Live data from Hacker News

Mainnet Merge Announcement

blog.ethereum.org

201–210 of 609 posts

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.

Quoted post unavailable.

Exactly.

We’ve had over 50 years to transition off of oil and onto nuclear / electric infrastructure. Instead of that, the world leaders sat with their thumbs in ass on yachts, coked out orgies, and mc-mansions on humanities dime, slurping a gravy train that lasts a generation or two because “who cares what happens after I’m gone”.

Now the bell of death tolls and it is suddenly “everyone who has been locked up with no say”’s problem. People were duped and trusted greedy imbeciles with resource allocation, and then have to bail the same morons out.

PoW binds value to unavoidable physics. Clean up your energy or your planet dies. Increase compute capabilities or you will be left behind by others that do. It forces progress.

PoS binds value to rich people’s ballsacks. It results in no physical value binding, and is a digital continuation of the incompetent making resource allocation decisions — leading humanity right off a cliff.

I just don’t get how we can have all knowledge at our fingertips and humanity is still this bad at decision making.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#202

Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps? Like, you have this proof of stake thing, but the only reason it works is because there's just a small number of validators, which is just going to be the ethereum foundation and friends. edit: putting this at the top because nobody is responding on topic. I am NOT talking about the class of people who stake 32 eth to validate nod…

> Is it incorrect to say that ethereum is now entirely centralized with some extra steps?

no, that's right. It's now a chain where you make money (fresh coins) by a procedure controlled by the Ethereum Foundation.

What happens if something goes fatally wrong? The EF will step in and fix it.

This has (for a few years now) raised serious questions as to whether the new network will constitute an offering of securities - EF sets rules to run a validator and get paid in ETH.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#203

I can be anti-crypto and still appreciate this. First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. (Although having the impact to begin with is another story.) Secondly from a sheer technical coordination perspective there's a feeling of pulling off a complex dance. Makes it hard for any of us to claim our workloads aren't testable!

> First - clearly reducing the environmental impact of anything by this much is pro-humanity. How long until BTC follows suit?

Probably never. Bitcoin is famously conservative in comparison to other blockchain projects.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#204
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally wrong. Anybody has the ability to declare "the people with stakes did not validate correctly" In this context, what it means is that a person posted conflicting validation messages on different parts of the network, and anybody who can show the existence of two such conflicting messages can post it to the blockchain, receive a reward, and the offending validator gets slashed. (There are also other ways you ca…

What if they then show bogus evidence

Then the software will automatically discard the evidence.

I would suggest to stop spamming the HN comment section and read the introductory articles people helpfully linked you to.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.

Quoted post unavailable.

> All of the world's problems are government-created

Earthquakes? Dandelions? Sunburn? Marital infidelity?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#206
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is down almost 50%... from its high around Jan/Dec. I suspect people saw this coming from a mile away. If you think the effect is likely to be stronger or weaker than the market predicts, bet on it now.

People stopped buying GPUs a while back, it makes no sense to buy a GPU for mining 6 months before the merge

But HN comments assured me it was never going to happen/will stay "6 months away".

I sure hope those people bought mining GPUs/put their money where their mouth is.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules of the Bitcoin network are not validated by miners, they are validated by nodes. The miners have no control over nodes and unless their mining work is accepted by the consensus rules of the nodes they receive no mining reward.

> On 21 July 2017, bitcoin miners locked-in a software upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91 > By 8 August, another milestone was reached when 100% of the bitcoin mining pools signaled support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit#Activation

Signalling is not consensus I’m afraid…

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#208
post #151

What we see in the Tezos chain (liquid/delegated proof-of-stake) is that big custodial wallets for the exchanges have grown to be the largest block bakers: https://thestackreport.xyz/articles/top-tezos-block-producer... With ethereum the staking mechanism is a bit more complex, my understanding is you lock your stake for quite a while so maybe its too risky for the exchanges, but wouldn't be surprised that exchanges…

Coinbase is already offering an eth staking service: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/co...

It remains to be seen how much further staking will centralize. So far the distribution isn't so bad: https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#209
post #88

Quoted post unavailable.

Absolutely inane response. Most energy used by miners is not clean. And much of the world is either experiencing a large increase in energy costs or, in Europe’s case, an impending energy crisis due to the war in Ukraine.

If your answer to clean energy to just use less energy, that seems inane. Also the increase in energy costs because of the war in Ukraine is directly related to dependence on foreign fuel which is not clean. So the problem isn't energy consumption, the problem is using fossil fuels.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no defined role called a “slasher”. There are randomly-decided committees that are regularly updated as part of Ethereum PoS consensus that play different roles. Your validator could be in any one of those roles (or in a pending state) at any time.

I'm almost certain that is incorrect. This is an optional, expensive seeming process. e.g. https://docs.prylabs.network/docs/prysm-usage/slasher

> Running a slasher is not meant to be profitable. Slashing is meant to be rare and whistleblower rewards are purposefully low. Running a slasher is meant to be an altruistic action, and as stated, only a single, honest, properly functioning slasher needs to be active in the network to catch slashable offenses.

Hmmm. It seems dangerous to rely on altruistic enforcement in a network built around economic incentives. What if the altruistic slashers are simply paid money to turn off their nodes?

Post reply on HN