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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
It's the community - people who decide which "fork" to follow.
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.
Users will have funds on both chains, they can just wait it out.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
It feels unlikely that miners won’t find something to mine.
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.
The remaining fork seems to have considerably less activity now.
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.
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.
"Decentralization" in crypto is a myth.
Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
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.
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.
Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
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.
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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.
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.
Which, yes, this seems like it would help decrease confusion. But good lord, the blockchain infosphere is an aggressively adversarial one!
It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Predictabl...
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.
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.
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The title of the post is literally "The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?"
I get what's happening, my question was about the success of the renaming process.
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
Yeah but said bomb just got reset every time...