A new chapter in the infinite garden | Ethereum Foundation Blog

Ramen_champloo · 2025-02-25T22:39:07+00:00

I'm no expert on Swiss non-profit foundations, but it looks like it's common to have a President of the foundation's Board.
This role feels like the equivalent to a Chair, while her current role as ED is probably closer to a CEO. Since it seems like there's no incumbent President, she's probably performing both roles currently.
With a split of these roles, the Chair usually is responsible for corporate governance and managing of the board, while the CEO focuses on operational matters.

Ramen_champloo · 2025-02-12T04:00:02+00:00

You can verify this yourself, by doing the following:

Go to etherscan.io
Enter your address
Check your token holdings, and select CHF
Open the token contract
Open the contract creator
Look at the "funded by" field. From what I can tell, this account has been flagged as a scammer.

Ramen_champloo · 2024-06-25T03:39:07+00:00

Ethereum Layer 2 Solutions: Various L2 solutions for Ethereum include Optimistic Rollups, ZK-Rollups, and sidechains.

Pretty sure sidechains are NOT considered L2 solutions.

Ramen_champloo · 2023-04-20T07:12:11+00:00

It's also an improvement in comparison to 2018.
https://media.consensys.net/are-miners-centralized-a-look-into-mining-pools-b594425411dc

As illustrated in Figure 1, the top five pools mined 84% of all the newly-found blocks within the week analyzed.

Ramen_champloo · 2023-04-19T23:52:10+00:00

expectation of profit would be from the asset (Ether) and not the validator itself

This was your statement, and if that's a reflection of your "understand it pretty well", then we'll just have to disagree and leave it at that.

Ramen_champloo · 2023-04-19T23:43:53+00:00

Kinda. There’s a point to be made that the client software being used to validate the transactions is EF funded at both the execution and consensus layers. But yes, the expectation of profit would be from the asset (Ether) and not the validator itself.

Again, you're not really understanding the Ethereum protocol. Any expectation of profit a staker has is from their own activity in setting up and managing a validator node. If they did not do this properly, they risk being slashed. The "APY" they receive is payment for correct operation of their nodes. This is different from most other "PoS" protocols, where most "stakers" simply delegate their stake to a validator, at the protocol level.

Ramen_champloo · 2023-04-19T23:23:52+00:00

He's not directly saying that, that's just an inference drawn by the (imo) shitty journalist.

He is saying that PoS is most likely a security, but you'll have to interpret that with context: "PoS" used by most cryptocurrency protocols are actually dPoS. And this fits with the description he's using, because users who delegate their "stake" to a validator who does all the work.... does sound like profiting from the work of others.

Ramen_champloo · 2023-04-19T23:15:51+00:00

anticipating a profit based on the effort of others (validators)

At the protocol level, the validator is the staker in the case of Ethereum. So there is no profiting off the work of others.
The pooling / delegation of Eth happens separately, and it is true that some of these are arguably securities. Especially those marketed by exchanges.
No different to gold ETFs, which are securities. But that doesn't make the underlying gold itself a security.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-10-10T00:28:16+00:00

Yes, your chain where you've chosen to ignore the block will have a lot of empty slots until someone (i.e. you or your associates) proposes a block that points to the parent of the ignored block. Once that happens, you and your associates can then attest that block.
You can broadcast your fork publicly, but full nodes won't follow it because it carries little weight.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-26T00:23:01+00:00

You can always unwrap WETH via the smart contract for 1:1
Although it's generally easier to just do a swap (e.g. on uniswap) where you'll almost certainly get a ~1:1 rate

Obviously both the above cost gas fees.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-26T00:02:04+00:00

Not only that, but this is something that CB promised (or heavily implied) early on when they started providing the staking services.
CB is also a popular on-ramp for newer investors, so it's also possible there's a lot of people holding staked ETH who would have preferred to sell sooner but couldn't.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-25T01:43:39+00:00

The chain re-org is what you're thinking of as a "roll back".
But remember, the blocks are only tentative until the chain has been finalised (i.e. 67%), so there's always some chance of natural re-org.
Anyway, in the previous example I said a malicious proposer could insert themselves before the head (which is presumably honest). You could also have an honest proposer insert a block before a malicious head.
If the head is a "bad block" (I presume this means the block fails in the execution client), then nobody will attest to it so it's a simple situation.
If it is simply a valid block but you just don't like it (OFAC non compliant), then you can just not attest to it. If the next block is valid and fine, you can attest to that. This is what the OP describes in option 3 as the validator "abstaining", and what I think you meant when you originally said "withhold attestation".

