23 ms·
The Merge
- andrewstuart 4y agoNo amount of fancy, serious, technical, professional talk will convince me that crypto is anything but a giant ponzi scheme.
- baby 4y agoWhat are you doing on HN?
- lawn 4y agoThis is a bad thought process to have: No amount of fancy, serious, technical, professional talk will convince me that <subject> is anything but <dismissive words>. It's the same stance a lot of people take to vaccines, politics, religion, climate change, wars etc etc and it's causing heaps of problems.
- mupuff1234 4y agoNext step is to reduce societal harm by removing the token economy.
- thevania 4y agoI hope this crashes ethereum value and ideally takes down the whole crypto bubble
- Steven0147 4y ago
- Elizabeth0147 4y ago
- Elizabeth0147 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 4y agoPoor miners. /s
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoI can't tell you how much I enjoy refreshing these crypto threads. Comments are turning from black to gray to black again like I'm at a disco.
- cowtools 4y agoSomething I like about HN is that down-voted posts will often come back from the grave. For some reason voters have a lot of sympathy. Back on reddit, people use votes as a way to signal to each other what to believe in: instinctively, you upvote popular comments and downvote unpopular comments. It's really the first few voters that decide what people see.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoIf you vote instinctively, instead of for the betterment of the community, I'll be the one to ask you: please don't vote.
- orliesaurus 4y agoCurious: will it be more energy efficient?
- latchkey 4y agoGPU based mining of ETH will turn off, literally, in 15s (one block). But the thing is, it will just move to other coins, for now. Once those are not as profitable, things will rebalance as people shut off their GPUs. Future, ETH will grow with power requirements too... just a lot more slowly... ASICs for zero knowledge are coming, which will create a bit of an energy race. Staking will always be increasing... which will require compute and power. At the end of the day, overall, the existing power usage won't actually go away... it will just get moved to other things. Always remember that power companies are incentivized to sell their power to the highest bidder...
- zaptrem 4y agoCan you give more info about Zero Knowledge Proofs would require ASICS?
- latchkey 4y agohttps://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs." ... "Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-friendly."
- seibelj 4y agoThat doesn’t mean we need more power. It just means the requirements of ZK proofs may need specialized equipment to process them efficiently. Different problem.
- charcircuit 4y agoQuote from the blog linked: >The target date is September 15, 2022, but this estimate might have even a week of error.
- dsimmons 4y agoIt depends on a host of factors, so it's hard to predict exactly. As an example: it depends on the rate at which existing Proof of Work miners move the chain forward. We can make an estimated guess based on the current hash rate, but miners may begin to drop off early and try to "beat the rush" to sell their used hardware before everyone else, so the hash rate could drop more than anticipated.
- 0x64 4y agoThe current estimate for the upgrade can be found at [1]. It's not a regular upgrade that happens at a specific block height, hence the variance. Instead, the consensus is flipped over from PoW to PoS at a specific total difficulty, also known as mining difficulty. One of the reasons is to avoid miner attacks around the merge event. [1] https://bordel.wtf/ https://bordel.wtf/
- fizzynut 4y agoGiven that the merge reduces the electricity cost for new Ethereum by ~1000x, won't the price just tank in a race to the bottom?
- hackernudes 4y agoIs someone out there buying ETH because of the power that went in to mining it? It's more about supply and demand, I think. The supply of ETH does change after the merge, but from what I understand there will be less generated than before. All the tokens and contracts that use Ethereum will still need to pay gas fees and now instead of miners earning ETH, stakers will.
- fizzynut 4y agoThose with a "stake" of ETH will be gaining $xxxx of ETH for a cost of $x, so why would you not sell for a giant profit?
- latchkey 4y agoTaxes
- hackernudes 4y agoI don't understand what you mean. Stakers get ETH "for free" and therefore they crash the price? But the demand for ETH will still be there just like it was for mining. I don't really understand how Ethereum works very well. They are trying to tweak the ETH generation to make the merge work (see the ultra sound money memes). Just because stakers don't have to work hard doesn't mean ETH will crash. The whole thing does kind of seem hand wavey and magicky (compared to proof of work, I mean) but I've had a hard time finding resources that explain how it works simply.
- fizzynut 4y agoOk, a real life comparison, lets say there are 1000s of real life mines around the world that currently mine gold for say $50 per gram, but suddenly a processing technique lowers that cost for all miners to $0.50 per gram. In any normal market the price of gold should trend down.
