Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Mainnet Merge Announcement (ethereum.org)
556 points by bowsamic on Aug 24, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 586 comments



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.


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.


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


In fact, here are the instructions anyone can use to run a slasher at home https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher


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?


Security is maintained with at least one slasher.

And there is no upper limit on the number of slashers.


Thank you for all your work on Ethereum.


How many full nodes are there?


You can run the slasher this way but won't get the associated reward.


>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


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.


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.


On either fork, anyone can submit proof of your equivocation and get you slashed.

There are currently over 400,000 full-fledged validators. The maximum supported number of validators is the number of ETH divided by 32, or about 3.75 million. Scaling is the reason the limit wasn't made even higher, by lowering the ETH per validator.


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.


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).


Thank you. Given all the other radical changes in PoS plans that have slipped by during the years, that one threw me off (:


You know this will be hacked right? 2 layers of jargon, billion dollars? It’ll be a “hack”


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.


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


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.


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


> 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.


> This is also a "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive

Does it matter who does the slashing, as long as the incentive is enough to motivate doing it?


I feel like I’m going insane you’re literally just quoting Scifi bull shit. This is money we’re talking about.


To be fair, most cryptocurrency is nonsense sci-fi bullshit. I hesitate to even call it money.

Ok, let me try ELI5ing it.

Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what. Everyone trusts the lists. But what if someone decide to change the list so that it says they own someone else's stuff? Proof of Stake says that if someone wants to change the list - say, if someone traded something on the list to someone else - the page they add to the list also has to have some of their money taped to it. If that change turned out to be fraudulent, someone else can tattle on them, and then that someone gets the money taped to the list instead. So if you want to make sure you're reading from a not-fraudulent list, just check for the money taped to the page.

This all continues fine for a while. There's a bunch of people who maintain the list, all of whom have their own money taped to different pages of it.

One day, someone tries adding a fake transaction to the list. You, of course, notice it and tattle on them. Except in order to claim the funds taped to the list, someone else has to... add a note to the list saying you own them. And there's no reason why they can't just write down that they tattled instead of you, because the only proof that you were the one who tattled is getting it onto the list that you have to tape money to in order to add to. So the only people who have a reason to make sure the list is valid are the same people who are updating the list in the first place. Everyone else can tattle but they don't get paid for doing so, which was the the thing keeping the system secure.


> Let's say we have an economy where, in order to determine who owns what, people literally just make and publish a list of who owns what.

As an interesting aside, this is essentially how the economy of the Yap islands in Micronesia worked until the 20th century, with large stones from another island changing 'ownership', while being left in place (because it was too hard to move them)[1].

Except it was an oral history instead of a published list!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones


Oral history seems particularly robust in its ability to maintain consistency over time. There is an inherent weakness to publishing where authorship is corruptible and short circuits the durability of time spread across regions that maintain a consistent oral history.

It reminds me of the technique to remembering a book where you read one word at a time and repeat it out loud, repeating each segment + 1 in a loop. It’s quite trivial to remember every single word when doing that.


Who slashes the Slashers? (with apologies to The Watchmen)

EDIT: Clarification - once a slasher posts the violation, who removes the ether?


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.


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!


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"


What if they then show bogus evidence


There's no such thing as bogus evidence. Block signatures are validated cryptographically


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.


> 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.


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.


> 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.


If a network "votes down" cryptographic proof, that itself becomes cryptographic proof of dishonesty.


And... so what? Is there a mechanism to punish validators for not being honest on slasher votes?


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


It's a simple question. No need for ad hom.


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.


> I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you to.


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.


"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.


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.


> 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.


> Which sure sounds like a decentralized process that is ultimately just centralized around the ETH foundation at the end of the day.

The validators need to be decentralized (i.e. prevent "harmful collusion"), but the slashers don't need to be in the same way (as long as the validators are).


Nope. That's very inaccurate. If only the ETH foundation is allowed to slash, then it's just a centralized system with extra steps. Because only the ETH foundation is allowed to decide what is bad behavior.

It is not the case that only the ETH foundation can slash, which was the crux of my original question.

The fundamental misunderstanding people seem to be having is that slashers show objective proof of bad events. That's accurate. But validators are still free to agree or disagree with that objective proof of bad events. If you can create a means to prevent consensus on slashing for your overtly malicious behavior, your stake is only at risk if the entire community agrees to fork, which is probable for huge malicious behaviors but I'm not convinced is true for smaller things or circumstances where large actors have a vested interest in preferring the original chain.


I agree with your 3rd, 4th, and 5th sentences, but not with your 1st and 2nd. Assuming a large number of independent validators, the Nash equilibrium is close to "there is no equivocation, hence no slashable evidence, hence no incentive to run a slasher node". (Remember that Nash equilibrium implicitly assumes that agents are not allowed to cooperate with each other). Suppose some fraction of the validators are deviating from this equilibrium by doing lots of equivocation, now there is an incentive to run a slasher node. So what this modelling suggests is that in the real world, we can have a small number of slashers and a large number of validators, and the security comes from the fact that anyone could be a slasher (it's OK that the number of people who actually are is small). But we cannot conclude that "it's OK to have a small number of validators, as long as anyone can be a validator".


