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by chrisco255 1865 days ago
The proof of stake ETH2 chain is already live for Ethereum and has been since December. That chain is parallel to the existing proof of work chain. They now need to merge the POW chain into the ETH2 validator nodes so they can conduct consensus from there on. The merge has been simulated already and is being tested. Core devs seem to be confident it will be feasible with low risk. But of course, there's always a chance something goes wrong.

For more info check out this beautiful site: https://ethmerge.com/
1 comments
rawtxapp 1865 days ago
It's one thing for it to be live, it's another thing for it to be stress tested in actual production/real world with people's actual money.

I have a vested interest in hoping it lands successfully, but being a software engineer, I know how many bugs I've had even in simple programs, I can only imagine the kinds of bugs that will be discovered in eth2 considering just how complex it is.

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zapdrive 1864 days ago
Don't worry. If anything goes wrong (like a hacker stealing everybody's coins), they can just rollback the transaction. That's not a new thing for ethereum, to just rollback transactions. Lol.

For the uninitiated read about the dao hack and the debate that ensued. Basically, they just rolled back the transaction, just like a bank.

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runeks 1863 days ago
You're mixing up two different issues. One is a bug in the implementation of Ethereum, the other is a bug in a smart contract (that runs on Ethereum).

Undoing the former by rolling back the chain and fixing the bug is the only logical thing to do. Bitcoin devs have done the same a couple of times (e.g. [1]).

The DAO hack, however, was not caused by a bug in Ethereum. It was caused by a bug in the code of a smart contract. Ethereum executed this smart contract faithfully (there was no bug in Ethereum). Bitcoin has never done this.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

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chrisco255 1865 days ago
As someone else said, it's in production. Also, there are many, many forks of the EVM in production that run on proof of stake mechanics (Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Skale, Qtum, xDai, etc). The main thing you have to worry about with move to ETH2 is contentious forks of the main chain, like if POW miners revolt and start a fork or a blip at the merge point that takes the chain offline for a bit. The ongoing ETH2 consensus and validation mechanic is live already. ETH2 also has client diversity, with 4 different implementations written in four different programming languages (Rust, Go, etc). There is some world class talent on the ETH core team. I have full faith in them and their testing regiment. But of course there is no such thing as risk-free.
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runeks 1863 days ago
It's not really in production until the value of Ether tokens is protected by it. When that happens it will be potentially profitable to hack it. Right now only Ethereum supporters are testing the network, not Ethereum antagonists (black/gray hats).
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xur17 1865 days ago
The proof of stake chain is running in production with $16B staked in it.
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