- numlock86 4y ago> The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%. That's something Bitcoin needs ... or even better get rid of it altogether. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- wyager 4y agoProof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Proof of stake suffers from the "nothing at stake" problem, leading to grinding attacks etc.
- Victerius 4y ago> Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Every country's financial system: ahem. The U.S. dollar doesn't require giant energy-hungry server farms to be secure.
- cowtools 4y agoThe U.S. dollar is backed by a military many times more energy intensive.
- Victerius 4y agoWhat?
- Macha 4y agoSo if the us replaced the dollar with Bitcoin they could eliminate or downsize their military? Doubtful
- cowtools 4y agoI agree with the point you are making here. I just think that Proof-of-Work is usually a better choice for a cryptocurrency than Proof-of-Stake. Conventional currencies (notably the US Dollar) are also backed by signifigant military (and thus electrical) power. I would posit that Fiat currencies are nessisary in some sense, but not that they are more efficient to maintain than cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies tend to piggyback on the infrastructure and economy that are built on fiat (e.g. The internet).
- seydor 4y ago
- aqme28 4y agoWhat are you talking about?
- UberFly 4y agoDoom-and-gloom to not sure to doom-and-gloom. Rinse and repeat. Cripto watchers are like sports fans.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoAcronym could be better, but not sure what the rest of your comment is getting at.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoEthereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in a different way. In PoS, anyone with 32 ETH can deposit that ETH to become a validator, a node that participates in the network's consensus algorithm. Finalizing a block requires 2/3 of all active validators to sign off on it. Should a malicious actor try to tamper with the underlying protocol by using a large number of validators to revert a finalized block (the equivalent of a "51% attack" in PoW) their funds are slashed — meaning they lose a portion of their staked ETH. This makes attacks extremely expensive; it would be like a PoW system where if you use your mining hardware to attack the network then your hardware catches fire and is destroyed. PoS does not require the same energy-intensive hardware as PoW. Any relatively recent consumer hardware should be capable of running the software required to operate a 32 ETH staking node. If you deposit more than 32 ETH, you will be assigned multiple "validator slots" by the protocol, but you will still be able to run them from a single computer, though hardware requirements go up the more you stake. Most estimates put the expected energy savings from the switch to PoS to be around 99%. If you have any additional questions please let me know!
- steve_taylor 4y agoGoing by that description (I'm otherwise a n00b), my guess is that only a fraction of validator slots would be active, which means the network could be easily hijacked by a well-funded party who just wants to see the network burn (e.g. central bank of a superpower). Another possible weakness could occur if staking is mostly outsourced (i.e. staking as a service) and one provider overwhelmingly dominates the market. That provider would be in a position to hijack the network without having much of a stake in it. Proof of stake doesn't really live up to its name if the validation nodes aren't run by validation slot owners.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoThe threat of a 51% attack still exists on proof-of-stake as it does on proof-of-work, but it's even riskier for the attackers. A attacker would need 51% of the staked ETH (about $15,000,000,000 USD). They could then use their own attestations to ensure their preferred fork was the one with the most accumulated attestations. The 'weight' of accumulated attestations is what consensus clients use to determine the correct chain, so this attacker would be able to make their fork the canonical one. However, a strength of proof-of-stake over proof-of-work is that the community has flexibility in mounting a counter-attack. For example, the honest validators could decide to keep building on the minority chain and ignore the attacker's fork while encouraging apps, exchanges, and pools to do the same. They could also decide to forcibly remove the attacker from the network and destroy their staked ether. These are strong economic defenses against a 51% attack. Staking-as-a-service will operate as a market of diverse options. The network could decide to fork from an outsized dishonest market participant. It would be controversial, but the validity of the network is generally a common incentive for most involved.
- sktrdie 4y agoI don't get proof of stake. What's stopping anyone from presenting a new chain made up of thousands of fake transactions? And why wouldn't such chain be accepted by the network? Is it just "checkpoints" hardcoded in the software that don't allow this?
- whoooooo123 4y agoIt's bullshit: https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-people-promoting-it-are-scammers/ https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-scam-and-the-...
- 6c737133 4y agoA magnificently misinformed waste of bytes. Thanks for sharing.
- papa-whisky 4y agoI can't tell if "waste of bytes" is referring to the blog post shared by GP, or to proof of stake as a whole. If the former; as someone with little knowledge of cryptocurrency the post read fairly convincingly to me. In what ways is it misinformed?
