UNCHAINED: The Black Swan Event That Could Cause a Fork in Ethereum (Again)

The huge risks of a bug occurring to an Ethereum “supermajority” execution client were laid bare this week.

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This week a major potential risk to Ethereum was highlighted by a bug that surfaced in Nethermind, a minority execution client. While the bug was fixed quickly, it raised the question of what would happen to the blockchain if Geth, which is used by more than two-thirds of validators and so is considered a “supermajority client,” had a bug. The situation could potentially result in a catastrophic fork of Ethereum. 

Ethereum developer Lefteris Karapetsas joined Unchained to discuss the different scenarios of what could happen, the potential impact of a supermajority client issue on staking services such as Lido, why he feels the incentive system is poorly designed, and what other solutions are out there to address the lack of client diversity. 

Show highlights | 

What a consensus issue is in Ethereum and what happened with Nethermind last weekendWhy it would be a big problem if a supermajority client had a bugThe potential impact on staking services such as LidoWhy Lefteris feels like he is reliving the historic Ethereum DAO hack all over againWhether the largest entities running nodes will start pursuing client diversityHow the data on the prevalence of specific Ethereum execution clients is not verifiable or programmatic, making it less transparent and difficult to analyzeWhy Lefteris believes that the incentive system is not designed to achieve client diversityWhether there are developments in the works to try to solve the lack of client diversity 

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Guest  | 

Lefteris Karapetsas, Founder of Rotkiapp

Previous appearance on Unchained: Is Code Law? Should the Hacker Be Punished? The DAO Creators Disagree

Links | 

Unchained: 

Most Ethereum Staking Pools Are Using Just One Execution Client, Potentially Increasing Risks to the Network

The Chopping Block: Data Availability & Why It’s Important

CoinDesk: Bug That Took Down 8% of Ethereum's Validators Sparks Worries About Even Bigger Outage

The Defiant: Ethereum Software Client Centralization Sparks Concern

Crypto.news: Nethermind rolls out urgent fix for block processing bug in Ethereum client

Lukasz Rosmej’s tweet that minority client Nethermind had a consensus issue

Lefteris’ tweet on a supermajority Ethereum client bug 

Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong’s tweet on what he’d do in a censorship resistance request scenario

Run the majority client at your own peril! by Dankrad Feist

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Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC.  Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz. 

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