12 ms·

Ethereum London Mainnet Announcement

331 points by bpierre 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago
Whats the timeline looking like for PoS on mainnet?
- Sargos 5y ago
  December 2021 or Q1 2022 at the latest. The difficulty bomb is scheduled to activate in December so a fork of some kind will be needed to reset it so everyone is working diligently towards December as the ship date.
  - mrb 5y ago
    The difficulty bomb was supposed to first activate 4 years ago. It has been pushed back numerous times, about 6 times IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if come December they push it back one more time.
    - michaelsbradley 5y ago
      Once PoS is activated for mainnet in December (or early next year), the difficulty bomb will be no más.
      - mrb 5y ago
        Well, PoS is 4 years behind schedule. That's the reason the bomb has been pushed back for 4 years.
        michaelsbradley 5y ago
        Fair. But it feels pretty close now. I'm running multiple mainnet ETH2 validators at home, in good company with nearly 200_000 validators worldwide (see https://beaconcha.in https://beaconcha.in). The teams behind the ETH1 and ETH2 node software (the latter has multiple independent implementations, while for ETH1 go-ethereum dominates the scene) are working hard to make "the merge" (PoS for mainnet) viable ASAP. Disclosure: I work for status.im, but I'm not on the team responsible for nimbus-eth2/1.
        doomroot 5y ago
        Do you mind me asking what it costs to run a main net validator? Also how do you know the number of validators is correct? In other words can’t that be Sybiled?
        TarasBob 5y ago
        You can run a validator on a regular laptop or even a phone. You need to have 32 ETH minimum though, which is around $60,000.
        michaelsbradley 5y ago
        Correct, but I wanted to note that activating an ETH2 validator requires an exact 32 ETH deposit, no more and no less.
        nodesocket 5y ago
        If you are chosen to validate but your validator is down, broken or incorrect there is a penalty where they keep some of your ETH right?
        cmckn 5y ago
        Yup. The penalty is not kept by anyone though, it’s burned. Once your balance drops to 16 ETH, you’re removed from the validator pool. This happens slowly and depends on many factors of the current network. https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq “”” How badly will I be penalized for being offline? It depends. In addition to the impact of effective balance there are two important scenarios to be aware of: Being offline while a supermajority (2/3) of validators is still online leads to relatively small penalties as there are still enough validators online for the chain to finalize. This is the expected scenario. Being offline at the same time as more than 1/3 of the total number of validators leads to harsher penalties, since blocks do not finalize anymore. This scenario is very extreme and unlikely to happen. Note that in the second (unlikely) scenario, you stand to progressively lose up to 50% (16 ETH) of your stake over 21 days. After 21 days you are ejected out of the validator pool. This ensures that blocks start finalizing again at some point. “””
    - kolinko 5y ago
      Difficulty bombs were connected with consecutive Ethereum protocol upgrades - not just POS. Most of them ended up with network upgrades.
  - icelancer 5y ago
    I'll take the over. And this is speaking as someone who has staked ETH in PoS.
michaelsbradley 5y ago
If readers are curious how to get up-and-running with a (non-mining) full node (ETH1) at home, it's quite simple. This is how I did/do it on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu Server 20.04: 1. Download a prebuilt binary from https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/ https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/. 2. Unpack it. Optionally make it (or a symlink) available in your PATH. 3. Create a service definition, enable it, and start it: [Unit] Description=Go Ethereum [Service] Type=simple WorkingDirectory=/home/user ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/bash -c "/usr/bin/systemctl set-environment GETH_EXT_IP=$$(/home/user/.local/bin/ext-ip.sh)" ExecStart=/home/user/.local/bin/geth \ --nat extip:${GETH_EXT_IP} \ --ws StandardError=append:/home/user/.ethereum/geth.log PermissionsStartOnly=true User=user Group=user Restart=always RestartSec=5 [Install] WantedBy=default.target The script ~/.local/bin/ext-ip.sh consists of: #!/usr/bin/env bash dig TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' And that's it. geth will start syncing mainnet and will likely finish in under 12 hours (depending on your Internet connection, of course). Note: the initial sync is intensive in both network and disk IO, you'll need an SSD. Also, running a full node long-term (without pruning) currently eats quite a bit of disk space: $ du -sh ~/.ethereum/geth 598G /home/user/.ethereum/geth
- nubb 5y ago
  I’ve found not all ssd can handle a full node. If anyone is considering this just go w the nvme.
  - michaelsbradley 5y ago
    That's a great point. I went with nvme when building my NUC and don't regret it.
  - aaaaaaab 5y ago
    That is the price you have to pay to participate in a less secure, more centralized system. In what reality is it OK that you can't run a full node because the SSD cannot keep up? Should it be OK that a large segment of users who could have otherwise ran a full node, thus securing the network further, are unable to participate right out of the gate? enjoy your dogshit.
randomhodler84 5y ago
Will the miners accept 1559? It’s an optional space, miners are free to maintain the old chain and split. Of course this would be catastrophic. I know my history, this isn’t anything like the other times.
- melolife 5y ago
  People keep bringing this up, and the question you need to ask is why would anyone other than miners choose the non-fork chain? The fork will happen as long as one person is willing to mine it.
- Vespasian 5y ago
