9 ms·

The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?

98 points by capableweb 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cypherpunks01 5y ago
Is there any mechanism or inventive discouraging current Ethereum POW miners from rebelling against the coming switch to POS, and starting a major fork of the network when the network is slated to switch over ("The Merge")? How will everyone instantly agree that ETH1 is worth nothing on that date? I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  It actually happen 4 or 5 years ago. ETH classic chain was created out of the rebel ( or the loyal ? ) The remaining fork seems to have considerably less activity now.
- otoburb 5y ago
  There exists a mechanism that current Ethereum PoW miners could "rebel" by continuing to mine a different Ethereum blockchain. This would be similar to the fork that occurred with Ethereum Classic in 2015[1]. But there is a strong incentive to transition to PoS because it seems that the majority of stakeholders and participants in the Ethereum ecosystem agree with the upcoming switch to PoS. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
  - jagger27 5y ago
    What’s stopping miners from going to Ethereum Classic once the switch happens? It seems like the obvious choice here. I know the hash function is slightly different, so maybe it’s not ideal but it only seems to have a few parameters tweaked. It’s not like ETC is a total shitcoin compared to most other coins on exchanges. It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      I agree they'll likely find something to mine, but whatever it is has to make economic sense. If the block rewards don't cover the operational costs it won't work.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      It is the obvious choice and it will definitely happen. Miners are in the business of mining with their hardware, they do it where it is the most profitable with their hardware. Since mining will give 0 return on ethereum, expect a glut of hash power pouring into other networks when it happens. If any miner is dedicated to ethereum for some reason, I expect that they saved some of their block rewards to begin staking, and the smart ones are likely already staking on the beacon chain.
    - RealityVoid 5y ago
      Yes, the question is if the thing they mine makes sense financially. If overall, people will use the POS chain better, the value of POS ETH will be much greater. So, the financial rewards, in USD, buying power, whatever, will be lower. They will also flock to other coins and they will increase difficulty, getting diminishing returns. So overall market cap of rewards decreases, the amount of hash power increases leading to much much much lower rewards. I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
      - jagger27 5y ago
        Perhaps it wouldn't happen overnight, but wouldn't ETC prices rally with more people participating in the network? > I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater. I really hope so. It's just such a shame that board makers made mining specific boards without display outputs. What a waste for the secondary market.
        RealityVoid 5y ago
        > Perhaps it wouldn't happen overnight, but wouldn't ETC prices rally with more people participating in the network? If my understanding of the crypto economics is right, no. The token price drives the mining effort, not the other way around. People buy these tokens because other people are willing to trade at that price, not because of the mining power within. Having more hash power does nothing for me as an owner of a token. The auto-scaling of the difficulty level is there to make attacks more expensive as the token value increases, it maintains the cost/benefit balance out of whack for any attacker. Only difference is slightly longer block mining time. Overall, nothing a normal user would feel. Some people claim the other way, but I think they simply misunderstand the incentives. There was news that the Kazakstan crackdown led to the Bitcoin slump at some point, but that is, IMO, wrong, and they mistook some other events as causation. (in the same period, the stock market was also down). GPU mining will still be a thing, but there simply will not be enough value to go around and the mining will crater until profits will be sustainable again. Extra mining gear will be sold. I maintain my prediction, and am really willing to put money where my mouth is.
- rcxdude 5y ago
  They could, but the question is would anyone buy it? And is it worth trying to do that over switching to mining another GPU coin? (though mining profits from them should collapse as there is not currently nearly enough buyers for those coins to sustain the current hashrate that etherium is using).
- Danieru 5y ago
  Actually yes, and it's pretty brillaint: the difficultly bomb. The current fork of eth is programmed to kill itself sometime next year. This means even if miners want to continue mining they must prepare and propogate their own forked software. There is no "do nothing" default option.
  - dereg 5y ago
    I don't think it's brilliant. I think that the difficulty bomb is something akin to the debt ceiling in that it can be arbitrarily pushed back so, in reality, the real effect of the "bomb" is to give smaller groups of people outsized control over the network by holding miners hostage. My mind is open here - what are the flaws in my interpretation?
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      I think you're right about what difficulty bomb is like. Not sure why you think that means it's not brilliant.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      So the idea isn't about a deadline really, since it can be pushed back indefinitely. The idea is that you don't need consensus for it to go off, you need consensus for it not to go off. The status quo is always that it will go off if left untouched. It makes sure that miners can't just refuse the update, they have to fork the code to stop PoS. Which they're of course free to do, ETC removed the difficulty bomb entirely.
    - Danieru 5y ago
      And that's the brilliant part. The eth developers figured out a unique method for keeping every last bit of control.
      - immibis 5y ago
        Eh, if they act dishonestly the consensus can move to a different fork. The key is that fork has to have active consensus and can't just exist by default.
- traceddd 5y ago
  People will describe technical mechanisms, but they are all pretty irrelevant since a miner rebellion would easily modify the software. The real mechanism is that all the major players can’t accept two forks and maintain sanity. For example, Circle will have to choose which chain has a $1 peg for their USDC reserves, and they will certainly choose the chain supported by the core devs and the one the rest of the major players are selecting as well. That leaves the rebel chain in a very compromised position. With the peg being removed many defi protocols would be in an exploitable state. Removing all those abandoned and compromised services ends up with little reason for anyone to use the chain. To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users. Users will have funds on both chains, they can just wait it out.
