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Ethereum is still on proof of work, so it has the same problem as bitcoin. If they made confirmations take 1 minute instead of 10 minutes, that just means their

Ethereum is still on proof of work, so it has the same problem as bitcoin. If they made confirmations take 1 minute instead of 10 minutes, that just means their confirmations are 1/10th as reliable as Bitcoin's confirmations. Nothing was solved there. And PoS has been "not so far away for a couple years now" because they keep finding problems with it.

DennisP 7y ago
Ethereum uses a variant of GHOST, which is why they get away with 15-second block times. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-ghost-implementation https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g... Ethereum's PoS is currently implemented in seven independent and fully interoperating clients. Multi-client testnet should roll out soon, and production is expected first quarter 2020.
- codexon 7y ago
  Even if the block time can be lower, ethereum supports a comically low amount of transactions per second. https://ethstats.net/ https://ethstats.net/ 9943589 (gas limit) / 21000 (minimum price of a ethereum transaction) / 14.57 (average block time) = 32.5 transactions per second.
  - fastball 7y ago
    What's your point, exactly? My initial comment was that ETH is faster (15tx/s vs 3-5tx/s) than BTC and that layer1 scaling solutions for ETH are probably coming soon. Everyone that has replied to you is just providing more info than I did. And your response is "ethereum's transactions per second are comically low right now"?
    - codexon 7y ago
      What is my point exactly? I feel like this should be obvious to anyone that doesn't have a bias towards crypto because they are gambling a lot of money on it. Making confirmations faster usually just tends to make them weaker. The security of each confirmation is based on the work down (or cpu hours). By making confirmations take half the amount of time, this only makes confirmations half as secure, because the amount of CPU hours spent is the same. You can also make confirmations faster by shrinking the amount of work done per block. This means that while confirmations are faster, it will also take longer for your transaction to get into a block in the first place. Take a look at this and notice how coinbase requires over 10x more confirmations for ethereum than bitcoin. https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593836-why-is-my-transaction-pending- https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593...
      - fastball 7y ago
        The number of confirmations needed to feel like a tx is secure and the throughput of the network are not related. Regardless of that, you're still wrong about security and confirmations, using your own source. ETH ave. block time: 10s. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (35): ~350s BTC ave. block time: 10m. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (3): ~1800s So I can make 5-6 transactions that coinbase thinks is "secure enough" on Ethereum in the time it would take me to make one transaction with Bitcoin. Add to that the fact that the throughput of the network is higher, and ETH is actually about 17x faster than BTC, and that's totally ignoring the on-chain scaling that ETH is much closer to than BTC. Also I don't currently hold any crypto, so you can stop pretending that everyone who is more informed than you is actually just biased. I cashed (of my mostly BTC holdings) in 2017.
        codexon 7y ago
        Um no. I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower. A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add. These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security. https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurances-stupid-5dcd1c3f4e41 https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance... https://howmanyconfs.com/ https://howmanyconfs.com/
      - DennisP 7y ago
        Here's why GHOST supports shorter block times for the same security. In Bitcoin, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower in the linear chain behind it. Abandoned forks contribute nothing to that. With GHOST, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower descended from it, in all forks. This way all the forks contribute to a block's security. With a linear chain, propagation time is an issue. If blocks are too short it's more likely that miners will find more than one candidate block, causing the work on abandoned blocks to be wasted. With GHOST, no work is wasted. The original GHOST paper, which proposed the algorithm as a modification to Bitcoin, has some math to calculate, for a given propagation time, the block time that would produce equivalent security to a linear chain. It was significantly shorter.
liquidify 7y ago
>that just means their confirmations are 1/10th as reliable as Bitcoin's confirmations. This argument is tired. There is no rule that dictates that the same amount of work or stake is equal to the same amount of security across different coins. I trust ETH transactions just as much as I trust BTC, and there are others that I trust equally also. And now that BTC costs more in fees, their solution is to move to less secure off-chain layers. I'll take on chain ETH, monero, BCH, and a few others any day over a low security off-chain solution like what BTC offers. I may hold BTC, but I'm not buying it, and I'm not using it.
- um_ya 7y ago
  I would like to point out that the lighting network isn't "less secure", it's cryptographicly sound. It is less secure in the sense that you need to keep your lighting node online all the time, but this can be solved with other relegated solutions.
  - liquidify 7y ago
    This is plain wrong. Lightening is not on chain except at entry and exit points. By nature this means that anything that happens between is less secure because it has not be settled publicly. Until something has been printed into the blockchain with enough proof of work behind it to be considered immutable, it is simply not in the same domain of security. Comparing these two states is a joke because one of these states is ignoring the very reason why bitcoin was invented (rapid public immutable settlement). Until that settlement has occurred, you must do the very thing that bitcoin was created to remove... trust third parties.

