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You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing th
by Taek 6y ago
You should think of miners as bodyguards. They aren't intended to be active participants on the network, they are intended to provide the service of securing the network and serving the interests of the users of the network.
If a group of bodyguards at a concert vote democratically and 51% of them decide the singer shouldn't be allowed to go on stage and sing (because of a grudge or whatever), is that a problem? Yes absolutely that's a problem, and probably all of them are going to get fired.
Same sort of idea here. If the miners aren't serving the best interests of the network, the network has no obligation to continue paying the miners tens of millions of dollars per day (no joke, that's how much miners on Ethereum make in revenue right now) to continue sticking around.
- discardable_dan 6y agoThe difference is that a single bodyguard at a concert can quit or not, and likely won't (to pay rent). The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." These people are spending millions of dollars in electricity keeping things ticking away. If they stop, Ethereum's vested interest drops significantly. Since it is a fiat currency, less participants make it, unfortunately, less valuable. Telling 60% of holders their currency (or income toward driving that currency) is not how you keep them on your side, just like old mining town scrip is only worthwhile if the mine works. The second the mine shuts down on a union strike, the scrip becomes paper. On a personal note, I hope the miners get their due, because it was the initial philosophy of Ethereum. If they don't, I am curious to see how Ethereum moves w/r/t proof of stake vs proof of work guarantees. PoS seems at odds with the initial platform, and possibly long-term problematic for their "contracts-first" architecture.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago>>The Ethereum miners have unionized, however, so now you are negotiating with the miner unions to pay what they think is their "fair share." Unlike with employers and real world unions, the Ethereum network is not bound by labor laws to negotiate exclusively with unionized miners, or refrain from replacing them with non-unionized miners. Without those laws, unions are pretty powerless, which is why the late 19th century had such low unionization rates. >>I hope the miners get their due, because it was the initial philosophy of Ethereum. The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof of Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of Stake. Miners have already gotten much more time to earn from ETH issuance than was originally planned.
- jkhdigital 6y ago> The initial plan of Ethereum was to launch with Proof of Work, and very quickly afterwards switch to Proof of Stake And that’s the problem... it’s a bait and switch, because the miners had to bear the capital costs of investing in mining rigs, which would suddenly lose a lot of value in a switch to PoS. I think this is the original sin of Ethereum, and the network will be forever plagued by conflict because of it.
- nvlr 6y agoNot really a bait of switch though since Ethereum has always been very clear that this is the plan. Anyone who bought a rig should have known that they had a limited investment horizon.
- cachvico 6y agoThe miners do not give Ethereum its value; the market does.
- arcticbull 6y agoIt has no value without security and transactibility which is what the miners provide.
- rcxdude 6y agoNot in proof of stake (which provides it through stakers instead), which is what this whole thing is about.
- arcticbull 6y agoWell, this is about a 51% attack by the PoW miners and PoW is the law of the land. That’s why I replied in that way.
- shawnz 6y agoThey are paid fairly in exchange for providing it. If the current set of miners decide that they don't like Ethereum anymore then those profits are sitting on the table for anyone to take.
- woah 6y agoYou think that proof of work mining was the initial philosophy of Ethereum? It’s the exact opposite. Ethereum was always intended to be proof of stake, they just couldn’t get it shipped in time to launch, and then the schedule slipped a bunch more.
- shawnz 6y agoIf the current group of Ethereum miners decide to stop mining, why wouldn't new parties come in to take the profits they are leaving behind?
- jkhdigital 6y agoIt’s not like there’s a giant pool of mining hardware waiting in the wings to take over... I think we can assume that all hardware is always in use mining something as long as marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost.
- shawnz 6y agoEthereum is typically mined on GPUs so I would argue there really is a giant pool of hardware waiting to take over. On Bitcoin where ASIC mining is common that is indeed a concern, but consider even then, each hardware owner has stronger incentives to just lie about participating in such a strike while keeping the increased profits for themselves.