    - traceddd 5y ago
      Yes except that some users will be convinced by Minerchain marketing and sell their Stakingchain eth due to those beliefs.
      - jl2718 5y ago
        I was one of those people in prior forks. My logic was that the rebel chain would be more open for experimentation, would innovate faster, and therefore win out in the long run regardless of who was supported by Wall St. Turns out that financial backing eats innovation for breakfast. The fast-moving scrappy innovative chains are getting killed by chains that haven’t changed much since genesis except scaling back their white paper ambitions.
  - nathanvanfleet 5y ago
    People will indeed follow where the small minority of people who run things go.
- danvayn 5y ago
  The mechanism is staking. People stake Eth 1.0 to get 2.0 later, along with a bridge to convert Eth 1.0 to 2.0. They can't unstake for a period of time but get decent automatic returns. There won't really be much reason for people to use 1.0 to execute smart contracts*. There really isn't much for miners to do besides eventually cashing out and becoming a validator. Eventually when "the merge happens" Eth 1.0 will be automatically converted to 2.0. This won't be for a few years (but PoS will launch this year) *The 1.0 network supposedly uses 1000x times the energy of the 2.0 one to execute a smart contract and would obviously be more expensive to work with, so people will probably avoid using 1.0 as soon as possible. Less use means lower gas fees means lower payouts for miners, who already had payouts reduced by EIP 1559, and will likely have payouts reduced once more. So miners will see a slow death. Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
  - delaaxe 5y ago
    Did you read the title? We agreed to stop using the « 1.0 » and « 2.0 » denominations
  - chrismmay 5y ago
    There is no “ETH 1.0” token or “ETH 2.0” token. There is only ETH. They never “convert”. Anyone can fork the code at any time and keep mining. Many have. ETC and ELLA are a couple examples. Ethereum Genysys is a recent project in response to the PoS move. ETH 2.0 was always just a series of upgrades. “The merge” which will end PoW mining is expected to go live between March 30th and June sometime at the latest. Code is expected to be complete in February sometime. Testing is well underway already.
    - bobsmith1983 5y ago
      What about stakes eth on Coinbase? Are we going to loose them and so all that money?
      - chrismmay 5y ago
        I am not intimately familiar with the staking terms on Coinbase, but from what I recall, you should be able to withdraw your ETH at any time and receive it in at most a few days. If it has a lockup period, those terms would be very clearly stated, and you would eventually get your original investment back plus rewards according to the terms.
- _prototype_ 5y ago
  Im just going to switch to mining XMR after the "Merge"
- wmf 5y ago
  How will everyone instantly agree that [a rebel chain] is worth nothing on that date? Everyone doesn't have to agree, just the exchanges. If the rebel chain isn't listed on exchanges then it's effectively worth zero and it will wither away.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    And if the exchanges choose "both"? This has happened with multiple Bitcoin forks.
    - wmf 5y ago
      The chain that the exchanges call ETH will have virtually all the value.
      - bastawhiz 5y ago
        If the value of the coin is based on the energy required to mine the coin, then surely the value won't change substantially for the PoW rebel fork, since the "real" value remains unchanged. Nobody wants to throw away their millions of dollars of GPUs. Despite the many problems with PoW, it's at least easy to see why PoW mining's output has any value of its own. Unless the value never really was tied to the energy use in the first place, which isn't a great story for folks who want to treat the coins as anything other than speculative assets.
        wmf 5y ago
        Value has never been based on energy; value comes from demand which is created by FOMO and enabled by exchanges where people can buy in. Of course crypto is entirely speculative.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  The difficulty bomb makes it so that consensus doesn't have to occur to switch, but has to occur to prevent the shift from PoW. Everyone doesn't have to agree. There will be miners that attempt a fork to keep their position. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how this stuff is supposed to work. But the fact that PoS has been on the roadmap since the beginning takes away legitimacy from any claim that the PoS transition is illegitimate. The fact that Ethereum Classic exists and is a PoW version of ethereum and intends to stay that way will take that even further. There will probably continue to be forks of ethereum, just like there have always been. Anyone can fork an open source codebase and maintain it, anyone can use the software to spin up a consensus network, anyone can use prior state as a starting point. Chain forks are a social thing not a technical thing, game theory not withstanding, that's how nakamoto consensus and FOSS is supposed to work.
  - PikachuEXE 5y ago
    Yup the code is meant to be forked. It's the community - people who decide which "fork" to follow.
  - ya_throw 5y ago
    Who gets to decide the "legitimacy" of a chain? Some document, or the participants?
    - immibis 5y ago
      The users, really.
      - delusional 5y ago
        Specifically, every single user has to make that decision individually.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      Legitimacy is determined in the eyes of the userbase, in which software they decide to use and what ledger they regard as the canonical history of the network, i.e. what blockchain they sync. Whichever "Ethereum" the majority of users use is the "Ethereum."
- mindcandy 5y ago
  Based on the nature of open-source software and the generally implemented design of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum: Explicitly No. Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
- defaultprimate 5y ago
