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Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

launchpad.ethereum.org

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#101

Post by jihodl »

beaner wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #3

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…

Well put. Furthermore, humanities demand for energy is capped by its capacity to economically convert energy into useful work (e.g. through the production of durable goods, commodities, transportation services, etc). The Bitcoin network effectively gives us a new category of useful work and uncaps our demand for energy by decoupling it from the physical economy. Thus Bitcoin presents us with a viable pathway to becoming a Kardashev level 1 society by removing this bound. Energy will become abundant, the real price of energy will decrease due to the action of this scale-out and the innovations that entails, and the real price of bitcoin will march upward in accordance with the stock-to-flow model. Thinking of energy as priced against bitcoin and remembering how the network difficulty adjustment operates should help to elucidate how these two price actions can occur simultaneously for those of you scratching your head on that one. The feature you pointed out about mining being the most direct conversion between energy and value is an important one for people to grok in order to "get bitcoin". I would argue that energy itself is the only thing in the universe with intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of energy transcends constructs of human society. For instance, consider the animal kingdom and the flow of energy through the food web. By intimately linking the value of the bitcoin to the aggregate joules of energy flowing into the network, Satoshi delivered the most important financial innovation in the history of mankind; a digitally transactable surrogate for the intrinsic value embodied within energy.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#102

Post by krageon »

Ruphin wrote: post #91
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #54

When I go through the steps to see what needs to be done to be a validator it says "terms of use are entered into by and between you and the Ethereum Foundation". So it's a centralized joke?

The Terms of Service cover the usage of the Launchpad website. The website is a service created by the Ethereum Foundation to guide users through the procedures required to join the Ethereum 2.0 network as a validator. You don't need to use this website (or agree to the TOS for the website) to participate in the Ethereum 2.0 network. The technical requirements and procedures are fully documented in other places (in a…

They could just as easily have released user-friendly documentation without a ToS. Terms of Service are a way to oppress your users and are never a good sign.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#103

Post by SuoDuanDao »

The_Colonel wrote: post #75
beaner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Necessarily renewable because it is the cheapest possible energy long-term; you only need to pay for upkeep, not for resources to convert. Maybe this depends on whether you think renewables will become cheaper than coal/gas, and maybe you're pessimistic about that. I'm not. Robust because the phenomenon can begin detached from the energy grid by profit-seeking entities with capital to invest. Doesn't need permission,…

What has even higher potential to be cheap is nuclear energy - when you don't care as much about (operation, storage) safety, a lot of costs fall out ... Nuclear energy has high fixed costs but then scales pretty well. As crypto currencies with PoW become a major industry, it's not difficult to imagine it might be cost-effective to build huge nuclear plants in some corrupt African country. (Africa has also huge untap…

Cost of capital is higher in less stable countries though - the backers need insurance against unexpected outcomes either way, corrupt African countries (or some future equivalent) would require less community buy-in but what makes that true would cause other worries to the owners of capital.

Nuclear works in stable, rules-following countries like France where its high energy paybacks subsidise good salaries for an army of bureaucrats enforcing the rules.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#104

Post by krageon »

beaner wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #3

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 whole "this costs too much power!" movement is disingenuous, it generally relies upon comparisons to Visa or similar networks. These networks are built upon the suffering of millions (which you can I suppose equate to rampant CO2 production, if you really wanted to) and should not be used at all. Any alternative is better than that.

Then of course there is the whole notion that using a lot of power is in and of itself a big evil, which is ridiculous. Even from an environmental perspective, big industries are by far the biggest offenders. By shifting the perspective of the discourse away from the real offenders towards other "problems", we are doing a disservice to the actual issues.

At this point I'm convinced it's a movement composed primarily of people who don't understand what they're talking about, sprinkled with a light dash of actual malicious actors. This makes sense, as that's a realistic cross-section of the internet at large.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#107

Post by rglullis »

beaner wrote: post #94
rglullis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we care about is trust minimization And the costs of achieving those. > provides the best-yet incentives At an ever-growing prohibitive cost . > most equitable distribution of coin. Hardly true when you have more than 50% of the hashing power coming from farms ran in China on subsidized power and not paying for externalities.

I think you have it backwards. The price of the asset being mined determines the costs of the energy put in to mine it. By equitable distribution, I mean that mining is on average only marginally profitable; the bulk of mined coin needs to be sold on the open market, which means there is always liquidity and availability to those seeking to enter or exit. Hashing power centralization and coin distribution are differe…

> The price of the asset being mined determines the costs of the energy put in to mine it.

No, you have it backwards. A BTC that is already mined has as much value as a BTC that is yet to be mined, whether now or twenty years in the future.

Again, the fact that we spend energy to get more BTC is just accidental. There is no absolute law that postulates that the cost of energy and price of the asset need to be correlated.

> Decentralization of hashing power will continue to increase as the renewable energy costs continue to lower.

You are talking about spherical cows, I am talking about actual implementation of the system. Renewable energy costs mean jack shit when you have big central entities subsidizing dirty energy and if no one pays for the externalities. Also, it doesn't matter how "clean" a source of energy is. Unless you find a way to break the law of thermodynamics, the best way to be sustainable is to not consume the energy in the first place.

There are already plenty of market incentives for us to be more efficient and produce energy, we don't need to have an artificial component added to this system for it to work.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#109

Post by tromp »

woahAcademia wrote: post #108

I stopped trusting ethereum after EIP669. Ethereum used to have a soft cap of 100M coins. They removed the cap. Ethereum is no Bitcoin. It's more akin to dogecoin/fiat with its infinite money. Hope POS works so Bitcoin can adopt it.

Nothing wrong with uncapped supply. It's still disinflationary. In fact, it ends up with zero inflation when tail emission matches inevitable coin loss.

There is however something wrong with defaulting on promises made at launch.

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