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

The Merge

ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 414 posts

Re: The Merge

#31

Post by jcranmer »

cowtools wrote: post #17
Victerius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Every country's financial system: ahem. The U.S. dollar doesn't require giant energy-hungry server farms to be secure.

The U.S. dollar is backed by a military many times more energy intensive.

Fiat currency is not backed by military power. Note that there exist several countries without militaries, and none of those countries have worthless currencies. And there have existed countries that put significant investment into their military and still wound up with a worthless currency at the end.

Re: The Merge

#32

Post by numlock86 »

smashem wrote: post #14
numlock86 wrote: post #5

> The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%. That's something Bitcoin needs ... or even better get rid of it altogether. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

End the FUD https://endthefud.org/

> The delusional shitcoiner's funny compilation

Yeah, thanks for reminding me. We all had out good laugh at that site at some point.

Re: The Merge

#34

Post by MBCook »

lapser wrote: post #25
repomies69 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is never going to change from PoW... That's the point of the system, Bitcoin is unchangable, unlike Ethereum. But you are free to create your own PoS cryptocurrency. If some PoS system offers the same security features as Bitcoin, people will just switch from Bitcoin to that.

Bitcoin is still software. Software can change. It's the people who refuse to change it

A huge chunk of the miners fought tooth-and-nail to not increase the maximum block size. The chance of them agreeing to something like this seems very low indeed.

Re: The Merge

#35

Post by earnesti »

lapser wrote: post #25
repomies69 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is never going to change from PoW... That's the point of the system, Bitcoin is unchangable, unlike Ethereum. But you are free to create your own PoS cryptocurrency. If some PoS system offers the same security features as Bitcoin, people will just switch from Bitcoin to that.

Bitcoin is still software. Software can change. It's the people who refuse to change it

Yes, other way to put it is that the incentives for the software are designed in a way which makes certain changes extremely unlikely. However some changes are happening all the time (features added via a soft fork)

Re: The Merge

#36

Post by wavefunction »

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #30

Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network. While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of the network in…

I am sure staking pools will be available to people with less than 32 ETH

Re: The Merge

#37

Post by sktrdie »

I don't get proof of stake. What's stopping anyone from presenting a new chain made up of thousands of fake transactions? And why wouldn't such chain be accepted by the network? Is it just "checkpoints" hardcoded in the software that don't allow this?

Re: The Merge

#38

Post by Victerius »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #19
Victerius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security properties for a monetary system. Every country's financial system: ahem. The U.S. dollar doesn't require giant energy-hungry server farms to be secure.

Does the army and law enforcement not use energy? Do banks not have server farms?

Okay, back up a little. Crypto miners mine crypto in order to become rich. With national currencies, this is impossible. Citizens cannot create their own currency, and that's a good thing. If money could be easily forged, it would either be worthless, or a speculative instrument, like every crypto in existence. National governments are the source and the only legal creators of money.

Crypto mining also makes the blockchain secure. What this means is that a malicious individual cannot, say, transfer crypto from another person's wallet to his own, or alter the software algorithm that controls the creation of the cryptocurrency.

Proof of work cryptocurrencies require miners to expend an enormous quantity of energy in order to prevent problems that national currencies don't have in the first place. Cryptocurrencies have no advantage over national currencies except for anonymous online transactions.

Re: The Merge

#39

Post by fizzynut »

hackernudes wrote: post #27
fizzynut wrote: post #11

Given that the merge reduces the electricity cost for new Ethereum by ~1000x, won't the price just tank in a race to the bottom?

Is someone out there buying ETH because of the power that went in to mining it? It's more about supply and demand, I think. The supply of ETH does change after the merge, but from what I understand there will be less generated than before. All the tokens and contracts that use Ethereum will still need to pay gas fees and now instead of miners earning ETH, stakers will.

Those with a "stake" of ETH will be gaining $xxxx of ETH for a cost of $x, so why would you not sell for a giant profit?

Re: The Merge

#40

Post by zaptrem »

latchkey wrote: post #8
orliesaurus wrote: post #3

Curious: will it be more energy efficient?

GPU based mining of ETH will turn off, literally, in 15s (one block). But the thing is, it will just move to other coins, for now. Once those are not as profitable, things will rebalance as people shut off their GPUs. Future, ETH will grow with power requirements too... just a lot more slowly... ASICs for zero knowledge are coming, which will create a bit of an energy race. Staking will always be increasing... which…

Can you give more info about Zero Knowledge Proofs would require ASICS?
Post reply on HN