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The Merge

ethereum.org

341–350 of 414 posts

Re: The Merge

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat currencies are backed by huge financial sectors. If all you need are numbers in a database, what are all those towers in NY for?

There's nothing about crypto that shows it wouldn't have exactly the same size of a financial sector in addition to proof of work, so the two aren't doing the same things. Forget fiat. When money was gold in a vault, that's proof of stake, not proof of work. For proof of work, you'd have to disintegrate the gold. I wouldn't put my trust in a dollar backed by the absence of gold. edit: I think maybe bitcoin enthusiast…

Your gold analogy makes no sense to me, so either I'm misunderstanding it or you don't understand what you're trying to explain.

> I think maybe bitcoin enthusiasts think that value is a sort of spirit...

Interestingly, that is actually kind of how it works. The money you use itself has no value, it's value is in the things you use it to trade. So if you start trading in other currencies, those currencies receive that value, which gets reflected in the purchasing power metric.

Re: The Merge

#342
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multitudes of miners will no longer race to find the next computationally expensive hash. Proof of Stake does address the energy concerns of crypto.

At the expense of the “permissionless” nature of crypto, moving from “anybopdy can join with his GPU” to “you must pay the insiders to join the party”. I also reveals how centralized ethereum really is in terms of who holds the power: a blockchain where the devs can screw the miners like this isn't really reassuring… Bitcoin's carefully crafted balance of power (and the disapearance of Satoshi) lead to a technologica…

You don't have to "pay insiders", you simply have to purchase an asset on a liquid market. You can pay me and a thousand other people, it doesn't have to be insiders.

The bigger problem with PoS is that there's no ongoing cost. Buy your stake, don't fuck up and you're making money. Not true with mining, and this changes the incentive landscape quite a bit.

Re: The Merge

#343

My main issue with PoS is that people wont run nodes. Contrary to bitcoin there isn’t a self hosting culture on Ethereum. Its all about trading and tokenomics. They will stake through exchanges, which already control the fiat ramps and are easily controlled by regulatory pressure. Since those guys are now validating on chain transaction censorship might become a thing. And then there is the biggest irony on the fact…

I have no doubts a vibrant self hosting culture would spring up the moment chain transaction censorship turns up on the horizon.

Re: The Merge

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users, developers, other stakers.

Why would users and developers without stake get input? Doesn't that subvert the point of staking?

Users and the market decides on the chain, governance in Ethereum is based on social consensus not “one coin one vote.”

Re: The Merge

#345

My main issue with PoS is that people wont run nodes. Contrary to bitcoin there isn’t a self hosting culture on Ethereum. Its all about trading and tokenomics. They will stake through exchanges, which already control the fiat ramps and are easily controlled by regulatory pressure. Since those guys are now validating on chain transaction censorship might become a thing. And then there is the biggest irony on the fact…

I have no doubts a vibrant self hosting culture would spring up the moment chain transaction censorship turns up on the horizon.

Well it has started, Ethermine is not including tornado cash txns: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrettig/status/156082533102359756...

Re: The Merge

#346

You do not need to wait for the merge to see the effects. Staking pools are already heavily centralizing power in the network on centralized exchanges and """"decentralized"""" contract pools like Lido which can be manipulated and changed with the keys of a small group of people. Vitalik is already preparing to organize social enforcement and democratic slashing for when these pools have their arms twisted to censor…

> Vitalik is already preparing to organize social enforcement and democratic slashing for when these pools have their arms twisted to censor transactions by state actors.

I don’t see anything in the linked article that talks about Vitalik preparing to organize anything. He just replied to a tweet.

As far as I can tell, you’re misunderstanding the discussion around censorship and making some pretty big assumptions.

Re: The Merge

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would users and developers without stake get input? Doesn't that subvert the point of staking?

Users and the market decides on the chain, governance in Ethereum is based on social consensus not “one coin one vote.”

I still don't understand how consensus works off the chain. If 51% of the stackers just decide to run their own software and do their own thing. How does something off chain change that? How does something off chain penalize a majority of staked ETH?

Re: The Merge

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a complex mathematical problem. No mathematical problem is getting "solved". It is much more akin to playing the lottery: Entirely random numbers are being tried out, by sending them through an energy-intensive algorithm (being energy-intensive is the algorithm's only purpose in proof-of-work), until what comes out is less than another number. That other numb…

Eh, a mathematical puzzle is being solved via brute-force. My intent was to explain briefly that the problem/puzzle is by nature computationally-intensive to the extent that brute-force is the most efficient way to solve/complete it.

But the whole usage of the math puzzle is that you have to solve it using brute force, If there was a better way it won't be useful. So yeah the whole point is just guessing numbers not solving the puzzle.

Re: The Merge

#349
post #245
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what block is accepted As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the Ethereum blockchain.

Call me a pessimist, but I have stopped assuming rationality of all actors acting to secure a long-term future, especially in the world of cryptocurrencies

PoW is magical in that these actors are strongly incentivized to secure the network. PoS is not the same.
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