As someone who uses both BTC and ETH and who likes both, this is one of the reason why people prefer Bitcoin over Ethereum.
The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly.
While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very significant control on the blockchain which is far from ideal.
Developers can't do anything the users don't want. They can't make people adopt the new software. The miners are losing here because everybody else in the ecosystem wants proof-of-stake and 1559, including users, ETH holders, and app developers.
Absolutely, all the stuff built on ETH (defi, automated exchanges, nfts) can't truly take off when gas fees can cost 20-80 USD per action. There's already a blockchain that acts as a store of value, the world doesn't need a second bitcoin.
L2 (second layer) solutions like Optimism will fix the scaling issue. It's live with a limited Synthetix release now and will be open to the general public on the 15th. Many large projects including Uniswap, Compound, and Chainlink have said they will be migrating to Optimism L2. It's very simple to do (little to no changes needed) and with big names committing it seems to be the L2 of choice. WalletConnect, Metamask, and Coinbase have also said they'll be supporting it with Metamask and WalletConnect integration complete and WalletConnect in beta testing.
Matic is not an L2 though, it is a side chain. The reason L2s like optimism are exciting is because they inherit the security of ethereum mainnet. (matic has its own consensus mechanisms).
Exactly, it's a money grab. Optimism doesn't have a coin and have no plans to create one. ETH is be the only way to pay for gas on their rollup just as is the case on L1.
It's a little different with proof of stake. If there's a minority group that holds a large stake that "attacks" the blockchain against the majority's wishes, the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in this same way.
>the majority group can decide to roll back and blacklist the minority group. It's much more difficult to blacklist hash power in this same way.
and that is supposedly advantage of pos over pow?
In philosophical view the pow -> pos means taking power away from the more technical and giving it to the more business oriented group/approach. That has happened to Internet for example, and I just personally dont like such transitions.
There is a difference (with the introduction of slashing and user activated soft forks) in 51% attacks that revert finalized blocks. In PoW this type of attack would become cheaper as it persists, in PoS we have some defense that keeps making this attack expensive.
On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin with.
Vitalik and company have zero history in the proof of stake game, and what little security history they do have is pretty much awful. So I'm not too worried about what they have to say about things. If it's not something he copied from Tezos or ADA, I wouldn't consider it relevant to the discussion at all.
Except in this case, this is going against presumably 51% of the miners and changes take much longer to implement and activate on Bitcoin (taproot activation for example will be done over a very long period and needs a very high threshold).
Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty aggressive no matter how you look at it. As a user, I really hope it works out without major issues.
> and changes take much longer to implement and activate on Bitcoin
That's a funny way of saying BTC doesn't innovate.
> Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty aggressive no matter how you look at it.
It's been the plan for years. I first heard of it in 2017 and if I'm not mistaken I think it was also in the whitepaper. So it's neither coming out of the blue or an aggressive timeframe.
> That's a funny way of saying BTC doesn't innovate.
Or another way of saying you can expect some stability (and majority consensus) when there's more than a trillion dollars worth of value at stake.
It's been discussed for a longtime, yes, but the expectation is that it would roll out in phases over the next year or two, not rushed out because of a potential 51% attack.
Bear in mind the PoS network is already running, with 100,000 validators and $6 billion staked, after years of R&D. This last bit is relatively simple.
You say "miners" like they're a union with a spokesperson. They're not; they're thousands of people spread across the world, with different agendas.
Miners who refuse to adopt the new PoS system have the right to not upgrade to it. At that point, the system "forks" (the article calls it a 51% attack, but I think that's a little inflammatory). This literally already happened with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic; Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. It isn't a new situation.
The reason why some miners are dissenting this change is, first and obviously, because they disagree with it. So, why not just fork? Because no one talks about Bitcoin Cash; they talk about Bitcoin. They want to stay on PoW because it will return the best revenue for their mining operation, but if they're busy mining a coin that has little value, that also hurts their revenue. In other words, the only way for them to win is to get the community against the change, which is a losing bet because the change is widely supported.
People are free to disagree with and act against the developers. That's more than you can say for, for example, the United States Government; if I disagree with tax policy or federal monetary policy, I (may) have the option to leave, but changing the system would take a lifetime, if its even possible. Creating a new system without moving countries would inevitably end with the police at my doorstep.
Miners want money. Ethereum, like every currency, is worth what it is because of people. The value of Ethereum goes where the money velocity goes; in other words, where the users go. The critical question is not what the developers or miners support; its what the users support. Well, barring any major conflicts of interest, they'll/we'll probably support the developers; their power comes directly and only from the trust that the collective democracy of ethereum's users has in them. If Vitalik demonstrated extreme prejudice against ethereum's users, then the users would (probably) revolt, and new developers would be installed, but critically: Ethereum, like all blockchains, enables that in a way which doesn't involve the war, death, and bloodshed that overthrowing governments typically requires.
Miners want to have their cake and eat it too. They don't give a shit about Ethereum's users. They want a high ETH token price, wholly and totally supported by Ethereum's users, but without this RFC, which both the developers and most users support. They could fork, give the middle finger to the users, and their secondary TRASH-ETH blockchain would be worth nothing, because it doesn't have users, but at least they'd have proof of work. That's why they'll lose; not because the developers are on the other side, but because the users have put their faith in the developers, not the miners. And that's a very healthy position for ethereum to be in right now.
So if developers released a "jubilee" version of the software that took all ETH away from addresses that hadn't spent anything in 5 years, and distributed it evenly across all Ethereum addresses less 2 years old (which one might imagine would be a boon to a large number of users), would that be sufficient to upgrade the network?
Asking because one huge advantage I see in Bitcoin's upgrade procedure is that developers alone can't change the monetary policy -- i.e. developers can't just bribe users to screw over investors. I'm curious why the "All Core Devs call dictates software releases" upgrade process is considered an acceptable alternative?
> So is Ethereum not going to PoS if miners say no?
Correct
> Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers provide the code, but it only activates with miner consent.
Again, it's the same process with Ethereum.
Not sure if this is just a misunderstanding or if you're reading something that says this isn't the case, but if it's the latter then I suggest taking a good hard look at continuing to use this source for information.
Bear with me here, but I strongly suspect that this is not the case. Because PoS doesn't need miners, it seems the system can transition to PoS at any time and there's nothing miners can do to stop it. So unless the miners also happen to control over 50% of the staked ETH supply, miners don't have a say at all.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong -- I wish Ethereum could only upgrade with overwhelming miner consent. It would check the power of developers to alter the monetary policy as capriciously as they have done so far.
This is actually a current issue that's being discussed because the transition fully relies on the miners to make hand off the transition because of the contention with moving to PoS. One possibility is that miners will fork the chain, although that's not necessarily a huge concern because the community will follow the PoS chain. Another possibility, and I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it has to do with them re-mining the same block over and over so the transition block never happens (or something like that).
Miners chase the chain the market decides. They can in theory mine the less profitable chain, but in practise they don't. The markets are the ultimate deciders of the rule changes. This is true of bitcoin and etherium and all other cryptocurrencies alike (anyone can always change the rules and try to get others to use the new rules. Who the market actually pays any attention to is the main question).
The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly.
While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very significant control on the blockchain which is far from ideal.
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