Is there any mechanism or inventive discouraging current Ethereum POW miners from rebelling against the coming switch to POS, and starting a major fork of the network when the network is slated to switch over ("The Merge")? How will everyone instantly agree that ETH1 is worth nothing on that date?
I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.
The difficulty bomb makes it so that consensus doesn't have to occur to switch, but has to occur to prevent the shift from PoW.
Everyone doesn't have to agree. There will be miners that attempt a fork to keep their position. There is nothing wrong with this, it's how this stuff is supposed to work. But the fact that PoS has been on the roadmap since the beginning takes away legitimacy from any claim that the PoS transition is illegitimate. The fact that Ethereum Classic exists and is a PoW version of ethereum and intends to stay that way will take that even further. There will probably continue to be forks of ethereum, just like there have always been. Anyone can fork an open source codebase and maintain it, anyone can use the software to spin up a consensus network, anyone can use prior state as a starting point. Chain forks are a social thing not a technical thing, game theory not withstanding, that's how nakamoto consensus and FOSS is supposed to work.
Legitimacy is determined in the eyes of the userbase, in which software they decide to use and what ledger they regard as the canonical history of the network, i.e. what blockchain they sync. Whichever "Ethereum" the majority of users use is the "Ethereum."
People will describe technical mechanisms, but they are all pretty irrelevant since a miner rebellion would easily modify the software.
The real mechanism is that all the major players can’t accept two forks and maintain sanity. For example, Circle will have to choose which chain has a $1 peg for their USDC reserves, and they will certainly choose the chain supported by the core devs and the one the rest of the major players are selecting as well.
That leaves the rebel chain in a very compromised position. With the peg being removed many defi protocols would be in an exploitable state. Removing all those abandoned and compromised services ends up with little reason for anyone to use the chain.
To be honest, I still suspect someone will try. But it will be a mess and there will be lots of financial loss for users.
I was one of those people in prior forks. My logic was that the rebel chain would be more open for experimentation, would innovate faster, and therefore win out in the long run regardless of who was supported by Wall St. Turns out that financial backing eats innovation for breakfast. The fast-moving scrappy innovative chains are getting killed by chains that haven’t changed much since genesis except scaling back their white paper ambitions.
If that’s what you took away from my post, I must have done a poor job with it.
Firstly emergent consensus is a big part of decentralized systems. Core providers convening on a decision and supporting it is perfectly healthy. That’s quite different than a CEO saying things will be X way and everyone just having to accept it.
Additionally, my point is that people WILL likely try to have a contentious chain (as is their right in a decentralized project), but due to the maturity of Ethereum the technical consequences are much more impactful than the BTC/BCH scenario.
Appreciate your thoughtful reply here. I can tell you're excited about emergent consensus. So am I! Is there a DAO or L2 project you're particularly excited for here?
There exists a mechanism that current Ethereum PoW miners could "rebel" by continuing to mine a different Ethereum blockchain. This would be similar to the fork that occurred with Ethereum Classic in 2015[1].
But there is a strong incentive to transition to PoS because it seems that the majority of stakeholders and participants in the Ethereum ecosystem agree with the upcoming switch to PoS.
What’s stopping miners from going to Ethereum Classic once the switch happens? It seems like the obvious choice here. I know the hash function is slightly different, so maybe it’s not ideal but it only seems to have a few parameters tweaked. It’s not like ETC is a total shitcoin compared to most other coins on exchanges.
It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
As others have said, those other coins will get increased competition splitting the mining returns. Unfortunately (for the miners), Ethereum is vastly bigger than all the other coins.
I checked whattomine a few days ago and compared the hash rates of each coin. To make it simpler to compare, I converted it into RTX3080 equivalents. With this measure the hash rate for Ethereum was equivalent to mining with a bit shy of 10 million RTX3080s.
Ethereum Classic, which is the second biggest coin listed on whattomine, had a hash rate equivalent to about 263000 RTX3080s. I.e. Ethereum has 37 times more miners than Classic, and if they all moved to Classic the revenue would be slashed to 1/38 of what it is now while everybody would incur the same costs as now.
Ravencoin is the second biggest mineable coin (Monero isn't profitable to mine even now, so it does not matter) and Ethereum is 83 times bigger than Ravencoin.