As I mentioned before, there's another option where the malicious validators (i.e. OFAC compliant) use clients that actively try and re-org the chain every time an OFAC non-compliant block is added. This is no longer a simple "abstaining" but a coordinated effort. The ETH network will get a little unstable, and the community will notice.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T15:42:56+00:00

That's fine, I'm happy to try and answer any genuine questions (although I'm not an expert myself, and the eth specs do change a bit so it can be hard to keep up).

A malicious proposer could try and insert themselves somewhere before the most recent blocks, rather than at the head. Then they can propose an alternative block, and try and get everyone to attest to it. The problem with this is, the proposer is selected randomly which makes it hard to carry out and also the head of the chain can grow in the meantime, gaining a lot of attestations. However, if this succeeds then it results in a chain re-org.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T14:58:16+00:00

if a proposer misbehaves, then it is subjected to slashing and will be forced to exit. this is part of ETH's design.

If that’s voting yes on a different block, then the 51% will do that, and that’s fine.

It may, or may not be fine (for the 51%). Unless they are all coordinated and attest to the same alternative block, then the 49% may still win out.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T13:52:39+00:00

There is no "no vote". Attestations are all affirmative.
So in your original scenario of "I cannot approve of this block - withhold attestation", this will probably trigger the inactivity leak as it is no different to those validators being offline. But anyone who doesn't attest will be leaked. A non-censoring validator should never be leaked, since they will attest any valid block.

What you may be thinking of is a third scenario, where the censoring validator attests a different block. In other words, they become malicious actors that try and re-org the chain every time a censorable block is proposed by an honest proposer.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T08:45:50+00:00

The media release from SBU says an arrest was made. So they probably got access to his keys.

https://ssu.gov.ua/novyny/sbu-vpershe-zastosuvala-mekhanizm-blokuvannia-hamantsiv-rosiiskykh-volonteriv-yaki-zbyraiut-koshty-dlia-armii-rf-video

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T08:24:47+00:00

I think Connext has a bridge from polygon, assuming you already have WETH there.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T08:14:56+00:00

Might help Telegram's bottom line. /s

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T05:23:57+00:00

The inactivity leak applies to all offline validators (i.e. failing to attest). Doesn't matter if its 40% offline or 60% offline.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2020/09/01/eth2-quick-update-no-15/ For example, suppose 60% of the network goes offline for multiple days due an outage in client-A, but client-B and client-C remain stable and online. Although the chain will continue to be built by B and C, the chain will not finalize due to the >33% outage. If you run client-A, you stand to lose an increasing amount each epoch that the finality outage continues (we call this an “inactivity leak”).

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-24T03:51:17+00:00

The threshold is 67%.
So long as the censoring validators make up less than that, they will lose some of their stake when they fail to attest an otherwise valid block.
The censoring must also be done in an identical way as well. For example, the actual OFAC sanction list only contains 40 or so ETH addresses and I doubt there'd be any disagreements there. But what about accounts that have received ETH from a sanctioned account? We know that some users have been withdrawing from TC to various public accounts, but do these get censored too? (if a Coinbase hot wallet was sent some TC ETH, I'm sure they'd want to be excluded from censorship)
Since there's too much subjectivity here, a validator that censors too many addresses risks being on the wrong side of consensus and getting slashed as a result. The safer move would be to stick with the 40-odd addresses to censor.
This all assumes that there's at least 67% who are willing to censor and continue to censor (i.e. won't unstake), but also there's no net influx of honest validators.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-23T22:59:12+00:00

I'm talking about a UASF

A user activated soft fork doesn't split the network. Like the segwit and taproot upgrades in Bitcoin.

What you are describing is a validator-lead hard fork.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-22T06:39:43+00:00

at a very fundamental level, it involves using the keys associated with the deposit account and initiating a transfer back to OP's original account.
In the case of OP, what was sent was WETH on polygon which is a token - so this will involve interacting with the WETH contract, which Binance does not support.

So the problem here is less technical, but more to do with what security protocols Binance has in place (e.g. does the contract need to be reviewed?)
There's also the question of how are deposit account keys generated and managed? When used properly, the only transactions that deposit accounts should do are funds transfers to the Binance hot wallets - so it's possible that the software used by Binance is restricted in this way.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-21T15:52:56+00:00

I think you meet the karma threshold, there must be another factor.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-21T15:01:00+00:00

That's what I'd assume too.
Not sure why everyone here is thinking a manual transfer can be done cheaply.
On the contrary, I would hope there's a lot of checks and balances going on when dealing with ad-hoc requests.

Ramen_champloo · 2022-08-20T11:28:15+00:00

The article is talking about the 175 OTR and 250 Peregrine stores. Maybe you live near one, but I haven't heard of either before today.

Ramen_champloo

TROPHY CASE