I don't really agree but sure, however this counterpoint retracts the original premise, that the slashers are centralized. Something can be done with a small number of people and still be decentralized.


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


The evidence isn't like a Youtube video.


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.


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...


> 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.


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.


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.


Since this "premine" (the 59%) was really a token sale, I don't think it's too problematic (mining is buying tokens with electricity/hardware).


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.


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.


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).”


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?


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.


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.


> 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?


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?


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.


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.


Do you mean by claiming that the block containing it is invalid when it is valid, or visa versa? Or something else?

Also, how can there be a fee to trying to send an invalid transaction? Such a fee would have to be sent as part of a transaction, yes? Isn’t it just that someone spamming the network gets dropped from the gossip protocol stuff?


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.


So Elon Musk alone could do it on a whim, for the lolz?


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).


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.


The 51% is staked coins, not computers.


Doesn’t staking require active validator software on a computer with a great deal of uptime?


stakers/validators vs. slashers


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.


I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an optional, expensive seeming process.

e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher


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.


> 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?


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.


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.


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.


What about a DDoS attack?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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


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).


Yes, the utility function is linear for PoS, and wildly non linear for PoW


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.


Who gets to run a slasher node and who gets to agree that its valid to slash a block?


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.


> 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?


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?


> 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?


> just need 33% of the network to avoid being slashed. Is that wrong?

Yes, it is wrong.


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?


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.


But... you can't be slashed unless a block gets processed that supports your slashing, correct?


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


Does the network recognize a difference between being inactive/offline and actively voting no?


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.


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.


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.


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...


If you control 51% of the network, the network is fucked.

If you control 20% of the network, the other 80% is following the rules and colluding against you. (Even another 20% that are double-validating themselves are incentivized to slash you)


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.


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?


Possibly. You could even do this if the slashers were active. Just start up your attack instantaneously in between two blocks. Prior to the attack, nobody is cheating. After the attack, nobody is accepting evidence of cheating.

The whole cryptocurrency thing feels like a bit of a metastable equilibrium, but nobody's figured out anything better. Arguably even government-controlled fiat money is not much better - if >50% of the population doesn't like the rules, they will change them - we may be seeing the beginning of this right now, with a lot of people getting dissatisfied with half their income going to the black hole known as "landlords" who own the rights to take your income without producing any value whatsoever.

It might just lead to everyone abandoning your cryptocurrency and using a different one. Since you had to have >50% of the cryptocurrency in order to conduct the attack, you did lose a substantial amount of real-world value (billions or trillions of $) when everyone else stopped using your cryptocurrency.

It's pretty much analogous to if a majority of PoW miners decide to "go their own way" and make a chain where nobody else is invited. What happens then?


Coordinating and attempting an attack is seriously expensive in proof of stake if something goes wrong due to the slashing


> 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).


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.


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.


I’ve made .2 eth in under a year.


Sounds like an improvement to burning an entire country's worth of electricity...


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.


Instead you just need a massive amount of eth


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.


Sure, and Regular Money is best governed by billionaires. Incentives line up nicely if you're already rich.


What was the point of BTC and ETH then? We already have the system you describe with fiat currency and traditional banks.


32 Ether or mining equipment is nothing compared to what you need to have any real influence over fiat money.


There are additional goals including in part censorship resistance and it can't be seized without the keys.


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.


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.


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.”


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.


To be fair, you'll find the same problem with PoW, except people are more confident in their misunderstandings.


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.


Please explain the tcp/ip protocol or the paxos algorithm concisely.


Different question. I don't see people regularly arguing about whether TCP does the job it claims to. Sure people propose alternatives they believe to be superior, but fundamentally most agree it works.


That's not related to the complexity of the thing. Imagine Token Ring had a token, and there were a bunch of people invested in the idea that it was better than all the alternatives.


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).


Not how it works, whether it works.


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


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?


I think many American stakers wouldn't bother with the hassle, and instead would take a small haircut to stake with fully decentralized services (like rocket pool) or semi-centralized (but foreign-based) staking pools (like Lido) to prevent the threat of the U.S. government having any kind of control over the network.


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.


> 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.


Not only are you right, but it would be hard to convince a majority to vote either way over our mostly invisible future.


Who gets to decide if something should be slashed


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.


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?


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.


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.


Kind of like the top 2 mining pools owning more than 51% of the hashrate.

At the very least, for an individual actor, it would be much more expensive to acquire 33% of all ETH than it would be to acquire 51% of the Bitcoin hashrate


Exchanges make money from transactions. If they destroy the network for their users, they lose all their cash flow.


Or you could be a government with billions staked in your jurisdiction, and bureaucratic indifference to the outcome of your regulatory actions.


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.


I think you lost the context of the thread. I'm not suggesting they will spend billions on crypto. I'm suggesting they will use their regulatory teeth to compel USA companies that have already staked billions worth of their customers' ETH to comply with the sanctions on Tornado Cash addresses, consequences/slashing be damned. OFAC has lawyers on payroll, so this would literally be free for them.


> I'm suggesting they will use their regulatory teeth to compel USA companies...

If there's one group that the government care more about the finances of than taxpayers, it's companies. Destroying the wealth of these companies in their jurisdiction is an attack that can only be performed once, and provides no long term benefit, except for people outside their jurisdiction.


