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You 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 """"d

You 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 ago
We 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?
comex 4y ago
As opposed to miners which are… not heavily centralized?
- sph 4y ago
  Miners don't rule the Bitcoin network. Every single Bitcoin client has a vote, in that the most followed branch of the bitcoin network is the one that matters. The more clients, the more resistant the network is. Your Bitcoin client has the same voting power as the guy running an ASIC farm. That's the point of proof-of-work.
  - fidelramos 4y ago
    You got it completely backwards: in Bitcoin the only thing that matters is the computing power of miners, not the number of nodes. That is precisely the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto intended to solve, preventing Sybil attacks [0]. In few words, you don't want the consensus of the network to change just because you spawn more nodes voting the way you want to, they need to expend a resource that cannot be duplicated, in Bitcoin's case computing power/electricity. The Bitcoin Whitepaper also explains this in Section 4, "Proof of Work" [4]: > The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#proof-of-work https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#proof-of-work Edit: changed typo, "and the number of nodes" should have been "not the number of nodes".
    - mattwilsonn888 4y ago
      > Bitcoin the only thing that matters is the computing power of miners > That is precisely the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto intended to solve, preventing Sybil attacks "The problem" Satoshi wanted to solve is building a trustless ledger that can store real value, even if the only value is the ability to publish data uncensored and universally. Sybil attacks are an aspect of that and proof of work had already existed before Bitcoin to solve, you guessed it, Sybil attacks. You're view of Satoshi's intentions are therefore myopic. This is demonstrated when you conflate your quoted passage about chain reorganization with power over the network as a whole. Satoshi was sensitive to block size, so were and are all Bitcoiners. There is a reason the block size was not massive out of the gate, and in the main forks remains small: Satoshi understood that node participation was important and should not be gatekept. In a way, that's all irrelevant. We do not need the authority of the founder to draw our own conclusions about Bitcoin or blockchain - in fact one intention of Satoshi which is plainly obvious is this fact. Volunteer nodes absolutely contribute to decentralization of resources and power. Mining nodes have an interest in maximizing profits, while volunteer nodes have an interest in keeping the network tied to its ideology, which means not significantly changing, which is valuable for a store of value. It certainly is not a scalable model (neither is Ethereum, it just makes other trade offs), but the nodes do in fact keep check on each other.
everfree 4y ago
> Staking pools are already heavily centralizing power in the network on centralized exchanges and """"decentralized"""" contract pools That's just not true. Check the PoW and PoS pie charts here: https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://beaconcha.in/charts/pools_distribution https://beaconcha.in/charts/pools_distribution It's easy to see that they are extremely similar in terms of centralization.

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 ago

We 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?

comex 4y ago

As opposed to miners which are… not heavily centralized?

sph 4y ago
Miners don't rule the Bitcoin network. Every single Bitcoin client has a vote, in that the most followed branch of the bitcoin network is the one that matters. The more clients, the more resistant the network is. Your Bitcoin client has the same voting power as the guy running an ASIC farm. That's the point of proof-of-work.
- fidelramos 4y ago
  You got it completely backwards: in Bitcoin the only thing that matters is the computing power of miners, not the number of nodes. That is precisely the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto intended to solve, preventing Sybil attacks [0]. In few words, you don't want the consensus of the network to change just because you spawn more nodes voting the way you want to, they need to expend a resource that cannot be duplicated, in Bitcoin's case computing power/electricity. The Bitcoin Whitepaper also explains this in Section 4, "Proof of Work" [4]: > The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#proof-of-work https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#proof-of-work Edit: changed typo, "and the number of nodes" should have been "not the number of nodes".
  - mattwilsonn888 4y ago
    > Bitcoin the only thing that matters is the computing power of miners > That is precisely the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto intended to solve, preventing Sybil attacks "The problem" Satoshi wanted to solve is building a trustless ledger that can store real value, even if the only value is the ability to publish data uncensored and universally. Sybil attacks are an aspect of that and proof of work had already existed before Bitcoin to solve, you guessed it, Sybil attacks. You're view of Satoshi's intentions are therefore myopic. This is demonstrated when you conflate your quoted passage about chain reorganization with power over the network as a whole. Satoshi was sensitive to block size, so were and are all Bitcoiners. There is a reason the block size was not massive out of the gate, and in the main forks remains small: Satoshi understood that node participation was important and should not be gatekept. In a way, that's all irrelevant. We do not need the authority of the founder to draw our own conclusions about Bitcoin or blockchain - in fact one intention of Satoshi which is plainly obvious is this fact. Volunteer nodes absolutely contribute to decentralization of resources and power. Mining nodes have an interest in maximizing profits, while volunteer nodes have an interest in keeping the network tied to its ideology, which means not significantly changing, which is valuable for a store of value. It certainly is not a scalable model (neither is Ethereum, it just makes other trade offs), but the nodes do in fact keep check on each other.

everfree 4y ago

> Staking pools are already heavily centralizing power in the network on centralized exchanges and """"decentralized"""" contract pools That's just not true. Check the PoW and PoS pie charts here: https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks https://beaconcha.in/charts/pools_distribution https://beaconcha.in/charts/pools_distribution It's easy to see that they are extremely similar in terms of centralization.