While many contracts within Ethereum have clear flaws, that doesn't mean Eth as a whole is broken.
Time bandit attacks go away once proof of stake finality arrives. Also, trading ought to be done in Layer 2s. Does MEV work on L2s?
Re: certain token drops wasting lots of gas, it's up to the token authors to use an implementation that avoids gas wars.
Once you go into claiming equivalences with P = NP, you've lost me. Theoretical optimums are an academic game, in reality you can get 95% of the way there with heuristics.
> Because Ethereum transactions are programs, the halting problem means that it isn't possible to accurately predict the resources needed to execute them.
Ah, more appeals to theory. They're programs with a low ceiling on the number of steps and possible codepaths. They barely even have loops half the time. Estimating isn't that hard in practice.
I keep seeing this "eternal six months away" FUD, but no one wants to admit the devs delivered on the Beacon Chain which has been running smoothly for 1.5 years, and the Merge testnets are working quite well. Bitcoin maximalists are out there all day grousing about made-up deadlines promised by strawmen and laundered through hearsay. It has nothing to do with reality.
Go/no-go decision on doing the Merge or postponing the difficulty bomb to be discussed on the 29th of April [2022] ACD call.
If it’s "go" then start merging the existing testnets at 2 week intervals with a view to doing the real thing in July [2022].
ACD call == AllCoreDevs meeting. Here's a summary of the most recent one (includes a link to a recording of the call):
Along with pointers to current and historical information as to why arriving at PoS has been such a long and interesting road to hoe, while also being an open/source process involving teams and individuals all over the world.
If the constant delays and made-up ETAs weren’t enough to make you question PoS ever arriving — they should be, really — there are plenty of other reasons. There are a tonne of actors / influencers in the Eth space who do not want PoS to land for their own financial and political reasons.
Technical pitfalls and project stewardship can reasonably explain some delay — but years and years of it? And more than one statement that it’s just “months away?” The whole process has a fetid cloud hanging over it.
Postponed would mean the date was officially announced by one of the devs?
I've not had time to pay attention much over the past months, but to me that June date was always a silly rumor. Correct me if I'm wrong. End of year is what I heard, but even that isn't set in stone of course and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen till then.
> Postponed would mean the date was officially announced by one of the devs?
In true "decentralised fashion" the devs spread their info thin over multiple veues so it's hard to hunt down their statements.
But we could take to ethereum.org which previously stated [1]
--- start quote ---
When's it shipping?
~Q2 2022
This upgrade represents the official switch to proof-of-stake consensus. This eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining, and instead secures the network using staked ether. A truly exciting step in realizing the Ethereum vision – more scalability, security, and sustainability.
I can try to contextualize this... at least explain my understanding of the history.
Bitcoin grows popular and its proof of work burns increasing amounts of electricity. Ethereum devs do not want to see Eth go the same way, and prioritize Proof of Stake, which will not require any more waste. The devs sketch out new roadmaps, do research, and make slow but steady progress; software always takes longer than you think.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has completely fossilized for political reasons and basically cannot be improved at this point. Bitcoin maximalists (diehards) recognize Eth as an existential threat and start pushing this meme of PoS being always 6 months away, despite the actual Eth devs never promising such things.
It's the Eth people who constantly say it's 6 months away. Bitcoin people say that PoW is necessary for security and that PoS in Eth will be less secure, and also concentrates wealth and gains on that wealth into the hands of a small group.
Which is telling for a technology that is meant to replace money, something everyone knows how to use.
I've been passively following this scene for years and read/watched tons of content about it, but I still wouldn't know how to pay my friend across the room, especially not without an internet connection.
> You cannot handwave away problems by promising you'll fix them with X in Y months, when you consistently fail to deliver X.
You are free to reject such appeals to your patience and choose to use other products and services. Yet, people are also free to ignore your opinion that "blockchain is bad because of X" when they believe they are able to solve X.
I'm not free to ignore their externalities, though, am I? If my next door neighbor burns motor oil to stay warm in his backyard while promising that he'll switch to something better in six months, "just choose to not live next to him" is not a plausible argument!
The difference, in my mind, is that you are suffering under your neighbour's actions directly and the person on the other side of the argument can do something about it.
Arguments about when/if Ethereum will switch to PoS are different, because neither you are I can do anything about it either way; it comes an argument merely about predicting the future.
If you are talking with your elected presentative who wants to vote against a PoW ban who is holding out for a switch, then that is a different story.
That's true in the sense that it's not why ETH is broken. ETH as a whole is broken because it's cryptocurrency. The whole idea of smart contracts is never going to work as advertised, it's impossible to make a more complex contract without running into any number of these flaws and spending an inordinate amount of your time and energy trying to mitigate and workaround them. But at the same time these are the types of contracts that drive developers to ETH. It's a lose-lose situation, at best it's equivalent to a payment API that's extremely unpredictable and insecure and will never have those issues fixed because they're part of the design. These flaws aren't inherent in making online transactions, they only pop up when you insist on using blockchains for everything, when there's no real reason to do that.
>Also, trading ought to be done in Layer 2s.
It's really baffling to me how L2 chains have become a serious thing. If you ask me those are just workarounds for flaws in the design of the L1 chains, nobody actually wants to use L2 chains but they're forced to because ETH (and other L1 chains) are so poorly designed that it can't accommodate most things people actually want to do.
>They're programs with a low ceiling on the number of steps and possible codepaths. They barely even have loops half the time. Estimating isn't that hard in practice.
Ok but why should anybody have to estimate in the first place? There's no reason for it with a trivial transaction, requiring this is just bad design.
Time bandit attacks go away once proof of stake finality arrives. Also, trading ought to be done in Layer 2s. Does MEV work on L2s?
Re: certain token drops wasting lots of gas, it's up to the token authors to use an implementation that avoids gas wars.
Once you go into claiming equivalences with P = NP, you've lost me. Theoretical optimums are an academic game, in reality you can get 95% of the way there with heuristics.
> Because Ethereum transactions are programs, the halting problem means that it isn't possible to accurately predict the resources needed to execute them.
Ah, more appeals to theory. They're programs with a low ceiling on the number of steps and possible codepaths. They barely even have loops half the time. Estimating isn't that hard in practice.