It turns out Ethereum is more than 16 times bigger than every other coin listed on whattomine combined.
Yes, the question is if the thing they mine makes sense financially. If overall, people will use the POS chain better, the value of POS ETH will be much greater. So, the financial rewards, in USD, buying power, whatever, will be lower. They will also flock to other coins and they will increase difficulty, getting diminishing returns. So overall market cap of rewards decreases, the amount of hash power increases leading to much much much lower rewards.
I am willing to bet money that after ETH POS transition, graphics boards prices will crater.
> Perhaps it wouldn't happen overnight, but wouldn't ETC prices rally with more people participating in the network?
If my understanding of the crypto economics is right, no. The token price drives the mining effort, not the other way around. People buy these tokens because other people are willing to trade at that price, not because of the mining power within. Having more hash power does nothing for me as an owner of a token. The auto-scaling of the difficulty level is there to make attacks more expensive as the token value increases, it maintains the cost/benefit balance out of whack for any attacker. Only difference is slightly longer block mining time. Overall, nothing a normal user would feel.
Some people claim the other way, but I think they simply misunderstand the incentives. There was news that the Kazakstan crackdown led to the Bitcoin slump at some point, but that is, IMO, wrong, and they mistook some other events as causation. (in the same period, the stock market was also down).
GPU mining will still be a thing, but there simply will not be enough value to go around and the mining will crater until profits will be sustainable again. Extra mining gear will be sold. I maintain my prediction, and am really willing to put money where my mouth is.
I agree they'll likely find something to mine, but whatever it is has to make economic sense. If the block rewards don't cover the operational costs it won't work.
It is the obvious choice and it will definitely happen. Miners are in the business of mining with their hardware, they do it where it is the most profitable with their hardware. Since mining will give 0 return on ethereum, expect a glut of hash power pouring into other networks when it happens.
If any miner is dedicated to ethereum for some reason, I expect that they saved some of their block rewards to begin staking, and the smart ones are likely already staking on the beacon chain.
Actually yes, and it's pretty brillaint: the difficultly bomb.
The current fork of eth is programmed to kill itself sometime next year. This means even if miners want to continue mining they must prepare and propogate their own forked software. There is no "do nothing" default option.
I don't think it's brilliant. I think that the difficulty bomb is something akin to the debt ceiling in that it can be arbitrarily pushed back so, in reality, the real effect of the "bomb" is to give smaller groups of people outsized control over the network by holding miners hostage. My mind is open here - what are the flaws in my interpretation?
So the idea isn't about a deadline really, since it can be pushed back indefinitely. The idea is that you don't need consensus for it to go off, you need consensus for it not to go off. The status quo is always that it will go off if left untouched. It makes sure that miners can't just refuse the update, they have to fork the code to stop PoS. Which they're of course free to do, ETC removed the difficulty bomb entirely.
It's brilliant because it prevents a small constituency - PoW
generators and client developers - from sabotaging a roadmap by simply deciding to not support its planned upgrades.
With this safeguard in place, to change the roadmap, they need to gain support of users at large, by getting them to actively switch to their fork, just as the roadmap supporters need to do.
Therefore, supporters of change and statis are on equal footing, ensuring that the system isn't biased toward stasis even when the roadmap calls for change.
To summarize, the difficulty bomb encodes the roadmap's plan to implement a change in the protocol, into the protocol, graduating the plan from having mere social consensus, which requires active participation to enforce, to having a technical one, which is autonomously enforced.
Eh, if they act dishonestly the consensus can move to a different fork. The key is that fork has to have active consensus and can't just exist by default.
As I understand, it’s complete open source. So what is preventing a couple of miners to team up and change some integer to say year 2100 & recompile and distribute?
The blocks produced by this new software would be rejected by other miners still using the unmodified software, because difficulty(block)<difficulty_enforced_by_bomb_at-that_time.
Hence: the very definition of a fork, that is some blocks seen as valid by some faction and seen as invalid by others.
They could, but the question is would anyone buy it? And is it worth trying to do that over switching to mining another GPU coin? (though mining profits from them should collapse as there is not currently nearly enough buyers for those coins to sustain the current hashrate that etherium is using).
