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Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

launchpad.ethereum.org

41–50 of 266 posts

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#41
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proof-of-stake rewards those who already have enough to stake As opposed to people who have money buying mining hardware to make more money that can be invested into mining hardware?

Yes, that's how most businesses work. You start with a capital investment, often times through a loan, and through smart management, make a profit on the margin , that you can choose to reinvest to stay competitive. Proof-of-stake is completely unlike this. People who "have" are not required to exchange any effort to reap new reward. They retain purchasing power while the "have-nots" lose purchasing power. I dunno if…

I wouldn't say it's completely unlike. I don't think renting out some mining hardware for near-guaranteed return is any different in effort. It's about the same as putting money in an investment fund. PoW, PoS, and other investments practically end up with: until you withdraw the money you can invest your existing wealth to get returns, without real effort.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which energy intensive industries you're thinking of, but bitcoin mining has the potential advantage that it can be turned on and off at a moment's notice, and doesn't require constant human supervision. That's not true of a lot of industrial processes.

Aluminium smelting.

So, trying in good faith to understand, isn't the problem that the output in this case is physical, while Bitcoin's energy-to-money output is digital?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#43
post #34
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you could. But the presence of Bitcoin and proof-of-work actually speeds up the competition in the renewable energy space by making it more profitable than it otherwise would be. That's a good thing, it gets us to the world we want more quickly.

Building more renewable energy capacity only to have that capacity immediately used to mine Bitcoin rather than replace some existing fossil fuel use is not progress.

I don't see why not. One consequence is investment in renewable efficiency, which applies to the energy industry generally outside of crypto mining specifically. Another consequence is needing something to do with excess energy, which leads to more competition amongst sellers in the grid, making energy cheaper. This does marginally reduce dependence on fossil fuel.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#44

I honestly think eth2 will have an incredible effect. Think of all the developing countries or countries without proper financial infrastructure, even places where you do not trust your local currency. All these places will benefit hugely from a bootstrapped currency ready to be deployed for very little effort. Launching an ecommerce will suddenly be much easier for a many more people. I'm also very interested in see…

I can well imagine for politically-unstable countries this is very good. Not really sure about the rest of the world!

Besides, one distant analogy: I remember reading how internet will revolutionise totalitarian governments, because it is an unstoppable river of information. Well, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia are going strong regardless.

Bitcoin/eth are great, until some crony government introduces the death penalty for using it, or sth.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm choosing the case where the price is too high, because most people rely on energy being available and that's why there's a number of laws (depending on the country) that protect from disconnection. In practical terms, I prefer my freezer not to stop working and spoil stored food rather than having universal world currency which fluctates less.

Then we shouldn't have an issue, since I explained how such a system would continue to provide in that case.

Why would anyone run an energy storage system for general population in that system? If they can undercut the energy companies at some times and sell to the Bitcoin miners, why would they even bother with residential customers?

Sure, people who can afford energy storage themselves would be sorted. (Most of the time) Anyone below that wealth threshold would be at the mercy of "am I more important than the monetary gain today".

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Validators will need to run a computer with reasonably modern specs (at least 1TB SSD, 8-16GB RAM, multiple cores) in order to collect fees and not have their funds slashed. IIRC you need to have at least 70% uptime to not lose any funds, and to be a good investment you need 99%+ uptime. If you consider that modern systems with the required specs can run on 10W, you should get ~90kWh in a year. Transaction-speed wise…

Competing with Bitcoin's TPS in the single digits, high-hundreds/low thousands is a big leap... but still not enough to replace the higher order global currencies. In order to gain the necessary L2 support, they'll have to establish dominance relative to bitcoin with an equally lacking TPS. Seems like a "If they come, we will build it" problem.

Plenty of L2 solutions already exist and can be used with Ethereum already. If your single comparison point is the existing banking and credit card payment networks, you can take a look at e.g, Raiden which is already deployed on mainnet and can scale with the number of the nodes participating in the network. Hundreds of thousands of payment transactions per second are already possible.

The main issue is that most of them still are very complex to get fully operational, there is no big consensus among users on "what-to-use-when" and they all require a non-insignificant cost to setup in terms of all the contract transactions needed to get in and out of the chain.

There is no reason to doubt that they be more mature along with ETH2 and that that L1-L2 will complement each other nicely.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#48
post #42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aluminium smelting.

So, trying in good faith to understand, isn't the problem that the output in this case is physical, while Bitcoin's energy-to-money output is digital?

Why is that a problem? The price for Aluminium is more stable than the price of bitcoin.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#49
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean no more mining and waste of electricity ?

Just to riff on this idea, despite inevitable pushback: Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money. This pushes competition towards cheaper and cheaper sources of energy. First it's finding jurisdictions that subsidize it, then it's creating your own cheaper energy sources. Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. The penultimate phase is custom off-grid min…

> The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc.

Wasteful, why not put all their power output into Bitcoin mining then? Sounds like a version of the nano machines story multiplying and eating the planet, in this case for the sole purpose to mine Bitcoin, leaving a carcass of the Earth and nobody to spend those coins.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's how most businesses work. You start with a capital investment, often times through a loan, and through smart management, make a profit on the margin , that you can choose to reinvest to stay competitive. Proof-of-stake is completely unlike this. People who "have" are not required to exchange any effort to reap new reward. They retain purchasing power while the "have-nots" lose purchasing power. I dunno if…

I wouldn't say it's completely unlike. I don't think renting out some mining hardware for near-guaranteed return is any different in effort. It's about the same as putting money in an investment fund. PoW, PoS, and other investments practically end up with: until you withdraw the money you can invest your existing wealth to get returns, without real effort.

Proof-of-stake requires the majority of what is mined has to be sold on the open market. This redistributes mined coin to any user anywhere, rich or poor. If you mine and do not sell, you perpetually consume and fail in short order.

Proof-of-stake doesn't require this natural, market-driven redistribution. It exchanges it for an inflationary process that further separates the rich and the poor.

They're fundamentally different.

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