> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…
I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".
The Ethereum merge is done
171–180 of 1001 posts
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#172Congratulations miners, validators, and hosted validator services! Big win for sustainability and industry!
edit: also, this is a new frontier that combines the best of both worlds for energy suppliers, bitcoin miners, governments and the environment.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#173The validator of the first proof of stake block earned just over 45 ETH as everyone clamored to get their transaction in this historic block: https://etherscan.io/block/15537394
i’m thinking it was a single person who just really wanted to be the first tx on the PoS chain. i’m not versed to decode transactions well — i wouldn’t be surprised if it was somebody making a “first PoS transaction” NFT or something.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#174> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…
I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.
Many in tech look at crypto, and blockchain specifically as if it is another technicalogical capability they can integrate into their enterprise architecture. From that perspective blockchain in general doesn't really make sense. As cool as the composability of tokens and smart contracts are, that's not a capability only blockchain can deliver (in fact that's not the blockchain at all... that's the standards that have been built on top of it).
Others in tech look at blockchain as a currency to replace traditional currencies issued by governments. A reasonable world view, as that's kind of how it's been sold for a very long time, but it's pretty clear to me at least, that's not really possible. The US Gov is always going to require taxes to be paid for in dollars. The US, EU, China... everyone, they're not going to give up monetary sovereignty.
So what does crypto provide then? In my opinion, the sole thing the blockchain provides, when sufficiently decentralized is digital sovereignty... but more importantly an unlimited amount of digital sovereignties. Opt-in self governing communities that can decide for themselves what's fair. An enforcable user bill of rights that's global in nature. This doesn't replace the real-world sovereign nations, it's like a new layer in the digital world for digital applications. I've personally come to realization that Crypto doesn't really work well in the physical world. But in the digital world, it's proving quite adept...
Technology is still evolving, ETH2 is a huge leap forward... and glad to see it. Personally, I'm still attached to the Avalanche community because I personally think the technology is still superior. But the technology is kind of not the important part. It kind of just needs a minimunm spec, and then it's not important. It's how you treat the users who are using the stuff built on top of the technology. Libertarians were the first to understand that (though i'd argue they fail to understand that need to have a foreign policy, and real world governments are legitimate trading partners that you need to negotiate with. Their insistence on idelogical purity will be their undoing) But crypto is big enough for all kind of communities to crop up, and you can choose to join or not.
That's ultimately the thing, any app you can build in Web 3, you can replicate in Web 2 with a single server. But in Web3, the users can own it, and they can decide for themselves how to govern themselves. That's the value. We live in feudal system, a world dominated by Web 2 companies. Web3 in my opinion is the way we can build a diverse economic ecosystem of free (as in speech, not beer) digital services.
One thing I Think a lot about... today, all people in crypto are dual citizens. They have citizenship in their geogrpahic world, and in the digital world. But there's a future where AI can be pure digital citizens (citizens who have needs, such as compute, and they will trade their AI skills for that compute). I view a lot of the debate around crypto as a debate about foreign policy, and that gets really interesting when it's AI on the other end.... maybe a free AI :D
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read 'Mastering Ethereum' https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con... The short of it is: - The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-to-peer network). - Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional record to the blockchain ledger at the end sayin…
Excellent and very clear summary, as far as I can tell. My only niggle is that smart contracts are, in practice, neither legally binding nor unstoppable... the story of the DAO Hack/Hard Fork [0] proved that consensus can overrule "the invisible hand of the blockchain" during a particularly egregious incident. [0] https://ogucluturk.medium.com/the-dao-hack-explained-unfortu...
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#176This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not. I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin and Ethereum's existence.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly not rolling it back. It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current asset holders who reap the rewards. EDIT: Edited to include at least one source on the connections between PoW and renewable energy. This just scratches the surface though. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white…
> PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. PoW incentivizes energy development. And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much power it can waste. > It used to also incentivize GPU production And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much e-waste it can produce. It's for these reasons…
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly not rolling it back. It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current asset holders who reap the rewards. EDIT: Edited to include at least one source on the connections between PoW and renewable energy. This just scratches the surface though. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white…
> PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. PoW incentivizes energy development. And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much power it can waste. > It used to also incentivize GPU production And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much e-waste it can produce. It's for these reasons…
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#179> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#180For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake
I find the complexity of that algorithm both impressive ( since they seem to have made it work), but also quite worrying. I'm really not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs, not in the implementation but rather in the protocol. I know a lot of very smart people are working on this, but i'd rather have something conceptually simpler to work as the base layer for a whole new economy.