now, if the
| value of BTC grew 10X it would have to use on the order of
| 10 Argentina's worth of electricity. Obviously, that is not
| sustainable, and it ensures BTC can never grow in value too
| much if it sticks with PoW.
| josu wrote:
| If the hashrate can't keep up with the price increase
| because it has exhausted all sources of available
| electricity, then difficulty will adjust down.
|
| This doesn't limit the potential growth of Bitcoin, it
| only puts an upper bound on the security per block.
| OGWhales wrote:
| > In a PoW system, the amount of work done must be
| proportional to the total value of all BTC (if not, it
| would make 51% attacks feasible).
|
| I'm confused. Why must this be the case and how would it
| lead to a 51% attack if it were not?
|
| I know the difficult goes up when the price goes up
| because more people are able to mine profitably and the
| system will automatically scale the difficulty to
| maintain the 1 block per 10 minutes rate, but I don't
| understand what the difficultly being proportional to
| value has to do with 51% attacks being feasible.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I'd argue it's susceptible to 51% attack already, but as
| BTC's value grows, the profitability from pulling off a
| 51% grows as well. Therefore, the hashrate not scaling
| with the market cap of BTC makes the prospect of funding
| a 51% attack more and more appealing.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 1. The whole design of "Proof of Work" is that a miner
| must _prove_ that he has spent a certain amount of money
| (in the form of electricity spend) to mine a block and
| win the block rewards and fees.
|
| 2. First of all, this means that (eventually) the amount
| of electricity spent on mining is proportional to the
| total rewards earned (again, block rewards PLUS fees). So
| if the value of BTC goes up, it's a classic arbitrage
| play - miners would spend more electricity to win the
| more valuable rewards. Of course, everyone with the
| capacity would do this, until the difficulty level is set
| at a higher level.
|
| 3. Similarly, the value to be gained from a nefarious
| mining attack is proportional to the total value of BTC,
| so the difficulty must increase to keep a 51% from being
| feasible.
|
| The fact that electricity spend _absolutely must_ be
| proportional (over time, there can be short term
| imbalances before they are arbitraged away) to total
| value of the coins in a PoW system is a fundamental,
| undeniable fact. It is simply how PoW works. Yet I still
| am amazed how many BTC fan boys try to wave this away.
| zaroth wrote:
| It's not really so clear cut.
|
| Perhaps if a 51% attack let you fully steal coins yes.
| But there are only specific things a 51% attacker can do,
| and even attempting to pull off the attack has game-
| theoretic impact on the price if Bitcoin.
|
| The more practical attacks are greedy miner type attacks
| which just boost a large miners win rate.
|
| The 51%-esque chain rewriting, double-spending and
| transaction censorship stuff is a different story.
|
| What you can definitely say is that economically the
| profitability of the block reward and transaction fees
| will drive new entrants into mining. As BTC price
| increases the willingness to spend more on mining
| (wasting electricity) increases. But the block reward
| also halves now and then to reduce the value of new
| blocks and prevent the waste from getting absurdly out of
| hand.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| It also makes BTC positively radioactive to mainstream
| adoption. There are countless examples of $CORP
| announcing some bitcoin initiative or another only to
| roll it back almost immediately after the outrage
| expressed from a population that is increasingly aware of
| and concerned about climate change.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Have you seen a graph of global energy use over time? It
| goes up.
| operator-name wrote:
| It should be clear that a lot of Bitcoin's value is in its
| established history, legacy and to some extent trust. This
| is it's key differentiator to any other chain. PoW is part
| of Bitcoin's history and legacy, but it isn't PoW itself
| that gives bitcoin value.
| josu wrote:
| Thanks for expanding.
| exo762 wrote:
| May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.
| nowahe wrote:
| Basically, to validate a block, you need to bruteforce a
| SHA-256 hash of the block by incrementing a nonce in it.
| And by essence, bruteforceing is wasteful (and by
| extension, expensive).
