Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#41

Post by nope96 »

charlesdm wrote: post #36
aquadrop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin also worked ok before the number of transactions went high, is ether protected from that kind of thing? If for example amount of ether transactions go up 3 orders of magnitude? And it would be nice to have even smaller fees on Ether and transaction time less than a second, so it could be better than VISA/Mastercard.

Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin, very cheaply, and near instantaneous (e.g. little to no transaction backlog). The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network.

> Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin

Take a look at the charts here, http://bc.daniel.net.nz

It's not "free" to process more transactions. At some point you are no longer p2p and decentralized when the requirements to run a node go up so high, so quickly .

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#42

Post by charlesdm »

nope96 wrote: post #41
charlesdm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin, very cheaply, and near instantaneous (e.g. little to no transaction backlog). The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network.

> Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin Take a look at the charts here, http://bc.daniel.net.nz It's not "free" to process more transactions. At some point you are no longer p2p and decentralized when the requirements to run a node go up so high, so quickly .

I'm not sure on the exact details, but I believe those are full nodes. I believe there are also light nodes that are only a few gb in size when you sync them (e.g. a lot of the historical less relevant data is truncated).

I'm assuming those full nodes will eventually be intended to be run in data centers.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#43

Post by robk »

charlesdm wrote: post #38
golergka wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of money I'm curious, how many drug dealers do you know that accept Ether?

I'm curious, why does this matter? How many drug dealers do you know accept cash?

100% of them afaik

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#44

Post by albertgoeswoof »

Nokinside wrote: post #27

Protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent produce tangible value for the users. In all fairness it would be nice to see them getting at least something in order of $10 million for their nice effort. These new ICO's are manufactured to give the company that develops them hundreds of millions or even speculative billions in paper. How long until people realize again that these products have near-zero marginal cost? Artificial sc…

Ethereum is quite good though, up there with IPFS and BitTorrent in terms of innovation.

But I get your point - imagine a world where we were all paid competitive wages to work on OSS instead of high-ROI investments.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#45

Post by albertgoeswoof »

nope96 wrote: post #40
stupidcar wrote: post #29

It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and…

> Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead If Vitalik got hit by a bus tomorrow Ether price would drop 95%. A currency does not need a leader who directs it. Also it should be very difficult to make changes to a 150 Billion $ currency.

I don't see Ethereum as a 150 Billion $ currency, it's more like beta software or an experiment. The learnings made now could shape the future of tech, so it should be easy to make changes to.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#46

Post by sambe »

nope96 wrote: post #40
stupidcar wrote: post #29

It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and…

> Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead If Vitalik got hit by a bus tomorrow Ether price would drop 95%. A currency does not need a leader who directs it. Also it should be very difficult to make changes to a 150 Billion $ currency.

It's cryptocurrency. Someone is leading the crypto part (also: smart contracts etc. etc.). You could even argue that traditional currencies to have a leader - those maintaining the fiat.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#47

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

cryptodogemoon wrote: post #20
celticninja wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cryptocurrencies this coin was essentially a pre-mine which is done specifically to enrich the creators without any expense to themselves. Say what you want about bitcoin, but Satoshi Nakamoto earned his coins fairly (even though he may never access them) and created a fair and level playing field for everyone who started mining alongside him. Further the vague wording about the supply size means it is unlikely th…

Satoshi actually used a manipulative log curve for his minting algorhythm which effectively created a ponzi style distribution scheme. The majority of BTC was produced to the small userbase for minimal effort, whereas time passes the computational work and wattage required to produce coins for late adopters increases as presumably more users discover the system. Satoshi easily could have chosen a linear algorithm ant…

>Satoshi easily could have chosen a linear algorithm anticipating additional work input with more users, instead he designed a system to exploit late adopters.

Are you suggesting he provides a bigger reward for work as time goes on, thereby providing more currency later in the piece?

That would be counter-intuitive to the idea of bitcoin as a fixed store of wealth (strong libertarian influence, anti-bank ethos being kinda the cornerstone of the origins of bitcoin).

His plan was that the transaction fees would be what sustains the miners due to bitcoin being worth a lot once the block reward was low. The deflationary nature was not "manipulative" in the way you are implying, it was done in order to slowly wind down the reward and currency generation so eventually the transaction fees were the purpose for mining.

>The aspect of Bitcoins having a limited supply is mostly ineffective, as all the features of Bitcoin are now available in other service networks which are including more advanced features and better ASIC resistant algos.

Whether or not this is true is neither here nor there, the effectiveness is non consequential when it comes to the intent. He was not attempting to exploit late adopters.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#48

Post by VMG »

DalasNoin wrote: post #14
nope96 wrote: post #5

Any time I read about Ether I think about this - "12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers..." At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some "early contributors". Where's…

The FAQ is probably outdated. The roadmap in the article includes the switch too proof of stake. Proof of stake generally does not include block rewards, so it will stop completely.

What's the incentive to participate honestly in Proof of Stake if there is no reward?

Leaving aside the question whether PoS even works at all https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#49

Post by wslh »

nope96 wrote: post #16
marcell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? Why does Larry Page or Google Engineer #1 own billions of dollars of Google stock? Because he was there on day 1 and you weren't :)

I know the US Government oversaw the Google IPO and the stocks weren't printed out of thin air. In the Ether ICO, a big whale friend of Vitalik could have sent his Bitcoin in during the ICO sale, got Ether for it, then Vitalik sent him his Bitcoin back. Poof, Ether printed out of thin air - there is no way to prove this did not happen. That is the problem with these ICOs vs. using Proof of Work to fairly distribute t…

I was following your point of view until you said "That is the problem with these ICOs vs. using Proof of Work to fairly distribute the currency".

First, PoW can't be said to fairly distribute the currency but rather to secure the currency against double spend attacks. If it is a fair method or not is another discussion where many models are possible.

On the other hand there are questions about who develops the currency and how the team is funded. In this case Ethereum, Zcash and others propose this model which is valid. Bitcoin development is not progressing from thin air and it is not funded by the PoW mechanism anyway so the consensus method and the development work are different problems.

Re: Vitalik Unveils Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap

#50

Post by Nokinside »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #39
Nokinside wrote: post #27

Protocols like IPFS, BitTorrent produce tangible value for the users. In all fairness it would be nice to see them getting at least something in order of $10 million for their nice effort. These new ICO's are manufactured to give the company that develops them hundreds of millions or even speculative billions in paper. How long until people realize again that these products have near-zero marginal cost? Artificial sc…

Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users: transferring money and ability to create ICOs (just to name two). People value transferring money. It's a challenging technological task, which the humanity has been trying to solve for many years. It's a task that many people find useful. You don't mind paying 3% to your credit card company, do you? Even if you do, evidently many people around the world don't. Why is…

>Ethereum produces tangible value for it's users

Yes. I agree.

The potential capital efficiency for for these services is vastly greater than credit cards. You are trying to undersell the potential in distributed computing platform and smart contract technology if you defend the current cost structure.

The promise of these technologies is to reduce cost of financial transactions almost without limit.

Lets look into the future of efficient and revolutionary transaction and smart contact technology.

If billion people do 10 transactions per day (alternatively 10 billion 1 transactions per day) with cost $0.01 per transaction, the cost of this service would be only $10 million per day or 3.65 billion a year. Remove the operating costs in competitive markets and the profit margins will be extremely low.

The beauty of efficient established markets is that profits will be driven down. Artificial scarcity created by different coin protocols is temporary phenomenon. It dies when the hype dies.

Post reply on HN