Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

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> The developers aren't decentralized at all, they typically are a single, small team with some sort of leader. They can make a lot of decisions almost unilaterally.

That's painting everyone with the same brush...

It may be true for many projects, but the second largest blockchain (by marketcap), Ethereum, has like 10 independent client teams and a strong concentration on client diversity [1].

The media likes to paint Vitalik (one of the original founders) as the "leader" of Ethereum, but everyone that's actually working in Ethereum knows that he's at best an advisor these days, and has intentionally taken a back seat in terms of leadership to avoid the very effect you are describing.

> And very far below that is everyone else. You can run your "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or doesn't on the network.

> And that's why Bitcoin is the way it is. Back when fees rose to $50/transaction because the capacity was overwhelmed...

That is not why transaction fees are high... and miners do not decide what goes or doesn't on the network. That's a huge misconception.

Transaction fees are driven by demand, plain and simple. Demand is high in a scarce blockspace, so the fee goes up to keep the network stable.

Also, miners can't decide to just change the rules, that's a big misconception of the Sybil problem further driven by popular media. The rules are the rules, if miners don't follow them, clients (full or light) won't follow that chain, period.

Even if 50%+ of miners colluded, all they could do is prevent a consensus from forming (called "censorship"), so basically a DDoS. They cannot change the rules and "trick" clients into following them, as it is often portrayed!

If you're referring to miners having influence on what the rules are, as in influence over development, that's been tried and failed multiple times on multiple networks. In reality, devs and companies/user sentiment drives the majority of "social consensus".

If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS will eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening. For a past example, EIP-1559 was opposed by many large mining pools, still happened (because it improved user experience by making gas fees more predictable / reducing failed transactions -- in direct contradiction to your point).

[1] https://clientdiversity.org/

>> If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS will eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening.

This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is delayed because the miners are against it. It seems very important to people who are thinking about doing projects with Etherium because it will be based on PoS. Hoenstly, I don't know anything about this.

Here is my question(s) to the smart people on HN: Could miners or others with financial interest slow the switch to PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if that is happening?

No.

The switch to POS is entirely a socially initiated hard fork being built by Eth holders, users and developers. The miners who don't want to play along are effectively being fired. And there is a lot of economic incentive to get that fork done - mining is a really expensive way to generate consensus on a blockchain. What miners earn via block rewards is coming out of the pockets of other eth holders because of the coin's inflation. Ethereum will be able to reduce it's issuance/inflation by roughly 10x in the switch.

The starting point was launching the beacon chain back in December 2020, a separate chain designed to provide consensus and validation of mainnet ethereum in the (hopefully near) future, whose validating participants fund their deposits through what is just a normal contract on mainnet ethereum. From there that beacon chain has been refined and built into a protocol with multiple implementations, and had its stability monitored and tested.

From here, it's just a matter of forking mainnet ethereum into using the beacon chain as its consensus provider and ignoring the miners. And that step is pretty deep into the final testing phases using ethereum's long running testnets to run through the 'merge' at it is called.

> This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is delayed because the miners are against it.

They can say that all they want, there's 0 actual evidence of that. It's been delayed a bunch because it's an incredibly difficult thing to do for a network operating trillions of $ in transaction value.

All indications are at the moment that it will happen around September, but definitely this year. The big test (doing the PoS switch on the most similar testnet) was completed successfully last week!

> Could miners or others with financial interest slow the switch to PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if that is happening?

There are theoretical ways, but in practice it's not all that practical, because ultimately what matters is the "fork" developers and users want to follow. There's a negative incentive for miners to do anything disruptive because it could have an effect on the value of the tokens they already hold.

Additionally, Ethereum has a built-in "difficulty bomb", which basically ensures that a network upgrade happens at a certain cadence, which gives impetus for miners to follow new upgrades or no new ETH will be generated anyways past a certain point.

Financial interests push heavily towards PoS. Ten percent of all ETH is already deposited in the PoS network (currently running in parallel), and can't be withdrawn before the merge happens. The development teams were granted staked ETH by the EF, and can't withdraw it before the merge happens. All ETH holders are likely to benefit from the PoS merge, which will reduce issuance to the point where the ETH supply will begin to shrink because 90% of the fees are burned.

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