- ikt 4y agoYou can read more here when it was posted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366310 Basically he built up a strawman and then burned it to the ground.
- setr 4y agoI’m scouring through the comment chain but I’m not really finding such a definitive response. I’m assuming you’re referring to the first chain of comments, but that seems to boil down to “the attack exists but it’s fine because to successfully attack the network would destroy the network, and with it any profit you’ve made in the attack; thus you cannot profit” — but this is directly addressed by the “nothing at stake” section of the article; if I can attack the successfully attack the network, and liquidate my position before the network implodes, I win (which PoW mitigates by making the 51% attack itself prohibitively expensive). Which hardly seems unreasonable, because the network imploding is a feature of humans losing trust in the network and abandoning it — in compute-land, an eternity. In my skimming, I can’t find anything that addresses this — and especially not anything that merits describing TFA as a strawman.
- Tao3300 4y ago> As we approach The Merge of Ethereum Mainnet, you should be on high alert for scams trying to take advantage of users during this transition. Do not send your ETH anywhere in an attempt to "upgrade to ETH2." There is no "ETH2" token, and there is nothing more you need to do for your funds to remain safe. Yeah... this is going to be a shitshow. Who wants to set the over/under on $millions that get stolen? Which exchange or fund will lose a vast chunk of its holdings?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 4y ago> Who wants to set the over/under on $millions that get stolen? If you can think of a way to measure it metaculus would be interested properly. > Which exchange or fund will lose a vast chunk of its holdings? I'd place this at roughly at 0.01% chance for any major exchange or fund
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ben_jones 4y ago> I'd place this at roughly at 0.01% chance for any major exchange or fund Over 0.01% of major exchanges and funds have been hacked or scammed this month.
- wmf 4y agoYou can easily steal millions in crypto with fake Elon giveaways, Metamask phishing, etc so I'm not sure fake merge social engineering is any worse.
- encryptluks2 4y agoHow are gas fees going to be calculated, and how do you plan to control spamming the network similar to what you see with Solana?
- 0x64 4y agoBlock times become exactly 12 seconds, that's it. Nothing else changes: it's the same Ethereum, just greener and very slightly faster!
- rvz 4y agoAnd still cannot be used as a form of payment that is better than the current system.
- dsimmons 4y agoGas fees don't materially change under Proof of Stake. It's a common misconception that The Merge reduces fees (it does not).
- encryptluks2 4y agoSo what is the point of high fees under proof of stake? Before it was to reward the miners. Who exactly is being rewarded high fees once it changes and for what purpose? If the costs to run a validator are too expensive or need too many resources then you just end up promoting a centralized solution.
- T0Bi 4y agoThe point of fees isn't primarily to reward the miners. That's what the block reward is for. Under PoS validators will still get a block reward, although a lower one (90% less). The fees are to mitigate spam attacks. You can only fit that many transactions in a block. Fees are bids to be included in a block. The higher the fee, the earlier your transaction gets included. Fees on Ethereum are high, because a lot of people want to use it.
- ur-whale 4y agoTime to short NVidia
- dsimmons 4y agoIn the short-term, it's likely already priced in: folks have known this is coming for a while, and especially over the past 2-3 months where it became "real" versus "coming soon". Longer term, there may be uses for GPUs when it comes to zero-knowledge proofs (think: expensive to produce, easy to verify), but we still have a ways to go in that department.
- bluquark 4y agoThis reminds me of the nerve-biting period up to the James Webb launch. The devs put off this transition for so many years trying to plan for every contingency, but we still can't be certain they didn't miss a crucial flaw. In a system where the only thing holding back malicious actors is technical constraints, it only takes one bug or one misaligned incentive for a vicious cycle to take down the entire Ethereum ecosystem. An exploitable detail in the PRNG used to select the validators, for instance. And like a space telescope, there is no opportunity to realistically experiment with the change beforehand, nor an easy way to make adjustments after launch.
- latchkey 4y agoIt is order of magnitude easier for them to make changes after launch since the code and developers are here on earth and not floating in space.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 4y agoEspecially given Ethereum's decision power being entirely centralized in the hands of the developers (unlike bitcoin for instance) who has shown willingness to hard-fork when they consider it necessary. In fact, the move from PoW to PoS illustrate this concentration of power: the miners lose a lot but they had no say in the decision.
