MIT Chose Ethereum’s PoS as Top Technological Breakthrough
maxbit.cc
maxbit.cc
If the people who actually do the hard science and education work that has made MIT a valuable and trusted brand don't like this dilution and selling out of the trust they earned, then they have a responsibility to either push against it or vote with their feet and their attention and stop contributing to the continuation of trust in the brand.
This is how they describe themselves:
> Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is a world-renowned, independent media company whose insight, analysis, reviews, interviews and live events explain the newest technologies and their commercial, social and political impacts.
Take a look at their website: https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/about/
The name "MIT" is literally all over the place. If it wasn't actually MIT, I'd expect MIT to sue these "Technology Review" people.
Just because Facebook decided to rename itself (but not the website) “Meta” instead of “Facebook”, doesn’t mean I should respect that decision and call the organization Facebook by the name “Meta”. Similarly, but in kind of the opposite way, here.
> Stripe Press produces works about technological, economic, and scientific advancement
I'd say, call things the way they want to be called. If you put "MIT" in your organizations name, then I'm gonna assume your organization is associated/related to MIT. If you're not related to MIT but your name is "MIT $ORGANIZATION", then I'd say that is misleading, not the other way around.
If anything, Ethereum has been dragging it's feet on this. They originally planned to roll out PoS within a couple years after launch, and we're still here 7 years later. That's years of "wasted" proof of work when plenty of other coins rolled out PoS day one.
This isn't actually about choosing the most impressive technological innovation. This just a cheap political attack on bitcoin's PoW, in some kind of attempt to shame it into transitioning to PoS too, which is never going to happen. The bitcoin mindshare is completely locked in to PoW as a mission critical feature of the system, which would destroy the entire endeavor if transitioned away from.
Implementation matters more than "first!!11!". Obviously, starting with PoS is gonna be easier than creating a network and currency on PoW and then enabling the transition from PoW to PoS.
"Dragging their feet" is a funny way of saying "taking their time to implement it correctly". None of this stuff is easy and since most of the work is novel, it makes it extra hard to make sure everything is ok implemented.
If you take a closer look at Ethereums implementation of PoS, you'll notice there are a couple of novel ideas, which I'm guessing is why they got mentioned here. Another user in this submission already expanded on it too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515423
Legacy PoS tokens, like the USD, achieved legitimacy initially by backing with real money (gold) before eventually cutting ties and trying to stand without hard backing, but instead stand on trust in the institution that controls the consensus mechanism. Ethereum seems to be attempting a similar transition now, cutting itself from a hard energy backing that keeps large stakeholders in check.
At the end of the day, it's all about trust. Ethereum has their work cut out for them to establish large scale trust both in their transition to PoS as well as trust as a free floating currency, backed only by the Ethereum consensus makers, which could secretly be a small cabal of large stakeholders with majority control.
I will likely dump my Eth once they lock in PoS and it becomes clear that they can't back peddle.
To activate one validator node you stake 32 ETH (just ETH, no special token), no more and no less, i.e. your node can't be activated with less than 32 ETH staked and depositing more than 32 ETH is pointless (makes no difference). There are queues for activation and exit, so a node can't just jump in or out of that role on a moment's notice, needs to be anticipated over days and if it does immediately "drop off" then there will be penalties.
All validators have equal weight and are randomly selected over time, for limited amounts of time, to carry out various responsibilities: attestations, block proposals, sync committees, slashing.
In the big scheme of things, the main reason to run a validator node is the opportunity cost re: the estimated APR on the 32 ETH per rewards accumulated for correctly carrying out the various responsibilities mentioned above, versus doing something else in that time period with resources equivalent to 32 ETH + hardware/resource costs of running the node.
Why should I have to trust them to not do that again if another hack happened, even if they migrate to PoS and it causes a giant fork once again?
A public blockchain is supposed to be "trustless" in that you don't have to trust humans to be honest, because the system is harshly fair and enforced by computation and the laws of physics that no one can trivially bullshit their way around. The important function of proof of work is that it solves the Byzantine generals problem such that everyone can trust the system without caring much about who else is using or controlling it.
Proof of stake is problematic because it shifts the burden of trust back into the hands of humans, and we all know that "the hearts of men are easily corrupted".
If miners start acting bad, anyone else on the planet can acquire chips and electricity to peacefully countervail their power.