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?


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.


Sorry that's not correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582316


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.


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?


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!).


> 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.


Wouldn't it be a percentage of the people? So > 51%?


But you already have 51% of people lying for their own benefit in this scenario.


Sounds like the police.

Also do they prove before or after slashing?


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)


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.


The rules have always been made by the ethereum foundation and friends. How many rollbacks and forks have they done at this point?


Just the one I think? Sure there have been network and client issues at times but that goes for Bitcoin as well.


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).


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.


That's not true. Stakers don't make the rules any more than miners make Bitcoin rules.


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.


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


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.


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.


> 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.


Miners do make Bitcoin rules though, the entire protocol is a consensus protocol driven by the miners.


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.


Wrong; if miners deviate from the rules, then their blocks are simply ignored by everyone else.


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.


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.


> 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


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.


Signalling is not consensus I’m afraid…


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.


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.


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.


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.


And then the ETH becomes worthless, and despite having all the ETH, those people have no real-world money.


I'm confused why anyone would downvote this. Would you buy into a cryptocurrency where the validators are censoring transactions according to an agenda, or the one down the street where they're not?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


> 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.


<< 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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> Consensus rules say longer chain is valid.

I will not go into depth here but it's a commonly held view that this changes under PoS. Just flying by so hopefully sources are easily located


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.


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:  \**   \*  \***  \**   \*


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.


> 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.


All it takes then is for the majority to mine three blocks in a row at the precise right moment, consistently enough that there is lower gas available in minority blocks than demand from sanctioned transactions.

If that's what it comes down to (and there is reason to believe it won't), I imagine sanction addresses will still transact, just with higher latency and at higher cost than others.


The blocks with the "sactioned" transactions will be ignored by most of the people, so they will only live in forks that everyone will ignore.

Assuming enough hash rate and the exchanges (and the users) agree to ignore the "sactioned" transactions, then they will never be in the main chain, not even slowly.


Which one is the "main" chain is entirely/ subjective. If users prefer the unsanctioned chain, it can very well be "main", regardless (see BCH/BSV debacle on "who's the real BTC", also ETC).

Also just noting that while the conversation here is about Ethereum, you are describing the fork rules of Bitcoin. Next month the concept "hash rate" won't exist on ETH mainnet (potentially depending on who you ask; looks like there might be an ETC2).


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.


I want to thank everyone who engaged with me instead of downvoting me.

Okay, I think I see now where I was separately wrong and partially wrong in the previous comments. When I said there's a huge monetary upside to a 51% attack, that's wrong. There's not really any upside to speak of, especially considering the huge amount of computing resources you would need to do it.

So it's not surprising it hasn't been tried yet, and that's not a proof that it's a canard as I said before (but it's not a proof of the opposite, either). Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. So I'll concede and leave that point alone. I was wrong.

---

Now, when I said that the 49% can still use the 51%'s blocks, that's not entirely correct. It's correct only until the blockchain splits, then it's not correct. So my position wasn't entirely correct, but it still has value to this discussion. Let me illustrate with a randomly-generated timeline.

Let's make it easy and say 66% are censoring miners, and 33% are non-censoring miners.

We haven't discussed this yet, but let's also assume that the exchanges and non-mining users reflect this proportion. This is an unfounded assumption. But I'm steelmanning.

The 33% are in miner pool 1, and the 66% are in miner pool 2 and 3. The dots represent 5-minute intervals. Just like in Bitcoin, a block is mined roughly once every 20 minutes. Observe the moment at "X".

  ..3..........2...X1.3......1...1..........2......2..
At this point, the blockchain looks like this.

  100% 3--2
You might ask, "Why is it not forked at this point? Miner pools 3 and 2 are the malicious actors, and they had two blocks in a row." Because 1 has no reason to fork. All previous blocks are valid according to Miner pool 1.

Now, observe the point at X:

  ..3..........2....1X3......1...1.......X..2......2..
At this point, the blockchain has forked. It looks like this.

  66%  3--2
  33%  3--2--1
Notice, 33% has the longer chain, but the 66% do not accept the 33%'s block because it contains censored transactions, so a re-org does not occur. This situation will continue as long as the 33% chain is equal to or longer than the 66%, which could be a while.

But how can that be possible if the 66% has more hashpower?

Observe the point at X:

  ..3..........2....1.3X.....1...1..........2......2..
Chains:

  66%  3--2--3
  33%  3--2--1
They are equal. No re-org happens.

One should question at this point what's going on in the mempool here? One can assume the 66% censoring miners are not transmitting the censored transactions to the mempool. But how many censored transactions are we talking about? How much of a fee is each side collecting? Is this still in the coinbase reward era or after? Are the 33% smart enough to route around the 66%? Or punish them by kicking them off the mempool? Not sure. All of these variables can mitigate this attack. But I will not explore that now.

Although there are now two rival chains, for simplicity's sake, lets just assume the same timeline holds, and remove each of the two side's blocks from the other's chain starting from at the time of the fork.