- latchkey 4y agoMiners knew from day one that PoS was eventual. As a very large ETH miner, I'm not that concerned about that part of things. Why? The business model for my company was built around a larger idea than just mining. Mining was just a great way for us to bootstrap the business. Let's also not forget that there are other coins out there to mine. There is a huge potential for something to take ETH's place... whether that happens or not is up in the air and really depends on someone to step up and take it. Easier said than done, but the possibility is there.
- clord 4y agoSay I have a few GPUs churning but my payout date is late 2022. Should I just give up now?
- alchemist1e9 4y agoObviously you will keep running them for a bit to see what happens. That’s why for me it seems unavoidable there will exist an ETHpow or Ethereum Legacy, the only questions are does it’s value go to zero and if so, how quickly. If it does drop in value quickly then you will switch to ETC or some other PoW chain that your GPUs can mine and see if those are profitable.
- Ericson2314 4y agoDoes this thing still use libp2p, or did they give up on that?
- dorkwood 4y ago> Should a malicious actor try to tamper with the underlying protocol by using a large number of validators to revert a finalized block (the equivalent of a "51% attack" in PoW) their funds are slashed — meaning they lose a portion of their staked ETH Where does it go? Is it destroyed?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BoGs83 4y agoIt allows any nodes to validate the validator, they can call out anyone out by doing their own computation for the transaction. If they find a bad actor the stake that bad actor put is lost and goes towards the "whistle blower" node in their wallet. It is based (on my reading of it) on the notion that there are many more good actors then bad. I wonder if you can get in a situation where someone spams bad actors and fudges all the transactions.
- 0x64 4y agoThe validator that proposes the block with the slashing in it gets a small reward, while the rest is burnt. There are dedicated slashers on the network that observe attestations and block proposals for violations. They can either selfishly keep those observations until they can be included in a block, or broadcast them to the network so whoever is up next for proposal can slash the misbehaving validator. The whistleblowers themselves (altruistic slashers) get no reward, only the validator including it in a block does.
- bitL 4y agoOK, so you stake 32ETH, buy a dedicated server for a validator, and you'd get up to 5% reward per year. How is that going to pay off your dedicated server? Moreover, you are risking losing those 32ETH in case your validator goes down. Your payment would be proportional to the number of attestations, so if only a few people use ETH for transactions, your reward will be low. Did anyone think about making staking actually attractive to infrastructure providers? Infrastructure folks' reward was going down ridiculously even with POW, the POS seems like way worse, and if the number of attestations goes wild, I am sure ETH folks will find ways to penalize infrastructure folks again. I won't be surprised if ETH collapsed just because nobody would want to run 24/7 infrastructure for it.
- colinmhayes 4y agoThe reward goes up as the number of validators goes down.
- wmf 4y agoThese criticisms seem to all be based on theory with no reference to the existing Ethereum ecosystem. How is that going to pay off your dedicated server? 5% of 32 ETH is currently $2,500 which easily pays for a computer. Moreover, you are risking losing those 32ETH in case your validator goes down. You have to be down for months to lose your stake. Your payment would be proportional to the number of attestations, so if only a few people use ETH for transactions, your reward will be low. I'm pretty sure that validators produce blocks regardless of how many transactions there are. Ethereum's problem is too many transactions, not too few. Did anyone think about making staking actually attractive to infrastructure providers? Those providers exist and they're efficient enough that they can pass through most of the rewards.
- everfree 4y ago> Your payment would be proportional to the number of attestations, so if only a few people use ETH for transactions, your reward will be low. Attestations are a staking consensus concept, not a transaction concept. Attestations occur 24/7, not just when people decide to use the network.
- 0x64 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bilsbie 4y agoWhat’s the incentive to be a validator?
- DennisP 4y agoSame as for miners: new ETH issuance and transaction fees. The issuance is much lower than it is for miners, because the cost of staking is much lower than the cost of mining.
- armchairhacker 4y agoAwesome If crypto wasn't contributing causing a crash in the GPU market and contributing even more to climate change, I don't think it would have nearly as much hate as it does. Sure it's largely used for scams and money laundering, but at least it's used for scams and money laundering in a way I can ignore. Right now Bitcoin and Etherium, the leading cryptocoins, are absurdly slow and expensive, on top of causing all sorts of issues. Maybe blockchain is the technology of the future, maybe there are smaller coins, but right not whenever I hear "crypto" it's always something bad. Actually carrying this out and switching to a system which doesn't lead to absurd amounts of wasted computation is a great start to actual crypto usefulness.