  Not quite. They would need to coordinate a new hard fork before Mid-End August because of the incoming ice age which intentionally slows the chain to a stop unless a hard fork happens. Simply saying "No I don't want to do that" isn't enough, you need to get together people to form at least one suitable alternative. That's why the ethereum devs could maintain control of the chain and the Bitcoins couldn't. Consequently the Bitcoin chain is not able to incorperate any innovations that would ever so slightly hurt mining profit in the short term even if it would be great for the ecosystem as a whole
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    So it's not up to the miners and the consensus to decide what's best for the network? The leadership can decide the rules of a new fork unless everyone else coordinate to oppose it? Edit: What prohibits the leadership to do an arbitrary fork? How do cryptographic protocols factor the fact that leadership can just say 'no' and do the opposite and the chain will follow. Especially the word 'secure' in every coin looses it's meaning isn't it?
    - ascendantlogic 5y ago
      It is up to the consensus. If enough people opposed a release and were able to coordinate their own fork then they are still free to do so. > The leadership can decide the rules of a new fork unless everyone else coordinate to oppose it? You are 100% free to not install the latest upgrade on your node(s). Unless you have enough people who agree with you and coordinate their refusal to upgrade you will be a network of one that goes entirely unused. This is exactly how decentralization is supposed to work. You have to obtain some level of consensus to get anything done. This isn't a situation where "everyone" has too coordinate to oppose something, just "enough" people to form a fork that has enough hashpower/security to attract users. Even if a large enough minority of miners were able to coordinate a new chain, fork the code, make the necessary code changes and start their own version of Ethereum they still have to get people to use their network.
liquidise 5y ago
EIP 1559 is a substantial change to the handling of gas fees on the network. In addition to making gas fees be 2 parts (base and "priority" fees), this includes a provision for "burning" the base fee, reducing the overall ETH supply. From the code itself: # miner only receives the priority fee; note that the base fee is not given to anyone (it is burned) Models i have seen suggest this will not make ETH deflationary, as the expected burn rates are outpaced by expected mining rates, but the proposal does specifically make note of this[1]. 1: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559#eth-burn-precludes-fixed-supply https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559#eth-burn-precludes-f...
- hanniabu 5y ago
  The deflationary aspect isn't speculated to kick in until after the merge to PoS when the issuance drops significantly. Regardless, I don't believe it will be deflationary long term. It will likely just last a year before it reaches an equilibrium.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    The loss of coins means it will likely be massively deflationary over time. I don't have the numbers for ETH but off hand I believe 20% of all BTC has been lost already, since just 2009. That's an annualized 1.55% effective supply deflation rate during a period where new supply was quickly generated. Basically every random walk down the timeline leads to 100% of coins lost in the course of time. This is of course separate from the decrease in rate of supply creation.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      Arguably, Ethereum's even more prone to this of loss than BTC, because of the complexity of broken smart contracts with permanently locked funds.
      - bogota 5y ago
        I think it evens out though because of a lot of early people with lots of bitcoin just lost interest and lost the wallet. This was sadly the case for me as well as a few other people i know. By time eth came out though everyone was much better about backing up wallets you thought would be worth nothing.
Temasik 5y ago
Ethereum will be irrelevant by 2030 BitCoin already solved these
nestlequ1k 5y ago
I understand some of the upgrades going into the London fork, including EIP-1559, but I don't understand "the merge". Does it mean that some kind of sharding will be in place, and the currently useless PoS chain will be able to communicate with the PoW chain?
- everfree 5y ago
  Basically, at the point of the merge, nodes stop paying attention to what the PoW calculations are saying about the head of the execution chain, and start to pay attention to what the beacon chain (PoS chain) is saying about the head of the execution chain. Because the two chains become inextricably linked together at that point, with the execution chain becoming entirely dependent on the beacon chain, we call that point the "merge". So from that point on, new blocks on the execution chain - full of general Ethereum transactions - will be considered "confirmed" not because they include a difficult PoW calculation, but because the beacon chain has given that block its blessing (because stakers voted on it).
- delaaxe 5y ago
  The merge won’t include sharding
londons_explore 5y ago
Eth isn't yet a grown up ecosystem when one party can push for a major network change like this, and there not be any question that it'll go through. Democracy where one party wins every vote isn't really democracy. Benevolent dictator works for software projects, but not for currencies.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I think that is democracy, you're just pointing out a flaw in it. If it's not majority rule, what would you suggest (for alt-coins, not for politics, I mean; though answering both is fine). Politics-wise we can mitigate some of the effect by having proportional representation, but I'm not sure what the crypto-currency equivalent of that would be, nor really if it works as a concept.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Is Ethereum a software project or a currency?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- casi18 5y ago
