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Ethereum 2.0 launches

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#311

Post by hollerith »

konschubert wrote: post #190
lekevicius wrote: post #39

I am incredibly happy about this. It's the first step for a major cryptocurrency towards ledger security that does not damage the environment via mining. I always hated how wasteful and energy-inefficient mining is. Staking reduces energy costs by many, many orders of magnitude. With lightweight clients in development, it is possible to validate chain using Raspberry Pi. I hope (but don't expect) that some time in th…

Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are n…

>Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future.

I always thought the hardwired reward for mining, namely, X btc every 10 minutes, is the cause of Bitcoin's wasting electricity.

The electricity used is roughly proportional to the hashrate, which in turn is roughly proportional to the price of btc -- until the next halving, which I think is more than one year but less than 2 years from now.

These halvings of the reward every 2 years (which occur on a schedule set before Bitcoin was launched all those years ago) will some time in the next 10 years (which is 5 halving, representing a reduction in the reward by a factor of 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 == 32) or 12 years bring the Bitcoin network's electricity usage down low enough that a reasonable person will no longer avoid Bitcoin out of worry that it is bad for the global climate.

Note that this mining reward doled out every 10 minutes is not a transaction fee. E.g., neither of the transacting parties (i.e., neither the sender nor the receiver) pays it.

So tell me again what will eventually kill Bitcoin.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#312

Post by microtherion »

KSteffensen wrote: post #278
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No KYC Offline account creation Instantly liquid programmable assets Programmable banking Financial censorship resistant Micro finance Anyone can use it, it’s surprisingly simple You could create your own company+shares if you want and they can be instantly available on any market. Ever tried trading a penny stock, or an international stock? It takes forever to open an account at a brokerage where they may or may not…

> No KYC I don't know what KYC is but I'm not US based. Sounds like some fee that's peculiar to US banking environment (which I have heard is extraordinarily bureaucratic). >Instantly liquid programmable assets Another example of opaque blockchain jargon. Maybe it makes sense, but not as a way to convert the sceptical. >Programmable banking I can currently program transfers to happen regularly every month on a certai…

> I don't know what KYC is

KYC = Know Your Customer

> but I'm not US based

When sufficiently large sums of money are involved, it's hard to conduct legal business and not play by US rules. Swiss banks discovered this, at considerable expense to themselves and their customers. Cryptocurrency exchanges are going through the same discovery process right now, in both the legal and the philosophical sense.

> > Instantly liquid programmable assets

The unfortunate property of the liquidity of cryptocurrency assets is that they have a tendency to get siphoned away or evaporating in ways not anticipated by their owner.

> > Financial censorship resistant

> Is this a feature? Don't we as a society want a way to control e.g. drug lords and tax evaders moving their money around?

That's precisely one of the questions at stake here. Some folks appear to pine for the benevolent overlordship of the likes of, say, Ross Ulbricht.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#313

Post by hanniabu »

std_badalloc wrote: post #250
jpxw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference between realt.co and REITs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust

The difference is presumably the digital contract, that is written in a programming language that only a handful of people on earth can understand, where a programming error can make your money disappear, such that you have no recourse in the court system. Another difference is the pyramid scheme incentives in the cryptocurrency tech, causing everyone who's bought into it to be incentivised to talk about how great it…

Please don't comment on subjects you know nothing about and are clearly ignorant and show no desire to actually learn.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#314

Post by togs »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #288
pmachinery wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why am I paying fees if there's no middle-person?

Assuming you mean transaction fees on the Bitcoin and Ethereum (or similar) networks: Transaction fees are an important economic inventive for persons or organizations who run the “nodes” that make up the network. The hardware, electricity, and maintenance by humans needed to run those nodes cost money, and running them is not an altruistic endeavor. One of the goals is to make a profit; staking/mining rewards and tr…

Aren't transaction fees economic incentives for persons or organizations who run banks that make up the "nodes" of our current network? So everyone is now a bank? Or rather, anyone can choose to run a bank? But then as time passes some banks will get big, and it becomes impractical for anyone else to choose to run a bank, but now the New Big Banks are not accountable to any government as they (technically) are today...

I'm skeptical because I read this and it sounds like using technology to create a system with even less accountability and whose outcomes, however horrific, will be justified by "That's just how the system works; I don't know what to tell you."

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#315

Post by Zambyte »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #237
parksy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing completeness in layman's terms means you can write programs on it. Traditionally a computer that most people are familiar with is a single machine, like PC or the device we can hold in our hands. Etherium is a swarm of millions of computers that anyone can add to the swarm. When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. But wh…

> When people claim Ethereum is turing complete, it means that anyone can launch a program into it, and the "swarm" runs the program. (...) Ethereum has baked in protocols so that the distributed result of millions of nodes running a program reaches a stasticial consensus. Usually the reason to run something on more than one computing unit is to achieve additive gains - like getting results faster, or processing more…

> This however sounds like a million computers computing the exact same thing. Why would one want to do that?

