> A degraded fleet is worse than no fleet here, there is no 2 are down, 8 are up here.

Ethereum runs at 100% throughput with 100% of its security guarantees, all the way up to a 33% outage of its validator set. So it stays running at 100% capacity even in a 3 down, 7 up scenario. This has been the case since EIP-1559 was implemented in 2021, and it has been empirically tested.

That's more favorable than Bitcoin, which degrades in capacity (though not security) during partial outages. A 30% miner outage means a 30% reduction in transaction throughput.

The entire point of blockchains is that they are able to thrive and run robustly in a "2 down, 8 up" scenario. That's the sole property they sacrifice so much to achieve compared to centralized database software.

> A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare.

Every client is drop-in interchangeable. You don't need different skills to run each one, any more than you need different driving skills to drive a Honda than to drive a Toyota. The only difference is their internals.

To continue with your analogy, you start reaping the rewards of diversity when one car is revealed to have a manufacturing defect and the whole world needs a specific replacement part all at once. This isn't that uncommon. What happens is that the part goes out of stock.

Car diversity causes no maintenance nightmare, because good mechanics are everywhere and they can fix the 500 most popular car models very cheaply despite their varying internals. With Ethereum client diversity, if one of the ten clients breaks down, the fix arrives within hours, for free over the internet - no mechanic trip needed.

> Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.

If an airline bought all Boeing 737 Max, which didn't seem like a bad choice at the time, their entire fleet would have been grounded from March 2019 to November 2020.

Southwest suffered a $435 million loss. Everyone who bet on a single aircraft, lost. Everyone who diversified their fleet pulled ahead.

> I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.

It's never a bad idea to burn an identity. But after these conversations, I'm not convinced of the reason.

Society is a scam. Everyone else already owns all the good stuff by the time you're born.

Wake me up when you can manufacture a Bitcoin mining ASIC by yourself starting with sticks and rocks.

> We don’t know exactly what happened between 0 and 1, but it’s not really that important, other than it’s “externally verifiable hash”, eg PoW.

Whether or not someone ran a particular piece of software on their computer for ten minutes in 2009, or even six days for that matter, is not important.

> Real Return”. I think the real return is -40% since PoS? And falling? The illusion of yield. It’s the same nonsense they use to get people to buy treasuries with yields under inflation. It’s Wall Street tricks dressed up as yield. That’s all that’s been reinvented here. It’s not some grand hack to bypass “waste”.

When you hold ETH (and stake it, which is easy), your percentage share of all outstanding ETH goes slowly up over time. When you hold BTC, your percentage share only goes down as more BTC are mined.

The "return" is that you accumulate more of the asset's market cap over time. If you don't value ETH, just don't buy it. If you like ETH, staking gets you more of it. The return is real in the sense that it's paid partially by transaction fee revenue, not by simply inflating the network by the same amount as the reward payouts.

> I agree going after the stakers won’t shut it down. But going after the central devs? Remember liberty reserve? Ethereum is just LR, and Solana is LR2 and Sui is LR3?

Alright so Ethereum has ten central dev teams working on ten clients across international borders. Bitcoin has one central dev team working on one central client. Which is more decentralized?

> it was a split (not downtime)

There were several significant double-spends. People were able to create fake transactions and scam each other.

Preventing people from sending fake transactions is Bitcoin's one reason for existence. People made out with a bunch of stolen money.

If everyone being able to send fake Bitcoins around and scam people doesn't count as downtime, I don't know what counts as downtime.

Showing fake bitcoins is actively worse than if the network refused to process transactions at all.

As a side note, due to its slashing system, Ethereum "fails closed" like this and refuses to confirm transactions if the network were majorly disrupted.

> There could have been loses on the centralized exchange side for the few hours of ambiguity. maybe there was 1 public report of loss at the time.

At the time, I remember several reports of relatively large losses (and gains, by the scammers). But the private losses are probably larger and they're just as important. When people (and exchanges) get scammed, they're generally incentivized to stay quiet about it.

> This is the lesson that ETH people were not around for.

The "ETH people" that matter - the protocol researchers and client developers and exchange CEOs - were for the most part all around during the early Bitcoin days.

> More moving parts; more failure cases. More client, more moving parts.

Ten cars have "more moving parts" than one car, and the fleet is much more prone to a failure of one of the parts in one of its cars.

When two parts break at once, it's better to have a fleet of eight working cars than one broken car in need of two repairs.

Thanks for the source, by the way. I think Satoshi was just as wrong there as he was when he thought Bitcoin would become a "peer to peer electronic cash system".

> I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1.

The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.

Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.

> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.

To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.

How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.

It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.

> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.

Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.

> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.

You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.

I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.