  I dunno, remember Parity (who were very big players and leading devs in eth at the time) wanting a fork to recover contract funds and it was plainly rejected by the rest of the community. That said im also not really sure what you would be asking for as a change to the process? Anyone is welcome to join the discussions, propose changes, defend them, code them. What would make it "grown up" and mature in your eyes? Also what "one party" are you talking about, a person? organisation? There are multiple eth client teams, and London has been one of the most discussed hard-forks there has been, 1559 has been in discussion and development for a few years now. Im genuinely interested what would have to happen for you to see it as democratic? is it a question of sybil resistance? funding for teams?
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    I think the project founders would need to distance themselves from the project (or at least announce they would no longer be decision makers), and have a bunch of different people try to take the project in different technical and idealistic directions, with some failing and some succeeding. If the project survives that, you can have a lot more confidence the project can resolve disputes with no key members being vital to the process.
cryptica 5y ago
I never understood why people like Ethereum. It's one of the worst cryptocurrencies in existence. They've been working on staking and sharding for years and have shown no results on those fronts. This update is insignificant. This is not normal. There is something seriously wrong with the development process. IMO, they have been infiltrated by saboteurs and their project has become corrupted. Unfortunately, this is not something which can be fixed. The corruption exists at every level of the project; all their developers and miners are happy to have an inefficient blockchain as it allows miners to collect high fees. The leaders of the project want to stretch out development as long as possible so that they can drain the Ethereum Foundation's coffers at a rate which won't attract the attention of regulators. The top developers are corrupt and just want to increase their salaries and get promotions by collecting dirt and using extortion instead of delivering results. They hire new people who they believe can be corrupted to join their side... As someone who works in the blockchain industry, I can say that it's a total mess in there. The more valuable the project, the more corrupt it is. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Money is power. Ethereum is money. QED. They will never deliver anything meaningful. Never.
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > They will never deliver anything meaningful. Never. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/#explore https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/#explore
  - cryptica 5y ago
    I said meaningful. Unscalable DeFi scams don't count. All these ERC20 projects force their community to pay between $10 to $20 per transaction to Ethereum miners who add no real value to their project/token. No real project based on real underlying value would force their users to pay such extortionate fees to some set of third-party validators who have nothing to do with their project aside from wedging themselves as middlemen between their tokens and their users.
    - eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago
      The project is only 6 years old... This entire industry is still very young, lol. We've got smart contracts, that's an amazing idea and it works, the next step is to solve scalability issues. But it's not an easy task and needs time.
delaaxe 5y ago
ETH deflation simulator: https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/
pixel_tracing 5y ago
For someone out of the loop on crypto tech updates, can anyone ELI5?
- tomtomistaken 5y ago
  Just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGemhK9t44Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGemhK9t44Q
  - pixel_tracing 5y ago
    Thank you! Saved video for friends as well
jaco8 5y ago
I compiled and run an ethereum beaconnode on a raspberry 4. How much is this helping the ecosystem ? Why is running a beaconnode which helps validators to find the next transaction faster not being supported by fees (however tiny they may be). There seems to be no incentive to run this at all ... or am I missing something ?
- nootropicat 5y ago
  The direct incentive is gain from staking ether and transaction fees.
- michaelsbradley 5y ago
  You would need to "activate" your validator by depositing 32 ETH, and it takes a bit of time after the deposit is made before it will transition from pending to active. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/deposit-contract/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/deposit-contract/ Also, at the present time, it's a good idea to run an ETH1 node locally, with your activated validator set to check it for blocks added to mainnet. You could instead use a free or paid Infura endpoint, but the extra latency may prove problematic. Once activated, your validator would begin to earn rewards for making attestations and block proposals, etc. The APR is currently around 6% - 10%, depending on your validator's performance. Here are some stats for a validator I chose at random: https://beaconcha.in/validator/72727 https://beaconcha.in/validator/72727 https://beaconscan.com/validator/72727 https://beaconscan.com/validator/72727 Running an unstaked/unactivated validator is not a bad thing to do, but there is no financial incentive to do so.
tasshmars 5y ago
I am looking forward to the upgrade as it will cut down a significant amount of fees. That alone will enable numerous users to use ETH again to transact.
ricardobayes 5y ago
I just watched a 5 minute video explaining how this impacts miner fees etc. Extremely convoluted and complicated. To me nano and the other 'fee-less', instant transfer coins represent the future of crytos. I missed the train on ETH and BTC and now I feel like there's too much to catch up to, but also feel there are much simpler and usable coins (in the real world) are coming.