  66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2..
  33% ..3..........2....1........1...1....................
Now, observe the point at X:

  66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2.X
  33% ..3..........2....1........1...1...................X
Chains:

  66%  3--2--3--2--2
  33%  3--2--1--1--1
3 hours later, the 66% still have not overtaken the 33%.

One should wonder even more, what is going on in the mempool and ~$250B Bitcoin economy during this time?

In this example, only two blocks by the 33% are mined consecutively. What about 3 or 4? Could it be days before the 66% overtakes the 33%? I think it's possible.

On the other hand, the mining of consecutive blocks by the 66% does not create a contention between the two sides. So all miners are unified until the 33% gain an advantage. This is my point.

From the POV of the censored Bitcoin transactions, the 66% will succeed in censoring them until the issue is resolved. But I don't think you can say that the 66% have control of the network at this point. They've only succeeded in disrupting the network until more non-censoring miners come online, or something else happens.

Consider also that the attacker has to either possess 66% of all computing power devoted to Bitcoin in the known universe OR an incentive more attractive than the BTC block incentive for the operators of 66% of miners. Even for 51%, that's an impressive achievement.

It's a very interesting scenario but I still say it does not constitute a credible threat to Bitcoin. More of a thought experiment.


In your scenario, you are using

  66% ..3..........2....1.3.....................2......2.X
  33% ..3..........2....1........1...1...................X
but that's closer to a 50%-50% split of the miners, not a 66%-33%.

The problem is that 2 and 3 will produce the double of blocks. For e while 1 may tie or get ahead, but after 30 blocks the the 23 fork will almost always be like 10 blocks ahead of the only 1 fork.

Ignoring most of the . to make the graph shorter

  66% 3213...223.3223..23.23.323..3.2223
  33% 321.11....1....11..1..1...11.1....
or looking at each chain

  66% 32132233223232332332223
  33% 3211111111111

After a while, 1 can

A) Give up and start mining censored blocks

B) Start a new fork, from the current 2-3 chain with many censored blocks

C) Declare that they are a fork and convince the exchanges to give them a new moniker, like ETC of BXC

D) Convince the exchanges that they are the real chain in spite they are shorter, and convince the exchanges to give the other chain a new moniker.


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?


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.


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).


It's a blockchain, not a blockbag.


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%).


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.


Except, that minerA can't build off block B1 because it has transactions in it that it doesn't agree with. minerB just has to keep trying to find blocks to put the censored transactions into, while minerA is fighting against the rest of the miners to outpace them. This only really becomes possible at much higher thresholds, e.g. 70/30. Meanwhile, the community will see what is happening and steps may be taken to either soft-fork or hard-fork the bad actors off the network.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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


This thing actually happens ALL THE TIME in Bitcoin. That's why no one accepts a transaction (at least not one for any significant amount of BTC) as soon as it is in the latest block - they wait until the transaction is in the 3rd, 4th or older block.

The Bitcoin blockchain constantly "forks" for the latest 1-2 blocks. If you sell your car for BTC and hand over the car the moment you see the latest block contains the transaction where the BTC enters your wallet, you may see 1h later that the longest chain does NOT contain your transaction, and in fact your transaction is now invalid, because the buyer wallet has sent all the money somewhere else.


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.


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.


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?


51% is Bitcoin. That's what decentralized means


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.


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.


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?


> 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.


Ethermine is out - because the merge is in. They are literally out of the business. Why would anyone care what they do?

As for TC - who is rolling over? While some US based businesses are complying, protocol builders are saying that they will fight tooth and nail.


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.


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.


Waiting you run a big central database as Ethereum with the same marketcap.


Why should the marketcap be of any concern to me?

Is that how you evaluate technologies? By their marketcap?


some salty crypto tribalists ITT, I expected better of you HN.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


Many people do want to transact in rubles, but rubles are still a failed currency and will eventually be replaced with something else.


> 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.


> 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.


> 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?


I don't know the specifics of your pool, but the block is the transactions, so if you get the lucky number and mine a block, you have mined a block that consists of a specific set of transactions in a specific order.

Though it's entirely possible that mining pools dictate which transactions get sent to their miners for them to try mining.


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.


No 'they dont take your coins/stake'. That is just plain false.


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


There are staking pools, just like there were mining pools.


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.


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.


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.


If you join a staking pool, then by definition you are increasing the centralization of the network.


There are decentralized staking pools. https://rocketpool.net/


32 eth is such a small investment that it isn't that meaningfully different than 1 eth.


Yeah, taking $4k (price it reached in the recent bull market).

$4k vs $128k

Literally the same numbers.


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?


You’re joking right?


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.


For the scales usually considered in the crypto scene these would be considered incidental


    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/


Read the edit. Slashers. Not validators.


Any validator can run the slasher process.

Docs from one of the validator clients: https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher


> 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.


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.


Wait, I'm confused. Why exactly is this low-effort FUD post pinned to the top?


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.


No, the validators are anyone with a stake in the system, not just the Ethereum foundation and friends.


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.


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.


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.


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.


The code - not the people. Trust but verify - just like all other FOSS.


The people who are running the slasher nodes


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"


$52,800 is a pittance compared to any remotely significant mining operation


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.


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.


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.


Who validates the validators? The other validators?


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.


Not the people putting up the stake. The people with the power to declare them liars who lose their stake.


> 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.


