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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#241

Post by hocuspocus »

solumos wrote: post #121
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.

the easiest use case to grok (and one that's being used right now) is a near-instant global settlement layer e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear. Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for physical goods. e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2] [0] - http…

[0] "A network fee of 2.5% (with a cap of $500) will be deducted from your investment amount for settlement, custody, and trading costs associated with your payment in USDC". Very cheap indeed.

[1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle problem. You need trusted third parties in supply chains, a cryptographic signature would essentially achieve the same thing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#242

Post by unionpivo »

swalsh wrote: post #174
silisili wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there are a few common misconceptions that make people not understand the real value crypto is bringing to the table. 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 what peeked my interest in crypto in the first place, and is also the reason I am no longer on that bandwagon.

Because you don't really own it in web3 either. Until normal people get comfortable with self hosting their own stuff there will always be gate keepers and places where governments can apply pressure.

You don't really own your crypto coins unless you have your own wallet on your own hardware (with proper backups as well). And for most normal people even just that is too much.

And we are rapidly approaching a point where we don't really even own our hardware any more.

And everything else, that is build on top of that needs to run on top of some machine somewhere and unless you own it, you can't really rely on it. It's all encrypted so they can't steel from you (unless bugs), but they can also shut it down. Sure there are plenty(and jet still not enough) of nodes on ipfs system now. But many someone's need to run them and it's always possible that people will loose interest or economies will change and number of nodes goes down enough that it becomes practically unusable.

Same problem is with much of the other web3 stack. With few companies controlling much of the developers/stack and infrastructure needed.

Sure it's all open source and distributed, but even nowadays in early stages, before the masses come in, we are talking about lot of infrastructure needed to run everything.

And right now there are VC's putting billions in investments in this space, so having lots of infrastructure for "free" seems like it works. But sooner or later this people will want their money back, with interest, and regular people will be even more screwed, because this is completely unregulated (which is why VC's love it so much ) as a design principle.

On the other hand if you are technical enough to be able to self host your own stuff, boring old federated systems, like smtp, jabber , matrix, ... are a lot easier, cheaper, with a lot less moving part - easier to administer etc.

I am all for federated content and people owning their own digital features in their own hands and I think crypto chains are a distraction/overcomplication at best and could possibly be a trap for ultimate corporate walled gardens.

So my focus is on boring old self hosted federated services.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#243

Post by bambax »

Quindecillion wrote: post #232

Great, now all that energy can be "wasted" rendering pixels with GPUs instead. This was always going to happen. Eth was never going to realistically compete with Bitcoin for energy. Now Bitcoin is the only PoW network remaining, as it should be. Looking forward to seeing Bitcoin play a pivotal role in renewable energy infrastructure build-out and capturing flared and vented methane to be one of the biggest carbon-neg…

> Looking forward to seeing Bitcoin play a pivotal role in renewable energy infrastructure build-out and capturing flared and vented methane to be one of the biggest carbon-negative industries on the planet.

Crypto-talk is so similar to satire as to be indistinguishable.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#246

Post by mupuff1234 »

0xfoobar wrote: post #68

For 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

Most people aren't bashing the tech, but bashing the excessive hype, fraudulent scams and money chasing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#247

Post by dannyw »

fladrif wrote: post #240
0xfoobar wrote: post #68

For 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

Having read your article, I still don't understand one part. The claim that the honest validators in the face of a malicious superminority can eventually leak them out, but a malicious supermajority cannot do the same to an honest superminority. I figure there would need to be some other mechanism that would tip the balance in favor of the honest validators, otherwise it seems like majority should always win.

If you run a node, you're also checking that every block follows the rules.

A malicious supermajority cannot break the rules your client enforces, because your client will reject it.

Think of it as everyone running ethereum has a bunch of asserts() each block or communication it receives.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#248

Post by cinquemb »

swalsh wrote: post #174
silisili wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there are a few common misconceptions that make people not understand the real value crypto is bringing to the table. 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,…

Agree wrt avalanche, ava labs however... would be great if people could do some kind of pow to the decide to pos with avalanche tech, would have been better than current distribution of supply of validators and where those machines are running (like +70% on aws, ovh, etc..., though probably would have taken longer to grow)... which i wonder about what will it look like for eth now.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#249

Post by hocuspocus »

thegginthesky wrote: post #224
syl_sau wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Or you could use Wise.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#250

Post by trsh »

SilverBirch wrote: post #115

There are two interesting things I want to watch from this. The first is I'm interested to see what kind of bull run ETH goes on. The merge has been incredibly long coming, it has huge risks and I think that puts downward pressure on price, you really don't want to be doing stuff in ETH at the moment because there's a fairly good chance something goes wrong, someone stealds $XBn and runs off and the Ethereum guys go…

The idea that because it's risky right now and that a decrease in risk will provide higher returns isn't necessarily sound. For example, playing a financial equivalent to Russian roulette won't give you higher returns. You can look at the countries titled with the euphemistic "developing markets" which have historically had extremely high risks AND a much lower return than in lower risk countries. The risk-return trade-off may be assumed often, but there are controversies, and it's underlying theoretical basis only holds in an efficient capital markets where market participants are capable of pricing risk. A bank can price the risk of a mortgage default, but how can you price the risk of anything in the Blockchain space, like say Ethereum getting completely wiped out by a hack, etc?
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