5 ms·

“The Merge,” the biggest change in Ethereum history

33 points by bpierre 4y ago

theandrewbailey 4y ago
Proof-of-stake is like AI and fusion power: always around the corner, but never arrives. Vaporware. The etherium devs have repeatedly set cutover dates, then pushed it back for years. Do they uncover more issues and corner cases that they have to deal with each time, or are they simply uncomfortable with a change of this magnitude?
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  maybe you should read the article before embarrassing yourself?
- rytill 4y ago
  Bet on your belief; you could make a lot of money: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos
  - satyrnein 4y ago
    Not really "a lot" it seems. If you look at the price for "No merge by January 1st" it shows $0.03, which seems promising, but you can only buy like $3 worth of contracts at that price. If you try to buy $1000 worth, your average price shoots up to $0.52! Not sure if this is just a particularly thin market, or whether there's not actually a deep well on confidence that the merge is coming soon, or what.
    - cypress66 4y ago
      It's just an extremely thin market I believe. The October one seems a bit better, you can throw a couple hundred at reasonable prices.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
> "one coin, one vote." who has the gold makes the rules.
- csense 4y ago
  Suppose we all agree that "One citizen, one vote" is better and ought to be implemented. "One coin, one vote" is relatively easy to implement, since the blockchain intrinsically knows how many coins each address has. To implement "One citizen, one vote" you need to know who's a unique citizen. How do you code that into a blockchain? [1] [1] The usual approach is an oracle, where you just say "Organization X issues every person a cryptographically signed certificate, and Organization X pinky promises to issue exactly one certificate to each individual person." This completely centralizes the governance into Organization X, since there's no technical means to check or enforce the pinky promise.
  - pornel 4y ago
    You can't. It's the oracle problem. These systems are doomed to be oligarchies.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - aftbit 4y ago
    The approach that is taken by Proof of Humanity (and by extension Kleros Court) is to have an adversarial process where anyone can claim to be a unique human & submit evidence, which can then be vouched or challenged by anyone else registered in the system. A challenge is adjudicated by a "jury" of other registered users. There's an economic component as well: you must make a deposit to create a profile or promote a challenge, which you lose if you lose the adjudication. There's even an ERC standard process for adjudication, ERC 792. Surely not foolproof, but more consistent with the distributed ideals than an oracle. https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer/ https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer/
cuteboy19 4y ago
Second biggest. Rolling back a supposedly "immutable" blockchain beats that by a million
- djohnston 4y ago
  You can go use Ethereum classic mate, it has always been a choice
- koheripbal 4y ago
  If the majority of the network agrees to roll something back, that's a feature, not a bug.
hgsgm 4y ago

33 points by bpierre 4y ago

Proof-of-stake is like AI and fusion power: always around the corner, but never arrives. Vaporware. The etherium devs have repeatedly set cutover dates, then pushed it back for years. Do they uncover more issues and corner cases that they have to deal with each time, or are they simply uncomfortable with a change of this magnitude?

LewisVerstappen 4y ago
maybe you should read the article before embarrassing yourself?
rytill 4y ago
Bet on your belief; you could make a lot of money: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos
- satyrnein 4y ago
  Not really "a lot" it seems. If you look at the price for "No merge by January 1st" it shows $0.03, which seems promising, but you can only buy like $3 worth of contracts at that price. If you try to buy $1000 worth, your average price shoots up to $0.52! Not sure if this is just a particularly thin market, or whether there's not actually a deep well on confidence that the merge is coming soon, or what.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    It's just an extremely thin market I believe. The October one seems a bit better, you can throw a couple hundred at reasonable prices.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

> "one coin, one vote." who has the gold makes the rules.

csense 4y ago
Suppose we all agree that "One citizen, one vote" is better and ought to be implemented. "One coin, one vote" is relatively easy to implement, since the blockchain intrinsically knows how many coins each address has. To implement "One citizen, one vote" you need to know who's a unique citizen. How do you code that into a blockchain? [1] [1] The usual approach is an oracle, where you just say "Organization X issues every person a cryptographically signed certificate, and Organization X pinky promises to issue exactly one certificate to each individual person." This completely centralizes the governance into Organization X, since there's no technical means to check or enforce the pinky promise.
- pornel 4y ago
  You can't. It's the oracle problem. These systems are doomed to be oligarchies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- aftbit 4y ago
  The approach that is taken by Proof of Humanity (and by extension Kleros Court) is to have an adversarial process where anyone can claim to be a unique human & submit evidence, which can then be vouched or challenged by anyone else registered in the system. A challenge is adjudicated by a "jury" of other registered users. There's an economic component as well: you must make a deposit to create a profile or promote a challenge, which you lose if you lose the adjudication. There's even an ERC standard process for adjudication, ERC 792. Surely not foolproof, but more consistent with the distributed ideals than an oracle. https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer/ https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer/

cuteboy19 4y ago

Second biggest. Rolling back a supposedly "immutable" blockchain beats that by a million

djohnston 4y ago
You can go use Ethereum classic mate, it has always been a choice
koheripbal 4y ago
If the majority of the network agrees to roll something back, that's a feature, not a bug.

hgsgm 4y ago