If stakers start acting bad, the only options you have are 1) abandon the monetary system or 2) violently coerce the top stakers and torture them into giving you control of their stake.
This is why bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency likely to become the truly global, monetary asset that nation states use for trade and monetary reserves. No way in hell nation states will trust Vitalik and his gang to honestly secure their money.
And before you claim it couldn't happen, keep in mind they already did it to keep the chain locked to maximum of 7 tx per second. If you can convince people to let that slide, you can convince them to let near anything slide. It fundamentally makes the currency useless.
For all Ethereum's flaws, at least people understand the limitations of their trust model and their processes. The mythology built around BTC is completely unhinged from reality and people have no clue how inaccurate it is when compared with the facts on the ground.
> they already did it to keep the chain locked to maximum of 7 tx per second
Are you talking about Bitcoin Cash? Bitcoin Cash forked off of Bitcoin, not the other way around.
In theory. In practice a lot of people will never bother to track splits, understand the intricacies of what a given fork means; case in point here where you claim that Bitcoin Cash split off BTC despite their pursuing the original architecture of Bitcoin proper, and BTC going a completely different direction with lightning forced in as a core part of the architecture and total on chain throughput permanently limited to a level which makes it useless as anything more than a toy.
> If they do something you don't like you can continue using the other fork, there is literally nothing stopping you or anybody else, and you did not lose any funds
The important thing is that they can set the characteristics of the monetary base of BTC to arbitrarily whatever they want without limit, and this has effects on what that monetary base is able to accomplish. For example; they can force it to never be used as a peer to peer electronic currency for the world, it doesn't take much of a reach to imagine who might want to do such a thing and what other goals and projects they might want to steer BTC toward, that may well have nothing to do with the interests of BTC holders nor the reasons they've convinced themselves that they're holding it.
Their interests don't matter though, and the reasons they think they're holding it don't matter either. What matters is what the core council of developers announce from on high is the future direction of the chain, all else be damned, that's what you're going to be stuck with. At the moment you think "I've been duped" your options are either to divest and have your goals thwarted, or fork off and lose enormous amount of momentum and historical record and most likely if history is any example, only one in a million will even notice what happened and what your fork was for.
You come out ten years later as a settlement layer for central banks and shake your head wondering what the hell happened, then you realise you never really understood it to begin with.
I'm not talking about an ideological split. Node operators who didn't intentionally switch over to the Bitcoin Cash software were mining on the original Bitcoin chain, not the other way around.
The bcash "original vision" argument is extremely tiresome. If you think that's the "real Bitcoin" then you are free to use it, but that's not what the world at large settled on. Again, nobody is forcing you or anybody else.
> In practice a lot of people will never bother to track splits
That's because most splits are basically worthless, not worth the trouble of cashing out. Bcash was an exception that gained traction, and most people did track it.
> For example; they can force it to never be used as a peer to peer electronic currency for the world
Then use the other side of the fork? My point is that it's completely democratic, it's completely up to those who accept BTC as payment what side of the fork they accept, and as a BTC holder you do not need to preemptively choose a side.
Which is to say; they were entirely duped by the complete change in direction and went right on just mining the way they were beforehand despite the difference.
> The bcash "original vision" argument is extremely tiresome. If you think that's the "real Bitcoin" then you are free to use it, but that's not what the world at large settled on.
"The world" didn't settle on anything, centralised exchanges allocated the BTC ticker to whatever was blessed by the core BTC client as "bitcoin core" and that's all she wrote. Most people have no idea it happened, and even fewer why or how. And the fact that happened so silently with so little fanfare and so completely is exactly why BTC is such an utter failure at what it actually set out to do and what so many people foolishly continue to believe it still is.
> That's because most splits are basically worthless, not worth the trouble of cashing out. Bcash was an exception that gained traction, and most people did track it.
Right, because you can't fool all the people all the time. You can do a good enough job though that even in relatively obscure forums like hacker news posters refer to the chain that just wanted to actually execute on the original mission by the derogatory title slapped onto it by the exact same saboteurs that forced their agenda over the original. And that matters at scale when you're considering the entirety of the global economy. It drastically impacts how much difference you can make.
> Then use the other side of the fork?
