Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum 2.0 launches

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 639 posts

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#471

Post by kemonocode »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #378
kemonocode wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with these kind of questions is that they're hardly ever done in good faith, and they show over and over again whenever crypto is brought up on HN. Crypto has its good uses, and I've relied on it for my livelihood before (and even wished it wasn't just used as a speculation vehicle) when traditional banking couldn't meet my needs, so it's a very Americentric/Eurocentric thing to assume it's only ever good to…

Could you expand on a scenario where "traditional banking couldn't meet your needs," but crypto was able to?

I've talked about it in length before here in HN comments (feel free to look into my comment history) but paraphrasing: I live in Venezuela, so many things people take for granted are unfeasible/outright impossible for me to get access to. I have a PayPal account but no useful international bank account, and as I refuse to keep any significant amounts of money there, that money needs to go somewhere, and physical cash comes with its own issues too.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#472

Post by Flashtoo »

javert wrote: post #463
downandout wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin might fall into obsolescence, but it won’t be because it is mined. It simply isn’t as useful as ETH. I firmly believe that DeFi, which is based upon ETH’s smart contracts and distributed EVM concept, is the future of the finance and investing universe, even with its many issues today. Flash loans/minting, for example, have turned the markets into the ultimate meritocracy. Anyone - rich or poor - can access up…

> Anyone - rich or poor - can access up to hundreds of millions of dollars instantly to execute any profitable transaction, no human review or approval necessary What does this mean? If I'm poor (or rich), why not borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to make some highly speculative trade? If it goes well, I win big; if it goes tits up, the lender loses big (not me). I'm certain that's an uncharitable reading of you…

Flash loans let anyone borrow a large amount of crypto with no collateral, provided the loan amount plus a fee is returned in the same transaction it is borrowed in. No collateral is required because there is no risk (assuming no exploits).

This means you can't take the highly speculative trade, you can only go for a sure thing. But if you do have a sure thing, you can borrow as much currency as the lender can provide.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#473

Post by cdiddy2 »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #453
colecut wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the highest dapp compatibility

> It has the highest dapp compatibility Mmh thanks, well security is more relevant to me, but I nevertheless went to their website. Apparently it's a browser plugin. That's a big security no-no from my side, too much attack surface - sorry.

What you really want is a hardware wallet(trezor) that hooks into metamask. That way you have the usability of the plugin without the risk that it can take all your money

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#474

Post by damon_c »

lifeformed wrote: post #347
deeeeplearning wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true about the majority of the workings of the internet, or the electrical engineering that built their phones or dozens of other things people use everyday without understanding. How is that relevant in this case?

Because laypeople know what benefit the internet or their phones provide. No layperson knows what the benefit of cryptocurrency is.

> laypeople know what benefit the internet

Yes that's true now, but what about in 1997? That's what year it is in Ethereum now.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#475

Post by dmihal »

nikolay wrote: post #330

One question - why didn't Bitcoin drop to zero? I know, VHS survive and Betamax didn't, but unlike Betamax, Ethereum is pretty popular for everything, not just for low-class commodity speculation.

Bitcoin isn't valuable because of its technical properties, just like gold isn't valuable because of its physical properties.

Both are valuable because of their universally recognized scarcity and value. If you want to put your wealth in a SoV cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is the clear schelling point.

Ether will remain competitive with BTC, it may even flip it in market cap, but I doubt Bitcoin will ever go away.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#476

Post by this_user »

1996 wrote: post #329
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...

No, it's very short sighted and wrong: their whole analysis from 2016 depend on a high variance of rewards, which completely ignores the reality of 2017 clogged mempool where miners chose the highest tx fee. Selfish mining is possible, at least for a short period of a time, but sunk costs are eventually sunk costs and you compete for the next block.

Why would mining be anything but selfish? The only reason miners are operating is because they expect a reward that is greater than their expenses.

That means block rewards plus TX fees need to be greater than the cost of running the network. Block rewards are effectively a tax on existing holders through inflation of supply, but that will go to zero in the long run. As the rewards decreases, TX fees will need to increase, which means the average TX will rise. This will increasingly make using BTC prohibitively expensive unless the block size is increased so as to allow more TX per block.

But if the scenario should arise where revenue no longer covers the costs of being a miner, the whole economic model breaks down. This could even get to the point where going rogue, and attempting to exploit the network with the hash power, could become more profitable for a miner.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#477

Post by DennisP »

nonveumann wrote: post #447
DennisP wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw there is a proposal to add a return stack to the EVM: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2315.m... Your evm-assembler looks pretty interesting. It's crossed my mind before to write an evm Forth, just for fun, and the lack of a return stack so far has dissuaded me.

It's more than a proposal at this point, it's been accepted into the next network upgrade, Berlin, and has been implemented in all major clients for a while now.

That's fantastic, thanks!

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#478

Post by garmaine »

wrinkl3 wrote: post #394
rauljordan2020 wrote: post #246

Eth2 dev here, maintainer of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm , one of the implementations currently running the blockchain written in Go. This has been a monumental effort. There are 3 other implementations in mainnet, and consensus is running perfectly. Few other protocols in blockchain have more than one dominant implementation. The beauty of eth2 comes from its efficiency in signature aggregation: https://t…

I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.

This is still true (and is just as true of Ethereum, whether the devs on that project think of it as true or not). There is at least one instance in the past where the network has forked based on the (unspecified) behavior of bitcoind, and a couple more close calls where such forking behavior was properly reported and fixed before triggering.

If there is any way in which different implementations of consensus-critical code behave differently for the same inputs, it can be used to split the network. If you are running a node implementation other than the majority hash-rate reference client, you open yourself up to be potentially vulnerable during the fork. This remains just as true, if not more so with staking instead of proof-of-work.

You can do things to protect yourself like run ALL implementations and shut down if a fork is detected, although properly setting that up is nontrivial and in the end what value is gained? It very, very, VERY rarely makes sense to have multiple reference implementations of consensus code.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#479

Post by brighton36 »

beaner wrote: post #443
downandout wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin might fall into obsolescence, but it won’t be because it is mined. It simply isn’t as useful as ETH. I firmly believe that DeFi, which is based upon ETH’s smart contracts and distributed EVM concept, is the future of the finance and investing universe, even with its many issues today. Flash loans/minting, for example, have turned the markets into the ultimate meritocracy. Anyone - rich or poor - can access up…

The false premise you're using is that smart contracts provide more utility than sound economic policy does.

How does sound economic policy differ from visual economic policy?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#480

Post by tomhoward »

cwkoss wrote: post #461
tomhoward wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges There absolutely is: it is almost unimaginably expensive and administratively complicated, hence the only entities to IPO these days are companies valued in the tens of billions, who have exhausted all other options for raising capital privately and need to raise at least hundreds of millions or billions m…

The issue I have with this is that those regulations still exist. For a recording artist to raise funds in this way still requires that they deal with all the administrative complications - laws just tend to not be enforced very frequently in this new space. If Jay-Z launched Jay-Zcoin and raised $100M, the SEC and IRS are going to be poking around his finances and looking for any place he violated the law and imposi…

Of course tax laws still apply, as they should.

But Jay-Z raising $100M is the wrong use-case example; he’s already a superstar and already wildly rich so doesn’t need investors, or can easily get them the old fashioned ways (eg record company advance) if he does.

A more apt one is a little-known up-and-comer raising $20k, as they currently might on Kickstarter or Patreon, but possibly using the smart-contract features of Ethereum to link the provision of rewards to some programmed metric like number of Spotify plays.

Post reply on HN