Ethereum Blog

GitHub! It's all open source. EIPs are Ethereum Improvement Proposals. You can view them all here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues Ethereum Foundation blog is a good read on technical detail with no price discussion: https://blog.ethereum.org/

You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/. Many people who want to understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using etherium. Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled with made-up jargon? That's the issue that I see here.

There's no solution that will give PoS the same objectivity PoW enjoys, but PoS (with slashing and exit delays) is secure against long forks under a weakly subjective model. Vitalik has a pretty good post about it: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub… Essentially, the solution is to ignore forks whose lengths exceed the exit delay, since such forks can be created without a slashing risk. The main issue is that new nodes need to start with a (somewhat recent) trusted checkpoint. This does open up some attack surface that doesn't exist in PoW, though in my view it's not much of an issue. If I want to be extra careful, I can always ask several sources for a checkpoint and make sure they match.

Great question, it's not timestamps but attestations (signed validator votes for pairs of checkpoint blocks) that determines the canonical chain head. This fork choice rule, known as LMD-GHOST, is different from PoW which has a "greatest difficulty" rule for determining the canonical chain. There is some element of bootstrapping who the original validator set was, known as "weak subjectivity". There's a great post from Vitalik exploring this further at https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

> It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now Likely because you don't actually follow the development milestones, and are just synthesizing a conclusion based on social media headlines/comments. Successful testnets for the merge have been launched and merge execution from a shadow-fork of the mainnet to a PoS testnet have been completed in the last 2 months. As far as I am aware, no merge date has ever been set and all previous timelines were speculation, not missed deadlines. I would recommend people sign up for an ETH feed or newsletter (e.g. the ETH Foundation blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/03/23/finalized-no-34/) and stop letting naive comments on hacker news/reddit/twitter dictate their opinions on the state of things like crypto.

The merge (end of PoW) won't fix gas prices [1], which is why these projects move onto other (theoretically less secure) networks. The transition to ETH2 (which is also now called something else [2]) is still an undefined date target. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=eth+merge+gas+prices [2] https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming/

Yes, but that's just because a design goal is for modest computers to be able to fully participate in the protocol, and the low number of transactions was the best they could do. They've also been planning to scale since early days. Here are some of Vitalik's blog posts on scaling back in 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-building-top/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/13/scalability-part-3-metacoin-histo… And here's one of his 2021 posts, in which he talks about the importance of regular users being able to run a node, but says a million tx/sec should be achievable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html

Why do unsophisticated, redundant, vitriolic takes like this get upvoted on HN so much? Is there some common ax to grind here? The strongest point here is the strawman presentation of the altered security model that PoS can be proven to form consensus under. Reading the source he cites is far more informative: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub… The majority of the article frames distributed consensus mechanisms in an extremely sophomoric understanding of asset value and the PoW security model. All of these topics (including valid ETH criticisms) are discussed in much better ways in many other places.

Proof-of-stake has much more ability to enact censorship resistance (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/06/the-problem-of-censorship/) than proof-of-work. PoW imposes huge entry barriers by restricting mining to those who can build and then operate expensive mining rigs, which are resources not equally available even to people with the same amount of money and may be monopolized (how many competitive mining rig manufacturers are there, and how many countries do they operate in?); PoS makes participating a much more level playing field by removing dependence on physical and monopolizable resources. PoW does have sheer simplicity and a proven record of working on its side, but the idea that whatever upsides to PoW over PoS that exist are and will stay worth more than 0.5% of global electricity production seems extremely biased.

This is known as the "nothing at stake" problem. This 2014 blog post by Vitalik Buterin discusses it: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

>>Except, this is not what's happening in real life. People follow the canonical chain, and PoW helps them all determine what the canonical chain is without having to ask around. In POW you still have to ask around, to find out what the canonical consensus protocol is. Having more POW alone is not enough to have your chain accepted, as it still needs to be valid according to the other rules of the protocol. Both POS and POW depend on some level of subjectivity/trust, even while the latter relies on it less than the former. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

This property is called Weak Subjectivity and is indeed a compromise that PoS makes over PoW. However, in practice, the trust assumptions aren't much higher than when you, say, download node software from a source that you trust. > I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever. With weak subjectivity, you only have to trust them to be correct on a timeframe of every few months. If consensus is actually broken somehow over such a long period of time, there will be big headlines about it and you'll be able to configure your node accordingly. Further reading: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

There's not really much reading on this- You simply can't take 10 assets that are worth less than $1 individually (because of guarantor risk) and mix them together to create an asset that's pegged at exactly $1- This is not a problem that can be solved by "diversification". For other history on synthetic assets, read Preston's posts and also Vitalik's posts such as https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-trust-uni…

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub… The above blogpost should explain this sufficiently.

How is it possible or how is it challenging? The FAQ document describes both. It relies on a principle called "Weak Subjectivity" that Vitalik describes in detail here: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub… I'll admit, that I don't have a complete understanding of the theory behind PoS systems, and there are certainly tradeoffs between PoW and PoS, but Vitalik makes the arguments that the benefits of lower energy consumption and quicker transaction fees outweigh the weakened guarantees. Whether you agree with him depends on your values with respect to Cryptocurrency.