How will everyone instantly agree that [a rebel chain] is worth nothing on that date?
Everyone doesn't have to agree, just the exchanges. If the rebel chain isn't listed on exchanges then it's effectively worth zero and it will wither away.
If the value of the coin is based on the energy required to mine the coin, then surely the value won't change substantially for the PoW rebel fork, since the "real" value remains unchanged. Nobody wants to throw away their millions of dollars of GPUs. Despite the many problems with PoW, it's at least easy to see why PoW mining's output has any value of its own.
Unless the value never really was tied to the energy use in the first place, which isn't a great story for folks who want to treat the coins as anything other than speculative assets.
Value has never been based on energy; value comes from demand which is created by FOMO and enabled by exchanges where people can buy in. Of course crypto is entirely speculative.
Rebellion is not as simple as it looks like. I'm saying that as a person who played a big role in Ethereum Classic "rebellion".
As many mentioned here, you need to disable the Difficulty Bomb. But it is not the bigger problem actually, maybe it's even the simplest one.
What you also need:
- Organized community. I.e., some places to communicate. That's not easy. And be aware of ETH-maximalists that will come to trash it.
- Wallet that works out of the box. Not that Metamask, which is the most popular wallet in ETH, will never agree to support fork like it never agreed to support ETC.
- Block Explorer. People need to see their balance, check transaction status, exchanges need to point to that explorer as proof, etc.
- Miners would risk losing all their money if the chain eventually fails. Most miners are not so invested.
- Replay Protections to separate balances in forks. That's not easy. I mean, we have EIP-155, which was proposed by Ethereum Foundation, but it ensures that EIP-155 kind of replay protection would hurt forks because all of the software would need to be fixed for it. I.e., it's not a solution "out of the box", not user friendly.
- Exchanges. Maybe not so hard now. But without proper Replay Protection in place, some exchanges would lose their funds and would actively fight new forks to avoid liability.
- Public API endpoint. Like Infura. Because nobody runs its own node.
No, and I suspect many miners will do this because they anticipate the same thing I do: PoS will be a catastrophic failure with myriad exploits, vulnerabilities, and philosophical paradoxes that arise with popularity.
None, however they'd lose out on all the economic activity that drives the value of POS ethereum long term. And they'd lose the same economic activity drives the value of what they forked; and presumably that would cause a drop in value and less transactions; both of which are an incentive for miners to do something else with their resources.
That economic activity consists of all the smart contract/web3/whatever you want to call startups that are currently building solutions based on the main Ethereum network and the investors/traders/opportunists backing them by speculating on the value of their coins/NFTs/etc or the value of their solutions.
Most of those companies will probably benefit from the improved scalability and reduced cost associated with POS; or even require it to be viable at all. At least I would expect this to be true for the ones with some ambition to actually deliver working products; which are probably also the ones with the most investor backing. Of course, many more serious applications switched to alternate blockchains because of the scaling issues with POW might now consider switching back. And additionally, improved scale associated with POS might bring some new companies with investors as well. So, I would advice people to just follow the money when speculating on the future value of any fork.
I suspect that won't stop anyone from creating that fork and you should actually anticipate multiple parties doing this and claiming to be the one true fork with varying degrees of credibility to trick people into buying some of their forked ETH. That's just how pump and dumps work and there are plenty of opportunists active to make that happen. And of course a fork means there are plenty of people not interested in the fork that would end up selling their forked eth so they can buy some more actual eth. Lots of people selling and not a lot of people with a good reason to buy means forked eth is not going to be worth a lot. Miners are going to run whatever has the highest yield. That probably is not going to be a forked Ethereum. Probably it's more lucrative to switch to some other POW blockchain (doge, bitcoin, etc.) if you have any serious amount of hardware.
Disclaimer: I don't hold any Eth and am not really into crypto investing. Ironically, that makes me a more reliable source of information because I have no stake in this game.
The mechanism is staking. People stake Eth 1.0 to get 2.0 later, along with a bridge to convert Eth 1.0 to 2.0. They can't unstake for a period of time but get decent automatic returns.
