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An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should

An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should be celebrated here. Else, what is the point in calling ourselves "Hacker" News?

pavlov 4y ago
What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
- sterlind 4y ago
  proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
    - meowkit 4y ago
      Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
      - sterlind 4y ago
        I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.
    - sterlind 4y ago
      exactly! hence why I think this must be the most harrowing software upgrade of all time.
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    >not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure Is there any good writeup or video essay about how incentives and control will change? I'm a bit sceptical about this part. Feels like ethereum owners now have a big incentive to make this change benefit them rather than the utility of ethereum. Like I heard this will make it even more deflationary which seems like an odd choice.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Your average software update does not put 200B at risk.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that. The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update. Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash, sure, but their actual trades aren’t on Ethereum. Crypto is all about perception of decentralization. It’s a story, not a product.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      I mean META stock is down 60% YoY and the revenue is the same. Hard to argue what is "manipulated" vs. perception
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap. Is Apple really worth $2.5 trillion? I dunno, seems like a lot, but the market determines what things are worth. But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc). More than $28B moves on chain every day: https://money-movers.info/ https://money-movers.info/
      - pavlov 4y ago
        > "It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap." This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense. Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares. There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.
- dist1ll 4y ago
  Several reasons come to mind: - Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems. Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. And they can be done asynchronously, at the discretion of the user. If you think about it, deployment for this type of software boils down to uploading build artifacts into a public folder. - Most other massively deployed software is developed by a single organization that completely owns the pipe. Ethereum has multiple client teams that need to coordinate and rigorously test their specs. - Any failure has potential to severely damage the reputation of Ethereum, and in turn a multi-billion dollar market.
  - krainboltgreene 4y ago
    > Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems This is a hilarious statement. > Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. Only to be followed by this.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  iOS / Windows etc are not open source and are delivered by centralized entities (Apple, Microsoft). Android is open source but is also delivered by a single company (Google). Maybe my phrasing didn't reflect it but I meant one of the biggest upgrades for an open source project done by a distributed group of developers.
- jlokier 4y ago
  > What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? > How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems? The code size for the core software of Ethereum isn't huge. It's possible for one person to understand it, and it's much simpler than iOS, Android or Windows. There are many things running on top, but those are supposd to keep running, similar to applications when you upgrade an OS. But the finance attached to Ethereum is huge. I checked the figures just now. $194 billion of ETH is being transferred from one blockchain mechanism to a radically different one, in about 40 minutes (estimated). Instantly, in what is effectively a single special transaction. The consensus algorithm around that transaction is special and complicated, and it will only ever run once. It has been very carefully tested in advance by many teams at different companies, because it coordinates a handover between two robust but very different kinds of consensus protocols that don't normally link up. It's unusual for another reason: Blockchains rarely merge two existing blockchains into one. Forking is more common, but not merging two different kinds of