That isn't the point at all. If you invest in a hospital because you think it's a good investment and because you approve of the mission statement of a hospital, and it spins off an abbatoir and starts butchering baby calves and selling veal instead because it thinks that's somehow superior to the original mission, your ability to sell your stock in the abattoir doesn't change the fact that the economic impetus that went into the hospital is now almost entirely behind the abattoir. And so it has been with BTC, it was turned from decentralised currency to disintermediate central banks to a shitty, low quality, captured centralised settlement layer for those exact same central banks, and all the while it mostly kept the public relations layer from the original project, and most people still claim that's why they're interested in it, screaming calves in the abattoirs or not.
The core point is they hold absolute power over BTC as an enterprise and what it is or will be able to accomplish in the future, and holders are purely along for the ride come what may.
lol, were you around when this was going on? People were absolutely losing their shit about bcash. This post really takes me back to that honestly.
> And so it has been with BTC, it was turned from decentralised currency to disintermediate central banks to a shitty, low quality, captured centralised settlement layer for those exact same central banks, and all the while it mostly kept the public relations layer from the original project, and most people still claim that's why they're interested in it, screaming calves in the abattoirs or not.
We are not going to agree on that point. Consensus disagreed with you here, so I'm not sure what exactly you want to happen. Any system, not just a cryptocurrency, has the potential to split off from your specific viewpoints at any time. In this case it did, so what remediation do you want beyond the ability to sell out of the currency?
> The core point is they hold absolute power over BTC
Who is "they"? If you mean tiny group of developers I disagree. If you mean the developers + users + exchanges + merchants then yes, you are right. They reached a consensus and you are in the minority.
I was, and I recall that the vast majority of trade volume was not constituted in USDT also. Both those things are no longer true, most trade now is USDT, and near enough to nobody has the faintest idea what actually happened back then.
> We are not going to agree on that point.
It's not a point of "agree or not agree". It's a point of fact. If you won't acknowledge the fact that a currency needs more than seven transactions per second across the globe in order to actually be used as a global currency, or that the lightning whitepaper itself says very clearly that it was designed to resemble the banking settlement network, that's just your ignorance, not something to be argued about.
> Consensus disagreed with you here
There wasn't any consensus, there was just centralised exchanges tagging the output of the core node software as BTC and that's all there was to it, I can dig up the bitfinex announcement of exactly that if you want to dispute the point, but once again, it's a simple fact.
> so I'm not sure what exactly you want to happen.
I'm completely out of that fight so I don't want anything to happen of course aside from the entire thing to fail miserably and be viewed as a cautionary tale. I don't think that will actually happen though, because the world is simply too full of ignorant and stupid people who desperately want to believe the lie they've been sold and moon lambo doing it.
> Who is "they"? If you mean tiny group of developers I disagree
Yes I mean the tiny group of core developers who actually already did this back in 2017, so once again, this is just a point of fact and there's nothing to dispute, and to the extent you try, you're simply outright wrong.
How should the exchanges have done it? Just listed both at BTC? I really don't get what you want here.
> Yes I mean the tiny group of core developers who actually already did this back in 2017
The group of developers running the centralized exchanges, who you also blame?
And changing a bridge into an airport might be characterised as a disagreement on how to cross the river in question, but that characterisation would be utterly dishonest. The fact that people accepted the same dishonest characterisation when it came to "lets change decentralised global peer to peer currency to a settlement network for central banks and let them handle the last mile of transactions" is exactly my point and exactly why things are so utterly hopelessly broken.
People really didn't question this nonsense as much as they actually saw it, and most people never even saw it to begin with to question it, it's ancient history now, buried, but absolutely undisputed that while the exchanges simply bless whatever the core devs say is BTC as such, they hold the power to define what that is.
> What I'm trying to get out of you is how the "winning fork" should be decided, beyond just "I think my fork should have won".
Exactly how it was going to be done before bitfinex (who is also invested in blockstream, whose CTO at the time was the head of the faction responsible for this inane nonsense) changed to the "whatever the core devs say is what we'll bless as BTC" and then all the other exchanges backed off and followed bitfinex assumedly as to not allow the chaotic confusion that would ensue if the original plan to follow the hashpower was held to.
And that is how I believe it should've been done. That's how it was done on later splits between BCH and BSV, and then again between BCH and XEC. In fact that's how it's always done, generally speaking, except in this isolated case when it is likely because of the incestuous relationship between all the parties involved to fix the match to castrate BTC entirely.
