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Ethereum 2.0 launches

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#131

Post by cameronh90 »

dsg42 wrote: post #115
dbetteridge wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a personal level I to have no need or want of cryptocurrencies, but the stated benefits are not for first world, white, city dwellers with ready access to the existing monetary system. - Someone lives somewhere that the U.S refuses to bank with (Sanctions) - Someone who lives somewhere that simply has no financial infrastructure readily accessible and relies on prepaid cards for things like water and electricity (…

Just to be clear, these reasons are: - To commit a crime - Not a real use case (If someone has no access to normal financial infrastructure, including Venmo and similar, how would they ever use crypto) - To avoid processing fees by paying higher fees?

Living somewhere the US has sanctions against isn't a crime.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#132

Post by mikro2nd »

callahad wrote: post #77
mikro2nd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns. Understanding this may necessitate reading some books, but in short, sovereigns have historically proven to be untrustworthy, so a trust-free form of money is a powerful notion.

> The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns. Do you believe that any existing cryptocurrencies currently fulfill that criterion?

Yes.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#133

Post by nabla9 »

Sargos wrote: post #41
tormeh wrote: post #31

Is it still deflationary? Wondering if I should invest in the coin itself (which makes sense for deflationary coins) or a company doing something with it (which makes sense for an inflationary coin)

BTC (2%) and ETH (4.5%) are both inflationary right now and have never been deflationary. BTC will be inflationary until about 100 years from now. ETH is a bit more complex but in about a year when it switches from proof of work to proof of stake the inflation will drop to <1%. When EIP-1559 is implemented next year then most of the transaction fees are burned which will likely drop the inflation rate into the negati…

Deflation = value of money increases.

Inflation = value of money decreases.

Sargos seems to be confusing 'inflation' and 'monetary inflation' (increase in money supply).

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#134

Post by ForHackernews »

louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

Imagine an extremely slow CPU, where every opcode cost money to run. Imagine you could deploy code to this machine, and it would be guaranteed to execute in a publicly verifiable way, and nobody could change it or modify it (unless you get several influential people to agree to a fork that changes the rules).

I think that's basically Ethereum.

Oh, also imagine that instead of costing money directly, you instead have to pay somebody to run their car engine at full speed while up on blocks in a garage. Oh, and if they ever stop revving their car engine, somebody else might rev their engines faster/more and then they can steal all your money.

Edit: Apparently ETH 2.0 has reduced the amount of pointless engine-revving.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#135

Post by Kbelicius »

SCHiM wrote: post #69
louwrentius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not looking for links to books. I'm looking for an explanation in plain English that shows why any of this matters.

In simple terms. The currencies, and related technologies al deal with the problem of transferring of money/services between parties where no centralized trust/power exists. This is, in the words of their proponents to prevent abuse by the trusted party: Credit card companies blocking transfers to legitimate companies on the basis of pressure from the US gov. Banks printing money and devaluing currency of currency ho…

> If you write a program on the eth blockchain, no party can one change the way the contract was written or execute. What is written is what it does. You can't change the TOS later or something similar. They are called contracts for this reason.

Did things change since the days of the DAO hack?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#136

Post by dragonelite »

flixic wrote: post #32
ArtWomb wrote: post #29

Whoa, according to AllNodes, Expected ROI for Eth2 stakeholders is 16.6%, which easily beats out almost any other DeFi interest bearing account (typically ~10%)!

APR depends on total staked amount, and decreases as staked Eth increases. You can see the chart here: https://launchpad.ethereum.org Now that the launch has succeeded, I will stake some of my Eth. As more people do that, APR will fall.

So probably somewhere between 5~6%, maybe i should convert some of my Tezos to eth in the future.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#137

Post by jesusthatsgreat »

pmachinery wrote: post #59
louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

> I don't understand cryptocurrencies. People buy cryptocurrencies and hope the price rises and they can dump it back into the USD it has always been valued in, before everyone else does the same. Since spamming forums to inflate the price doesn't work as it did a decade ago, in order to prevent them crashing to the floor, all kinds of nonsense white elephant use-cases have to be imagined/invented. We all understand…

Same could be said about the stock market. Lots of companies aren't in profit and would die without the ability to dump shares and without speculators (and indeed the government itself - the ultimate speculator) propping it all up. Many of them die anyway, sometimes right after raising fresh capital from suckers who believed in their vision.

We've been here before in tech with the dotcom bubble. Lots of noise, nonsense and white elephants. Most projects will crash and burn, some will go on to change our daily lives.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#138

Post by louwrentius »

markkat wrote: post #125
louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

It makes me sad, because I expected a comment like this to be the highest on HN. In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to…

> In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use.

Does this sentence actually mean anything?

> In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid.

What does this mean in concrete terms?

> Imagine using your phone to buy shares in a recording artist you just discovered, and selling those shares when they win a grammy. Imagine building a stream of passive income based on the shares you've earned in projects you've worked on throughout your life.

Who wants this?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#139

Post by DennisP »

xorcist wrote: post #82
mckirk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it really shouldn't make sense, because Bitcoin is a completely separate currency from ETH... but it's still way too deeply connected to 'anything crypto' in people's minds, it seems.

Why would it make more sense to price it in USD? Bitcoin is the de facto base currency for all cryptocurrency exchanges.

Not really anymore. If for example you look at the ETH markets, the top 12 trading pairs by volume are with national currencies, and the first market with ETH/BTC is down at the 13th spot.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum#markets

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#140

Post by rjknight »

louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

This is a bit like saying that nobody needs a Linux desktop because Windows is good enough. Some people just care more than you do about certain principles, even if caring about those principles means that they have to endure a lower "quality" product.

Most blockchains are strictly inferior to a modern financial system when it comes to things like speed and cost of transferring small sums of money - which is the use case that most people have. But, if you are running Wikileaks, blockchain payments are superior because the credit card companies can't decide to stop processing your payments.

Does anyone else need it? Right now, I think the answer is "no". But nobody really needed a Linux desktop either, and 25 years on we have Chromebooks and Android.

Ethereum allows you to upload complex scripts to it, where those scripts are executed by a variety of different nodes which compare results and ensure that the script was executed faithfully. Do I personally need this? Probably not, no. There's a competitive market in cloud hosting and very few circumstances where I would be afraid that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft is going to tamper with my computation, or refuse to execute it. But there are situations in which it is difficult to get multiple parties to agree on a trustworthy host for data and applications, and current political trends point toward that problem growing in significance. Maybe at some point we will want to use blockchain systems to maintain audit trails or even to coordinate our computations.

If these systems can prove robustness and reliability over a long period of time, maybe it makes sense to write the rules for multi-party computations as Ethereum scripts, and it becomes a ubiquitous low-level part of the stack. Maybe everyone ends up having an Ethereum account and we use it in place of the current payment system. Who knows? These scenarios are unlikely, but then nobody in 1995 would have believed that in 2020 both the majority of the world's servers and the world's most popular personal computing devices would run Linux.

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