blockchains. This is also an open source style software upgrade, because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago, and nothing forces people to upgrade, only incentive and getting the news out to them. Not only is the consensus algorithm different, the p2p networking protocols are also different after the merge. There are many changes, though most of them are running already on one of the two chains being merged together. Countless third party applications, defi, secondary blockchains and so on running on top are supposed to be able to continue running, seamlessly. There's a lot of those, running from many authors and companies, and some of those have their own financial value that's not even counted in the $194 billion I mentioned above. Their total value is not clear. Those third party applications have not, in general, been tested on the new system. Nobody can be sure exactly which ones or how many will fall over, because it has not been possible to test them. It's a big like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10: Applications are not supposed to be affected if the OS authors did it right. Unlike most software updates rolled out on large networks, which can be done gradually with the old and new running alongside each other for a while, the Ethereum Merge is one single transaction to transfer everything over including protocols, and requires the whole network to do it all at the same virtual time. Nobody knows in advance which block will contain the transition. Only the statistical conditions for the transition are set, and there is a kind of meta-consensus protocol to ensure the transfer between very different consensus mechanisms is itself going to satisfy special rules of both consensus mechanisms during the handover. When it's over, the merge code will probably be deleted from client software, because it is only supposed to run once. There will be future upgrades, as there have been "hard forks" in the past, but they don't appear require such high levels of carefulness and coordination as the merge. That said, maybe things like the planned switch to sharding, state expiry, change of hash tree structure, and zk rollups will be fairly radical too.
zionic 4y ago
Exactly. This is a triumph and the entire open source community should be celebrating
- cflynnus 4y ago
  Disagree. This is a centralized project forcing a set of breaking consensus rule changes on users. Literally "upgrade your software or your money is gone" Bitcoin has hard guarantees of user rights. Ethereum is a centralized project masquerading as decentralized.
  - mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
    Uh, that's just wrong. If you don't upgrade your software your money is not gone.
    - cflynnus 4y ago
      If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.
      - foepys 4y ago
        There only needs to be a single miner that uses PoW and you can freely move your funds to other wallets. You can even start the miner yourself. So no, your funds are definitely not lost. You might be the only one connected to the "network" but wasn't this the promise of cryptocurrency decentralization?
        cflynnus 4y ago
        well the PoS fork tokens will acquire 99% the value of the current ethereum tokens, so if you want to access that you've got to upgrade your software. You are right tho you'll continue to be able to interact with the PoW network.
cflynnus 4y ago
"upgrade" is a misnomer. It's a "fork" There will be 2 competing versions of Ethereum after this. Actually there will be 3 because there's already ethereum classic from the last time Ethereum hard forked.
- michaelsbradley 4y ago
  Yes, but two of the networks will remain/be wee; the other (Ethereum mainnet)... not so much.
throw827474737 4y ago
Hello hello crypto fans, someone overestimating the significance and importance of some open source project here? lol Also PoS fans watch out and lets talk again in the future, I believe you are loosing some of your desired properties and may be surprised long-term..
cuteboy19 4y ago
Eh, what's the worst that could happen? If they mess up they can just roll back the immutable blockchain again, same way they did it last time
- capableweb 4y ago
  The project was way smaller back then and it was easier to coordinate the community (which was required for a rollback like that). It's highly unlikely to ever happen again.
stonogo 4y ago
It's just another cryptocurrency fork. It's not particularly more work or harder impact than your average Debian point release, with the most obvious difference being that there are fewer users affected.
PufPufPuf 4y ago
No, it's absolutely not as significant as you make it. Nobody outside the crypto community really cares.