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.


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?


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.


tangentially, how can one profit from ETH becoming more centralized?


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.


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.


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...


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.


Ethereum.org is owned by the Ethereum Foundation (hence the EF in the url) which exists to support the ecosystem from a technical and business perspective, not convince users to use Ethereum or invest in it.

Members of the Ethereum Foundation have been critical of Ethereum and called out overzealousness in the past, warning that the price might not be rational.


There's countless examples of niche jargon on the front page of HN every day. Sometimes it has to do with Rust, or Zig, or Protobuf, or an obscure file spec. Today the jargon happens to be about blockchain consensus engineering.


Nobody is talking about Jargon on the front page of HN.


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.


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.


1. This is mostly for developers 2. The iPhone was once new. Electric vehicles were once new. People will adapt.


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.


I predict that many of these GPUs will continue to mine just on different chains.


The rewards on other chains aren't enough to sustain all the GPUs.


GPU mining was a thing long before the recent high ETH valuations


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.


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.


IIRC, Mining can be intensive on VRAM, which can shorten cards' lifespans.


You can replace the fans and repaste the die.

I’m curious about the prices though like don’t expect anything firesale-y


Isn't the whole point that outrageous processing power is no longer a prerequisite.


Yes, and all of the GPUs currently being used will be available at fire sale prices.


Yep. So now you may be able to pick up GPUs for MSRP, unlike the last few years.


right, so presumably there will be a lot of idle GPUs that miners will sell / less demand for new GPUs?


Show HN: Proof of Work System Based on Hashing Comments of People Who Hate Crypto but Won’t Stop Talking About It


I wonder how much energy is wasted by transmitting and storing messages of users complaining about Bitcoin's energy usage.


No doubt an inconsequential amount just like bitcoin's impact of less than 0.5% of world energy usage.


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!


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.


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/


Client diversity has improved in recent months, particularly consensus clients:

https://clientdiversity.org/


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


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


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.


If geth isn't ready for the merge, how were (formerly) PoW testnets upgraded to PoS already?


Because geth was ready for those test merges.


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.


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).


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.


> First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity.

How long until BTC follows suit?


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.


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...


Check out btc.b on Avalanche. Already exists.


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.


Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in comparison to other blockchain projects.


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.


So your argument is "it doesn't matter that Bitcoin wastes energy because we'll all eventually transition to green"? Don't you think the extra consumption makes that transition harder?


Bitcoin mining is profitable only if you can get cheap energy. That means outside of city centres, off peak, often energy that is otherwise unsaleable. No, Bitcoin mining isn't making summer heatwave weekday peak electricity more expensive.

Imagine governments putting a tax on fossil fuels. Bam! coal and petrol cheap energy is non-viable anymore, you'll see Bitcoin miners building solar and wind plants to power their operation. And along with them the rest of the world.

It's easier for politicians and keyboard warriors to blame climate change on Bitcoin than actually moving to a greener world by making fossil fuels unprofitable.

The extra consumption angle doesn't make any sense for an ultra technologic world, that only 1/4th of the world populace has access. Bitcoin or not, energy usage will be ramping up, especially if we want to create a fairer world. The only way to reduce energy usage is to stop being a technological civilisation, or give access to electricity to fewer and fewer people.


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.


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.


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.


Never. PoW is a fundamental part of what makes bitcoin valuable.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


lmao, this would be apocalyptic.


Have you seen a graph of global energy use over time? It goes up.


Now I see that "throwaway" probably didn't mean "the amount of work done" but instead "the amount of money spent on work done".


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.


Thanks for expanding.


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.


May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.


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".


I know technical side of things really well, thank you. I'm talking about economical analysis - which is absolutely insane. Value of a thing is not determined by cost of its production. It is determined only by amount someone wants to pay for it.

Claiming that PoW cost gives BTC its value is bonkers.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


Wait, really? It only costs $5k to mine one when they sell for $21k?


I meant electricity cost, on average, is ~ 5k USD. I didn't factor anything else, like cost of hardware, rent/location, living expenses etc.



Never, maxis know how much BTC will be worth when the last BTC is mined.


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


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-...)


Off-topic but have you got any recommendations on stuff to read to set up a GPU at home to run stable diffusion?


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).


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).


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.


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.


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.


Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp.


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.


I believe there is some workaround for AMD as well, but I believe it will be a pain to set up on my machine. I have Radeon Pro 580, on Windows I even use the Adrenaline custom drivers…

Getting VR to work was tiresome, so now I don't want to even start before I see someone else succeeded.


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...



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.


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.


Thr udeal scenario would be for ethereum foundation to keep becoming more and more irrelevant. Why would they take on 'more' responsibility if the goal is decentralisation?

afaik, all clients are open source projects. And many are being funded by gitcoin grants now(crowdsourcing)


Because they earned $ 1 billion with the Ether presale [0], and if the community gives a billion dollars to a non-profit, the non-profit ought to deliver a usable product from that, not hide behind some handwaving of why that's the job of other people.

If they deliver a usable product that doesn't prevent anyone else from also doing so and thus achieving decentralization.

But it would mean that they actually do their job for the billion they were given.

[0] Calculated with today's Ether price, based on: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/19/ethereum-founda...