|
| And this is by design, as the only way to mint a new
| bitcoin is to throw away computational power (ie energy
| -> money). And the amount of power needing to be wasted
| is constantly adjusted by the network (it's targeting a
| certain amount of blocks / hour, adjusting the difficulty
| of the sha bruteforce, compensating for technological
| improvement).
|
| Now, to create a bitcoin you need to mine a block
| (solving the bruteforce), inherently requiring a set (on
| average) amount of real world value (mostly energy) to be
| irrevocably wasted. For the miners to recoup those
| losses, they MUST sell the bitcoin they just created for
| at least their lost value. Which in turn, guarantee the
| minimum value of each bitcoin.
|
| And with this system, the minimum value of each bitcoin
| is inversely equal to the amount of value "wasted".
| sph wrote:
| And you can extrapolate this correlation between energy
| consumption and Bitcoin price into the idea that a
| Bitcoin represents some unit of energy.
|
| I wonder if there's a graph anywhere showing the value of
| 1 BTC in kWh.
| josu wrote:
| This is a good explanation
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32583540
| unnouinceput wrote:
| It costs an average of ~5k USD to mine one bitcoin.
| Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner
| will sell below this value due to not breaking even on
| electricity. That's why also bitcoin miners go to places
| where electricity cost is low, and why they undervoltage
| their mining cards.
| exo762 wrote:
| Why does it make any difference for me (a hypothetical
| BTC holder) how BTC is minted?
|
| > Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner
| will sell below this value due to not breaking even on
| electricity.
|
| It does not work like that. If you need to pay your bills
| you will sell BTC for whatever price it is right now.
| Unless you want to long BTC, but that's a different
| story.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Meaning even if the value drops at exchanges, no miner
| will sell below this value due to not breaking even on
| electricity
|
| You have causation reversed here. It is not that bitcoin
| would not sell/be worth less than the amount to mine it.
|
| Instead, it is that it wouldn't be mined if it were worth
| less than the cost to mine it.
|
| At which point, miners would drop out, and the cost to
| mine it would reduce, as the difficulty goes down.
| SilasX wrote:
| Wait, really? It only costs $5k to mine one when they
| sell for $21k?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| I meant electricity cost, on average, is ~ 5k USD. I
| didn't factor anything else, like cost of hardware,
| rent/location, living expenses etc.
| petters wrote:
| What cards? Bitcoin has not been mined on GPUs for a long
| time and I would have thought that the ASICs used were
| already optimal.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| ASICs are also populated onto cards, and miner firmware
| handles tuning the hash rate of each chip (or card) based
| on inputs like desired temperature and power consumption.
| These inputs are often adjustable.
|
| Heat causes chips and other components to degrade, so not
| everyone runs their miners at maximum output all the
| time.
| googlryas wrote:
| Not really - being able to resolve double spends in a
| decentralized cryptocurrency is what makes BTC valuable,
| and PoW is just one method for doing that. I don't think
| there is any evidence that PoW is _the only_ way to resolve
| double spends with a decentralized cryptocurrency.
| swalsh wrote:
| Satoshi consensus is essentially the bible to their cultural
| ideology.
|
| You can bridge bitcoin to another chain with faster finality,
| smart contracts, and environmental consensus.
|
| But at the end if the day there will still be a huge amount
| of people who will never deviate from the core ideology.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not ideology. There are pros and cons to both proof
| and stake and proof of work.
|
| The idea behind PoW was to decentralize proofs by allowing
| anyone to participate. This is a valuable property in a
| cryptocurrency. Bitcoin's implementation utterly failed in
| that regard. There are better projects out there, like
| Monero, but Bitcoin just refuses to die.
| Temasik wrote:
| yyyk wrote:
| If this works well enough, I wonder how long before governments
| decide to straight up ban large PoW chains.
| overtonwhy wrote:
| And now there's a split where the miners keep mining and
| everybody gets a new duplicate coin account and the grifters cash
| out more?
