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51% of miners need to be censoring you. If not, the transaction will eventually get in.
by vvillena 5y ago
51% of miners need to be censoring you. If not, the transaction will eventually get in.
- paulpauper 5y agowhich is just 2 of them
- vvillena 5y agoPlease respect the HN guidelines: this response makes clear that you were not asking a question, but fishing for debate. Let's be better.
- newswasboring 5y agoAllow me to be better. Top 3 mining pools control >51% of the hashrate today[1]. I can see 3 teams aligning to do whatever they want. I understand the standard argument is those pools actually represent thousands of individual miners, but the miners only have control over mining, not the selection of transactions (please correct me if I am wrong). edit: [1] https://etherchain.org/miner https://etherchain.org/miner
- vvillena 5y agoYou are right. Whoever controls the pool controls what goes into the mined blocks, so there's a chance they could cooperate to forbid certain types of transactions. Mining empty blocks in Ethereum is something that happens from time to time too, but usually, mining pools want to include as many transactions as possible in their blocks, as this increases profits. So yeah, it can happen in theory. However, the move to PoS will probably change this, as a valid block containing a "banned" transaction can't be easily disputed even by a majority, as long as the block is correct. The only way to try to fight it is to burn lots of ETH, meaning any pool that engages in such behavior becomes weaker.
- newswasboring 5y agoExploring this further, PoS seems to give the impression you need to control 51% of all Eth to control the chain. But that doesn't seem to be true, you just need to controlled the majority staked eth, which will probably be a much smaller number than all Eth. This means at equivalent cost of maintaining a large pool, you can probably take over the block chain. (Again, please correct me if I am wrong).
- vvillena 5y agoControlling 51% of all staked ETH is enough to launch some attacks, but the cost of the attack is way way higher than in PoW. The gist of it is that the community can reach a new consensus in which the malicious majority staked funds simply don't exist anymore. This means any single attack costs a lot of money, and there's a well-known recovery process to negate the attack and penalize the attacker.
- newswasboring 5y agoWouldn't this require a fork? I believe as eth gains adoption, forking will become less possible. I say this because asking big vendors/payment processors don't really have an incentive to change. Is there a way to do this, without forking the chain?
- vvillena 5y agoIt's indeed a fork. Ethereum has shown to embrace forking as the tool of choice to update their own consensus, thanks in part to the lesson learned with Bitcoin, where the lack of incentives to change the consensus have resulted in extreme conservatism that prevents most changes. Ethereum has the Ice Age built into their PoW algorithm, ensuring consensus has to be renewed periodically. I'm not aware if there exists a PoS equivalent to this.
- newswasboring 5y agoI don't think Ice Age protocol solves our problem, especially in a PoS setting. Ice Age tries to incentivize a move by raising difficulty till its unprofitable, the only equivalent I can see is decreasing interest rates for staked tokens. But once someone is in control of the chain, they just have to be clever about stealing stuff without raising too many alarms. I believe more drastic measures will need to be taken and consensus will need to be made between actual humans and no protocol can help with this.