  No, and I suspect many miners will do this because they anticipate the same thing I do: PoS will be a catastrophic failure with myriad exploits, vulnerabilities, and philosophical paradoxes that arise with popularity. "Decentralization" in crypto is a myth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  None, however they'd lose out on all the economic activity that drives the value of POS ethereum long term. And they'd lose the same economic activity drives the value of what they forked; and presumably that would cause a drop in value and less transactions; both of which are an incentive for miners to do something else with their resources. That economic activity consists of all the smart contract/web3/whatever you want to call startups that are currently building solutions based on the main Ethereum network and the investors/traders/opportunists backing them by speculating on the value of their coins/NFTs/etc or the value of their solutions. Most of those companies will probably benefit from the improved scalability and reduced cost associated with POS; or even require it to be viable at all. At least I would expect this to be true for the ones with some ambition to actually deliver working products; which are probably also the ones with the most investor backing. Of course, many more serious applications switched to alternate blockchains because of the scaling issues with POW might now consider switching back. And additionally, improved scale associated with POS might bring some new companies with investors as well. So, I would advice people to just follow the money when speculating on the future value of any fork. I suspect that won't stop anyone from creating that fork and you should actually anticipate multiple parties doing this and claiming to be the one true fork with varying degrees of credibility to trick people into buying some of their forked ETH. That's just how pump and dumps work and there are plenty of opportunists active to make that happen. And of course a fork means there are plenty of people not interested in the fork that would end up selling their forked eth so they can buy some more actual eth. Lots of people selling and not a lot of people with a good reason to buy means forked eth is not going to be worth a lot. Miners are going to run whatever has the highest yield. That probably is not going to be a forked Ethereum. Probably it's more lucrative to switch to some other POW blockchain (doge, bitcoin, etc.) if you have any serious amount of hardware. Disclaimer: I don't hold any Eth and am not really into crypto investing. Ironically, that makes me a more reliable source of information because I have no stake in this game.
- splix 5y ago
  Rebellion is not as simple as it looks like. I'm saying that as a person who played a big role in Ethereum Classic "rebellion". As many mentioned here, you need to disable the Difficulty Bomb. But it is not the bigger problem actually, maybe it's even the simplest one. What you also need: - Organized community. I.e., some places to communicate. That's not easy. And be aware of ETH-maximalists that will come to trash it. - Wallet that works out of the box. Not that Metamask, which is the most popular wallet in ETH, will never agree to support fork like it never agreed to support ETC. - Block Explorer. People need to see their balance, check transaction status, exchanges need to point to that explorer as proof, etc. - Miners would risk losing all their money if the chain eventually fails. Most miners are not so invested. - Replay Protections to separate balances in forks. That's not easy. I mean, we have EIP-155, which was proposed by Ethereum Foundation, but it ensures that EIP-155 kind of replay protection would hurt forks because all of the software would need to be fixed for it. I.e., it's not a solution "out of the box", not user friendly. - Exchanges. Maybe not so hard now. But without proper Replay Protection in place, some exchanges would lose their funds and would actively fight new forks to avoid liability. - Public API endpoint. Like Infura. Because nobody runs its own node.
magicjosh 5y ago
Are there any other analog examples where a protocol has attempted this kind of re-naming? Did it work? Or fail? The Ethereum community is so wide ranging, from devs all the way up to people who bought NFTs.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  It's not a renaming. They're basically just saying that ETH 2.0 as a concept typically used for versioning is not technically correct. There is just Ethereum, and there's various proposals and upgrades in the pipeline for years worth of development. ETH2 was supposed to symbolize the upgrade to proof of stake and the merging of the POW chain with the POS beacon chain. I think it may have encompassed the implementation of sharding as well. But since Ethereum is a living protocol, with many different upgrades and improvements to implement, I think it's more accurate to drop the versioning idea and just explain the different components and features as they go. The next major upgrade for Ethereum will be The Merge, which merges the Proof of stake consensus layer with the proof of work execution layer. It's expected to happen this summer. Afterwards, Ethereum will no longer run on GPUs, you'll be able to run a full node on a Raspberry Pi.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    > It's not a renaming The title of the post is literally "The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?" I get what's happening, my question was about the success of the renaming process.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      I see. Well, I think it is a confusing title. As they're not really renaming "ETH2" at all, they're just doing away with it and referring to the components individually. I think some people will still use the phrase ETH2 until the Merge this summer, since it's been around for a while. But then I suspect it will fade away after the Merge. And the next big upgrade after that is Sharding, which is easy enough to say and describe by itself.
msoad 5y ago
Isn't PoS inherently against decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies? You have to have money to use money
- alittlesalami 5y ago
  PoW is one level of abstraction away from "you have to have money to use money"; "you have to have money, to buy compute, to use money". Additionally, compute resources are subject to centralization.
- TimeBearingDown 5y ago
  Not any more than PoW, which has worse economies of scale in which the richest get richer at a faster rate as they can lock up supply of available hardware.
  - dereg 5y ago
    The big difference is that hardware depreciates. Proof of stake requires none other than a single purchase to be gifted the right to perpetual seignorage. Staking ETH once versus constant operation of a mining farm is a non-trivial delta in effort.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      …and to maintain (or pay a host to maintain) a node.
      - dereg 5y ago
        I suppose so. If you're payment to an agent to carry out either task, the downstream complexity of the task is irrelevant because the difficulty to you is the same.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      It costs less to stake, but it pays less too. Ethereum's staking rewards are an order of magnitude lower than its mining rewards.
chrisco255 5y ago
I'm glad they are clarifying the language here, but it's still fairly useful to use ETH2 as a moniker from a public marketing point of view. It's much easier than explaining beacon chain, execution layer, consensus layer, etc to just say we have a new version of Ethereum coming out later this year and then go into more details after.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Per their notes, one of the reasons driving this is to prevent unscrupulous parties from attempting to scam users re: swapping their tokens for "2.0" tokens. Which, yes, this seems like it would help decrease confusion. But good lord, the blockchain infosphere is an aggressively adversarial one!
  - solveit 5y ago
    Turns out trustlessness wasn't just aspirational