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| No.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| In this thread: A million crypto tribalists whatabouting and
| clutching pearls and absolutely nobody talking about what this is
| - a pretty cool organizational and technical achievement.
|
| Fantastically well done to the cat herders and cats that we call
| the Ethereum dev community, this is a prime example of how things
| can get done not by relying on the profit motive of a large
| corporation of the interests or a nation-state, but on the
| genuine belief in the soundness of an idea and a willingness to
| work together to change the world.
| hartAtWork wrote:
| Amen
| naltun wrote:
| Nicely said.
| stockpricethrow wrote:
| How will this affect the revenue and stock prices of major
| hardware manufacturers? Particularly GPU manufacturers? If the
| price of GPU's drop due to a large second hand market opening up,
| would GPU manufacturers be hurt in any way?
| joshmarlow wrote:
| Even if the crypto market for GPUs dries up, the ML market only
| seems to be growing. GPU manufacturers should be just fine.
| jahewson wrote:
| Unlikely. There are plenty of other coins out there to mine and
| one of the advantages of GPU vs ASIC is that you can just
| switch instantly.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Na. Bitcoin and Ethereum make up 60% of the total
| cryptocurrency "market cap" and a good chunk of the remainder
| are USD stablecoins that run on top of a base chain with no
| mining itself.
|
| The next most valuable proof of work coin at <1% of the total
| market value is dogecoin, and that's already long been using
| ASIC miners like bitcoin.
|
| Unless Ethereum miners forcibly maintain a PoW fork or try to
| pump up Ethereum Classic back into the spotlight, GPU mining
| might finally be effectively dead.
|
| As many people have said for years, there's only room on this
| planet for one proof of work chain, and it's bitcoin. All
| other use cases with be proof of stake, or sidechains and
| layer twos of some base chain.
| jahewson wrote:
| Eek, thanks for the stats, I didn't realise it was that
| lopsided. Maybe I'll be able to afford a GPU again!
| anonporridge wrote:
| Yeah. Ethereum has been the bane of home PC gaming for
| years now.
|
| It would have been nice if they had at least moved to
| purpose made ASICs, like bitcoin had the decency to do.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Nope, mining needs to be profitable too. There is not enough
| margin in all altcoins combined to support the influx of GPUs
| coming from ethereum.
| immibis wrote:
| Nvidia is down almost 50%... from its high around Jan/Dec. I
| suspect people saw this coming from a mile away. If you think
| the effect is likely to be stronger or weaker than the market
| predicts, bet on it now.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to
| buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge
| sp332 wrote:
| It's true they stopped buying new ones, but now they won't
| have any reason to keep old ones either. I'm expecting
| (hoping for) a glut of previous-generation GPUs as miners
| close up shop.
| johntb86 wrote:
| I've heard people warn that used gpus formerly used for
| mining might be a bad deal, since they've been run flat
| out 24/7. I don't know how true that is.
| OGWhales wrote:
| Buying used in general is risky, but I'd wager buying
| from a miner is not much worse than buying used from a
| non-miner.
|
| I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards
| and with running them at a constant rate, they won't
| undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down
| each time it gets used.
| sp332 wrote:
| That might be true for the chips, but the fans have
| probably been run 24/7 for much longer than the comsumer-
| level cards are rated for. So keep an eye out for dying
| fans.
| ls612 wrote:
| The cores should be fine since they have usually been run
| undervolted at lower temperatures, but the memory has
| been more stressed than a gaming card's memory.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| A friend sold me a 1070 Ti he used 24/7 for a year
| mining... something (zcash?). I ended up using that thing
| in my gaming PC for 3 more years before I upgraded
| recently.
|
| I'm sure the lifespan of used GPUs is reduced, but it's
| hard to say by how much. There's probably a lot of
| variability due to chip yield and operating conditions
| (especially temperature and ESD safety). But if I could
| get one at half off, I'd probably take that chance.
| zionic wrote:
| But HN comments assured me it was never going to
| happen/will stay "6 months away".
|
| I sure hope those people bought mining GPUs/put their money
| where their mouth is.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| watch ethereum classic just pick up where ethereum left off lol
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-24 23:01 UTC)