> The group of developers running the centralized exchanges
The group of developers who get to decide entirely on their own what is the canonical chain, in light of the fact that for this precedent, the exchanges allocate them that privilege as discussed above.
I also don't see how force centralized exchanges to follow those rules though.
I don't expect the hashpower would have gone in the BCH direction, but I may be wrong.
But that's life. We're stuck with the world we have and the nature of the people in it, warts and all. We don't get to wish them away, we must contend with it as it actually is. And any currency that can't operate with those realities of human nature as they are is going to always have that problem to contend with because if there's one thing I've learned about humans at scale, it's that they don't change. I keep that in mind constantly now and the education I got from the experience is priceless and it's the primary lens through which I see most things now; keeping that fundamental lie of equality and the common sense of humanity and how we're all invulnerable to propaganda in mind.
It's definitely served me well over the past few years, so hats off to the Machiavellian psychopaths responsible for the entire episode I guess.
IMO BCH would have lost anyways.
No, it isn't. It accurately reflects the original intent as outlined in the whitepaper, that is not an argument or opinion, it is a fact. And it is also a fact that BTC does not. As for what's "real" well that's an entirely different question, even what's "better" is an entirely different question; maybe peer to peer currency for the world that disintermediates and thus disempowers the present mediators of the economy of the world would actually be catastrophic, those things are questions, arguments and matters of opinion, sure. But the underlying attributes of the things under discussion and what they actually are, are not, they are observable, indisputable facts of reality.
> I personally disagree with you, and think the larger block sizes were shortsighted, and Bitcoins path towards smaller transactions and layer twos is the more responsible approach.
Sure, and I think your position and argument is wrong, and I think the fact that it has continued to be attacked after the split whilst BTC has been in a holding pattern and accomplished absolutely nothing significant since except validating the warnings of everybody who said it was a sabotage attempt is evidence of that fact, but these are just opinions and arguments, so whatever.
> IMO BCH would have lost anyways.
And the critical factor is what it all boils down to; nobody ever got the chance to see, because the powers that be couldn't allow the question to be raised.
That tells me everything I need to know about this. But it also doesn't change the fact that "the bad guy won" so, whatever. Cheating a win doesn't change the fact it's still a win.
Sure, but I disagree that that matters. The whitepaper is not an authority, the project is allowed to evolve and that doesn't make it illegitimate. I think sticking to a whitepaper (that was written ages ago, long before any of this tech even gained any traction or real world usage) seems crazy to me, like some sort of religion / cargo cult.
Do you see the original whitepaper as something that's perfect? No room for improvement or change in the ideas presented there?
> Sure, and I think your position and argument is wrong, and I think the fact that it has continued to be attacked after the split whilst BTC has been in a holding pattern
BTC has had tons of development (Lightning, time locks, signature schemes, smart contracts), especially compared to BCH which is pretty close to dead. It may not be the direction you want but don't mischaracterize it as a lack of development.
> "the bad guy won" > Cheating a win doesn't change the fact it's still a win.
There is no game, there are no rules, there are no "good and bad" guys. Respectfully, that's a pretty naive view of the world.
The whitepaper is a statement of intent, what the project is actually for. It can evolve into anything that still serves that intent, it can even shift it somewhat, but to go exactly 180 degrees contrary to the intent is like saying it's perfectly reasonable to set out building a shield, turn it into a sword and still insist that everybody else calls it a shield and any actual shields that exist after that point are impostors to the title.
People are observably stupid enough to do so, but that is not a shield, and BTC is not a global peer to peer currency. It is a settlement layer for banks; the exact opposite of what it was intended to be.
Nobody can spin that into sensibility. It is an attack by definition. Every other fork that has happened it was arguable, but the BTC fork was the exact opposite of what bitcoin was intended to achieve.
That's clearly not an accident, no matter how many people would desperately like to believe otherwise.
> Do you see the original whitepaper as something that's perfect? No room for improvement or change in the ideas presented there?
Not at all. Plenty of other unsabotaged cryptocurrencies exist right now that still serve the intent of the original project but use vastly different mechanics to do so, I sincerely hope they give BTC the death it so richly deserves. That's fine and desirable as long as the plane still flies instead of tries to write a strategic shift into becoming a lawn dart as some kind of desirable evolution.
> BTC has had tons of development
All of it firmly dedicated to cementing the sabotage of the settlement layer for banks betrayal in place. So even worse than none at all. It isn't that it's just stale, but it's actually directly harming the original mission and sucking air out of the room and diverting investment from that goal, fooling idiots who naively don't realise they've been hijacked entirely off the original mission.
