2 ms·

EIP 1559 was immensely popular among everyone in the community besides miners. The same is true of proof-of-stake.

littlestymaar 5y ago
With “the community” being the name for a bunch of online forums whose admins are… Ethereum devs. How surprising… The foundational decentralization feature of a cryptocurrency is the fact that the blockchain is edited by a distributed network of competing people: yes I'm talking about the miners. If the miners have no power in your system, then their is no practical decentralization because mining is the only thing actually decentralized in a blockchain!
- sophrocyne 5y ago
  I’m not arguing that both systems (PoW and PoS) don’t have their issues with some measure of aggregated power, but it’s just a false narrative to say that staking and mining aren’t equally decentralized. The migration to PoS isn’t some rug-pull on miners, they’ve known about it for years. If there was legitimate protest, they’d refuse to adopt new versions that incorporated the ETH kill switch. The reason they haven’t? They have no skin in the game - most are mercenaries for hire, operating through centralized pools, cashing out whatever they mine. PoS is a superior system - more flexibility for decentralized participation (only benefit to pooling is convenience), and dramatically better for the environment at scale. Everyone who holds the asset (I.e. the people who should have the most say in platform operations) have invested in PoS, and want it. It’s widely supported. Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb. I've never said “bitcoin is the way”. Let me be clear, bitcoin is a giant CO2-emmiting turd invented by a libertarian who wanted to bring the gold standard back. But, if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power), that's it. (And, BTW, if you don't need the sybil-resistance that permissionlessness implies, then you are in the realm of traditional distributed systems and using a blockchain is just path dependency at this point …)
    - DennisP 5y ago
      You need to buy mining equipment too. To get the best returns on Bitcoin, you need the connections and scale to buy the latest ASIC hardware from the few manufacturers that make it.
      - littlestymaar 5y ago
        Just because bitcoin is bad doesn't mean Ethereum isn't too.
        DennisP 5y ago
        You said: "if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power)." So my point was that having to buy stake doesn't make Ethereum's proof-of-stake any more permissioned than proof-of-work, where you have to buy mining equipment.
- DennisP 5y ago
  The forums do not ban people like r/bitcoin does. In fact, plenty of ETH-hating Bitcoiners show up on r/ethereum, and even get a few upvotes. For the DAO fork at least there was controversy. There was a little bit of controversy on 1559, but it was mostly from miners or people who had clear misunderstandings about how it worked. It ended up improving the user experience and, according to Coinbase, saving users a little money. Proof of stake has no noticeable pushback except in the mining subreddits, and has been part of the plan since 2014. If it had no support then the beacon chain wouldn't have 9 million ETH deposited. For the DAO fork, people made the same claim, that the visible community actually misrepresented people's real feelings. But in the end, both sides got a chain of their own, and oddly enough, the side that had appeared more popular before the fork ended up having vastly more market value.

With “the community” being the name for a bunch of online forums whose admins are… Ethereum devs. How surprising… The foundational decentralization feature of a cryptocurrency is the fact that the blockchain is edited by a distributed network of competing people: yes I'm talking about the miners. If the miners have no power in your system, then their is no practical decentralization because mining is the only thing actually decentralized in a blockchain!

sophrocyne 5y ago
I’m not arguing that both systems (PoW and PoS) don’t have their issues with some measure of aggregated power, but it’s just a false narrative to say that staking and mining aren’t equally decentralized. The migration to PoS isn’t some rug-pull on miners, they’ve known about it for years. If there was legitimate protest, they’d refuse to adopt new versions that incorporated the ETH kill switch. The reason they haven’t? They have no skin in the game - most are mercenaries for hire, operating through centralized pools, cashing out whatever they mine. PoS is a superior system - more flexibility for decentralized participation (only benefit to pooling is convenience), and dramatically better for the environment at scale. Everyone who holds the asset (I.e. the people who should have the most say in platform operations) have invested in PoS, and want it. It’s widely supported. Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > Unwillingness to accept anything other than “bitcoin is the way” is just baseless faith in modern garb. I've never said “bitcoin is the way”. Let me be clear, bitcoin is a giant CO2-emmiting turd invented by a libertarian who wanted to bring the gold standard back. But, if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power), that's it. (And, BTW, if you don't need the sybil-resistance that permissionlessness implies, then you are in the realm of traditional distributed systems and using a blockchain is just path dependency at this point …)
  - DennisP 5y ago
    You need to buy mining equipment too. To get the best returns on Bitcoin, you need the connections and scale to buy the latest ASIC hardware from the few manufacturers that make it.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Just because bitcoin is bad doesn't mean Ethereum isn't too.
      - DennisP 5y ago
        You said: "if you're doing PoS you're not in a permissionless blockchain anymore (since you need to buy staking power)." So my point was that having to buy stake doesn't make Ethereum's proof-of-stake any more permissioned than proof-of-work, where you have to buy mining equipment.
DennisP 5y ago
The forums do not ban people like r/bitcoin does. In fact, plenty of ETH-hating Bitcoiners show up on r/ethereum, and even get a few upvotes. For the DAO fork at least there was controversy. There was a little bit of controversy on 1559, but it was mostly from miners or people who had clear misunderstandings about how it worked. It ended up improving the user experience and, according to Coinbase, saving users a little money. Proof of stake has no noticeable pushback except in the mining subreddits, and has been part of the plan since 2014. If it had no support then the beacon chain wouldn't have 9 million ETH deposited. For the DAO fork, people made the same claim, that the visible community actually misrepresented people's real feelings. But in the end, both sides got a chain of their own, and oddly enough, the side that had appeared more popular before the fork ended up having vastly more market value.