There won't really be much reason for people to use 1.0 to execute smart contracts*. There really isn't much for miners to do besides eventually cashing out and becoming a validator. Eventually when "the merge happens" Eth 1.0 will be automatically converted to 2.0. This won't be for a few years (but PoS will launch this year)
*The 1.0 network supposedly uses 1000x times the energy of the 2.0 one to execute a smart contract and would obviously be more expensive to work with, so people will probably avoid using 1.0 as soon as possible. Less use means lower gas fees means lower payouts for miners, who already had payouts reduced by EIP 1559, and will likely have payouts reduced once more. So miners will see a slow death.
There is no “ETH 1.0” token or “ETH 2.0” token. There is only ETH. They never “convert”.
Anyone can fork the code at any time and keep mining. Many have. ETC and ELLA are a couple examples. Ethereum Genysys is a recent project in response to the PoS move.
ETH 2.0 was always just a series of upgrades. “The merge” which will end PoW mining is expected to go live between March 30th and June sometime at the latest. Code is expected to be complete in February sometime. Testing is well underway already.
I am not intimately familiar with the staking terms on Coinbase, but from what I recall, you should be able to withdraw your ETH at any time and receive it in at most a few days. If it has a lockup period, those terms would be very clearly stated, and you would eventually get your original investment back plus rewards according to the terms.
PoW is one level of abstraction away from "you have to have money to use money"; "you have to have money, to buy compute, to use money". Additionally, compute resources are subject to centralization.
There is a crucial difference between decentralized and equitable. A decentralized blockchain needs some mechanism to guarantee perpetual operation in a trustless environment, like requiring expensive computations (proof of work) or showing you have "skin in the game" (proof of stake) in order to add transactions to the shared ledger. If you don't have such a mechanism, there's no way to tell valid from invalid transactions, and the blockchain falls apart at the seams.
What it sounds like you are suggesting is that cryptocurrencies should be equitable: everyone should have the same rights to own part of the blockchain. This isn't necessary for a decentralized, trustless, distributed transaction ledger, nor is it likely ideal. What would be the value or utility of a ledger which absolutely anyone could add to at anytime for any reason? You would need to solve 2 problems: 1) distributing the tokens fairly and evenly among every person living and yet to live, and 2) distributing henceforth unfathomably performant supercomputers to all of these token-holders-jus-sanguinis. Any analysis of either of these would very quickly approach insurmountable problems.
There are fundamental constraints to computers and computer networks that have to be addressed in order for these technologies to exist. They preclude any sort of utopian currency of heaven where everyone wins, just by the nature of our physical universe and today's understanding of computation.
With regard to your first problem, it may be hard but should result in a more thoroughly decentralized system, no? And on the second, I thought PoS is orders of magnitude less compute-intensive?
Not any more than PoW, which has worse economies of scale in which the richest get richer at a faster rate as they can lock up supply of available hardware.
The big difference is that hardware depreciates. Proof of stake requires none other than a single purchase to be gifted the right to perpetual seignorage. Staking ETH once versus constant operation of a mining farm is a non-trivial delta in effort.
The minimum amount required to stake is 32 ETH. That’s $75k at today’s price. There are cheaper was to “stake” but those are not really “ETH PoS” staking. So no, it does not “cost less to stake”.
There are ways to have a fractionalized stake, essentially the PoS equivalent of participating in a PoW mining pool. They call them staking pools, which seems logical enough.
I agree with you of course, but those are not “ETH PoS” staking, strictly speaking. They are just layers on top. You definitely make more running your own validators.
What are you comparing $75k to? My understanding is meaningful mining under PoW requires buying expensive mining hardware that goes out of date quickly. Under PoS there is no such depreciation...a laptop from 2020 will likely be able to run PoS in 2040.
I personally have been mining ETH for years with equipment I bought for $20k in 2017 - 2018. I’ve made many times my investment back. That same equipment is still running profitably today.
If I have enough, I will run a validator. If not I will probably do some defi like lido + curve + yearn. I may also mine something else like flux or raven.
There's initial capital expense, and ongoing expense. You're of course correct that the minimum capital is lower with mining. However, given a $75K initial investment, a miner has much higher ongoing expense.
