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Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

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Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#111

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

> Am I the only one who thinks

No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns.

First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs.

That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details.

Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us.

I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius. Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the glee with which boosters like you allow it to be.

The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is NFTs.

You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the environmental impact.

So....that's what I think.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#112

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

Agree. The blockchain is the tape; amazing! I'm a bit late to the party, but have invested a reasonable amount into it recently. I'm on the side of ETH 2.0 and massive scalability and lower gas prices(even though I currently mine liquidity) so the true potential of smart contracts and DeFi can be realized.

The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#113
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t half of our current money supply controlled by 1% of people? If the asset holders controlled things, why wouldn’t they just demand everyone else hand over their cash? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richest-1-percent-control-more-...

That's a good question. Imagine what would happen if one person held literally all the money. It may be easier to imagine a 100-person community rather than the whole world. One thing that would have to happen is everyone else would develop their own money/currency, which would turn mean that the one person with all the money is no longer the one person with all the money. A thing quite likely to happen is that every…

Money used to represent the value backed up by gold in bank storage. Nowadays its just a paper, so indeed its easy to create new money.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it sounds less a 51% attack and more like miners voting against something that isn't in their interest We also used to call this situation a potential "fork" (as in, the thing with two prongs) before the word "fork" was somehow redefined to mean "protocol update everyone agrees on, with a linear history without any prongs".

It's still a fork in both cases. One path is taken by almost noone, but it's still an open possibility to keep it alive.

Yup. See: ETH Classic.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#115

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the…

Where do the crypto folks hang out?

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#116

Why is it a good thing to make ETH deflationary? Don't you want people to spend it?

One of the biggest mistakes of cryptocurrency was calling it cryptocurrency. Distributed Ledgers have multitudes of use cases. One of them is as a currency, but you don't need the base layer to be a currency. ETH doesn't need to be spent as much as its needed to act as a quantitative measure of ownership and buy in. You can build a currency on the second layer, which has been done.

Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Doesn’t ETH on some level have to change hands for work to get done?

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#117

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its po…

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the…

I'm positive about Bitcoin valuation over the long term.

I'm negative about Bitcoins utility.

I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM and their valuation over the long term.

I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage. It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes.

I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs, don't come up much here at all.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#118
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization.

The problem with crypto is volatility. The whole market moves in one direction or another, usually with Bitcoin. Scarcity is not the only thing that makes up the economy. We need also need inflation. Stop engaging in these ideological wars. Let's fix the problem and drive adoption.

https://bitflate.org/post/2020/04/26/we-need-inflationary-cr...

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the…

Where do the crypto folks hang out?

Everything is organized around coins and projects. For example if you are into eth core then you are in eth magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org

The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord. Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some decent subreddits but it isn’t the primary place.

This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you are serious. Etc.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#120
post #118

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency spawn a generation of people who worship Austrian economics. This ETH upgrade is making ETH even more deflationary. People are obsessed with price and want to pump the numbers. These wars are not doing anything to advance adoption and bring freedom to people. Crypto builders are pumping the coins under the banners of freedom and decentralization. The problem with crypto is volati…

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