- ashfame 6y agoA decentralized network doesn't care for vision, it functions as per what its participants want. What you are describing, is a problem in centralised network, which Ethereum is. So, you are technically right, but let's not confuse the interests of the creator is same as the interests of the users of the network. Miners are not supposed to serve anyone but themselves. Everyone for themselves. A right system economically incentivize the right action by design, like in Bitcoin. Important to understand the first principles before judging any distributed system.
- warent 6y ago> A decentralized network doesn't care for vision I'm not sure how this can be true as long as conditions are met: 1. original creator of decentralized network still exists 2. people still respect and give authority to creator Bitcoin is visionless because it was theorized anonymously. Not so with Ethereum
- chrisco255 6y agoNo it's very much decentralized as the miners are threatening a fork. This is not unlike what Bitcoin went through in 2017 when it split between BTC and BCH. If it were centralized a fork wouldn't be possible. The miners are mercenaries. They have no loyalty to the network and the network has no loyalty to them (hence the push for proof of stake). For what it's worth, EIP-1559 wasn't Vitalik's idea, but the change is almost universally supported by the Ethereum application developers and users. At any rate the sooner we get off proof of work the better. Users are spending $20M a day on transaction fees. Let's put that money back into the ETH community by switching to proof of stake and burning the transaction fees.
- 3np 6y agoThat bodyguard narrative is yours and I think it makes little sense. Hash power is required to form consensus. If anything, non-mining full nodes run by users would be the closest to “body guards”. Miners would be the ones who settle and publish the lineup.
- shawnz 6y agoThe point of the analogy is that they are being paid to provide a service, and if they have a disagreement about it, then their only choice is to forefit their profits and let someone else come in to extract them instead.
- malikNF 6y agoTbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should have the power to vote in this blockchain, if its actually decentralized. The problem here is with the design of eth, eth was a rushed blockchain from the start, now vitalik is trying to rush the release all of a sudden because the people managing his network are not happy with the up coming changes? What the hell kind of decentralization is this if vitalik can escalate major decisions about network? Eth is not a decentralized project if one individual(or a few) can decide to go against 51% of the stakeholders of the network.
- keymone 6y agoMiners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are also users, merchants and developers. Governance of any cryptocurrency is extremely touchy subject and one thing you don’t want to do is setting a precedent for making a controversial change. If you justify such change by “majority of miners want it” - you’re basically handing over the protocol to their hands. Nothing will prevent miners to adopt changes that eventually centralize currency control, increase rewards(inflation), etc.
- malikNF 6y ago>> Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it. What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does. So they are partly responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said initially it is hard to say who the actual decision makers of the chain are because it is not defined properly by eth. >>Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are also users, merchants and developers. Like I mentioned in my previous comment, my whole disagreement with the OP of this comment chain is, their analogy calling miners bodyguards only, my argument is that its hard to tell, because anyone can play any role in this network, on eth the incentives are set up in such a way that each actor can be multiple actors, and there isn't any clear distinction as to who gets to decide what on the network. >>If you justify such change by “majority of miners want it” - you’re basically handing over the protocol to their hands. Nothing will prevent miners to adopt changes that eventually centralize currency control, increase rewards(inflation), etc. I am not trying to justify it as majority miners want it, my criticism of the eth chain is they have done this sort of nonese in the past (remember the DAO hack where vitalik and co decided to serve their own interests and rolled back a blockchain? ) It clearly shows eth hasn't grown or come up with a solution as to how to govern their blockchain in a decentralized manner. At the moment, a small select group of people, rather than the majority of its stakeholders get to decide what happens to the blockchain, and that to me doesn't look like decentralization. Whats to stop a powerful government forcing vitalik and co to implement or remove what they want in the future?
- fallingknife 6y agoYour analogy breaks down at "because of a grudge or whatever." The reason the miners are pissed is because ethereum is proposing to stop paying them. So what if the bouncers shut down the event because management told them they're not getting paid? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
- Shoue 6y agoThat's not true, they can still join a staking pool if they want to continue being "paid", so really it's just the way they're being paid that's changing.