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Agreed that it's a good idea from that perspective. It doesn't help that Coinbase listed ETH2 as a separate asset in their app to represent staked yield producing Ethereum. It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/ https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
    - bobsmith1983 5y ago
      Do you know if staked eth on Coinbase are gone? Did we lost that money? sorry I m still a beginner in this and worried about my staking.
      - wmf 5y ago
        Nothing is changing except the terminology. Nothing is gone.
  - 5y ago
steelstraw 5y ago
Does anyone have a good idea of how the switch to PoS will affect gas fees?
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  It won’t effect them much. L2 solutions will make a bigger impact.
- meowkit 5y ago
  From my understanding, the block rate should increase slightly, reducing fees very slightly. Any fee reductions will likely be eaten up by activity. Lower gas fees will come some scaling changes, not consensus changes. Layer 2 and sharding.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Rollups and sharding are aimed at reducing gas fees. Rollups are already live, with Arbitrum, Optimism, StarkNet, and zkSync being some of the biggest ones.
- daydream 5y ago
  The switch to PoS won’t affect gas fees, but everyone thinks it will, and people are going to go ballistic when they realize that. Explained in https://thedailygwei.substack.com/p/setting-expectations-the-daily-gwei https://thedailygwei.substack.com/p/setting-expectations-the...
bombcar 5y ago
I was really hoping this was a rant how back in the good old days you had eth0 and eth1 and you were happy about it, now we get en0sp04 and who knows what port that even is.
- icelancer 5y ago
  Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfig.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - AceJohnny2 5y ago
    In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. On some systems, plugging a dongle, or changing what port a USB hub was plugged in, could reorder/rename the ethernet ports and now your config for `eth2` was suddently being applied to a completely different interface. So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...) But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Yeah, I wish more Linux versions made that easier to do - I find it much easier to remember eth0 and eth1 vs the low level name, though the stability is nice.
      - eropple 5y ago
        Does your shell not tab-complete interfaces? Mine does, and is smart enough not to suggest up interfaces for `ifup` (so if I have a machine with a 10G card and a 1G onboard I make sure to keep the 1G interface disabled), but I don't know if that's one of my army of zsh plugins. For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.
crazypython 5y ago
Very excited about Ethernet!
freeduck 5y ago
vmception 5y ago
I hope they can pull this off! This is one of the more interesting stories in the crypto space.
losvedir 5y ago
How does this relate to Coinbase letting users exchange their ETH for "ETH2", to join a staking pool?
- wmf 5y ago
  "Some staking operators have also represented ETH staked on the Beacon Chain with the ‘ETH2’ ticker. This creates potential confusion, given that users of these services are not actually receiving an ‘ETH2’ token. No ‘ETH2’ token exists; it simply represents their share in that specific providers’ stake."
- artdigital 5y ago
  Coinbase and others (Binance) use "ETH2" as a token for signalling that the ETH has been locked-up for the network upgrade. A ETH2 token on those platforms is just a proof that the underlying ETH has been locked. If you were to not use a CEX, your ETH would be gone until the upgrade is finished, so exchanges make that a bit less harsh with their eth2 tokens and allow you to still do stuff with it
zeroesandones 5y ago
Hopefully it happens this year, POW isn't sustainable anymore
- gizmo385 5y ago
  POW was never sustainable.
bob1983 5y ago
What about Coinbase staking? Does this mean, we lost all eth staking and money? Can someone please let me know ?
- immibis 5y ago
  What? There's still a proof of stake upgrade coming
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jrm4 5y ago
Anyone here with thoughts on Pulsechain (and perhaps its cousin, Hex?) As I understand, it's an Ethereum fork that will duplicate Eth and all its assets, with the hope that people might switch due to lower fees?
- dmead 5y ago
  It sounds like a scam.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    I absolutely agree that's what it sounds like. Nevertheless, I'm primarily investing* in Hex / Pulse / PulseX. *No, I'm not putting in any money that I can't afford to lose, what are you, crazy? :)
    - dmead 5y ago
      Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'm 99% sure that any features being built on top of blockchains are features designed to impress and confuse people that don't realize that it's a scam.
- wc- 5y ago
  I don't really want to say more because I'm worried that the creator of both of these (Richard Heart) would somehow be litigious, but please do more research, especially into how the hex network handles fees and rewards flowing back toward the creator. There are very concerning behaviors of the hex network that enrich the creator at the cost of everyone else. Pulse is doing the same, it's a playbook being followed. And this is coming from a very pro-crypto person, non-btc maxi etc, type of person.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    I'll say it for you: It's a scam.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Not gonna lie, you kind of lost me at "would be litigious." I have quite a bit of trouble believing that's he's lurking this board here, ready to go after you? Looks like the rewards and fees go back to stakers. Sure, there's a big quiet wallet, but that's nearly all of them.
bobsmith1983 5y ago
Anyone here can give me some idea on how this impact on Coinbase staking? Does it mean we lost all staked eth and money? Sorry new to crypto.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  No, it's something like a train changing tracks: the cargo (ETH 'coins' and other parts of its ecosystem) just moves onto the new tracks. The cargo isn't thrown out, it's not incompatible with the new tracks.
  - chrismmay 5y ago
    Not a great analogy imho. The ETH consensus change from PoW to PoS changes the way that blocks are signed and validated. No more PoW. Instead, now validators decide. It’s more like unanimous voting. If you try to sign a fake block, you lose some or all of your deposit.
- chrismmay 5y ago
  This has no impact on anything really at all. It’s just re branding, hopefully to clarify things. ETH does not change with ETH2. It’s just a series of upgrades to eliminate wasteful proof-of-work mining and improve scalability.
ddtaylor 5y ago
> would eventually be deprecated via the difficulty bomb Yeah but said bomb just got reset every time...
- immibis 5y ago
  Another HN commenter pointed out that it requires active consensus to reset, as opposed to just being a do-nothing default state. The intention may be for do-nothing default chains to die off if nobody is interested in maintaining them.

