Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 1001 posts

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#221

Post by herbst »

syl_sau wrote: post #140
colesantiago wrote: post #62

This 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.

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly w…

No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few companies that restrict things that go way further than the law.

You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services.

There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for.

Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#222

Post by freeqaz »

Animats wrote: post #22

The bottom just fell out of the used GPU market. NVidia Tesla 80 24GB on sale for US$79 in quantity. [1] [1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

A nice human made a spreadsheet with a chart at the bottom to help answer this question: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zlv4UFiciSgmJZncCuju...

In terms of ROI, the 3060 with 12GB of RAM seems to be the best one for cheap. The M40 has 24GB of RAM too but the core is super slow.

I'm personally holding out for prices on 3090s to crash. Also, NVIDIA is rumored to be launching their new GPU series in 2 weeks (there is a scheduled event already).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#223

Post by AgentME »

timeon wrote: post #196
salex89 wrote: post #102

Can we have our GPUs back now?

It depends... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844350

ETC's block reward pays for a certain amount of mining to happen. If demand for ETC and its price stay about the same, then ETC's block reward won't change. Nearly all of the miners who quit mining ETH will find it not profitable to mine ETC. (If they all started mining ETC, then the reward would be split too many ways, it wouldn't be profitable for anyone, and people would exit until the reward was split less.)

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#224

Post by thegginthesky »

syl_sau wrote: post #140
colesantiago wrote: post #62

This 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.

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly w…

Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that.

Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#225

Post by JonathanBeuys »

maxioatic wrote: post #25
JonathanBeuys wrote: post #6

It worked. And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%: https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046 I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.

During the livestream of the Merge someone said 0.2%, while Bitcoin was at 0.5%. Regardless, still an amazingly high percentage to just “turn off”.

Well, I laid out my numbers and calculation.

If there is a more accurate way of calculating it that results in 0.2%, I would love to hear about it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#226

Post by chx »

lmarcos wrote: post #28

> 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…

Nothing is going on.

You are on the right track.

There's an incredible amount of word salad piled on the fact that people are playing a negative sum game when getting involved with any cryptocurrency that has transaction fees.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#227

Post by fsloth »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #167
jll29 wrote: post #125

Earlier 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...

The only reason contracts are binding is because they are enforced by courts. Legally enforceable contracts and the courts that enforce them was one of the killer features of western societies an a non-trivial reason for their economic success.

I have no idea how smart contract could be globally enforced, or can they be, but if they can, the way I see it, this should create new prosperity for those who have been unable to enjoy access to fair courts and binding contracts.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#228

Post by roenxi »

Uehreka wrote: post #5

I gotta say, I’ve been really cynical about this and honestly thought Ethereum would keep putting off the move to PoS forever. I’m very very happy to be wrong. I still don’t see the value in cryptocurrency as a project, but now that it’s not rolling back years of renewable energy development, I’m down to have some much more interesting conversations about Ethereum, and I may even be willing to buy some and try it out…

It isn't really over yet. This must have had a fairly radical impact on the incentives of the people who are involved in running the network since random outsiders can't muscle in any more. We don't know what that does the economics of the project from just the first couple of hours. I'm going to be checking back in on Ethereum after 1 and 12 months to see what really happened here.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#229

Post by gambiting »

duskwuff wrote: post #95
jazzyjackson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The validator is randomly chosen, no? So we essentially have a lottery as a banking system now?

Worse: a lottery for the rich. Validators are required to stake at least 32 ETH (~$52k USD) to participate.

I mean......isn't that any lottery? People who buy 100k lotto tickets have an undeniably higher chance of winning than people who bought a single ticket. Here it's the same - the higher your stake the higher the chances. But you don't need to stake all 32 eth to participate.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#230

Post by miohtama »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #44
pshc wrote: post #35

The 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

The validator is randomly chosen, no? So we essentially have a lottery as a banking system now?

It's not "lottery as a banking system", because there are rules for validators for failing over and others replacing them. This is what complex consensus mechanisms are about - how to have 100% uptime instead of few nines. The system has built in incentives for the operators to keep it running smoothly, but still not being unable to change or reject the transaction payloads, like PayPal or banking system could.
Post reply on HN