Any details on what changed since serenity?


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/


There's also http://bordel.wtf which I think is more accurate


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.


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


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.


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?


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


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...


difference is that a blockchain can always fork away from corrupted entities. (bitcoin -bitcoin cash fork in 2017)


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.


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.


Don't have the numbers here but last I read you can retire staking with just 3 validators.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


> 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.


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.


> 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.

I was totally and exactly clear about what I meant about "Inventing new problems" after Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake.

One can move to proof-of-stake, reduce or eliminate the significant environmental issues in their chains whilst also increase centralization which is another major valid criticism brought up after the upgrade to PoS widely discussed here. Like I said before, I don't see anyone here discussing how Ethereum moving to PoS is worse for the environment than PoW and I consider the environmental issues of Ethereum brought up by many critics answered and it will no longer be an issue.

You can still be anti-crypto and welcome this [0] (or not) and still criticise it on the centralization, scams and ponzi enablement and alledged limited use cases etc. But not for the environmental issues, or 'burning up the planet', etc on Ethereum.

> 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.

I did not make that claim.

> 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.

Right, unfortunately Ethereum or the wider crypto ecosystem in general isn't going to go away that easily. But I know it certainly will be more regulated with a few surviving blockchains.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580828


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.


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...


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.


> 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...


> 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?


It is true. It's more true on PoS than PoW, since the mechanism in PoW is indirect. We can also consider how it works with traditional currencies, such as dollars, which has a hybrid PoS/??? system: you can receive resources by having the most resources (federal reserve deposits) and you can also receive them by performing services which the democracy deems useful (government spending), and to balance the numbers, resources are passively taken from people who spend their money but not from those who hoard it... maybe not the best design :)


I absolutely hate cryptocurrency shilling on HN so forgive me if the following appears like so, but this answers your question.

> 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.

This is not a problem if the reward distribution is proportional to the investment from miners, which happens when the mining competition has low or inverse economies of scale, and a low barrier to entry.

In PoW and Bitcoin especially, the economies of scale are huge. "Industrial" miners are greatly more profitable than home miners, and ASICs require an upfront investment which comes with risk that smaller operations might not want to take. The result of this high barrier to entry and economies of scale are empirically verifiable by looking at the hash rate from block wins.

A correctly designed PoS system almost completely removes economies of scale (notice I said correctly designed, because many other PoS cryptocurrencies actually explicitly favor larger stakes), but might add some artificial barrier to entry, like Ethereum's 32 ETH minimum. The wealth centralization effect is also amplified in PoS by how directly acquiring the scarce resource required to participate in the competition influences the value of existing stakers' investment.

In Proof of Space consensus protocols (PoST) [1], the scarce resource is storage space. This can have minimal or even inverse economies of scales relative to money invested, as the running costs become almost as minimal as a PoS operation. And since the quality of the storage material is also irrelevant, what matters most is the cost per Tb of acquisition of storage space. The best savings are done on second hand drives, which makes investment in free time rather than money the profit differentiator. The free time to wealth ratio scales inversely, so smaller PoST miners can have a proportional advantage over larger ones. This decentralization effect is empirically verifiable with how much more individual mining nodes the biggest PoST cryptocurrency Chia currently has than Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the comparatively very low absolute amount of rewards its consensus delivers to its miners.

[1]: full name: Proof of Space and Time, with Time referring to a competition required to get reliable timestamps on the blockchain happening in parallel to the competition over Space.


I don’t really care I’m just saying how it looks from the outside


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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 :)


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.


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.


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).


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?


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.


People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Fans are not the interesting part of a graphics card. Fans are commodities, even if you may have to rig up something with cardboard and duct tape.


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.


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.


Even if the crypto market for GPUs dries up, the ML market only seems to be growing. GPU manufacturers should be just fine.


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.


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.


Eek, thanks for the stats, I didn’t realise it was that lopsided. Maybe I’ll be able to afford a GPU again!


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.


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.


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?



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.


Originally it was 3200 eth, but the price has risen too much.


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


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)


If being subject to OFAC oversight would "destroy" Ethereum, then Ethereum should be destroyed.


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.


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.


He's saying cryptocurrencies should be bigger than the US government. The system should be so resilient that there is no way for the USA or anyone else to intervene no matter how much they want to.


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.


die hard bitcoin followers want regulations and etfs. The cypherpunks aren't relevant in bitcoinland these days. In fact in a poll overwhelmingly 90% responded that they'd be willing to slash ofac validators if the need arises. The greatest strength of crypto is the ability to fork, and you'd see which one of those would be called 'ethereum' by some derivatives market before the event even happens


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.


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.



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.


Nicely said.


Amen


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/


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.


What are the chances that this doesn't end in disaster? Honest question.


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.


Can you provide some examples?


Many/most people "in the know" peg it somewhere in the ballpark of ~90-95% chance of success from what I've seen.


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...


> 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.


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.


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.


The Wayback Machine begs to differ:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google...

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


> 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.


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.


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?


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


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.


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


If this works well enough, I wonder how long before governments decide to straight up ban large PoW chains.


[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]


Ethernet is in the 12,000 megawatt energy usage range? Pretty impressive - and will be a nice savings if that energy usage goes away.