331 points by bpierre 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago

Whats the timeline looking like for PoS on mainnet?

Sargos 5y ago
December 2021 or Q1 2022 at the latest. The difficulty bomb is scheduled to activate in December so a fork of some kind will be needed to reset it so everyone is working diligently towards December as the ship date.
- mrb 5y ago
  The difficulty bomb was supposed to first activate 4 years ago. It has been pushed back numerous times, about 6 times IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if come December they push it back one more time.
  - michaelsbradley 5y ago
    Once PoS is activated for mainnet in December (or early next year), the difficulty bomb will be no más.
    - mrb 5y ago
      Well, PoS is 4 years behind schedule. That's the reason the bomb has been pushed back for 4 years.
      - michaelsbradley 5y ago
        Fair. But it feels pretty close now. I'm running multiple mainnet ETH2 validators at home, in good company with nearly 200_000 validators worldwide (see https://beaconcha.in https://beaconcha.in). The teams behind the ETH1 and ETH2 node software (the latter has multiple independent implementations, while for ETH1 go-ethereum dominates the scene) are working hard to make "the merge" (PoS for mainnet) viable ASAP. Disclosure: I work for status.im, but I'm not on the team responsible for nimbus-eth2/1.
        doomroot 5y ago
        Do you mind me asking what it costs to run a main net validator? Also how do you know the number of validators is correct? In other words can’t that be Sybiled?
        TarasBob 5y ago
        You can run a validator on a regular laptop or even a phone. You need to have 32 ETH minimum though, which is around $60,000.
        michaelsbradley 5y ago
        Correct, but I wanted to note that activating an ETH2 validator requires an exact 32 ETH deposit, no more and no less.
        nodesocket 5y ago
        If you are chosen to validate but your validator is down, broken or incorrect there is a penalty where they keep some of your ETH right?
        cmckn 5y ago
        Yup. The penalty is not kept by anyone though, it’s burned. Once your balance drops to 16 ETH, you’re removed from the validator pool. This happens slowly and depends on many factors of the current network. https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/faq “”” How badly will I be penalized for being offline? It depends. In addition to the impact of effective balance there are two important scenarios to be aware of: Being offline while a supermajority (2/3) of validators is still online leads to relatively small penalties as there are still enough validators online for the chain to finalize. This is the expected scenario. Being offline at the same time as more than 1/3 of the total number of validators leads to harsher penalties, since blocks do not finalize anymore. This scenario is very extreme and unlikely to happen. Note that in the second (unlikely) scenario, you stand to progressively lose up to 50% (16 ETH) of your stake over 21 days. After 21 days you are ejected out of the validator pool. This ensures that blocks start finalizing again at some point. “””
  - kolinko 5y ago
    Difficulty bombs were connected with consecutive Ethereum protocol upgrades - not just POS. Most of them ended up with network upgrades.
- icelancer 5y ago
  I'll take the over. And this is speaking as someone who has staked ETH in PoS.

