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Mainnet Merge Announcement

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Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#541

Post by anderspitman »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #537
anderspitman wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to create a technology so complicated that proponents can't concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why it doesn't.

Aren't there loads of things where you can't concisely explain how it works? Fundamentally this is a hard problem, we shouldn't be too surprised if the solution does not fit in a hackernews comment. (Especially when so many people on this site seem desperate to misunderstand anything related to cryptocurrencies).

Not how it works, whether it works.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#542

Post by anderspitman »

serverholic wrote: post #505
anderspitman wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to create a technology so complicated that proponents can't concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why it doesn't.

Please explain the tcp/ip protocol or the paxos algorithm concisely.

Different question. I don't see people regularly arguing about whether TCP does the job it claims to. Sure people propose alternatives they believe to be superior, but fundamentally most agree it works.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#543

Post by rglover »

marshray wrote: post #540
rglover wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew this would be your response. You met someone who doesn't capitulate to your manipulation, took the time to cite things, and you're predictably "not impressed" even going so far as to refute the source I gave with "something else is going on" (conspiratorial thinking) or the source being "right-wing navel-gazing" (when all of the sources are either published papers, politically neutral statistics, or mainstream…

It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face. "Something else is going on" is not "conspiratorial thinking" when it comes to analyzing data. Systematic biases in data is the normal and expected state of affairs. > or the source being "right-wing navel-gazing" (when all of the sources are either published papers, politically neutral statistics, or mainstream media outlets). I didn't s…

> It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face.

What are your standards for a good study, then? You understand that this basically makes anything I give you a non-starter as its validity is wholly based on your opinion of it, right?

> I said the "other stuff you wrote" was.

Fair, my mistake. But, to your point, it's not navel gazing it's objective reality (whether you like that reality or not is irrelevant). Empirically, the problems you encounter today are in far greater numbers than they were in the past and those problems all track with decisions made in government (either directly or indirectly).

Frankly, just based on your initial response to me, I don't think a conversation would be terribly productive for either of us.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#544

Post by gnramires »

Anunayj wrote: post #77
xur17 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9.9% percentage of that also was set aside for "founders" > Today it accounts for something like 59% of total supply. Make what you will of that. Can you help me understand what exactly this means? Ethereum's supply has grown since the presale, so if anything the 9.9% should have gotten smaller since then.

Oh, I was a bit unclear there. The 9.9% was of the total money that was raised in the ICO (60m) and ended up being ~5.9m. The total initial premine was 72m (~59% of today's supply). I think someone more knowledgeable might provide a better breakdown of those funds, except that the article(s) linked covers it a lot better than my comment.

Since this "premine" (the 59%) was really a token sale, I don't think it's too problematic (mining is buying tokens with electricity/hardware).

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#545

Post by beaned »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #426
drog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no designated class of slashers. Slashing is part of the protocol and to slash somebody you have to prove it to the protocol that they broke rules of slashing. One of the rules is that you can't create two different blocks in the same slot (block number) i.e. you can't deliberately fork. There is a designated place in the block of the beacon chain where you can put signatures of the different blocks in the s…

I am one of the maintainers of the Go implementation of Ethereum proof-of-stake, called Prysm (github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and also implemented a "slasher" in Go that can be used to slash malicious validators. Anyone can run a slasher and you don't need to have 32 ETH to do so. As long as your slasher software can prove that a validator committed a slashable offense, you can submit this proof to any full node to…

How many full nodes are there?

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#546

Post by stale2002 »

jbaczuk wrote: post #516
stale2002 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the point here is that if there are easy ways to reduce energy usage, that have few drawbacks, then that is a good thing to get that free lunch.

I understand. My point is there is no reason to reduce energy usage. There is reason to reduce "dirty" energy usage. There is an abundant supply of "clean" energy.

> My point is there is no reason to reduce energy usage. There is reason to reduce "dirty" energy usage

Reducing energy usage is almost exactly the same thing as reducing dirty energy usage.

This is because if there is X less total energy required, that means we can shutdown the X worst energy producing sources.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#547

Post by marshray »

rglover wrote: post #543
marshray wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face. "Something else is going on" is not "conspiratorial thinking" when it comes to analyzing data. Systematic biases in data is the normal and expected state of affairs. > or the source being "right-wing navel-gazing" (when all of the sources are either published papers, politically neutral statistics, or mainstream media outlets). I didn't s…

> It's a bad study and I'd be willing to tell the researchers that to their face. What are your standards for a good study, then? You understand that this basically makes anything I give you a non-starter as its validity is wholly based on your opinion of it, right? > I said the "other stuff you wrote" was. Fair, my mistake. But, to your point, it's not navel gazing it's objective reality (whether you like that reali…

> What are your standards for a good study, then?

