571–580 of 609 posts
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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.
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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.
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Never, and that's a feature. The energy consumption has always been a red herring. Everything consumes energy. Humanity's goal is to optimise energy generation and make it as green as possible, not reduce total energy usage to zero. That's just an idiotic proposition. The problem has never been "Bitcoin draws too much power", the problem is "we need more energy generation, and cheaper, and possibly not from fossil fu…
So your argument is "it doesn't matter that Bitcoin wastes energy because we'll all eventually transition to green"? Don't you think the extra consumption makes that transition harder?
Imagine governments putting a tax on fossil fuels. Bam! coal and petrol cheap energy is non-viable anymore, you'll see Bitcoin miners building solar and wind plants to power their operation. And along with them the rest of the world.
It's easier for politicians and keyboard warriors to blame climate change on Bitcoin than actually moving to a greener world by making fossil fuels unprofitable.
The extra consumption angle doesn't make any sense for an ultra technologic world, that only 1/4th of the world populace has access. Bitcoin or not, energy usage will be ramping up, especially if we want to create a fairer world. The only way to reduce energy usage is to stop being a technological civilisation, or give access to electricity to fewer and fewer people.
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Anyone tried on an intel Mac? I'm ok with Bootcamp.
I don't believe there's anything OS specific for it, just most guides are for Windows for simplicity. However it does require a nvidia gpu and Macs are generally AMD or integrated gpus.
Getting VR to work was tiresome, so now I don't want to even start before I see someone else succeeded.
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This isn't exactly correct: 1. Every full node is part of this dark forest, maintains its own mempool, and gossips the mempool to others. You do not have to be a validator or miner to run a full node; just run an Ethereum client. 2. There are indirect economic incentives to 'watch the watchmen': a slashable staking violation that doesn't get slashed breaks the Ethereum security model, and is expected to be an extreme…
Every full node can still manipulate the transaction to make it look like they are slashing rather than the person who originally reported the fraud. This is also a "hey why not, its free money" kind of incentive. I do agree that there probably will be altruistic validators in some cases, but the economic incentives work against them. The history of cryptocurrency has trended towards doing the minimum amount of valid…
Does it matter who does the slashing, as long as the incentive is enough to motivate doing it?
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Since blockchains are specifically built with idea of censorship resistance in mind, and Ethermine not including TC transactions can't actually prevent other miners from including them... I'm struggling to understand the point you are trying to make. Are you talking about lack of ideological purity of Ethermine?
> lack of ideological purity of Ethermine? Yes, and the fact that everyone in the Ethereum community has largely glossed this over in their enthusiasm for the "merge" and what it will do the price of their assets. Cryptocurrencies that embrace the centralization and censorship of fiat currencies are completely unnecessary and have no real utility. Tornado Cash and Ethermine should have been a line in the sand, a hard…
As for TC - who is rolling over? While some US based businesses are complying, protocol builders are saying that they will fight tooth and nail.
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May I ask you to elaborate? This sounds intriguing.
Basically, to validate a block, you need to bruteforce a SHA-256 hash of the block by incrementing a nonce in it. And by essence, bruteforceing is wasteful (and by extension, expensive). And this is by design, as the only way to mint a new bitcoin is to throw away computational power (ie energy -> money). And the amount of power needing to be wasted is constantly adjusted by the network (it's targeting a certain amou…
Claiming that PoW cost gives BTC its value is bonkers.
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Buying used in general is risky, but I’d wager buying from a miner is not much worse than buying used from a non-miner. I believe miners are more likely to undervolt their cards and with running them at a constant rate, they won’t undergo the same stress from heating up and cooling down each time it gets used.
That might be true for the chips, but the fans have probably been run 24/7 for much longer than the comsumer-level cards are rated for. So keep an eye out for dying fans.
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Let's say it like this: In the near future the rules are made by the people with the most ETH and soon after the most ETHs will be earned by the people who make the rules.
And then the ETH becomes worthless, and despite having all the ETH, those people have no real-world money.
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I don't know the specific rules for Ethereum, but in general PoS systems, anyone can slash. All you have to do is submit two different headers for the same block signed by the same validator. This proves the validator is cheating. The person who submits the proof may get to keep some of the validator's slashed money, which is a good incentive to run slashing nodes as this can amount to thousands of dollars per slash,…
In a general PoS system like you describe, what prevents a bistable situation from emerging? If there is any significant level of cheating, then running a slasher is profitable, which makes cheating very unprofitable, driving it to zero. But in the absence of cheating, what's the motivation to develop, maintain, test, and operate a slasher node? Isn't this prone to long periods of time with negligible cheating where…
The whole cryptocurrency thing feels like a bit of a metastable equilibrium, but nobody's figured out anything better. Arguably even government-controlled fiat money is not much better - if >50% of the population doesn't like the rules, they will change them - we may be seeing the beginning of this right now, with a lot of people getting dissatisfied with half their income going to the black hole known as "landlords" who own the rights to take your income without producing any value whatsoever.
It might just lead to everyone abandoning your cryptocurrency and using a different one. Since you had to have >50% of the cryptocurrency in order to conduct the attack, you did lose a substantial amount of real-world value (billions or trillions of $) when everyone else stopped using your cryptocurrency.
It's pretty much analogous to if a majority of PoW miners decide to "go their own way" and make a chain where nobody else is invited. What happens then?