DennisP 7y ago

Ethereum uses a variant of GHOST, which is why they get away with 15-second block times. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-ghost-implementation https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g... Ethereum's PoS is currently implemented in seven independent and fully interoperating clients. Multi-client testnet should roll out soon, and production is expected first quarter 2020.

codexon 7y ago
Even if the block time can be lower, ethereum supports a comically low amount of transactions per second. https://ethstats.net/ https://ethstats.net/ 9943589 (gas limit) / 21000 (minimum price of a ethereum transaction) / 14.57 (average block time) = 32.5 transactions per second.
- fastball 7y ago
  What's your point, exactly? My initial comment was that ETH is faster (15tx/s vs 3-5tx/s) than BTC and that layer1 scaling solutions for ETH are probably coming soon. Everyone that has replied to you is just providing more info than I did. And your response is "ethereum's transactions per second are comically low right now"?
  - codexon 7y ago
    What is my point exactly? I feel like this should be obvious to anyone that doesn't have a bias towards crypto because they are gambling a lot of money on it. Making confirmations faster usually just tends to make them weaker. The security of each confirmation is based on the work down (or cpu hours). By making confirmations take half the amount of time, this only makes confirmations half as secure, because the amount of CPU hours spent is the same. You can also make confirmations faster by shrinking the amount of work done per block. This means that while confirmations are faster, it will also take longer for your transaction to get into a block in the first place. Take a look at this and notice how coinbase requires over 10x more confirmations for ethereum than bitcoin. https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593836-why-is-my-transaction-pending- https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593...
    - fastball 7y ago
      The number of confirmations needed to feel like a tx is secure and the throughput of the network are not related. Regardless of that, you're still wrong about security and confirmations, using your own source. ETH ave. block time: 10s. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (35): ~350s BTC ave. block time: 10m. Time to get to Coinbase confirmations (3): ~1800s So I can make 5-6 transactions that coinbase thinks is "secure enough" on Ethereum in the time it would take me to make one transaction with Bitcoin. Add to that the fact that the throughput of the network is higher, and ETH is actually about 17x faster than BTC, and that's totally ignoring the on-chain scaling that ETH is much closer to than BTC. Also I don't currently hold any crypto, so you can stop pretending that everyone who is more informed than you is actually just biased. I cashed (of my mostly BTC holdings) in 2017.
      - codexon 7y ago
        Um no. I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower. A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add. These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security. https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurances-stupid-5dcd1c3f4e41 https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance... https://howmanyconfs.com/ https://howmanyconfs.com/
    - DennisP 7y ago
      Here's why GHOST supports shorter block times for the same security. In Bitcoin, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower in the linear chain behind it. Abandoned forks contribute nothing to that. With GHOST, the chosen block is the one with the most hashpower descended from it, in all forks. This way all the forks contribute to a block's security. With a linear chain, propagation time is an issue. If blocks are too short it's more likely that miners will find more than one candidate block, causing the work on abandoned blocks to be wasted. With GHOST, no work is wasted. The original GHOST paper, which proposed the algorithm as a modification to Bitcoin, has some math to calculate, for a given propagation time, the block time that would produce equivalent security to a linear chain. It was significantly shorter.

liquidify 7y ago

>that just means their confirmations are 1/10th as reliable as Bitcoin's confirmations. This argument is tired. There is no rule that dictates that the same amount of work or stake is equal to the same amount of security across different coins. I trust ETH transactions just as much as I trust BTC, and there are others that I trust equally also. And now that BTC costs more in fees, their solution is to move to less secure off-chain layers. I'll take on chain ETH, monero, BCH, and a few others any day over a low security off-chain solution like what BTC offers. I may hold BTC, but I'm not buying it, and I'm not using it.

um_ya 7y ago
I would like to point out that the lighting network isn't "less secure", it's cryptographicly sound. It is less secure in the sense that you need to keep your lighting node online all the time, but this can be solved with other relegated solutions.
- liquidify 7y ago
  This is plain wrong. Lightening is not on chain except at entry and exit points. By nature this means that anything that happens between is less secure because it has not be settled publicly. Until something has been printed into the blockchain with enough proof of work behind it to be considered immutable, it is simply not in the same domain of security. Comparing these two states is a joke because one of these states is ignoring the very reason why bitcoin was invented (rapid public immutable settlement). Until that settlement has occurred, you must do the very thing that bitcoin was created to remove... trust third parties.