The ethereum 2.0 testnet is going through a stress test after the finding of a clever bug that may have crypto political dimensions.
The initial report by the team that there was a malfunction in servers’ time sync from Cloudflare makes it somewhat clear what bitcoiners’ point may be.
Prysm devs say rough time was meant to be decentralized, but it wasn’t, with a greater point potentially makable here.
That being a little bug can bring down the whole network, and therefore ethereum 2.0 is not as secure as bitcoin, with it currently going through four forks. The big question is of course whether it can get back to one chain and keep on running. If it does, then this was a nice test. If it doesn’t, then there’s a very big problem. As you may know, bitcoiners don’t like Proof of Stake because of the nothing at stake problem in as far as there is nothing preventing you from signaling for two chains at the same time, except in eth there’s slashing, while in Proof of Work (PoW), hash obviously can be allocated to only one chain. Yet you can imagine if all of this happened life, all of DeFi would straight out stop, with no code related fix here to this requirement that 34% of validators should not go off at the same time as otherwise, the whole thing stops.
It’s probably a matter of preference however whether it’s better the network keeps running with reorgs, or just stops, with both probably as bad for DeFi. Read the full article here.
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