98 points by capableweb 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Is there any mechanism or inventive discouraging current Ethereum POW miners from rebelling against the coming switch to POS, and starting a major fork of the network when the network is slated to switch over ("The Merge")? How will everyone instantly agree that ETH1 is worth nothing on that date? I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.

dopidopHN 5y ago
It actually happen 4 or 5 years ago. ETH classic chain was created out of the rebel ( or the loyal ? ) The remaining fork seems to have considerably less activity now.
otoburb 5y ago
There exists a mechanism that current Ethereum PoW miners could "rebel" by continuing to mine a different Ethereum blockchain. This would be similar to the fork that occurred with Ethereum Classic in 2015[1]. But there is a strong incentive to transition to PoS because it seems that the majority of stakeholders and participants in the Ethereum ecosystem agree with the upcoming switch to PoS. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
- jagger27 5y ago
  What’s stopping miners from going to Ethereum Classic once the switch happens? It seems like the obvious choice here. I know the hash function is slightly different, so maybe it’s not ideal but it only seems to have a few parameters tweaked. It’s not like ETC is a total shitcoin compared to most other coins on exchanges. It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    I agree they'll likely find something to mine, but whatever it is has to make economic sense. If the block rewards don't cover the operational costs it won't work.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    It is the obvious choice and it will definitely happen. Miners are in the business of mining with their hardware, they do it where it is the most profitable with their hardware. Since mining will give 0 return on ethereum, expect a glut of hash power pouring into other networks when it happens. If any miner is dedicated to ethereum for some reason, I expect that they saved some of their block rewards to begin staking, and the smart ones are likely already staking on the beacon chain.
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    Yes, the question is if the thing they mine makes sense financially. If overall, people will use the POS chain better, the value of POS ETH will be much greater. So, the financial rewards, in USD, buying power, whatever, will be lower. They will also flock to other coins and they will increase difficulty, getting diminishing returns. So overall market cap of rewards decreases, the amount of hash power increases leading to much much much lower rewards. I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      Perhaps it wouldn't happen overnight, but wouldn't ETC prices rally with more people participating in the network? > I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater. I really hope so. It's just such a shame that board makers made mining specific boards without display outputs. What a waste for the secondary market.
      - RealityVoid 5y ago
        > Perhaps it wouldn't happen overnight, but wouldn't ETC prices rally with more people participating in the network? If my understanding of the crypto economics is right, no. The token price drives the mining effort, not the other way around. People buy these tokens because other people are willing to trade at that price, not because of the mining power within. Having more hash power does nothing for me as an owner of a token. The auto-scaling of the difficulty level is there to make attacks more expensive as the token value increases, it maintains the cost/benefit balance out of whack for any attacker. Only difference is slightly longer block mining time. Overall, nothing a normal user would feel. Some people claim the other way, but I think they simply misunderstand the incentives. There was news that the Kazakstan crackdown led to the Bitcoin slump at some point, but that is, IMO, wrong, and they mistook some other events as causation. (in the same period, the stock market was also down). GPU mining will still be a thing, but there simply will not be enough value to go around and the mining will crater until profits will be sustainable again. Extra mining gear will be sold. I maintain my prediction, and am really willing to put money where my mouth is.
rcxdude 5y ago
They could, but the question is would anyone buy it? And is it worth trying to do that over switching to mining another GPU coin? (though mining profits from them should collapse as there is not currently nearly enough buyers for those coins to sustain the current hashrate that etherium is using).
Danieru 5y ago
Actually yes, and it's pretty brillaint: the difficultly bomb. The current fork of eth is programmed to kill itself sometime next year. This means even if miners want to continue mining they must prepare and propogate their own forked software. There is no "do nothing" default option.
- dereg 5y ago
  I don't think it's brilliant. I think that the difficulty bomb is something akin to the debt ceiling in that it can be arbitrarily pushed back so, in reality, the real effect of the "bomb" is to give smaller groups of people outsized control over the network by holding miners hostage. My mind is open here - what are the flaws in my interpretation?
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    I think you're right about what difficulty bomb is like. Not sure why you think that means it's not brilliant.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    So the idea isn't about a deadline really, since it can be pushed back indefinitely. The idea is that you don't need consensus for it to go off, you need consensus for it not to go off. The status quo is always that it will go off if left untouched. It makes sure that miners can't just refuse the update, they have to fork the code to stop PoS. Which they're of course free to do, ETC removed the difficulty bomb entirely.
  - Danieru 5y ago
    And that's the brilliant part. The eth developers figured out a unique method for keeping every last bit of control.
    - immibis 5y ago
      Eh, if they act dishonestly the consensus can move to a different fork. The key is that fork has to have active consensus and can't just exist by default.
traceddd 5y ago
People will describe technical mechanisms, but they are all pretty irrelevant since a miner rebellion would easily modify the software. The real mechanism is that all the major players can’t accept two forks and maintain sanity. For example, Circle will have to choose which chain has a $1 peg for their USDC reserves, and they will certainly choose the chain supported by the core devs and the one the rest of the major players are selecting as well. That leaves the rebel chain in a very compromised position. With the peg being removed many defi protocols would be in an exploitable state. Removing all those abandoned and compromised services ends up with little reason for anyone to use the chain. To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users.
- vmception 5y ago
  > To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users. Users will have funds on both chains, they can just wait it out.
  - traceddd 5y ago
    Yes except that some users will be convinced by Minerchain marketing and sell their Stakingchain eth due to those beliefs.
    - jl2718 5y ago
      I was one of those people in prior forks. My logic was that the rebel chain would be more open for experimentation, would innovate faster, and therefore win out in the long run regardless of who was supported by Wall St. Turns out that financial backing eats innovation for breakfast. The fast-moving scrappy innovative chains are getting killed by chains that haven’t changed much since genesis except scaling back their white paper ambitions.
- nathanvanfleet 5y ago
  People will indeed follow where the small minority of people who run things go.
danvayn 5y ago
The mechanism is staking. People stake Eth 1.0 to get 2.0 later, along with a bridge to convert Eth 1.0 to 2.0. They can't unstake for a period of time but get decent automatic returns. There won't really be much reason for people to use 1.0 to execute smart contracts*. There really isn't much for miners to do besides eventually cashing out and becoming a validator. Eventually when "the merge happens" Eth 1.0 will be automatically converted to 2.0. This won't be for a few years (but PoS will launch this year) *The 1.0 network supposedly uses 1000x times the energy of the 2.0 one to execute a smart contract and would obviously be more expensive to work with, so people will probably avoid using 1.0 as soon as possible. Less use means lower gas fees means lower payouts for miners, who already had payouts reduced by EIP 1559, and will likely have payouts reduced once more. So miners will see a slow death. Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