michaelsbradley 5y ago

If readers are curious how to get up-and-running with a (non-mining) full node (ETH1) at home, it's quite simple. This is how I did/do it on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu Server 20.04: 1. Download a prebuilt binary from https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/ https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/. 2. Unpack it. Optionally make it (or a symlink) available in your PATH. 3. Create a service definition, enable it, and start it: [Unit] Description=Go Ethereum [Service] Type=simple WorkingDirectory=/home/user ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/bash -c "/usr/bin/systemctl set-environment GETH_EXT_IP=$$(/home/user/.local/bin/ext-ip.sh)" ExecStart=/home/user/.local/bin/geth \ --nat extip:${GETH_EXT_IP} \ --ws StandardError=append:/home/user/.ethereum/geth.log PermissionsStartOnly=true User=user Group=user Restart=always RestartSec=5 [Install] WantedBy=default.target The script ~/.local/bin/ext-ip.sh consists of: #!/usr/bin/env bash dig TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' And that's it. geth will start syncing mainnet and will likely finish in under 12 hours (depending on your Internet connection, of course). Note: the initial sync is intensive in both network and disk IO, you'll need an SSD. Also, running a full node long-term (without pruning) currently eats quite a bit of disk space: $ du -sh ~/.ethereum/geth 598G /home/user/.ethereum/geth

nubb 5y ago
I’ve found not all ssd can handle a full node. If anyone is considering this just go w the nvme.
- michaelsbradley 5y ago
  That's a great point. I went with nvme when building my NUC and don't regret it.
- aaaaaaab 5y ago
  That is the price you have to pay to participate in a less secure, more centralized system. In what reality is it OK that you can't run a full node because the SSD cannot keep up? Should it be OK that a large segment of users who could have otherwise ran a full node, thus securing the network further, are unable to participate right out of the gate? enjoy your dogshit.

randomhodler84 5y ago

Will the miners accept 1559? It’s an optional space, miners are free to maintain the old chain and split. Of course this would be catastrophic. I know my history, this isn’t anything like the other times.

melolife 5y ago
People keep bringing this up, and the question you need to ask is why would anyone other than miners choose the non-fork chain? The fork will happen as long as one person is willing to mine it.
Vespasian 5y ago
Not quite. They would need to coordinate a new hard fork before Mid-End August because of the incoming ice age which intentionally slows the chain to a stop unless a hard fork happens. Simply saying "No I don't want to do that" isn't enough, you need to get together people to form at least one suitable alternative. That's why the ethereum devs could maintain control of the chain and the Bitcoins couldn't. Consequently the Bitcoin chain is not able to incorperate any innovations that would ever so slightly hurt mining profit in the short term even if it would be great for the ecosystem as a whole
- ithinkso 5y ago
  So it's not up to the miners and the consensus to decide what's best for the network? The leadership can decide the rules of a new fork unless everyone else coordinate to oppose it? Edit: What prohibits the leadership to do an arbitrary fork? How do cryptographic protocols factor the fact that leadership can just say 'no' and do the opposite and the chain will follow. Especially the word 'secure' in every coin looses it's meaning isn't it?
  - ascendantlogic 5y ago
    It is up to the consensus. If enough people opposed a release and were able to coordinate their own fork then they are still free to do so. > The leadership can decide the rules of a new fork unless everyone else coordinate to oppose it? You are 100% free to not install the latest upgrade on your node(s). Unless you have enough people who agree with you and coordinate their refusal to upgrade you will be a network of one that goes entirely unused. This is exactly how decentralization is supposed to work. You have to obtain some level of consensus to get anything done. This isn't a situation where "everyone" has too coordinate to oppose something, just "enough" people to form a fork that has enough hashpower/security to attract users. Even if a large enough minority of miners were able to coordinate a new chain, fork the code, make the necessary code changes and start their own version of Ethereum they still have to get people to use their network.