So, my original point was to respond to the above comment: "Proof of stake requires none other than a single purchase to be gifted the right to perpetual seignorage."
My claim was that the lower ongoing expense of staking is compensated by lower rewards, so that both systems have similar profit for similar capital outlay. In setups where mining expense is almost zero, the higher rewards of mining give it much more seignorage than proof of stake.
I suppose so. If you're payment to an agent to carry out either task, the downstream complexity of the task is irrelevant because the difficulty to you is the same.
There is one thing: decentralization, and there is another: concentration of ETH ownership.
Concentration of ownership means a few entities own most of the ETH. Up to a point (where one entity owns all the ETH, and therfore ETHUSD goes to zero), who cares, as long as there are still enough token in circulation to conduct business?
Decentralization OTOH means that no one can prevent me from executing a transaction on the chain.
With POW, these two things are basically unrelated: concentration can be arbitrarily high, I can still transact.
However, IIUC, with the aptly named POS, concentration of ownership brings concentration of voting power and therefore large holders become theoretically capable of censoring transactions ... not great.
And I don't believe there is any mechanism in place to prevent ownership - and therefore voting power - to reach arbitrarily large levels.
In the US, probably around 10,000. US Banks all operate by virtue of a banking license issued at the state or federal level. Banks must do as they are told by these centralized authorities or else they lose their license.
Decentralization is about not needing anyone’s permission to participate and being free from censorship. You don’t need good credit or even ID to open an account and no one can seize your funds because of debts, fines, or taxes. Of course validators have their slashing rules, but those are programmatic. Not some judge in divorce court, for example.
> Decentralization is about not needing anyone’s permission to participate
But you do need permission, which is implicitly conferred by following the protocol. It's really quite similar to traditional banks, it's just that the protocol is digital/mathematical rather than legal.
I'm wondering if we should care as long as there's reasonable assurance that they won't cheat when executing transactions? You don't need full democracy where everyone gets a say, just enough decentralization so they're unlikely to collude to do whatever bad things you're afraid of.
I'm glad they are clarifying the language here, but it's still fairly useful to use ETH2 as a moniker from a public marketing point of view. It's much easier than explaining beacon chain, execution layer, consensus layer, etc to just say we have a new version of Ethereum coming out later this year and then go into more details after.
Per their notes, one of the reasons driving this is to prevent unscrupulous parties from attempting to scam users re: swapping their tokens for "2.0" tokens.
Which, yes, this seems like it would help decrease confusion. But good lord, the blockchain infosphere is an aggressively adversarial one!
That's the weakest reason out of all the other reasons, because there are many more scammers with a much greater incentive to make money who all have infinite time to think of some other way to get people's money.
Agreed that it's a good idea from that perspective. It doesn't help that Coinbase listed ETH2 as a separate asset in their app to represent staked yield producing Ethereum.
I was really hoping this was a rant how back in the good old days you had eth0 and eth1 and you were happy about it, now we get en0sp04 and who knows what port that even is.
I know exactly what enpXsY is at a glance, and you can too! It's predictable device naming and it helps a system administrator know what NIC they're dealing with at a glance. "enp2s0" is "en" (Ethernet; there's "wl" for WLAN and "ww" for WWAN), "p2" (PCIe bus 2), "s0" (PCIe slot 0). They can also be named "enoX" if the system knows that it's integrated/onboard, though this is rare, and hotplug PCIe devices read as "ensX".
On systems that historically have not used this, it was possible for devices to be non-deterministically assigned to eth0, wlan0, etc. -- and while you could say "just pick a guaranteed order", that violates the principle of least surprise. Predictable device naming is the same, everywhere, on the same hardware.
You can still set aliases if you're more comfortable with that, but this is a really sane default.
This isn’t as consistent as you’re making it seem. I added an add-in PCIe Ethernet adapter and it became enp5s0 while the on-board Realtek formerly known as enp5s0 got bumped to enp6s0.
Your hardware is reporting that peripherals have logically moved, so yeah, the names change? It's definitely not perfect, but also consider that this is in part to help manage larger fleets of systems, and if you have thirty of the same machine and you put thirty add-in PCIe ethernet cards into them, at least they'll all predictably change and so in your test lab (you got a test lab for this hypothetical fleet, right?) you'll know what your changes are causing and be able to roll out synchronized software changes to pick up on it.
