Ethereum Blog

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-subjectivity/) 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…

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

"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.