liquidise 5y ago

EIP 1559 is a substantial change to the handling of gas fees on the network. In addition to making gas fees be 2 parts (base and "priority" fees), this includes a provision for "burning" the base fee, reducing the overall ETH supply. From the code itself: # miner only receives the priority fee; note that the base fee is not given to anyone (it is burned) Models i have seen suggest this will not make ETH deflationary, as the expected burn rates are outpaced by expected mining rates, but the proposal does specifically make note of this[1]. 1: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559#eth-burn-precludes-fixed-supply https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1559#eth-burn-precludes-f...

hanniabu 5y ago
The deflationary aspect isn't speculated to kick in until after the merge to PoS when the issuance drops significantly. Regardless, I don't believe it will be deflationary long term. It will likely just last a year before it reaches an equilibrium.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  The loss of coins means it will likely be massively deflationary over time. I don't have the numbers for ETH but off hand I believe 20% of all BTC has been lost already, since just 2009. That's an annualized 1.55% effective supply deflation rate during a period where new supply was quickly generated. Basically every random walk down the timeline leads to 100% of coins lost in the course of time. This is of course separate from the decrease in rate of supply creation.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Arguably, Ethereum's even more prone to this of loss than BTC, because of the complexity of broken smart contracts with permanently locked funds.
    - bogota 5y ago
      I think it evens out though because of a lot of early people with lots of bitcoin just lost interest and lost the wallet. This was sadly the case for me as well as a few other people i know. By time eth came out though everyone was much better about backing up wallets you thought would be worth nothing.

Temasik 5y ago

Ethereum will be irrelevant by 2030 BitCoin already solved these

nestlequ1k 5y ago

I understand some of the upgrades going into the London fork, including EIP-1559, but I don't understand "the merge". Does it mean that some kind of sharding will be in place, and the currently useless PoS chain will be able to communicate with the PoW chain?

everfree 5y ago
Basically, at the point of the merge, nodes stop paying attention to what the PoW calculations are saying about the head of the execution chain, and start to pay attention to what the beacon chain (PoS chain) is saying about the head of the execution chain. Because the two chains become inextricably linked together at that point, with the execution chain becoming entirely dependent on the beacon chain, we call that point the "merge". So from that point on, new blocks on the execution chain - full of general Ethereum transactions - will be considered "confirmed" not because they include a difficult PoW calculation, but because the beacon chain has given that block its blessing (because stakers voted on it).
delaaxe 5y ago
The merge won’t include sharding

londons_explore 5y ago

Eth isn't yet a grown up ecosystem when one party can push for a major network change like this, and there not be any question that it'll go through. Democracy where one party wins every vote isn't really democracy. Benevolent dictator works for software projects, but not for currencies.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I think that is democracy, you're just pointing out a flaw in it. If it's not majority rule, what would you suggest (for alt-coins, not for politics, I mean; though answering both is fine). Politics-wise we can mitigate some of the effect by having proportional representation, but I'm not sure what the crypto-currency equivalent of that would be, nor really if it works as a concept.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Is Ethereum a software project or a currency?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
casi18 5y ago
I dunno, remember Parity (who were very big players and leading devs in eth at the time) wanting a fork to recover contract funds and it was plainly rejected by the rest of the community. That said im also not really sure what you would be asking for as a change to the process? Anyone is welcome to join the discussions, propose changes, defend them, code them. What would make it "grown up" and mature in your eyes? Also what "one party" are you talking about, a person? organisation? There are multiple eth client teams, and London has been one of the most discussed hard-forks there has been, 1559 has been in discussion and development for a few years now. Im genuinely interested what would have to happen for you to see it as democratic? is it a question of sybil resistance? funding for teams?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  I think the project founders would need to distance themselves from the project (or at least announce they would no longer be decision makers), and have a bunch of different people try to take the project in different technical and idealistic directions, with some failing and some succeeding. If the project survives that, you can have a lot more confidence the project can resolve disputes with no key members being vital to the process.