Prospective. For example, they decide in advance to test Ts for a randomly-selected group of men.

This study reads as basically "We queried our healthcare system database and made up the rules as we went along."

For example:

* How did they choose the date ranges 1/2006 through 3/2019?

* How did they decide to divide the dates into four ranges of 4, 3, 3, and 4 years each?

* Why did they include "only the first blood sample taken from each patient"?

* Why were there 38,701 subjects with an age measurement but only 22,169 that recorded a BMI in 2016-9?

* Why did the number of subjects double over the course of the study period? Did more patients enter the healthcare system? Did they, say, open new treatment facilities to attract different clientele?

I mean, it's not worthless, it can be useful to put the data out there for meta-analysis. But on its own it should not be used to draw a conclusion.

And so on.

> You understand that this basically makes anything I give you a non-starter as its validity is wholly based on your opinion of it, right?

You're right - it's my opinion and I do lean on my personal experience when considering others' arguments.

> it's objective reality (whether you like that reality or not is irrelevant).

Some of the data may reflect objective reality, but many of your conclusions do not.

> Empirically, the problems you encounter today are in far greater numbers than they were in the past

Yes, but this statement has been true my entire life. Everyone agrees our world gets more populous and more challenging almost every year.

The statement may be true, but so broad that it conveys little meaning.

> and those problems all track with decisions made in government (either directly or indirectly).

This conclusion is not well supported.

Try to describe how you have considered and rejected other possible explanations for the observed phenomena.

> Frankly, just based on your initial response to me, I don't think a conversation would be terribly productive for either of us.

Go back and read what you wrote again. You mention 'politics' and/or 'government' in every post. You cannot even discuss whether or not a hormone level is declining without fitting it within your ideological framework.

Take care :-)

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#548

Post by zeroclip »

IncRnd wrote: post #514
dsimmons wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think this is mainly aimed at developers (and ETH ecosystem developers specifically). While I don't disagree that there's a "vocabulary" problem (e.g. "dank-sharding"), in a perfect world, a normie would largely just interact with an application without needing to know any of this.

You say that from the standpoint of readers at this HN blog page, but this blog post is the top blog post and first one seen on https://blog.ethereum.org/ . Many people who want to understand what they are looking at prior to purchase would look at this page and quickly close it, never to invest using etherium. Do you download binary utilities for execution, when every page on the website (or app store) is filled wit…

There's countless examples of niche jargon on the front page of HN every day. Sometimes it has to do with Rust, or Zig, or Protobuf, or an obscure file spec. Today the jargon happens to be about blockchain consensus engineering.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#549

Post by TakeBlaster16 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #470
TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could be a government with billions staked in your jurisdiction, and bureaucratic indifference to the outcome of your regulatory actions.

A government spending billions of taxpayer dollars on an attack which can be reversed in an afternoon with a new software update is more likely to be an existential threat to that government than to Ethereum. The sort of software update I'm imagining is one which just zeroes the holdings of the government wallet(s), and continues the chain from just before they launched their attack.

I think you lost the context of the thread. I'm not suggesting they will spend billions on crypto. I'm suggesting they will use their regulatory teeth to compel USA companies that have already staked billions worth of their customers' ETH to comply with the sanctions on Tornado Cash addresses, consequences/slashing be damned. OFAC has lawyers on payroll, so this would literally be free for them.

Re: Mainnet Merge Announcement

#550

Post by conroydave »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #426
drog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no designated class of slashers. Slashing is part of the protocol and to slash somebody you have to prove it to the protocol that they broke rules of slashing. One of the rules is that you can't create two different blocks in the same slot (block number) i.e. you can't deliberately fork. There is a designated place in the block of the beacon chain where you can put signatures of the different blocks in the s…

I am one of the maintainers of the Go implementation of Ethereum proof-of-stake, called Prysm (github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and also implemented a "slasher" in Go that can be used to slash malicious validators. Anyone can run a slasher and you don't need to have 32 ETH to do so. As long as your slasher software can prove that a validator committed a slashable offense, you can submit this proof to any full node to…

Thank you for all your work on Ethereum.
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