To be fair, while Bitshares was a pretty complete failure, BitUSD, which sits on top of it as a "stablecoin" should be regarded as a complete success. Look at the price chart relative to dollars. [1] It only has brief and small excursions away from $1 despite being thinly traded and having very low market cap, and being backed by having a nearly worthless coin, as cryptocurrencies go. Stablecoins are a very interesting concept. They are a game-theoretically incentive compatible way to stabilize a currency WITHOUT a trusted monopoly producer. [2] 1 - https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitusd/ 2 - https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocurrency/

I recommend reading this: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/07/on-public-and-private-blockchains… . In a private blockchain the reading and writing permissions are controlled, therefore only selected nodes can write to it. "The validators are known, so any risk of a 51% attack arising from some miner collusion in China does not apply." I guess you could still have attack from authorized nodes in your own organization?

my favorite part of this latest ICO hack is that it appears to have gone to same wallet as the dao hack ..... Any proof of this? EDIT: This appears to be false. From https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-vulnerabil… The leaked ether is in a child DAO at https://etherchain.org/account/0x304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c62820b7d83… But that site shows the account hasn't received anything since July 8.

To add to that, the escalating hashrate war within Bitcoin between Unlimited and Core is popcorn worthy. And within the wider space of blockchains, improving access to strong anonymization techniques appears to be moving forward quickly: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcash-ethereum…

I tend to subscribe to the definitions laid out in the following article: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/07/on-public-and-private-blockchains…

"304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c62820b7d83490" (160 bits) was reportedly worth millions of dollars https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-vulnerabil…

> How do _you_ know your contract is secure? It most likely is not, looking at the recent post on contract security, most if not all examples ever posted as best practice are flawed and can be exploited: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/10/smart-contract-security/ (currently down, cached version https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://blog.eth…

"Scaling infinitely" is a pretty steep requirement. I wouldn't go there yet, either implementation of the blockchain technology is useful long before the insane transactions per seconds which VISA is handling. But yes, Ethereum has similar constraints as Bitcoin. Vitalik did some scalability blog posts on https://blog.ethereum.org/ but it's entirely possible that any blockchain technology just won't scale as we would like it to (that is, as good as a centralized approach). OTOH, if there is a good technological solution, currently I have much more confidence that it gets implemented in Ethereum than in Bitcoin. The current infighting, bickering and actual threats and actions (e.g. DDOS at dissenting miners) is slowly but steadily destroying the Bitcoin community.

I disagree. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

yes, well done. I also liked pos explanation by Buterin (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub…

> Second, you probably need to trust the servers you are storing your data on. Sure, you have some guise of anonymity, but ultimately you're probably transporting over TCP/IP and so you can look at the IP sender field to figure out who's data you're storing. Obviously this is a huge problem if some malicious person decides they want to corrupt or delete all files stored by certain entities. Vitalik Buterin of ethereum worte an excellent blog post addressing all of these concerns. The conclusion is that you can in theory get 99.7% (99.99%) availability by using 3x (4x) redundancy from regular home users (defined as being reachable 50% of the time). https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/16/secret-sharing-erasure-coding-gui…

I would recommend reading http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-…

I really want to read those notes you've written (I've sent you an email). Paul Graham, Patrick Collison and Vitalik Buterin all have this ability to express ideas in an extremely deep yet clear and concie way. It's one thing to do this individually, but what amazes me is their ability to scale out this communication sty;e to their entire organization. If you read any of the blog posts by YC, Stripe and the Ethereum Foundation you'll understand what I mean. You can also see how it stands so far ahead of most other companies. A recent example that comes to mind for anyone interested: Ethereum Foundation's blog post explaining why they're moving away from calling their upgrades "Eth2"and just calling it "Eth" instead. https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming/ As a founder myself, I really want to figure out the tactics to scaling clear and effective communication to an entire team.

there are some significant issues about vyper that anyone using it would/should be aware of: https://blog.ethereum.org/2020/01/08/update-on-the-vyper-compiler that’s not to discredit anyone using vyper, just that when putting “billions of dollars” in play on a project like this, you better have teams of folks looking into the security implications of using such a technology with known caveats that the ethereum foundation team publicised. now things may have changed in the meanwhile between the time that notice was published and now, but if you are using or recommending vyper, it’s worth it to ask or state explicitly “which” vyper and “which version” of vyper, or “did you fork vyper in order to fix some of the issues outlined in the audit” as well as “if you are using vyper in critical applications, are you contributing your fixes back to the community?” If some of the answers are "the ethereum foundation team are too conservative" "the audit doesn't mean anything" "we don't have anyone looking into the security aspects of vyper" then you have your answer: they're going to get hacked.

This is a silly article. Only working in a weaker security model does not, a priori, mean that proof of stake is a scam; it just means you need to convince yourself that the weaker security model holds. You can read the post linked (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-sub… and decide for yourself. Personally, I think this kind of "quiescent" knowledge, letting you differentiate the real chain from the fake chain on long enough timescales (which basically amounts to knowledge of a single hash, when you get right down to it), is perfectly reasonable to assume under realistic circumstances, for the same reason that synchronized time is not a remotely difficult problem on long enough timespans. The only problem lies in new nodes (that enter the system when there's not a quiescent state, and the longer chain is being withheld) being exposed to fake chains. By using a VDF as mentioned below to make sure it takes just as long to construct a new chain as it took to construct the old one, one can ensure that as long as at the time the stakers held their keys (rather than for all time) a majority were trustworthy, then the probability that they were able to maintain a longer chain becomes vanishingly small. Therefore, nodes will be able to reliably choose the longer chain on reconnecting to the system. This trust model seems pretty realistic to me, and it's not like Bitcoin can handle the case of a continuous partition to begin with. So…