Ethernet? 12 GW?

Maybe old coaxial 10Mbit cards.


Does staking make Etherium deflationary? (or make it more deflationary if it already is)


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/


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.


> 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.


Thank you for explaining!

Will gas fees burn or go to stakers?


Part is burned, part goes to stakers.

EIP-1559 is the Ethereum patch that introduced the fee burn in Aug 2021.

It's a bit complex, but basically speaking, the higher demand is for the network, the more expensive transactions become and the more ETH gets burned.


This. Based on current activity, it gets close, but if/once fees rise again, there's a threshold above which it becomes net deflationary.


You can check running stats at https://etherchain.org/burn


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)


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.


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?


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


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?


> 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.


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.


What you seem to be suggesting is that, there's some collective with an immutable interest in maintaining ETH-stability, ETH-usefulness?


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.


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


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?


No.


Look up Ethereum Classic. It is still running. Why is this any different?


watch ethereum classic just pick up where ethereum left off lol


Can I unstake my staked eth after this merge?


No, you have to wait for a future protocol upgrade.


Nope.


[flagged]


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?


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


is it low cost, though?


Compared to similarly functioning systems that are decentralized and distributed? Yes.


Bitcoin and Etherium are probably amongst the most inefficient cryptocurrencies on the market.


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.


There are much cheaper ways to achieve consensus, so long as you don't care very much about that consensus being real.


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


etherium is hardly low-cost


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.


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).


With such a tone I wouldn't expect an answer. Do your own research.


[flagged]


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.


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.


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.


> Even wind/solar/nuclear has a carbon cost to it.

Yeah, so does life.


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.


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.


> My point is there is no reason to reduce energy usage. There is reason to reduce "dirty" energy usage

Reducing energy usage is almost exactly the same thing as reducing dirty energy usage.

This is because if there is X less total energy required, that means we can shutdown the X worst energy producing sources.


If that's how it actually worked, that'd be great. But I don't think you can count on energy demand to decrease or even stay the same over the long term.


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).


> 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.


[flagged]


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.


> All of the world's problems are government-created

Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?


> 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).


This isn't 'controversial', it's total Alex Jones Infowars-type batshit.


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).


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.


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-...


[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.


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.


It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face.

"Something else is going on" is not "conspiratorial thinking" when it comes to analyzing data. Systematic biases in data is the normal and expected state of affairs.

> 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 didn't say your sources were "RWNG", I said the "other stuff you wrote" was.

The sources could all be good, and still not actually support your conclusions.

> I made a point to look at your HN profile and subsequently your Twitter > and you're clearly ideologically overwhelmed.

I've been having good discussions on Twitter Spaces lately. Feel free to connect over there if you'd like to discuss this further.


> It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face.

What are your standards for a good study, then? You understand that this basically makes anything I give you a non-starter as its validity is wholly based on your opinion of it, right?

> I said the "other stuff you wrote" was.

Fair, my mistake. But, to your point, it's not navel gazing it's objective reality (whether you like that reality or not is irrelevant). Empirically, the problems you encounter today are in far greater numbers than they were in the past and those problems all track with decisions made in government (either directly or indirectly).

Frankly, just based on your initial response to me, I don't think a conversation would be terribly productive for either of us.


> What are your standards for a good study, then?

Prospective. For example, they decide in advance to test Ts for a randomly-selected group of men.

This study reads as basically "We queried our healthcare system database and made up the rules as we went along."

For example:

* How did they choose the date ranges 1/2006 through 3/2019?

* How did they decide to divide the dates into four ranges of 4, 3, 3, and 4 years each?

* Why did they include "only the first blood sample taken from each patient"?

* Why were there 38,701 subjects with an age measurement but only 22,169 that recorded a BMI in 2016-9?

* Why did the number of subjects double over the course of the study period? Did more patients enter the healthcare system? Did they, say, open new treatment facilities to attract different clientele?

I mean, it's not worthless, it can be useful to put the data out there for meta-analysis. But on its own it should not be used to draw a conclusion.

And so on.

> You understand that this basically makes anything I give you a non-starter as its validity is wholly based on your opinion of it, right?

You're right - it's my opinion and I do lean on my personal experience when considering others' arguments.

> it's objective reality (whether you like that reality or not is irrelevant).

Some of the data may reflect objective reality, but many of your conclusions do not.

> Empirically, the problems you encounter today are in far greater numbers than they were in the past

Yes, but this statement has been true my entire life. Everyone agrees our world gets more populous and more challenging almost every year.

The statement may be true, but so broad that it conveys little meaning.

> and those problems all track with decisions made in government (either directly or indirectly).

This conclusion is not well supported.

Try to describe how you have considered and rejected other possible explanations for the observed phenomena.

> Frankly, just based on your initial response to me, I don't think a conversation would be terribly productive for either of us.

Go back and read what you wrote again. You mention 'politics' and/or 'government' in every post. You cannot even discuss whether or not a hormone level is declining without fitting it within your ideological framework.

Take care :-)


> Try to describe how you have considered and rejected other possible explanations for the observed phenomena.

Sure. I use abductive logic/reasoning to connect different data points (this could be a study, social trend, major event, etc) and reason out how/why that outcome might be possible (and whether or not there are any gaps/inconsistencies in that reasoning).