- bluquark 4y ago> at least it's used for scams and money laundering in a way I can ignore. I thought this, and then my mom got scammed. She realized one day later, and the bank was able to recover the portion sent via bank transfer. But they also tricked her into sending money via bitcoin ATMs, and that portion was not recovered.
- baby 4y agoUse a bank. That the bank uses bank deposits, or crypto, or central reserves, shouldn’t matter to the user. As long as the bank can provide fraud insurance.
- Elizabeth0147 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- noelsusman 4y agoThe energy part of crypto is a pretty small part of why I hate on it. More of a cherry on top. I'll stop hating on crypto when it becomes useful for anything other than committing crimes.
- EarlKing 4y agoI'll be sure to inform Chris Chan. .......I'll see myself out.
- mattwilsonn888 4y agoYou do not need to wait for the merge to see the effects. Staking pools are already heavily centralizing power in the network on centralized exchanges and """"decentralized"""" contract pools like Lido which can be manipulated and changed with the keys of a small group of people. Vitalik is already preparing to organize social enforcement and democratic slashing for when these pools have their arms twisted to censor transactions by state actors. https://bitcoinist.com/vitalik-buterins-take-on-possible-ethereum-censorship-by-ofac/ https://bitcoinist.com/vitalik-buterins-take-on-possible-eth... Before the merge has even happened, you have a central network leader preparing to use his influence to secure the network through what amounts to outside or meta-intervention (we're forking the chain because we see something is wrong) to prevent the technically possible "attack" (in Buterin's own words in agreement with most reasonable blockchain folk) from people already consolidating power for the post merge network. This is no longer a trustless and open system. Bitcoin does not scale, but it's proof of work distributed block ordering mechanism is not killing the planet or reliant on high demand energy - it is actually most profitable to mine Bitcoin with otherwise wasted, low demand energy. Even the premise for moving to PoS (at least as a foil to Bitcoin) is wrong.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago> Vitalik is already preparing to organize social enforcement and democratic slashing for when these pools have their arms twisted to censor transactions by state actors. I don’t see anything in the linked article that talks about Vitalik preparing to organize anything. He just replied to a tweet. As far as I can tell, you’re misunderstanding the discussion around censorship and making some pretty big assumptions.
- alchemist1e9 4y agoWe could see a very unexpected outcome of an ETHpow chain living on and PoS falling on it’s face, effectively validating PoW as the important innovation that is is. How does it fail you ask? Probably something along the lines of the outages seen with Solana, some unexpected sequence of events that causes a cascading failure of validators which needs a “restart”. PoW doesn’t ever need a restart condition, it’s build into the foundation. I don’t know what will happen, perhaps PoS will work fine, the Merge takes place and all the miners shutdown or move to ETC or whatever. Or does The Merge and some failure around it mark the eventual slow death of PoS and a resurgence of Bitcoin dominance?
- azth 4y agoWhat effect will this have on its price?
- redox99 4y agoIf everything else stays the same, it should have a positive impact on price because of the reduction of issuance.
- dcow 4y agoI predict this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum. First we will see what the intrinsic value of a blockchain is. Then the network will die when someone buys the 2/3rds of the validators for less than Visa makes in a day. It will probably just be Visa. Code is not law, money is. This is the core value on the network and has been for quite awhile now.
- Cantinflas 4y agoYou'd need billions to buy a significant %...
- dcow 4y agoNot after we learn the intrinsic value of the network.
- erulabs 4y agoObjects and ideas do not have intrinsic value. Value is a subjective judgement of individuals at a particular time and place. We will find out the new price after the merge.
- Prunkton 4y agoyou said it yourself 'Code is not law, money is'. Money will always flow to the market with the highest 'capital efficiency', its like the laws of thermodynamics for economics/human greed lol. This is the whole point why people perform the ridiculous undertaking to build dedicated fiber-connections between stock markets on different continents. we already know DeFi does outperform traditional markets in this regard in important topics. Its an engineering task to increase the % in this still very young discipline. But IMHO it is mostly a question of regulation to have a significant shift
- Prunkton 4y agothis is not how markes work. while trying to buy 2/3 by of a semi-stable (in that time frame) amount of ETH, you will skyrocket the price and have to pay more for each additional ETH. A huge amount of ETH is already staked aka out of the system since you can not unstake them at the moment. You can not liquidate your staked ETH regardless how much money you throw around. This is not a practical attack vector you would literaly >100x the ETH price. This aspect also differs from the PoW approach where you take a source from outside of the system (Hardware) to participate. And since there is a 'infinite' number of Hardware/Hashpower you could accumulate over time attacks are easier (still hard for different reasons) to perform. But lets assume you archive to controll 2/3rds of validators, you can not start staking the very next second. There is a queue (I think of some days) and people will recognize the attack before you will be able to perform it and people will simply blacklist you for their own sake.
