Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb • Hacker News Board

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#21

Post by arcticbull » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

flarex wrote: post #20

arcticbull wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even those are mostly exchanges (speculation), derivatives (extra speculation) and stable coins (to enable speculation on exchanges which want to avoid AML and KYC in the facilitation of money laundering).

Whether you agree with the use cases or traction they're gaining doesn't negate that there's a lot of others that do find them useful.

That's totally fair and I only call it out because in my original post I said "other than speculation and money laundering" (which I freely admit is a big use case) and you provided me a list dominated by speculation and money laundering.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#22

Post by woah » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #19

flarex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralised Finance (Defi) apps are starting to gain traction on Ethereum. Theres about half a billion in funds currently making use of them. https://defipulse.com

Even those are mostly exchanges (speculation), derivatives (extra speculation) and stable coins (to enable speculation on exchanges which want to avoid AML and KYC in the facilitation of money laundering).

We use the stablecoin Dai for althea.net. There are several networks running providing internet to people with wireless mesh nodes that pay each other with Dai.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#23

Post by CydeWeys » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #4

majewsky wrote: post #3

> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?

> but by that over 2 magnitudes? Why do you question the claim? The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different. I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative t…

The total power consumption of any given crypto currency scales according to the ongoing value of new block rewards per fixed unit of time. You can ignore the rest of the factors (like algo, block time) for the most part. Miners run if they can make money for a given cost of electricity, and don't if they can't.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#24

Post by flarex » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #21

flarex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you agree with the use cases or traction they're gaining doesn't negate that there's a lot of others that do find them useful.

That's totally fair and I only call it out because in my original post I said "other than speculation and money laundering" (which I freely admit is a big use case) and you provided me a list dominated by speculation and money laundering.

Maker and Compound both support interest and borrowing which are what you'd find in a traditional bank (at much worse rates). The money laundering argument could be applied to anything that can't be controlled by governments. Unfortunately there are many countries where monetary policy is oppressive so Defi finance is a legitimate alternative. Just because technology can be abused doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used. See the internet etc.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#25

Post by rolltiide » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #21

flarex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you agree with the use cases or traction they're gaining doesn't negate that there's a lot of others that do find them useful.

That's totally fair and I only call it out because in my original post I said "other than speculation and money laundering" (which I freely admit is a big use case) and you provided me a list dominated by speculation and money laundering.

The opposite of anti-money laundering (AML) isn’t actual money laundering

AML implementation is a poor and misapplied user experience that is usually done as an excuse to prevent money laundering. Many services apply it arbitrarily with no scrutiny and use it to steal users funds. Unclear regulations per country dont help and unscrupulous actors take advantage.

Onchain and noncustodial services are either exempt or function autonomously, removing this particular duty of the state. They also typically have unlimited amounts that you can move, compared to arbitrary monetary amounts that centralized systems impose. “DeFi” efforts are being made to make the experience of using onchain noncustodial services as fast or faster than offchain custodial services and a lot of progress has been made towards that.

Regarding the actual money laundering everyone’s afraid of, even the strictest regulations never actually prevented that while taxing all business and financial institutions. The Patriot Act wouldn’t have flagged any of the 9/11 transactions, HSBC still laundered billions for the actual cartel, minorities go to jail for accidentally using over $10,000 in cash, and even Al Capone could have passed the KYC part of AML regulations, so who is this for? Any way its going to be moot and already is for a lot of people.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#26

Post by DennisP » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #19

flarex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralised Finance (Defi) apps are starting to gain traction on Ethereum. Theres about half a billion in funds currently making use of them. https://defipulse.com

Even those are mostly exchanges (speculation), derivatives (extra speculation) and stable coins (to enable speculation on exchanges which want to avoid AML and KYC in the facilitation of money laundering).

You quoted "a vibrant ecosystem of banking functions, asset management, trading exchanges, and more" and called it a stretch. Now you're complaining it's just stuff for speculation like exchanges and derivatives. That's literally what the quote said was there.

A popular asset management system is this: https://www.tokensets.com/

Maker and Compound allow borrowing backed by collateral.

Decentralized exchanges include the various DEXs and Uniswap.

All of these get substantial usage.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#27

Post by scribu » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

As an outsider to the blockchain world, I would be more interested to know why proof-of-stake is not used by Ethereum yet.

Found one article on the subject: https://medium.com/ibbc-io/the-beautiful-complexity-of-pos-3...

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#28

Post by robcohen » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

scribu wrote: post #27

As an outsider to the blockchain world, I would be more interested to know why proof-of-stake is not used by Ethereum yet. Found one article on the subject: https://medium.com/ibbc-io/the-beautiful-complexity-of-pos-3...

Because it's hard. Also technical debt moving from Eth 1 to 2 makes it harder.

My guess is another blockchain will execute PoS better because it won't have tech debt.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#29

Post by tromp » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #23

wyldfire wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but by that over 2 magnitudes? Why do you question the claim? The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different. I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative t…

The total power consumption of any given crypto currency scales according to the ongoing value of new block rewards per fixed unit of time. You can ignore the rest of the factors (like algo, block time) for the most part. Miners run if they can make money for a given cost of electricity, and don't if they can't.

Indeed; see for example this screener showing daily issuance in dollars:

https://messari.io/screener/play-around-074BC5B4

from which we can infer that Bitcoin uses about 10x more electricity than Ethererum.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#30

Post by DennisP » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

some1else wrote: post #8

Given that they keep postponing the transition to PoS, wouldn't it be smarter to remove the artificial difficulty increase and make the network more efficient?

Fwiw the transition doesn't look that far off now. There's a working multi-client testnet for the new (separate) proof-of-stake chain, and a recent proposal by Vitalik to transition the old chain into it more quickly than previously expected: https://ethresear.ch/t/alternative-proposal-for-early-eth1-e...