- delaaxe 5y ago
  Did you read the title? We agreed to stop using the « 1.0 » and « 2.0 » denominations
- chrismmay 5y ago
  There is no “ETH 1.0” token or “ETH 2.0” token. There is only ETH. They never “convert”. Anyone can fork the code at any time and keep mining. Many have. ETC and ELLA are a couple examples. Ethereum Genysys is a recent project in response to the PoS move. ETH 2.0 was always just a series of upgrades. “The merge” which will end PoW mining is expected to go live between March 30th and June sometime at the latest. Code is expected to be complete in February sometime. Testing is well underway already.
  - bobsmith1983 5y ago
    What about stakes eth on Coinbase? Are we going to loose them and so all that money?
    - chrismmay 5y ago
      I am not intimately familiar with the staking terms on Coinbase, but from what I recall, you should be able to withdraw your ETH at any time and receive it in at most a few days. If it has a lockup period, those terms would be very clearly stated, and you would eventually get your original investment back plus rewards according to the terms.
_prototype_ 5y ago
Im just going to switch to mining XMR after the "Merge"
wmf 5y ago
How will everyone instantly agree that [a rebel chain] is worth nothing on that date? Everyone doesn't have to agree, just the exchanges. If the rebel chain isn't listed on exchanges then it's effectively worth zero and it will wither away.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  And if the exchanges choose "both"? This has happened with multiple Bitcoin forks.
  - wmf 5y ago
    The chain that the exchanges call ETH will have virtually all the value.
    - bastawhiz 5y ago
      If the value of the coin is based on the energy required to mine the coin, then surely the value won't change substantially for the PoW rebel fork, since the "real" value remains unchanged. Nobody wants to throw away their millions of dollars of GPUs. Despite the many problems with PoW, it's at least easy to see why PoW mining's output has any value of its own. Unless the value never really was tied to the energy use in the first place, which isn't a great story for folks who want to treat the coins as anything other than speculative assets.
      - wmf 5y ago
        Value has never been based on energy; value comes from demand which is created by FOMO and enabled by exchanges where people can buy in. Of course crypto is entirely speculative.
betwixthewires 5y ago
The difficulty bomb makes it so that consensus doesn't have to occur to switch, but has to occur to prevent the shift from PoW. Everyone doesn't have to agree. There will be miners that attempt a fork to keep their position. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how this stuff is supposed to work. But the fact that PoS has been on the roadmap since the beginning takes away legitimacy from any claim that the PoS transition is illegitimate. The fact that Ethereum Classic exists and is a PoW version of ethereum and intends to stay that way will take that even further. There will probably continue to be forks of ethereum, just like there have always been. Anyone can fork an open source codebase and maintain it, anyone can use the software to spin up a consensus network, anyone can use prior state as a starting point. Chain forks are a social thing not a technical thing, game theory not withstanding, that's how nakamoto consensus and FOSS is supposed to work.
- PikachuEXE 5y ago
  Yup the code is meant to be forked. It's the community - people who decide which "fork" to follow.
- ya_throw 5y ago
  Who gets to decide the "legitimacy" of a chain? Some document, or the participants?
  - immibis 5y ago
    The users, really.
    - delusional 5y ago
      Specifically, every single user has to make that decision individually.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Legitimacy is determined in the eyes of the userbase, in which software they decide to use and what ledger they regard as the canonical history of the network, i.e. what blockchain they sync. Whichever "Ethereum" the majority of users use is the "Ethereum."
mindcandy 5y ago
Based on the nature of open-source software and the generally implemented design of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum: Explicitly No. Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
defaultprimate 5y ago
No, and I suspect many miners will do this because they anticipate the same thing I do: PoS will be a catastrophic failure with myriad exploits, vulnerabilities, and philosophical paradoxes that arise with popularity. "Decentralization" in crypto is a myth.
deleted 5y ago
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jillesvangurp 5y ago
None, however they'd lose out on all the economic activity that drives the value of POS ethereum long term. And they'd lose the same economic activity drives the value of what they forked; and presumably that would cause a drop in value and less transactions; both of which are an incentive for miners to do something else with their resources. That economic activity consists of all the smart contract/web3/whatever you want to call startups that are currently building solutions based on the main Ethereum network and the investors/traders/opportunists backing them by speculating on the value of their coins/NFTs/etc or the value of their solutions. Most of those companies will probably benefit from the improved scalability and reduced cost associated with POS; or even require it to be viable at all. At least I would expect this to be true for the ones with some ambition to actually deliver working products; which are probably also the ones with the most investor backing. Of course, many more serious applications switched to alternate blockchains because of the scaling issues with POW might now consider switching back. And additionally, improved scale associated with POS might bring some new companies with investors as well. So, I would advice people to just follow the money when speculating on the future value of any fork. I suspect that won't stop anyone from creating that fork and you should actually anticipate multiple parties doing this and claiming to be the one true fork with varying degrees of credibility to trick people into buying some of their forked ETH. That's just how pump and dumps work and there are plenty of opportunists active to make that happen. And of course a fork means there are plenty of people not interested in the fork that would end up selling their forked eth so they can buy some more actual eth. Lots of people selling and not a lot of people with a good reason to buy means forked eth is not going to be worth a lot. Miners are going to run whatever has the highest yield. That probably is not going to be a forked Ethereum. Probably it's more lucrative to switch to some other POW blockchain (doge, bitcoin, etc.) if you have any serious amount of hardware. Disclaimer: I don't hold any Eth and am not really into crypto investing. Ironically, that makes me a more reliable source of information because I have no stake in this game.
splix 5y ago
Rebellion is not as simple as it looks like. I'm saying that as a person who played a big role in Ethereum Classic "rebellion". As many mentioned here, you need to disable the Difficulty Bomb. But it is not the bigger problem actually, maybe it's even the simplest one. What you also need: - Organized community. I.e., some places to communicate. That's not easy. And be aware of ETH-maximalists that will come to trash it. - Wallet that works out of the box. Not that Metamask, which is the most popular wallet in ETH, will never agree to support fork like it never agreed to support ETC. - Block Explorer. People need to see their balance, check transaction status, exchanges need to point to that explorer as proof, etc. - Miners would risk losing all their money if the chain eventually fails. Most miners are not so invested. - Replay Protections to separate balances in forks. That's not easy. I mean, we have EIP-155, which was proposed by Ethereum Foundation, but it ensures that EIP-155 kind of replay protection would hurt forks because all of the software would need to be fixed for it. I.e., it's not a solution "out of the box", not user friendly. - Exchanges. Maybe not so hard now. But without proper Replay Protection in place, some exchanges would lose their funds and would actively fight new forks to avoid liability. - Public API endpoint. Like Infura. Because nobody runs its own node.

