101–110 of 381 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ETH2 (proof-of-stake) already has 16 billion dollars of ETH locked into it, and has been running for months. The proof-of-stake switchover seems to be on a good track and should work form technical standpoint.
Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.
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Yes, running a validator will cost some money. I will explain how I think. If the rich want to get richer he have to make good investment decisions and some work. In POS you don't have to do anything at all, just buy and hold. So in POS, you don't need to innovate your business model. In POW, you always have to innovate to be a leader. Bitcoin ASIC innovation in last years shows how strong competition is. And competi…
You're assuming that PoS is divorced from competition and innovation. Those who innovate tend to earn capital, be it fiat, or let's say Ethereum here. You're assuming those that have Ethereum didn't innovate in some way up the line to be able to buy their earned share. And if you want more shares for PoS, well, you innovate and earn to buy more shares. Your model only works if you assume a very closed and proprietary…
If the devs have a 51% share of staked ETH and they never sell any ETH then even if you buy all ETH on the market you will never get beyond 49%. The only way that can happen is if the devs to decide to hand over control to you voluntarily.
>Your model only works if you assume a very closed and proprietary economic system.
What you are assuming is that the economy exists for the sake of Ethereum, people work and exist so that they can buy ETH shares for POS but reverse doesn't apply because owning ETH only entitles you to earning more ETH, nothing more.
This is a trap that a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts fall into. The decentralized nature of blockchains doesn't extend into reality. You cannot have a house deed on the blockchain because it would require a central authority outside of the blockchain to recognize the deed. Therefore information can enter the Blockchain and be stored there, but it cannot have impact outside the blockchain because the world isn't being simulated inside a decentralized blockchain.
In that regard the blockchain is similar to a sandbox, the only thing that exists is the sandbox itself and all the data you have decided to store inside it and since a lot of the data is meaningless, the focus is put on the sandbox being a goal in itself.
Another common trap is to build a programming language where the only significant project written in that language is the compiler.
As a Bitcoin miner ( https://toom.im ), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes ex…
That's a very dubious way of looking at it. Blockchains all have a bottleneck. All transactions in the world have to go through the miner. And the situation is actually worse than that because we don't know who will solve the useless Proof of Work hashcash function ahead of time, so EVERY potential transaction is gossipped to EVERY potential miner, and then the miners ALL go to town wasting electricity. How great! An…
Unless you buy straight from a miner, the Bitcoin you buy changed hands many times before reaching you and those transfers didn't all occur on the blockchain (could have happened on an exchange, could have happened on lightning network, could happen on another blockchain like eth).
If you look at actual transactions on the blockchain, you'll see that they have an average value of ~300-400K [1] per transaction which means it's acting as final settlement.
1: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionvalu...
A fascinating thought experiment would be to have a further breakdown by "non-speculative" transaction. It's difficult/impossible to compute whether a transaction's purpose is speculation, but given that that's most of what these coins are currently used for, it would surprise me if less than half of these transactions are for the purpose of price speculation. This is going to make these coins compare substantially l…
As a Bitcoin miner ( https://toom.im ), while I appreciate the work put into it, this particular metric of "transactions per kW" might not work the way you expect. The main point that you should understand is that a PoW blockchain's energy usage is not proportional to its transactions. I'll say that a different way: the transactions themselves do not use any energy in mining. I'll say this in a third way: it takes ex…
I’ve gone back and forth on this myself, but I think it is valid to consider the cost of the entire network as a matter of carbon accounting. After all, one of Bitcoin’s selling points is the difficulty of a double-spend. This wouldn’t be the case if Bitcoin mining was not subsidized from the pool of unmined coins.
For example, one could naively believe that there's absolutely no marginal emission from deciding to get on a plane. The plane is emitting basically the same amount whether there's 99 people on board or 99 + 1 (you) on board, and the plane's going to make that particular flight whether or not you get on. However, you're funding the airline industry and increasing demand (and therefore supply) for flights along that route and perhaps also indirectly helping pay for other things the airline is doing, so that could probably be considered a marginal emission contribution.
If you ignore transaction fees for a moment, it seems like this logic doesn't quite work for cryptocurrency networks. It seems like a closer analogy would be something like a contrived scenario with an airline that has routes which are absolutely static and predetermined (e.g. a contrived scenario where an airline decides it's going to fly a passenger plane a certain route once per day every day at the exact same time for a year no matter what, even if no one's aboard, and also the tickets are free if assuming no transaction fees). There are still the indirect issues with supporting the network, but it seems like there's less of a marginal emission concern if you're someone who's just making transactions, or arguably even no marginal emission concern.
In reality, you are adding some marginal emissions due to transaction fees (direct incentive to mine), and the indirect incentives could maybe be broken down into something marginal as well (no one using the network = no incentive to mine since the currency would probably have no value), but basically it kind of feels like there's less of a direct marginal emission concern as an end user of the network compared to something like getting on a plane, especially if you take transaction fees out of the equation. In that sense, it feels like abstaining is somewhat more of a moral protest rather than a direct economic "vote" or boycott.
Am I wrong about any of this? I probably am; this is just a random thought. Maybe the transaction fees are the crux of it (even if the block rewards are much more lucrative), so eliminating them from the equation for the sake of argument makes the whole point moot?
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> so once Ethereum finishes its switch over to proof-of-stake Isn't there a lot of uncertainty as to how well proof-of-stake will work?
It's the kind of thing where if it fails, it's going to fail explosively and unexpectedly. Proof-of-stake is vulnerable to various miner collusion attacks that Bitcoin is not vulnerable to. The gist of it is that casting multiple conflicting votes (sometimes way after you cast your original vote) doesn't require any additional resources in a proof-of-stake system, whereas casting additional votes in a proof-of-work s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve gone back and forth on this myself, but I think it is valid to consider the cost of the entire network as a matter of carbon accounting. After all, one of Bitcoin’s selling points is the difficulty of a double-spend. This wouldn’t be the case if Bitcoin mining was not subsidized from the pool of unmined coins.
Yes, rather than thinking about transactions we should ask whether the existence of Bitcoin as a whole is worth 6 GW of power.
Bitcoin cash and SV are low on the carbon emission cause they forked from BTC right? So they re-used bitcoins early work. Or am I totally wrong here?
>re-used bitcoins early work
All forks share the same blockchain up until certain block.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the kind of thing where if it fails, it's going to fail explosively and unexpectedly. Proof-of-stake is vulnerable to various miner collusion attacks that Bitcoin is not vulnerable to. The gist of it is that casting multiple conflicting votes (sometimes way after you cast your original vote) doesn't require any additional resources in a proof-of-stake system, whereas casting additional votes in a proof-of-work s…
I may be wrong, but collusion is hard to achieve via provably random selection procedures for validators of transactions, etc.