It is what it sounds like, and it isn't ideal. In order for the Ethereum network to reach an agreement on the result of a computation, multiple nodes need to do the computation to check each other. How do you decide how many nodes need to do the computation for it to be accepted by the network? That's not an easy question to answer. The simplest and safest way is to require 100% of nodes to do the computation. Safely getting that % down from 100 to increase the throughput of the network is a problem actively being worked on.

As for a generic use case, think of Ethereum as something like AWS Lambda that happens to have native support for transacting assets.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#316

Post by [deleted] »

mrlala wrote: post #238
dmihal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget about the developing world. I'm an American living in Europe. My money is in the US banking system and in crypto. There's no easy way for me to "Venmo" money to my friends here, I'd have to use an international bank transfer which would take over a week and cost high fees. But with my friends in crypto: I can just transfer them Dai. It takes about 15 seconds and costs less than a dollar (and will get cheaper w…

And what about the costs of then converting eth for each person to a useable currency? What if you were to make a mistake and send money to the wrong person? What if someone hacks into whereever you are storing your eth and you lose them? I mean I get what you are saying, but you just leave out all the pesky little details which at the end of the day are very important and why there are costs associated to banking.

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#317

Post by dirtnugget »

hanniabu wrote: post #306
dirtnugget wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, as far as I understood the time between blocks in a PoS chain is basically just a timer (e.g. 10 seconds). There is no need to adjust that dynamically because there is no "race" to solve a problem. I guess it is even more predictable if it is not dynamically adjusted.

This is incorrect. The difficulty is PoS adjusts to meet the target block time just like it does in PoW.

I have to suspect that you are wrong. Can you provide a source? There is no mentioning of difficulty in the spec, instead there are predefined slot times:

https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/dev/specs/phas...

Here is how they sync: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946264

Assuming they describe the BeaconBlocks mentioned here: https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/dev/specs/phas...

Also, which effect would an increased difficulty have?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#318

Post by nootropicat »

aeternum wrote: post #304
DennisP wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually research out of Princeton, that says blockchains destabilize if the rewards are dominated by fees. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...

These researchers really need to re-evaluate their assumptions: >Figure 2: Illustration of Mining Gaps. Miners will only mine when the instantaneous expected reward exceeds the instantaneous cost This makes no sense, rational actors generally consider discounted future cash flows, not just instantaneous reward. Perhaps the quality of the paper is explained by the researchers following this strategy and only working o…

Discounted cash flow applies to capital like asics, but energy used for mining is instantaneous cost. When the expected revenue from mining is lower than expected power expenses mining makes zero sense.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#319

Post by pavlov »

joosters wrote: post #259
The_Colonel wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also those stored procedures are immutable, written in a language with more holes than Swiss cheese... You're probably referencing this fuck up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) The huge advantage of smart contracts is that they are supposed to be trustless - you don't need to necessarily trust your business partners because contract is set in stone ... code and will be executed exactly as agree…

You don't have to go back that far in time, 'hacks' and bugs in 'smart' contracts happen almost every day. Here's a recent $7M loss: https://cointelegraph.com/news/yield-generating-stablecoin-p... and here's a $89M loss less than a week ago: https://decrypt.co/49657/oracle-exploit-sees-100-million-liq... It's not even the first time that the 'Compound' smart contract has been 'hacked', but that doesn't stop fools fro…

"I'd like my investment bank to be an immutable, unfixable piece of code that's a sitting duck target for hackers"

-- nobody ever (except Ethereum ideologists)

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#320

Post by michaelsbradley »

purerandomness wrote: post #300
michaelsbradley wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you mean transaction fees on the Bitcoin and Ethereum (or similar) networks: Transaction fees are an important economic inventive for persons or organizations who run the “nodes” that make up the network. The hardware, electricity, and maintenance by humans needed to run those nodes cost money, and running them is not an altruistic endeavor. One of the goals is to make a profit; staking/mining rewards and tr…

Wait, but then we went full-circle again. What problem is cryptocurrency solving then?

Ethereum (or Bitcoin) is not controlled or regulated by a single entity or group of entities with exclusive membership.

The software behind it is open source and anyone with the know-how can contribute to its improvement.

Anyone with the means and know-how can be part of the network, i.e. operate one/more nodes on the network. With e.g. Ethereum 2.0 (ETH2) the bar is much lower in terms of hardware and electricity costs. For example, I’m running an ETH2 node at home on an Intel NUC (Core i3) with the BIOS set to “low power mode”; its power draw is hovering around 10 Watts, and it would be around 4 Watts if I wasn’t also running a non-mining ETH1 node on the same box (presently necessary as the ETH2 network transitions away from being an ETH1+ETH2 hybrid).

Pretty much anyone with a computer can setup a wallet and near instantly send/receive funds to anyone else in the world who also has a wallet. There is no red tape and no regulation/interference (in the tech itself, that is; your local government may have some laws).

There is the difficulty of acquiring cryptocurrency with USD, CNY, etc. But in most places it’s not that difficult to setup an account with an exchange; or you can arrange for a direct transfer if you know someone who is willing to swap crypto for cash (just be aware of local laws).

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