> there are no "good and bad" guys. Respectfully, that's a pretty naive view of the world.
In the context of the mission yes there very much are, and those that betray it are "bad" in terms of bad for the mission. They might be ethically good overall if the mission turns out to be undesirable and all along what everybody wanted was just more banks and the power they allow people who control them to wield, but that is indeed an argument that I'm not particularly interested in mostly because of the reason you mistake my position for being; global ethics and morality are complex beasts subject to endless debate with very little progress toward an objective outcome.
Is x a betrayal or in service of mission y however is as easily defined as how precisely mission y was. And it was very precisely defined, and BTC is indisputably a betrayal of it and thus bad from the perspective of the mission.
Can you ensure that no small group will ever one take take the a controlling stake, either by time and patience or by violent force, coercing or killing other stakers?
And yes, it would cause people to lose confidence, which is why this kind of attack probably won't happen unless Ethereum or some other PoS system achieves a much greater level of global dominance where it has become too big to fail.
I take your point that Bitcoin could more easily recover from this, as new mining hardware can be built by honest participants unlike tokens, but it would take too long. It would be too late to restore confidence at that point anyway.
I think both networks are resistant to the attack for the same reason, it's just too expensive. You could argue that Ethereum is actually more resistant, as buying tokens drives up the price. Bitcoin has the opposite economies of scale. The more chips an attacker produces, the better they get at making them, and the more cheaply they can amass hashrate.
This is the whole point of slashing/rewards in PoS. They have no reason to act bad, as if they do, the network itself loses value, so anything they can have gained, will result in losing it. It's a equilibrium where you can't gain anything by destroying the network.
'Until then, it's not ready yet and we'll see when they actually move to PoS'* (Which at this current time, is more centralized than mining and makes the largest holders even richer).
I don't think I am going to tell someone to wait for 7+ years for something that doesn't exist yet in order to actually 'use it', unless I'm speculating on the price of the cryptocurrency.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1045416/10-break...
Sigh...
Very fast (seconds), good programming support and documentation, very tiny fees. It seems that bots or people automatically bury my comments if I mention the cryptocurrency by name on HN, so I am going to leave that for people to look up if they are interested.
EDIT: Screw it. Algorand.
- It's slashing mechanism creates 'economic finality'. Any validator participating in a reorg beyond that ~12 minute economic finality window would find themselves slashed and forced exited from the validator set.
- Lengthy entrance and exit queues mean that the validator set can't be shifted faster then the community can adapt should an attacker try manipulate the network.
- Multiple independent client teams have implemented a publicly agreed upon specification (there are 6 known at the moment). This keeps insider developers from sneaking in adverse changes without causing a huge hullabaloo.
Getting all this right is why it's taken so long to roll out.
Or maybe, just maybe, the author holds a not insignificant amount of Bitcoin and is working overtime to dismiss criticism.
> Or maybe, just maybe, the author holds a not insignificant amount of Bitcoin and is working overtime to dismiss criticism.
No shit Sherlock. This is a ridiculous point to make to try to dismiss someone's argument. If you believe something is a good investment, then of course you're going to own a lot of it and promote your reasoning to think it's good and alternatives are bad. Literally everyone one the planet does that and you're deluding yourself if you think anyone who has put in enough time and effort to understand the complexity of things is going to be bias free.
I also don't think there is a cryptocurrency network that is widely used that has operated without network halts, downtime or congestion so I do not expect any network to have such a 'smooth' transition either.
Opinions about unknowable consensus mechanisms aside, I have serious doubts about PoS given there's no clear associated PoW presented alongside the staking. But what do I know? I have grey hairs.
I still like Bitcoin and Lightning because the PoW and PoS work with each other to deliver similar functional properties. This is a personal opinion based on reading and trying to imagine how the Yapese managed their stashes of huge coins.
Fun fact: One particularly large coin dropped off an outrigger on the way back from being mined and instead of taking it out of circulation, a few of the consensus makers went out and dove on it to confirm it was indeed sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor.
I've set intent to go dive it and see it for myself.
What does this mean? A cursory Googling isn't shedding light on this metaphor for me.
Functional as in works as intended? Maybe but certainly not functional as in "Useful as powerplants"