- blobster 4y agoThere seem to be at least two big issues with the upcoming merge: 1 - Stablecoin issuers like USDC can de facto determine which chain succeeds in case of a fork (PoW vs PoS) 2 - 70% of validators are US-based, and as custodians, they will have to comply with OFAC. More info in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/milessuter/status/1560070819518234624 https://twitter.com/milessuter/status/1560070819518234624
- betwixthewires 4y agoWell, they're not custodians exactly. The way they work is not really cleanly analogous to the system OFAC is designed to interact with. 1 is true, but reframed: tools people use de facto decide what infrastructure they run on, and therefore what infrastructure those people use their tools on. it's not as controversial when framed in an unbiased way. We are just describing network effects. As far as the twitter thread goes, there's a 3rx option: the big validators can no longer validate. Remember, validators aren't the only ones that validate blocks, all nodes do, validators validate transactions and finalize epochs. If they refuse to validate a valid block proposed by another validator that the rest of the network sees is valid, they basically have to fork themselves off onto their own, valueless chain. If most validators start refusing to finalize blocks, their stake gets slashed and they no longer validate. They have no choice but to violate OFAC if it is deemed that finalizing a block which contains transactions they didn't and wouldn't include is a violation, so in that scenario they'd have no choice but to stop validating. The other side of this hill to me looks like a lot of decentralized, anonymous validators, and I'm happy with that.
- remote_phone 4y agoWill this drop has fees? Gas fees are keeping crypto from taking off, it’s ridiculously high
- Prunkton 4y agogas fees will not get affected by the merge from a users point of perspective (there is a lot going on for validators etc). This was not part of the plan. In this regard there was kind of a shift over the last years of how Ethereum is working and wants to work. The current vision of Ethereum is roughly: There is a protocol layer (1) and an application layer (2). User transactions should be dealed with on layer 2 with fees around 0.1$. Layer 1 is considered as the generalized security layer to make specialized layer 2 possible without downsides. User transactions can be that cheap because they are part of an accumulated so called rollup, there are different kind of rollups for more specialized use-cases. But to come back to your initial question. There are also updates in the pipeline for ethereum to increase its performance in regard of gas fees and ts/s >100x in the coming ~5y. There will be several small updates, way way easier to implement than the merge. The first should hit mainnet 2023.. but time will tell ;)
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoLayer 2s that retain Ethereum security are huge for swaps, planned stock exchange replacement. See: Loopring
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- erwinh 4y agoThe Tezos chain has been consistently upgrading itself with very little downtime for the past couple of years: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/the-ithaca-transition-in-one-visual-tsr-weekly-13-22 https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/the-ithaca-transition-in... Lets see how ethereum does.
- irusensei 4y agoMy main issue with PoS is that people wont run nodes. Contrary to bitcoin there isn’t a self hosting culture on Ethereum. Its all about trading and tokenomics. They will stake through exchanges, which already control the fiat ramps and are easily controlled by regulatory pressure. Since those guys are now validating on chain transaction censorship might become a thing. And then there is the biggest irony on the fact that PoS basically recreates the legacy financial system where banks and central banks being the stewards of the network.
- Paradigma11 4y agoI have no doubts a vibrant self hosting culture would spring up the moment chain transaction censorship turns up on the horizon.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 4y agoWell it has started, Ethermine is not including tornado cash txns: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrettig/status/1560825331023597569 https://mobile.twitter.com/lrettig/status/156082533102359756...
- Ruphin 4y agoProof of Stake and Proof of Work only impact the consensus model of the network (i.e. how new blocks are added), but for network participants that do not participate on consensus there is no difference. Just like in Bitcoin or in Ethereum now, you can run a node without participating in mining or staking. If you run an Ethereum node now, it will still be the same after the Merge, and not somehow less valid. It will still check the correctness of all the transactions, as it does now. I think a large cause of this confusion is the "validator" terminology; calling nodes that produce blocks through staking validators makes people think that normal nodes don't validate or check anything, but this is not correct.