We don't all have fleets of machines, of course, and systemd has functionality for disambiguation in a single-system environment where interfaces might appear and disappear sometimes. udev also has a mode where the interface is automatically named after its MAC rather than its physical location. It's not on by default on any Linux distro I know of, but it's just a flag IIRC.
I just went through a lengthy diagnosis of systems that weren't optimal because something in systemd was trying to match devices prefixed by "pci/" and udev formats the device path as "pci-" so I am kinda not ready to talk about my trauma yet.
Being hardware or software makes no difference: the fact is that network adapters still change names, but now you can't assume the default is eth0 on most systems.
The idea of a "default" interface for a particular physical transport is worth examining for coherency, I think. If you only have one adapter, then it's the one that shows up when you list your interfaces, so script to that end. If you have more than one, then trusting an ordering that can change on boot is unsafe.
But don't worry - those of such a soberly considered persuasion can just use the configuration management they've definitely built and that necessitates such assumptions as "there's always an eth0" to bring it back.
I remotely installed a firmware update on a Broadcom NIC and the server rebooted with completely different device names and no networking. Thankfully I could still access OOB management. It was definitely a shock to see how fragile the new naming scheme is.
Well it's "predictable" from that perspective, sure. But from my perspective, I used to be able to predict that the first (often only) Ethernet NIC in a host would be "eth0", and now I can't.
Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfig.
In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. On some systems, plugging a dongle, or changing what port a USB hub was plugged in, could reorder/rename the ethernet ports and now your config for `eth2` was suddently being applied to a completely different interface.
So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...)
But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.
> In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing.
In the even older days, before the Linux kernel started probing hardware in parallel to speed up the boot process, this wouldn't vary depending on timing; for a given kernel version, the order would always be the same. Of course, the order could change when you updated your kernel, either because it had a new driver which was probed earlier, or because the probing order for the PCI bus changed to the opposite order (IIRC, that actually did happen). And of course, having the network drivers as kernel modules makes it much harder to preserve a deterministic probing order; but back in these days, it was much more common to carefully customize each machine's kernel to have as built-in drivers precisely the set corresponding to the hardware present on a given machine or fleet of machines, carrying that customization over for each new kernel release ("make oldconfig"); kernel modules would be relegated to things like filesystems which you might need only once in a while, and they would be unloaded when no longer in use (memory was precious).
Yeah, I wish more Linux versions made that easier to do - I find it much easier to remember eth0 and eth1 vs the low level name, though the stability is nice.
Does your shell not tab-complete interfaces? Mine does, and is smart enough not to suggest up interfaces for `ifup` (so if I have a machine with a 10G card and a 1G onboard I make sure to keep the 1G interface disabled), but I don't know if that's one of my army of zsh plugins.
For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.
Are there any other analog examples where a protocol has attempted this kind of re-naming? Did it work? Or fail? The Ethereum community is so wide ranging, from devs all the way up to people who bought NFTs.
It's not a renaming. They're basically just saying that ETH 2.0 as a concept typically used for versioning is not technically correct. There is just Ethereum, and there's various proposals and upgrades in the pipeline for years worth of development. ETH2 was supposed to symbolize the upgrade to proof of stake and the merging of the POW chain with the POS beacon chain. I think it may have encompassed the implementation of sharding as well. But since Ethereum is a living protocol, with many different upgrades and improvements to implement, I think it's more accurate to drop the versioning idea and just explain the different components and features as they go. The next major upgrade for Ethereum will be The Merge, which merges the Proof of stake consensus layer with the proof of work execution layer. It's expected to happen this summer. Afterwards, Ethereum will no longer run on GPUs, you'll be able to run a full node on a Raspberry Pi.
I see. Well, I think it is a confusing title. As they're not really renaming "ETH2" at all, they're just doing away with it and referring to the components individually.
I think some people will still use the phrase ETH2 until the Merge this summer, since it's been around for a while. But then I suspect it will fade away after the Merge. And the next big upgrade after that is Sharding, which is easy enough to say and describe by itself.
