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> Run your own node. This is lazy reporting It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn'
by TheCowboy 5y ago
> Run your own node. This is lazy reporting
It isn't practical for the majority of people to run their own node. Even Vitalik Buterin acknowledges[1] this isn't realistic for the current state of things.
Last year I was interested in running a sidechain node and I was shocked when I looked at minimum system requirements. I can't just run it in the background and I have a 5600X Ryzen. Plus my NVMe drive needed to be much bigger. It also can eat through SSDs, and HDDs are considered too slow.
Worse to me: It looks like another time consuming hobby. I spent a lot of time even just getting up to speed on the current ecosystem, the jargon, best practices, etc. It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated.
It just seems like people are simply pushing a technology that isn't ready yet for what people in the scene think is currently possible.
My interest for running a node was for prediction market trading to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. Another ridiculous problem that many people in the scene act like isn't a big deal.
1. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
- xiphias2 5y agoRegarding Ethereum you’re right, it’s centralized. With Bitcoin I run my node and check the incoming transactions with it whenever I make a big money transfer (for outgoing transactions a full node is not really needed, as I don’t care if the network doesn’t accept it as long as my counterparty does). Running a Bitcoin node is practical (less than a day of running in the background on the first run) if the amount of money is significant.
- TheCowboy 5y agoIf we limit ourselves to Bitcoin then we're at a sliver of the web3 ecosystem everyone is casting their hopes upon. And Bitcoin in its current state still seems more like a blockchain working prototype and isn't 'feature-ful' enough to replace centralized finance. But proof-of-work's energy consumption is what kills Bitcoin for me. For what it's worth, I consider myself crypto agnostic. If a tech delivers something better then great.
- xiphias2 5y agoBitcoin has nothing to do with Web3, they are two different things (web3 is a new term, Bitcoin is a system from 2008)
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoCryptocurrency agnostic — thank you. I'm going to borrow. I don't necessarily like all of the community, current "leaders" etc — I just know a sticky concept when I see it.
- vmception 5y agoEthereum is only centralized if you dont run your own node. It is as practical to do that as it is a bitcoin node (but not for what the person you replied to was trying to do). This is an absurd distinction, and even if it wasnt absurd or wasnt practical then it is a fixable issue. Because it already has been fixed. Geth has a pruned fast sync client that has everything necessary for consensus, it takes about the amount of space and resources as a bitcoin one.
- suikadayo 5y agoI run an Ethereum node at home just fine. There’s nothing centralized about Ethereum.
- 3np 5y agoThe majority of people in the world? No, that's correct. The majority of people who use Ethereum today, or hang out on HN and would be inclined to do so? Absolutely feasible. I was recently set straight on this[0]. Things have been improving a lot even since that blog post by vb, and ongoing efforts are still progressing. And note that in the linked thread, I was pushing for full archive nodes. While it's desirable that this is feasible to have a healthy network, most people have their needs served by having pruned full nodes, which requires a fraction of the storage space. Also, several clients (at least geth and erigon) allows for split storage, where you have recent/hot state on faster storage like nvme, and historical archive on a larger drive. If you are up for it, you may want to give it another shot. My 3400G now handles this fine, alongside other workloads. I have not tried myself yet, but it does seem realistic to run a full node on an rpi4b with usb3 storage now, if you don't need to run heavy RPC queries on it. It seems to be common practice to do the initial sync on a beefier machine with more RAM and IO, and then migrate over to a more lightweight instance for the ongoing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584184
- landemva 5y ago' My interest for running a node was ... to attempt to counter frontrunning aka sandwich attacks. ' You may have misunderstood the eth tech stack. Running your own node is not a means to prevent sandwich attacks.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoCan you not you "see" more transactions, faster...?
- akyu 5y agoThe block producer chooses transaction ordering. They control who gets sandwiched. Running your own node won't change anything.
- TheCowboy 5y agoThe trading site's performance is quite high latency, and uses a 3rd party endpoint (I forget which one) that doesn't emphasize performance. You reduce the latency of your orders, acquire real-time price information, notification of liquidity changes faster, etc. If you think it's to prevent attacks in some absolute sense, that isn't the goal. Your goal is to make life more difficult for them and/or decrease profit incentives. You only need to remove some of the profit to make it not worth someone's time to maintain, and at least you're bleeding less money if they do continue. You get to be more strategic in how you place orders and make it really annoying for a botter or force the botter to blacklist your trades from your attacks (something that has happened before). You can also identify flaws in the bot and exploit them to make it bleed money(this has been demonstrated as possible many times).
- TheCowboy 5y agoI specifically said "counter" not "prevent". I explained in another post.
- landemva 5y agoRunning your own node neither counters nor prevents front running your transactions. If you send tx to standard mempool, the tx can be seen and front run. There are existing solutions for the narrow use case you seem to have - flashbots and a few others. And they have cost savings to you of not running your tx (saving eth gas fees) if your tx submission does not win.
- posix86 5y agoI agree with you that crypto often makes things unecessairly complicated sometimes. Every heard of hypercore protocol? They're a force against that. Ethereum should take note there.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago> It looks like another time consuming hobby. So did BBS message boards. Better shut this whole, inefficient pile of gack and hacks down!
- thebean11 5y agoSSDs are fine, you absolutely don't need an NVMe. A mid shelf 2TB SSD is way more than enough. Processor requirements aren't that high either, but yes it is a noticeable amount of resource usage, so running in the background isn't practical.
- spookthesunset 5y ago> It often seems like crypto is trying to take something less complicated and make it complicated. That could be intentional. The more complex it is, the harder it is to “prove” the whole thing is nothing more than a twist on classic pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. The more complicated it sounds the easier it is to bamboozle people into handing over their hard earned fiat to earlier generations of holders.