- Tepix 6y agoYes, the plan is to find a solution to make it work without the current bouncers
- ryebit 6y agoNot to find a solution, it was already found. The roadmap plan was always to switch to PoS, the miners and PoW were always temporary until it was developed / ready. Now the beacon chain (core of PoS) is live, with around $6 billion staked. Some of the miners (not all of them by far) are complaining they're no longer going to be needed, going so far as to make a show of "force". Others (like f2pool) have calmly been preparing with rest of Ethereum community, and are transitioning to staking themselves.
- psKama 6y agoI believe your analogy is totally ill-structured and it misses the very main idea behind decentralization. There is no security guards, there is no concert-goers and there is no superstar singing at the stage. There is only MH/s and every single MH/s is equal to other one. That's the all idea about the system proposed and has been used. Miners are wrong not because you believe different people should have different weighted power to change the system, they are wrong because the roadmap for PoS was well-established long long time ago giving them more than enough time to re-structure their revenue channels and invest accordingly. Therefore for them to say "we have been used. we invested a lot and now we are pushed aside" doesn't make any sense because the investment they had made until the roadmap for ETH2.0 was public has a ROI multiples times of what they invested already as of today. For them to say this there are 2 options. 1) They were living in a cage and missed the plans for ETH2.0 and even after the roadmap is public they kept investing in mining equipment which will be useless soon. 2) They are just greedy and they just want to keep the same earnings although they have not got even a single argument for "why keeping the high fees is good for the ecosystem" apart from it means more money for them.
- TomSwirly 6y ago> more than enough time to re-structure their revenue channels and invest accordingly. In other words, their business just goes away, but they can always start some other business?
- psKama 6y agoIn other words, they have been notified 2+ years ago that, their business -which has been very profitable so far- would go away because there is a better technology which can be used so that the network can still run with less environmental impact on earth. I wish every business was that lucky to be notified that early against the next technological breakthrough which deemed them obsolete.
- pinoli 6y agommh doesn’t make a lot of sense. Miners do actually provide the infrastructure for the network to function properly: no miners, no coins, no blocks, no transactions, no network. I know it’s tempting to discard miners’ concerns, but it would be a great mistake. Miners need incentives, without incentives we’ll start allocating capital and resources somewhere else. We are not greedy, not crazy, not confrontational: we are just rational. If someone don’t like us, then could do without us.
- michaelsbradley 6y agoAs of 01 Dec 2020, there is already another Ethereum mainnet chain (Eth2 Phase 0) running in parallel with and dependent upon the Eth1 mainnet chain: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconscan.com/ https://beaconscan.com/ https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/tree/dev/specs/phase0 https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/tree/dev/specs/phas... Vitalik is proposing a role reversal to take place earlier than it was previously planned (not completely accurate in a technical sense re: previous plans, but effectively the same): Eth1 mainnet will hand-off consensus responsibility to Eth2 mainnet (PoW -> PoS), while Eth1 nodes continue to "run the code" that executes smart contracts / processes transactions. If the plan is put into motion, and as long as some miners / mining pools don't yank the plug on their mining nodes in the canonical Eth1 mainnet, then the canonical mainnet — per consensus among the Ethereum Foundation and aligned developers, Eth2 validator operators, orgs/companies/exchanges/etc — will transition suddenly from Eth1 (PoW) to Eth2 (PoS). And that will be the end of all mining on the canonical Ethereum mainnet. Miners/pools who find it impractical or undesirable to reallocate resources from mining to staking may band together to continue running an alternate mainnet chain based on PoW (ETW?); market forces would then decide whether that chain is viable, as well deciding the fate of the evolved (PoS) Ethereum mainnet chain.
- pinoli 6y agothanks for the info, I knew all of that. the problem here is not the expected switch to PoS, the problem is how do we go about reaching consensus about something in Ethereum. Is Vitalik calling the shots? I hope not. So if a small group of people is very determined and excited, doesn't mean shit to the ecosystem at large. I am not saying this EIP, or PoS, are bad. It's the way you do it that matters.