magicjosh 5y ago

Are there any other analog examples where a protocol has attempted this kind of re-naming? Did it work? Or fail? The Ethereum community is so wide ranging, from devs all the way up to people who bought NFTs.

chrisco255 5y ago
It's not a renaming. They're basically just saying that ETH 2.0 as a concept typically used for versioning is not technically correct. There is just Ethereum, and there's various proposals and upgrades in the pipeline for years worth of development. ETH2 was supposed to symbolize the upgrade to proof of stake and the merging of the POW chain with the POS beacon chain. I think it may have encompassed the implementation of sharding as well. But since Ethereum is a living protocol, with many different upgrades and improvements to implement, I think it's more accurate to drop the versioning idea and just explain the different components and features as they go. The next major upgrade for Ethereum will be The Merge, which merges the Proof of stake consensus layer with the proof of work execution layer. It's expected to happen this summer. Afterwards, Ethereum will no longer run on GPUs, you'll be able to run a full node on a Raspberry Pi.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  > It's not a renaming The title of the post is literally "The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?" I get what's happening, my question was about the success of the renaming process.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    I see. Well, I think it is a confusing title. As they're not really renaming "ETH2" at all, they're just doing away with it and referring to the components individually. I think some people will still use the phrase ETH2 until the Merge this summer, since it's been around for a while. But then I suspect it will fade away after the Merge. And the next big upgrade after that is Sharding, which is easy enough to say and describe by itself.

msoad 5y ago

Isn't PoS inherently against decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies? You have to have money to use money

alittlesalami 5y ago
PoW is one level of abstraction away from "you have to have money to use money"; "you have to have money, to buy compute, to use money". Additionally, compute resources are subject to centralization.
TimeBearingDown 5y ago
Not any more than PoW, which has worse economies of scale in which the richest get richer at a faster rate as they can lock up supply of available hardware.
- dereg 5y ago
  The big difference is that hardware depreciates. Proof of stake requires none other than a single purchase to be gifted the right to perpetual seignorage. Staking ETH once versus constant operation of a mining farm is a non-trivial delta in effort.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    …and to maintain (or pay a host to maintain) a node.
    - dereg 5y ago
      I suppose so. If you're payment to an agent to carry out either task, the downstream complexity of the task is irrelevant because the difficulty to you is the same.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    It costs less to stake, but it pays less too. Ethereum's staking rewards are an order of magnitude lower than its mining rewards.

chrisco255 5y ago

I'm glad they are clarifying the language here, but it's still fairly useful to use ETH2 as a moniker from a public marketing point of view. It's much easier than explaining beacon chain, execution layer, consensus layer, etc to just say we have a new version of Ethereum coming out later this year and then go into more details after.

ethbr0 5y ago
Per their notes, one of the reasons driving this is to prevent unscrupulous parties from attempting to scam users re: swapping their tokens for "2.0" tokens. Which, yes, this seems like it would help decrease confusion. But good lord, the blockchain infosphere is an aggressively adversarial one!
- solveit 5y ago
  Turns out trustlessness wasn't just aspirational
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Agreed that it's a good idea from that perspective. It doesn't help that Coinbase listed ETH2 as a separate asset in their app to represent staked yield producing Ethereum. It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/ https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
  - bobsmith1983 5y ago
    Do you know if staked eth on Coinbase are gone? Did we lost that money? sorry I m still a beginner in this and worried about my staking.
    - wmf 5y ago
      Nothing is changing except the terminology. Nothing is gone.
- 5y ago

steelstraw 5y ago

Does anyone have a good idea of how the switch to PoS will affect gas fees?