cryptica 5y ago

I never understood why people like Ethereum. It's one of the worst cryptocurrencies in existence. They've been working on staking and sharding for years and have shown no results on those fronts. This update is insignificant. This is not normal. There is something seriously wrong with the development process. IMO, they have been infiltrated by saboteurs and their project has become corrupted. Unfortunately, this is not something which can be fixed. The corruption exists at every level of the project; all their developers and miners are happy to have an inefficient blockchain as it allows miners to collect high fees. The leaders of the project want to stretch out development as long as possible so that they can drain the Ethereum Foundation's coffers at a rate which won't attract the attention of regulators. The top developers are corrupt and just want to increase their salaries and get promotions by collecting dirt and using extortion instead of delivering results. They hire new people who they believe can be corrupted to join their side... As someone who works in the blockchain industry, I can say that it's a total mess in there. The more valuable the project, the more corrupt it is. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Money is power. Ethereum is money. QED. They will never deliver anything meaningful. Never.

whitepaint 5y ago
> They will never deliver anything meaningful. Never. https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/#explore https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/#explore
- cryptica 5y ago
  I said meaningful. Unscalable DeFi scams don't count. All these ERC20 projects force their community to pay between $10 to $20 per transaction to Ethereum miners who add no real value to their project/token. No real project based on real underlying value would force their users to pay such extortionate fees to some set of third-party validators who have nothing to do with their project aside from wedging themselves as middlemen between their tokens and their users.
  - eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago
    The project is only 6 years old... This entire industry is still very young, lol. We've got smart contracts, that's an amazing idea and it works, the next step is to solve scalability issues. But it's not an easy task and needs time.

delaaxe 5y ago

ETH deflation simulator: https://ultrasound.money/ https://ultrasound.money/

pixel_tracing 5y ago

For someone out of the loop on crypto tech updates, can anyone ELI5?

tomtomistaken 5y ago
Just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGemhK9t44Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGemhK9t44Q
- pixel_tracing 5y ago
  Thank you! Saved video for friends as well

jaco8 5y ago

I compiled and run an ethereum beaconnode on a raspberry 4. How much is this helping the ecosystem ? Why is running a beaconnode which helps validators to find the next transaction faster not being supported by fees (however tiny they may be). There seems to be no incentive to run this at all ... or am I missing something ?

nootropicat 5y ago
The direct incentive is gain from staking ether and transaction fees.
michaelsbradley 5y ago
You would need to "activate" your validator by depositing 32 ETH, and it takes a bit of time after the deposit is made before it will transition from pending to active. https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/deposit-contract/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/deposit-contract/ Also, at the present time, it's a good idea to run an ETH1 node locally, with your activated validator set to check it for blocks added to mainnet. You could instead use a free or paid Infura endpoint, but the extra latency may prove problematic. Once activated, your validator would begin to earn rewards for making attestations and block proposals, etc. The APR is currently around 6% - 10%, depending on your validator's performance. Here are some stats for a validator I chose at random: https://beaconcha.in/validator/72727 https://beaconcha.in/validator/72727 https://beaconscan.com/validator/72727 https://beaconscan.com/validator/72727 Running an unstaked/unactivated validator is not a bad thing to do, but there is no financial incentive to do so.

tasshmars 5y ago

I am looking forward to the upgrade as it will cut down a significant amount of fees. That alone will enable numerous users to use ETH again to transact.

ricardobayes 5y ago

I just watched a 5 minute video explaining how this impacts miner fees etc. Extremely convoluted and complicated. To me nano and the other 'fee-less', instant transfer coins represent the future of crytos. I missed the train on ETH and BTC and now I feel like there's too much to catch up to, but also feel there are much simpler and usable coins (in the real world) are coming.