For example, our current economic situation: massive, unpayable federal debt, rising inflation, and a serious constriction of the middle class. My first question for all of these things is "how does that happen, academically speaking?"

Well, a massive unpayable debt is only achievable via government spending. Taking that a step further, how does that spending happen? Mismanaged budgets, pork barrel legislation (they just passed the "Inflation Reduction Act" which does nothing to limit inflation and only contributes to it via more spending), and increasing the money supply. If my thesis is "the government is at fault," at this point I stop and say "could anything else possibly affect these things?" If my answer is no, I continue my thinking.

Next, I consider the social implications of something like this. What happens when people don't have money? First, anxiety, then, as they approach poverty: depression, anger, despair, etc. As the money supply increases, there are more dollars competing for the same resources and so prices go up (effectively devaluing the currency). This translates to more effort being required of an individual to keep up with the price increases, leading to some degree of mental pressure (doubly so if that increase is steady). If you factor in rising crime rates, well, what do people do when they're desperate for basic needs? Yep, crime.

So, you're stressed out because you're working harder but not earning more, you have less money for enjoying life and instead dedicate all of your resources to needs/survival (which creates a feeling of being trapped). Eventually, all of this mental pressure starts to affect your day-to-day behavior. If you're in a relationship, that relationship will undoubtedly suffer issues. If you're strapped for cash, you won't be terribly concerned with your health and will "just eat whatever" (either because it's affordable, or, that cheap junk food is the only good feeling/dopamine you get in your day). And guess what immense amounts of stress affect? Cortisol levels. What does that affect? Hormones.

So, in this one example, we've got the government's mismanagement of the economy leading to mental health problems, physical health problems, and relationship problems. To validate it, I ask "what are the inconsistencies?" In the reasoning above, there are none. You can easily trace back each of those problems to a root of poor decision making in the government.

> You mention 'politics' and/or 'government' in every post.

Right, because that's the discussion being had. If we were talking about oatmeal, I'd mention oatmeal in every post. This is just misdirection to try and discredit my observation of yourself.


> massive, unpayable federal debt, rising inflation, and a serious constriction of the middle class

I've been hearing people say all this since the 1970's. What's different now?

> If you factor in rising crime rates, well, what do people do when they're desperate for basic needs? Yep, crime.

Crime rates are not rising, they are low compared to the peak in the early 1990's. Whomever is telling you that is lying to you. Stop listening to them.

> So, in this one example, we've got the government's mismanagement of the economy leading to mental health problems, physical health problems, and relationship problems.

This is classic begging the question. By the second sentence you have concluded that the government spending is the source of all woes and use the rest of your post explaining again why you believe everything is the government's fault.

You are unable to consider other possible explanations.

Your reasoning begins and ends with the premise that the problem can only be government.


> I've been hearing people say all this since the 1970's. What's different now?

Right, because the problem accelerated when we unpinned from the gold standard. What's different is that the current balance is upwards of 31T dollars. Purchasing power of the U.S. dollar is down significantly from the 70s.

> Crime rates are not rising, they are low compared to the peak in the early 1990's.

They were. And then all of a sudden, they're on the rise again [1]. What might have caused that? Forcing people to stay in their homes, shutter their businesses (leading to employees being laid off), and lose their livelihoods.

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth... (see: "Socioeco­nomic Instabil­ity and Disrup­tions to Community Life")

> You are unable to consider other possible explanations.

I'm not unable, there are just none that make as much sense. I can throw the same back at you and say that you're unable to consider that government is causing these problems (at the root, meaning direct or indirect). Can you tell me why they're not?

> Your reasoning begins and ends with the premise that the problem can only be government.

Did I say only? No, but in that specific example, it's easily ID'd as a root issue. That's the point of that type of reasoning. I have a hypothesis, does the logic supporting that hypothesis track all the way from the root to the effect and back. If so, I trust it (not in an absolute sense, but enough that I can quickly identify other outcomes as being descendant from that). I can certainly find other fringe causes, but if I had to pick out "the one," it'd be the government, nearly every single time.


[1] Thank you for sharing that interesting article!


> 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.


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.


let's just rebrand it JPMcoin and get this charade over with already...


bullish outlook. Heavily loaded up when ETH was at <$1K.


nobody cares what you bought


neither your comment.


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.


Why a surprise? Why very surprised?

There has been a sustained effort over the last 2+ years to make this happen:

- thousands of commits in many public Git repositories, mostly on GitHub

- cross-team calls (for a variety of teams external to the Ethereum Foundation, though having received grants from the same) with recordings, transcripts, and minutes that are accessible to the public

- a series of testnet "merges" leading up to the OP that stretch back over recent months

I'm asking a genuine question. Yes, I realize it's taken time to make it happen and far longer than originally estimated, but it's not like the announcement popped out of nowhere.


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).


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?


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.


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.


Absolutely. But validator block rewards are automatically adjusted to compensate for that.


Locking up some currency is better than a similar amount being continuously needlessly spent on mining hardware and electricity.


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%.


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.


> distributes some of it to the "public" through a sale

Why the quotes? Did you miss the public launch announcement in 2015?




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: