6 ms·

Seems like one of the core arguments of this is that the the core devs have pushed the difficulty bomb multiple times because they've missed their original time

Seems like one of the core arguments of this is that the the core devs have pushed the difficulty bomb multiple times because they've missed their original timelines for switching to PoS without any repercussions. It seems to me that this is actually the correct thing to do. I'd rather the core devs take their time and iron out the issues instead of being incentivized to play fast and loose with a system that manages billions.

fastball 5y ago
The actual core idea seems to be that the core devs can do whatever they want without cooperation from miners, which is... the opposite of true.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Miners were very opposed to EIP-1559 and in the end when the talks failed they mostly just ignored them. It's kind of true.
  - latchkey 5y ago
    Not true at all. There was never any real consensus among miners on this front. As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. The miners who I watched were just kind of bandwagon on the theme of "wait, I'll earn less cause you're burning my fees"? Which in reality isn't entirely the case (price and usage have gone up, along with the lack of wallet support).
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      The Community calls didn't reach agreement with miners, and the fact that they kept protesting it is why the Ethereum Foundation decided to move the ETH 2 timeline forward. https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-1559-has-accelerated-upgrade-eth-2-0/ https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-15... >As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. I don't know what mechanics you think others didn't understand. Your profitability has dropped and the move is basically moving miners' profit to the largest holders (e.g. everyone who pushed for the change). It's not like the fees have dropped since EIP-1559 if that's something you thought the change will bring for some reason.
      - latchkey 5y ago
        LOL! Pretty sure those community calls did not include ALL miners. With regards to the rest, it is all political theater. The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, that I'm sure most people (miners) are not even aware of: https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackmd.io%2F%40timbeiko%2F1559-update-004#Economic-Analysis-%F0%9F%93%91 https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm... As for profitability changes, that's almost impossible to measure right now. There is too many variables. One is that there isn't any wallet support for 1559 yet (MM came out today and is apparently, um, lacking). People are still over paying for transactions. Difficulty + price changes + pool luck + changes in hardware stability also make things nearly impossible to track accurately. I have a margin of error, but it doesn't look too bad right now actually.
        Tenoke 5y ago
        >LOL! Pretty sure those community calls did not include ALL miners. They included the biggest miners and overall > 50% of the mining power as far as I could tell. >The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, I wish you'd specify what mechanic in particular you think others misunderstood and you didn't, as I included the main ones from their arguments.
        latchkey 5y ago
        Exactly. 50% isn't enough to reach consensus. I also know pools that voted against it, which kind of regret that now that they understand things better. A big issue is that miners and some of the pools were still raw over progpow. Point #1 is a big one. A huge number of people thought that fees would go down.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    They brought the miners onto the weekly cat herders (the name for core dev weekly sync) meeting they hold. I watched the stream. They listened to the feedback, some other miners that were for it including Stakefish were present. The arguments weren't strong at all from the miners that were opposed and in the end, they dropped it.
- latchkey 5y ago
  It isn't quite that simple. There is a whole bunch of game effects happening here that add a lot of complexity to a statement like that. One key one is price, another is that most miners barely understand how the network works and therefore couldn't exert any force even if they wanted to. Pools concentrate the force, but miners can move to whatever pool they like the best (usually the most profitable... which is where the main store of wealth is)... disclosure: large scale eth miner
kristofferR 5y ago
Yeah, Ethereum's development isn't a simple project that can be rushed, it's massively complicated. This road map comes to mind: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1333922620857745408/photo/1 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540... It's very outdated now, that's not the point. The point is that every circle on the road map is a very complicated project in and of itself that needs tons of research, development and testing to be implemented properly. Just the code itself is thousands of commits.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ahdeanz 5y ago
  Absolutely, not to mention Eth just rolled out a major update last week. This rambling, bizarre article boils down to a few very basic, extremely played out arguments. Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work. You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read. Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest. Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking. The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.
latchkey 5y ago
Correct, the bomb is meant to be moved. It is more like a carrot/stick. It is the gadget that allows the devs to turn off the lights on the miners when they are ready to turn them off. Having a forced migration knob is a good thing.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
Agreed. The article feels a bit like it's salty about a very complex software project behaving like a very complex software project. My understanding of the changing of the rules "as you go" is that it's based on the reality being faced by the system. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is simultaneously one of it's strengths and one of its weaknesses, and Ethereum has chosen to move from PoW to PoS because of the belief that it's the right path to follow in attempting to solve the problems the system is facing in reality. I don't think the "working class" vs. "ruling class" analogy is particularly fitting. However, to continue the analogy, the profitability of Ethereum mining (from what I've heard) would have allowed pretty much all of the early "working class" to have climbed the social ladder to "ruling class" if they held onto some percentage of their earnings (you know, like "savings" or "investments" in this real-world analogy). If the "working class" believed in the longevity of the project they've chosen to work for, wouldn't they see the investment opportunity? Otherwise they're just there for the immediate profit, and there's no long-term contract or agreement that's been broken. The system is evolving, like what happens in the real world. > As a Bitcoiner... > We wouldn’t dare... > We would never... > doesn’t have a ruling class to take advantage of other classes Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either. Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term.
- meowface 5y ago
  >Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either. I think this is unfair. These are splinter communities. It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic and Binance Smart Chain. >Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term. I pretty much agree with this part. I think it'll probably cause very serious issues for it over the next decade. I predict they'll actually eventually move off of PoW or drastically alter the PoW algorithm, but only after many years of infighting and stubborn refusal to consider the possibility.
  - revnode 5y ago
    > It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic That's exactly what the article did.
h0l0cube 5y ago
There's a little more to the argument: > This time the working class has their pay reduced from 4 Eth to 3 Eth per block, a 25% pay cut. Miners now earn 40% less per block than at the time of the community’s constitution, which promised that code was law, and which the ruling class later said they would break only once, for what was an especially good reason. But the code is law promise has now been broken so many times people expect it to occur at regular intervals and even worry that “progress” is slowing down if there aren’t frequent enough hard forks (to break that promise yet again).
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Miners for Ethereum are incredibly profitable and benefit enormously from side-channel MEV (miner extractable value) payouts that tip them for transaction ordering. In doing so, they extract value from users making trades. In addition, a reduced issuance in crypto tends to lead to the underlying asset appreciating in value, as noted by the Bitcoin stock-to-flow model in the wake of each halvening. The "code is law" is not some universal absolute. Blockchains have always been forkable. But a chain can't have a contentious fork without a cost and it becomes costlier and riskier to do later in a chain's life.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    My understanding of MEV was "Maximum Extractable Value", and to clarify: MEV is the process by which a miner takes advantage of their ability to view pending transactions so they can "front-run" (add their own transactions ahead of) the transactions of others, bumping up the costs for the transactions that come after theirs, thus "extracting maximum value" from their privileged position. Using the original article author's analogy, the "working class" are adding their own percentage to the retail price and taking those profits home.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      MEV began as Miner Extractable Value, but a lot of people are adopting Maximum so that they can keep the same acronym for proof of stake. They typically don't have the on-chain analysis or skill to reorder the transactions in the highest extractable way, so people bid for these opportunities through side channels they signal the miner to do (off-chain) based on the mempool (backlog) of transactions. Miners profit from this activity and in some cases these profits exceed the 2ETH per block issuance. The class analogy is strained and doesn't fit at all. These are only possible because Ethereum has a rich application layer (and if anyone is 'working class' it's the users, devs and dapps on the chain). But these profits more than made up for any offset in EIP1559 losses.
redisman 5y ago
Every software project ever has been behind schedule
abecedarius 5y ago
Another point that's underemphasized in the piece: forkable governance with voluntary participation is very different from the scenarios that go with a "ruling class".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
unionpivo 5y ago
But then you don't have time bomb any more, is the point. And you don't have code is law any more. If you will hard fork every time it's convenient, you don't have anything stable. If they did it once, that would be one thing. But now it's happening semi regularly. Difficulty bomb is pretty much a marketing lie by now.
- dylkil 5y ago
  >If you will hard fork every time it's convenient Creating a hard fork isnt easy as you make it out to be
ridaj 5y ago
Why have this fake deadline at all then? That sounds like it is playing fast and loose with the system, since it practically requires a nontrivial action to postpone.
- everfree 5y ago
  The point of the difficulty bomb isn't to put a deadline on the developers, it's to prevent a situation where node operators get complacent and stop updating their nodes. It forces node operators to come to consensus on whether to fork alongside the developers or to fork in a different direction. It removes the option of doing nothing and letting the Ethereum chain stagnate.
- moomin 5y ago
  For the same reason congress keeps passing appropriation bills without fixing the problem that makes them keep on having to pass appropriation bills.

fastball 5y ago

The actual core idea seems to be that the core devs can do whatever they want without cooperation from miners, which is... the opposite of true.

Tenoke 5y ago
Miners were very opposed to EIP-1559 and in the end when the talks failed they mostly just ignored them. It's kind of true.
- latchkey 5y ago
  Not true at all. There was never any real consensus among miners on this front. As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. The miners who I watched were just kind of bandwagon on the theme of "wait, I'll earn less cause you're burning my fees"? Which in reality isn't entirely the case (price and usage have gone up, along with the lack of wallet support).
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    The Community calls didn't reach agreement with miners, and the fact that they kept protesting it is why the Ethereum Foundation decided to move the ETH 2 timeline forward. https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-1559-has-accelerated-upgrade-eth-2-0/ https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-15... >As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. I don't know what mechanics you think others didn't understand. Your profitability has dropped and the move is basically moving miners' profit to the largest holders (e.g. everyone who pushed for the change). It's not like the fees have dropped since EIP-1559 if that's something you thought the change will bring for some reason.
    - latchkey 5y ago
      LOL! Pretty sure those community calls did not include ALL miners. With regards to the rest, it is all political theater. The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, that I'm sure most people (miners) are not even aware of: https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackmd.io%2F%40timbeiko%2F1559-update-004#Economic-Analysis-%F0%9F%93%91 https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm... As for profitability changes, that's almost impossible to measure right now. There is too many variables. One is that there isn't any wallet support for 1559 yet (MM came out today and is apparently, um, lacking). People are still over paying for transactions. Difficulty + price changes + pool luck + changes in hardware stability also make things nearly impossible to track accurately. I have a margin of error, but it doesn't look too bad right now actually.
      - Tenoke 5y ago
        >LOL! Pretty sure those community calls did not include ALL miners. They included the biggest miners and overall > 50% of the mining power as far as I could tell. >The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, I wish you'd specify what mechanic in particular you think others misunderstood and you didn't, as I included the main ones from their arguments.
        latchkey 5y ago
        Exactly. 50% isn't enough to reach consensus. I also know pools that voted against it, which kind of regret that now that they understand things better. A big issue is that miners and some of the pools were still raw over progpow. Point #1 is a big one. A huge number of people thought that fees would go down.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  They brought the miners onto the weekly cat herders (the name for core dev weekly sync) meeting they hold. I watched the stream. They listened to the feedback, some other miners that were for it including Stakefish were present. The arguments weren't strong at all from the miners that were opposed and in the end, they dropped it.
latchkey 5y ago
It isn't quite that simple. There is a whole bunch of game effects happening here that add a lot of complexity to a statement like that. One key one is price, another is that most miners barely understand how the network works and therefore couldn't exert any force even if they wanted to. Pools concentrate the force, but miners can move to whatever pool they like the best (usually the most profitable... which is where the main store of wealth is)... disclosure: large scale eth miner

kristofferR 5y ago

Yeah, Ethereum's development isn't a simple project that can be rushed, it's massively complicated. This road map comes to mind: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1333922620857745408/photo/1 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540... It's very outdated now, that's not the point. The point is that every circle on the road map is a very complicated project in and of itself that needs tons of research, development and testing to be implemented properly. Just the code itself is thousands of commits.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ahdeanz 5y ago
Absolutely, not to mention Eth just rolled out a major update last week. This rambling, bizarre article boils down to a few very basic, extremely played out arguments. Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work. You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read. Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest. Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking. The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.

latchkey 5y ago

Correct, the bomb is meant to be moved. It is more like a carrot/stick. It is the gadget that allows the devs to turn off the lights on the miners when they are ready to turn them off. Having a forced migration knob is a good thing.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