Coinbase and others (Binance) use "ETH2" as a token for signalling that the ETH has been locked-up for the network upgrade. A ETH2 token on those platforms is just a proof that the underlying ETH has been locked.
If you were to not use a CEX, your ETH would be gone until the upgrade is finished, so exchanges make that a bit less harsh with their eth2 tokens and allow you to still do stuff with it
"Some staking operators have also represented ETH staked on the Beacon Chain with the ‘ETH2’ ticker. This creates potential confusion, given that users of these services are not actually receiving an ‘ETH2’ token. No ‘ETH2’ token exists; it simply represents their share in that specific providers’ stake."
Another HN commenter pointed out that it requires active consensus to reset, as opposed to just being a do-nothing default state. The intention may be for do-nothing default chains to die off if nobody is interested in maintaining them.
Anyone here with thoughts on Pulsechain (and perhaps its cousin, Hex?) As I understand, it's an Ethereum fork that will duplicate Eth and all its assets, with the hope that people might switch due to lower fees?
I don't really want to say more because I'm worried that the creator of both of these (Richard Heart) would somehow be litigious, but please do more research, especially into how the hex network handles fees and rewards flowing back toward the creator. There are very concerning behaviors of the hex network that enrich the creator at the cost of everyone else. Pulse is doing the same, it's a playbook being followed.
And this is coming from a very pro-crypto person, non-btc maxi etc, type of person.
Not gonna lie, you kind of lost me at "would be litigious." I have quite a bit of trouble believing that's he's lurking this board here, ready to go after you?
Looks like the rewards and fees go back to stakers. Sure, there's a big quiet wallet, but that's nearly all of them.
I have underlying concerns about forks in that it can be easy to fork and then hard to maintain - primarily because the level of knowledge required to fork a project is (or can be) much lower than that required to actually improve it, or fix it, or evolve it.
- What have they changed to keep fees lower? Is it just a factor of fewer users (Ethereum's gas fees are a result of the adoption of Ethereum, essentially it's a victim of its own success)
- Is it remaining proof of work? Will it also eventually need to transition to PoS if and when it reaches Ethereum-level popularity / congestion?
- Is it implementing sharding?
- How will it compete with Ethereum's fairly significant decentralisation? (one of the aspects of Ethereum that makes it an unlikely target of the SEC)
Fundamentally, how intimately do Pulsechain's developers understand Ethereum in order to make a better version?
(I've heard the 'scam' and Hex used together frequently, although admittedly that's on Reddit and Youtube, and in the cryptocurrency-sphere pretty much every project gets used together frequently with the word 'scam' - to such an extent that "assume scam" is probably sage advice).
For sure. I'm still wrapping my head around the tech, but they're saying Decentralized Proof of Stake which sounds like it theoretically takes care of sharding, PoS et al.
FWIW, I'm strongly convinced that Richard Heart is not a scammer, inasmuch as I do believe his intent is not to make himself rich (which I believe he already is) but to "make the best cryptocurrency." Whether it works or ends up that way is, of course, another story. Dogecoin being perhaps the best example of "what the creator wants might not matter."
(Compare to Elon Musk, who is obviously screwing around with crypto to make himself richer.)
I'm 99% sure that any features being built on top of blockchains are features designed to impress and confuse people that don't realize that it's a scam.
Rollups and sharding are aimed at reducing gas fees. Rollups are already live, with Arbitrum, Optimism, StarkNet, and zkSync being some of the biggest ones.
This has no impact on anything really at all. It’s just re branding, hopefully to clarify things. ETH does not change with ETH2. It’s just a series of upgrades to eliminate wasteful proof-of-work mining and improve scalability.
No, it's something like a train changing tracks: the cargo (ETH 'coins' and other parts of its ecosystem) just moves onto the new tracks. The cargo isn't thrown out, it's not incompatible with the new tracks.
Not a great analogy imho. The ETH consensus change from PoW to PoS changes the way that blocks are signed and validated. No more PoW. Instead, now validators decide. It’s more like unanimous voting. If you try to sign a fake block, you lose some or all of your deposit.
I haven't read enough to know the answer, figure someone here might have a better understanding. Was hoping the article would answer it, but it doesn't really.