waffle_maniac 5y ago
It won’t effect them much. L2 solutions will make a bigger impact.
meowkit 5y ago
From my understanding, the block rate should increase slightly, reducing fees very slightly. Any fee reductions will likely be eaten up by activity. Lower gas fees will come some scaling changes, not consensus changes. Layer 2 and sharding.
chrisco255 5y ago
Rollups and sharding are aimed at reducing gas fees. Rollups are already live, with Arbitrum, Optimism, StarkNet, and zkSync being some of the biggest ones.
daydream 5y ago
The switch to PoS won’t affect gas fees, but everyone thinks it will, and people are going to go ballistic when they realize that. Explained in https://thedailygwei.substack.com/p/setting-expectations-the-daily-gwei https://thedailygwei.substack.com/p/setting-expectations-the...

bombcar 5y ago

I was really hoping this was a rant how back in the good old days you had eth0 and eth1 and you were happy about it, now we get en0sp04 and who knows what port that even is.

icelancer 5y ago
Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfig.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. On some systems, plugging a dongle, or changing what port a USB hub was plugged in, could reorder/rename the ethernet ports and now your config for `eth2` was suddently being applied to a completely different interface. So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...) But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Yeah, I wish more Linux versions made that easier to do - I find it much easier to remember eth0 and eth1 vs the low level name, though the stability is nice.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Does your shell not tab-complete interfaces? Mine does, and is smart enough not to suggest up interfaces for `ifup` (so if I have a machine with a 10G card and a 1G onboard I make sure to keep the 1G interface disabled), but I don't know if that's one of my army of zsh plugins. For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.

crazypython 5y ago

Very excited about Ethernet!

freeduck 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

I hope they can pull this off! This is one of the more interesting stories in the crypto space.

losvedir 5y ago

How does this relate to Coinbase letting users exchange their ETH for "ETH2", to join a staking pool?

wmf 5y ago
"Some staking operators have also represented ETH staked on the Beacon Chain with the ‘ETH2’ ticker. This creates potential confusion, given that users of these services are not actually receiving an ‘ETH2’ token. No ‘ETH2’ token exists; it simply represents their share in that specific providers’ stake."
artdigital 5y ago
Coinbase and others (Binance) use "ETH2" as a token for signalling that the ETH has been locked-up for the network upgrade. A ETH2 token on those platforms is just a proof that the underlying ETH has been locked. If you were to not use a CEX, your ETH would be gone until the upgrade is finished, so exchanges make that a bit less harsh with their eth2 tokens and allow you to still do stuff with it

zeroesandones 5y ago

Hopefully it happens this year, POW isn't sustainable anymore

gizmo385 5y ago
POW was never sustainable.

bob1983 5y ago

What about Coinbase staking? Does this mean, we lost all eth staking and money? Can someone please let me know ?

immibis 5y ago
What? There's still a proof of stake upgrade coming

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jrm4 5y ago

Anyone here with thoughts on Pulsechain (and perhaps its cousin, Hex?) As I understand, it's an Ethereum fork that will duplicate Eth and all its assets, with the hope that people might switch due to lower fees?

dmead 5y ago
It sounds like a scam.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I absolutely agree that's what it sounds like. Nevertheless, I'm primarily investing* in Hex / Pulse / PulseX. *No, I'm not putting in any money that I can't afford to lose, what are you, crazy? :)
  - dmead 5y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'm 99% sure that any features being built on top of blockchains are features designed to impress and confuse people that don't realize that it's a scam.
wc- 5y ago
I don't really want to say more because I'm worried that the creator of both of these (Richard Heart) would somehow be litigious, but please do more research, especially into how the hex network handles fees and rewards flowing back toward the creator. There are very concerning behaviors of the hex network that enrich the creator at the cost of everyone else. Pulse is doing the same, it's a playbook being followed. And this is coming from a very pro-crypto person, non-btc maxi etc, type of person.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  I'll say it for you: It's a scam.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Not gonna lie, you kind of lost me at "would be litigious." I have quite a bit of trouble believing that's he's lurking this board here, ready to go after you? Looks like the rewards and fees go back to stakers. Sure, there's a big quiet wallet, but that's nearly all of them.

bobsmith1983 5y ago

Anyone here can give me some idea on how this impact on Coinbase staking? Does it mean we lost all staked eth and money? Sorry new to crypto.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago
No, it's something like a train changing tracks: the cargo (ETH 'coins' and other parts of its ecosystem) just moves onto the new tracks. The cargo isn't thrown out, it's not incompatible with the new tracks.
- chrismmay 5y ago
  Not a great analogy imho. The ETH consensus change from PoW to PoS changes the way that blocks are signed and validated. No more PoW. Instead, now validators decide. It’s more like unanimous voting. If you try to sign a fake block, you lose some or all of your deposit.
chrismmay 5y ago
This has no impact on anything really at all. It’s just re branding, hopefully to clarify things. ETH does not change with ETH2. It’s just a series of upgrades to eliminate wasteful proof-of-work mining and improve scalability.

ddtaylor 5y ago

> would eventually be deprecated via the difficulty bomb Yeah but said bomb just got reset every time...

immibis 5y ago
Another HN commenter pointed out that it requires active consensus to reset, as opposed to just being a do-nothing default state. The intention may be for do-nothing default chains to die off if nobody is interested in maintaining them.