Agreed. The article feels a bit like it's salty about a very complex software project behaving like a very complex software project. My understanding of the changing of the rules "as you go" is that it's based on the reality being faced by the system. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is simultaneously one of it's strengths and one of its weaknesses, and Ethereum has chosen to move from PoW to PoS because of the belief that it's the right path to follow in attempting to solve the problems the system is facing in reality. I don't think the "working class" vs. "ruling class" analogy is particularly fitting. However, to continue the analogy, the profitability of Ethereum mining (from what I've heard) would have allowed pretty much all of the early "working class" to have climbed the social ladder to "ruling class" if they held onto some percentage of their earnings (you know, like "savings" or "investments" in this real-world analogy). If the "working class" believed in the longevity of the project they've chosen to work for, wouldn't they see the investment opportunity? Otherwise they're just there for the immediate profit, and there's no long-term contract or agreement that's been broken. The system is evolving, like what happens in the real world. > As a Bitcoiner... > We wouldn’t dare... > We would never... > doesn’t have a ruling class to take advantage of other classes Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either. Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term.

meowface 5y ago
>Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either. I think this is unfair. These are splinter communities. It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic and Binance Smart Chain. >Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term. I pretty much agree with this part. I think it'll probably cause very serious issues for it over the next decade. I predict they'll actually eventually move off of PoW or drastically alter the PoW algorithm, but only after many years of infighting and stubborn refusal to consider the possibility.
- revnode 5y ago
  > It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic That's exactly what the article did.

h0l0cube 5y ago

There's a little more to the argument: > This time the working class has their pay reduced from 4 Eth to 3 Eth per block, a 25% pay cut. Miners now earn 40% less per block than at the time of the community’s constitution, which promised that code was law, and which the ruling class later said they would break only once, for what was an especially good reason. But the code is law promise has now been broken so many times people expect it to occur at regular intervals and even worry that “progress” is slowing down if there aren’t frequent enough hard forks (to break that promise yet again).

chrisco255 5y ago
Miners for Ethereum are incredibly profitable and benefit enormously from side-channel MEV (miner extractable value) payouts that tip them for transaction ordering. In doing so, they extract value from users making trades. In addition, a reduced issuance in crypto tends to lead to the underlying asset appreciating in value, as noted by the Bitcoin stock-to-flow model in the wake of each halvening. The "code is law" is not some universal absolute. Blockchains have always been forkable. But a chain can't have a contentious fork without a cost and it becomes costlier and riskier to do later in a chain's life.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  My understanding of MEV was "Maximum Extractable Value", and to clarify: MEV is the process by which a miner takes advantage of their ability to view pending transactions so they can "front-run" (add their own transactions ahead of) the transactions of others, bumping up the costs for the transactions that come after theirs, thus "extracting maximum value" from their privileged position. Using the original article author's analogy, the "working class" are adding their own percentage to the retail price and taking those profits home.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    MEV began as Miner Extractable Value, but a lot of people are adopting Maximum so that they can keep the same acronym for proof of stake. They typically don't have the on-chain analysis or skill to reorder the transactions in the highest extractable way, so people bid for these opportunities through side channels they signal the miner to do (off-chain) based on the mempool (backlog) of transactions. Miners profit from this activity and in some cases these profits exceed the 2ETH per block issuance. The class analogy is strained and doesn't fit at all. These are only possible because Ethereum has a rich application layer (and if anyone is 'working class' it's the users, devs and dapps on the chain). But these profits more than made up for any offset in EIP1559 losses.

redisman 5y ago

Every software project ever has been behind schedule

abecedarius 5y ago

Another point that's underemphasized in the piece: forkable governance with voluntary participation is very different from the scenarios that go with a "ruling class".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

unionpivo 5y ago

But then you don't have time bomb any more, is the point. And you don't have code is law any more. If you will hard fork every time it's convenient, you don't have anything stable. If they did it once, that would be one thing. But now it's happening semi regularly. Difficulty bomb is pretty much a marketing lie by now.

dylkil 5y ago
>If you will hard fork every time it's convenient Creating a hard fork isnt easy as you make it out to be

ridaj 5y ago

Why have this fake deadline at all then? That sounds like it is playing fast and loose with the system, since it practically requires a nontrivial action to postpone.

everfree 5y ago
The point of the difficulty bomb isn't to put a deadline on the developers, it's to prevent a situation where node operators get complacent and stop updating their nodes. It forces node operators to come to consensus on whether to fork alongside the developers or to fork in a different direction. It removes the option of doing nothing and letting the Ethereum chain stagnate.
moomin 5y ago
For the same reason congress keeps passing appropriation bills without fixing the problem that makes them keep on having to pass appropriation bills.