pavlov 4y ago

What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?

sterlind 4y ago
proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
  - meowkit 4y ago
    Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
    - sterlind 4y ago
      I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    exactly! hence why I think this must be the most harrowing software upgrade of all time.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  >not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure Is there any good writeup or video essay about how incentives and control will change? I'm a bit sceptical about this part. Feels like ethereum owners now have a big incentive to make this change benefit them rather than the utility of ethereum. Like I heard this will make it even more deflationary which seems like an odd choice.
moralestapia 4y ago
Your average software update does not put 200B at risk.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that. The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update. Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash, sure, but their actual trades aren’t on Ethereum. Crypto is all about perception of decentralization. It’s a story, not a product.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    I mean META stock is down 60% YoY and the revenue is the same. Hard to argue what is "manipulated" vs. perception
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap. Is Apple really worth $2.5 trillion? I dunno, seems like a lot, but the market determines what things are worth. But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc). More than $28B moves on chain every day: https://money-movers.info/ https://money-movers.info/
    - pavlov 4y ago
      > "It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap." This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense. Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares. There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.
dist1ll 4y ago
Several reasons come to mind: - Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems. Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. And they can be done asynchronously, at the discretion of the user. If you think about it, deployment for this type of software boils down to uploading build artifacts into a public folder. - Most other massively deployed software is developed by a single organization that completely owns the pipe. Ethereum has multiple client teams that need to coordinate and rigorously test their specs. - Any failure has potential to severely damage the reputation of Ethereum, and in turn a multi-billion dollar market.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  > Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems This is a hilarious statement. > Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. Only to be followed by this.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
RestlessMind 4y ago
iOS / Windows etc are not open source and are delivered by centralized entities (Apple, Microsoft). Android is open source but is also delivered by a single company (Google). Maybe my phrasing didn't reflect it but I meant one of the biggest upgrades for an open source project done by a distributed group of developers.
jlokier 4y ago
> What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? > How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems? The code size for the core software of Ethereum isn't huge. It's possible for one person to understand it, and it's much simpler than iOS, Android or Windows. There are many things running on top, but those are supposd to keep running, similar to applications when you upgrade an OS. But the finance attached to Ethereum is huge. I checked the figures just now. $194 billion of ETH is being transferred from one blockchain mechanism to a radically different one, in about 40 minutes (estimated). Instantly, in what is effectively a single special transaction. The consensus algorithm around that transaction is special and complicated, and it will only ever run once. It has been very carefully tested in advance by many teams at different companies, because it coordinates a handover between two robust but very different kinds of consensus protocols that don't normally link up. It's unusual for another reason: Blockchains rarely merge two existing blockchains into one. Forking is more common, but not merging two different kinds of blockchains. This is also an open source style software upgrade, because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago, and nothing forces people to upgrade, only incentive and getting the news out to them. Not only is the consensus algorithm different, the p2p networking protocols are also different after the merge. There are many changes, though most of them are running already on one of the two chains being merged together. Countless third party applications, defi, secondary blockchains and so on running on top are supposed to be able to continue running, seamlessly. There's a lot of those, running from many authors and companies, and some of those have their own financial value that's not even counted in the $194 billion I mentioned above. Their total value is not clear. Those third party applications have not, in general, been tested on the new system. Nobody can be sure exactly which ones or how many will fall over, because it has not been possible to test them. It's a big like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10: Applications are not supposed to be affected if the OS authors did it right. Unlike most software updates rolled out on large networks, which can be done gradually with the old and new running alongside each other for a while, the Ethereum Merge is one single transaction to transfer everything over including protocols, and requires the whole network to do it all at the same virtual time. Nobody knows in advance which block will contain the transition. Only the statistical conditions for the transition are set, and there is a kind of meta-consensus protocol to ensure the transfer between very different consensus mechanisms is itself going to satisfy special rules of both consensus mechanisms during the handover. When it's over, the merge code will probably be deleted from client software, because it is only supposed to run once. There will be future upgrades, as there have been "hard forks" in the past, but they don't appear require such high levels of carefulness and coordination as the merge. That said, maybe things like the planned switch to sharding, state expiry, change of hash tree structure, and zk rollups will be fairly radical too.

zionic 4y ago

Exactly. This is a triumph and the entire open source community should be celebrating

cflynnus 4y ago
Disagree. This is a centralized project forcing a set of breaking consensus rule changes on users. Literally "upgrade your software or your money is gone" Bitcoin has hard guarantees of user rights. Ethereum is a centralized project masquerading as decentralized.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  Uh, that's just wrong. If you don't upgrade your software your money is not gone.
  - cflynnus 4y ago
    If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.
    - foepys 4y ago
      There only needs to be a single miner that uses PoW and you can freely move your funds to other wallets. You can even start the miner yourself. So no, your funds are definitely not lost. You might be the only one connected to the "network" but wasn't this the promise of cryptocurrency decentralization?
      - cflynnus 4y ago
        well the PoS fork tokens will acquire 99% the value of the current ethereum tokens, so if you want to access that you've got to upgrade your software. You are right tho you'll continue to be able to interact with the PoW network.

cflynnus 4y ago

"upgrade" is a misnomer. It's a "fork" There will be 2 competing versions of Ethereum after this. Actually there will be 3 because there's already ethereum classic from the last time Ethereum hard forked.

michaelsbradley 4y ago
Yes, but two of the networks will remain/be wee; the other (Ethereum mainnet)... not so much.

throw827474737 4y ago

Hello hello crypto fans, someone overestimating the significance and importance of some open source project here? lol Also PoS fans watch out and lets talk again in the future, I believe you are loosing some of your desired properties and may be surprised long-term..

cuteboy19 4y ago

Eh, what's the worst that could happen? If they mess up they can just roll back the immutable blockchain again, same way they did it last time

capableweb 4y ago
The project was way smaller back then and it was easier to coordinate the community (which was required for a rollback like that). It's highly unlikely to ever happen again.

stonogo 4y ago

It's just another cryptocurrency fork. It's not particularly more work or harder impact than your average Debian point release, with the most obvious difference being that there are fewer users affected.

PufPufPuf 4y ago

No, it's absolutely not as significant as you make it. Nobody outside the crypto community really cares.