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

281–290 of 1001 posts

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#281

Post by leroman »

friendzis wrote: post #199
leroman wrote: post #111

Great! Unlike BTC the miners can sell their gear so they are not down on their investment.. I imagine BTC miners putting up a good fight if this was on the table and they stand to lose all their asics

One, they are going to sasturate the market which will drive the prices down significantly. They cannot not saturate the market, because GPUs age due to new developments by manufacturers. This already makes the prospect of recouping initial investments rahter dim. Consider that non-miner market has a huge distain for miners and are willing to pay premium on new cards just to stick to the miners. I don't think resale…

I suppose they made some money by running these cards.. They stand to get SOME of the initial investment back, unlike BTC ASICs, they are basically worthless outside of BTC mining..

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#282

Post by yread »

mckirk wrote: post #274
roschdal wrote: post #266

Bitcoin is using too much energy, and this energy is needed for more important things like heating and transportation.

Well that's easy: a 2kW Bitcoin miner heats your house just as well as a 2kW electric furnace. (I'm kidding but I'm also not; I'm regularly amazed by the fact that the most complex and intricate computational machines have exactly the same 'output' as the most basic 'heat this piece of metal' contraptions, when looked at as a blackbox.)

Have you heard of heatpumps?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#283

Post by seanhunter »

phartenfeller wrote: post #273

I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was decided a transaction w…

Ungovernable doesn’t mean that the people involved can’t decide what to do. “Ungovernable “ meeans an external party can’t force them to do something they don’t want.

The dao fork proves this because some people decided not to roll back and forked the chain instead. The ecosystem decided which fork was the main fork but they both live on.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#284

Post by chompychop »

Vespasian wrote: post #198
bsaul wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cryptocurrencies impose some complex constraints on themselves that require complex solutions. Conceptually banks and exchanges solved the consensus problem decades ago and they did it with a highly secured simple database and lots of crosschecks. But if you trust nobody (except some developers somehwere) then things get tricky

Could you go into more detail or provide references on where I could read up more on how banks do this? I've always wondered why we hear a lot about crypto exchanges getting hacked, but seldom about banks. What is it that banks are doing right (or crypto exchanges doing wrong) in terms of security?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#285

Post by bsaul »

mirekrusin wrote: post #217
bsaul wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is large areas in cryptography where if you don’t do it right the whole thing won’t work at all - in that sense there are large parts that are self verifying which collapses complexity. I’m not saying it’s all easy, just that experts can navigate through complexity because they know what to ignore by abstracting it and thinking about properties it holds, not keeping in mind all the guts underneath. Maybe good e…

Except cryptography usually rely on mathematical proofs. I'm not aware of such possibility for distributed systems. I know Lamport did work on that subject, but i'm not sure if you can equate a TLA+ proof on some properties to a mathematical proof about the structure of numbers, nor do i know if ethereum even has a TLA+ proof or equivalent of anything regarding the PoS protocol (i honestly don't know, so i may be completely wrong).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#286

Post by leroman »

andruby wrote: post #182
leroman wrote: post #111

Great! Unlike BTC the miners can sell their gear so they are not down on their investment.. I imagine BTC miners putting up a good fight if this was on the table and they stand to lose all their asics

Is there a real proposal to turn BTC into PoS?

If this works for ETH, I don't believe there's a real reason why this couldn't work for BTC **

** big asterisk here as I have spent no time trying to understand how they made it work for ETH and how/if this actually applies to BTC..

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#287

Post by Quindecillion »

shmde wrote: post #237
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…

> Great, now all that energy can be "wasted" rendering pixels with GPUs instead. Just like it was supposed to.

Point is the energy will still be spent and the carbon emitted if the grid is still primarily runs on fossil fuels.

Energy use isn't the problem. Carbon emissions are. Green the grid, don't try to police people's energy use.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#288

Post by asenna »

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…

> preferably books and not random blogs

The tech in Blockchain/Web3 world is changing and evolving incredibly fast (as is evident from this historic event today) and so by the time books come out, they already become outdated.

I would highly recommend reading Vitalik's blog[1]. He talks about various topics and has a knack for explaining things brilliantly.

[1] https://vitalik.ca/

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#289

Post by 0x64 »

gwd wrote: post #215

So there's an article with information about how to run a validator from home [1]. But my question is, what the typical ROI for this sort of thing? Not just from your stake of 32 ETH, but from the hardware depreciation, electricity costs, etc? I like the idea of a non-PoW blockchain, and I don't mind taking some risks, but before I invest $60k in becoming a validator, I'd like to know what the potential payback might…

APY depends on the current validator count, decreasing as more validators come online. Currently, the base APY is around 4 %.

On top of that, you have to factor in luck: block proposals are randomly assigned to validators, and they include a random amount of tips depending on network activity. You could propose a block that nets you 0.01 ETH in tips, or a block with 50 ETH in tips.

On average, I believe the post-Merge APY has been estimated to be ≈6 % (non-cumulative).

Hardware can be anything. Even a RasPi 4 with 8 GB of memory can be made to work. Any old x64 machine with two or more cores works. 16 GB of memory is recommended, as is a 2 TB SSD to minimize down-time. Storage requirements are likely to go down in the medium-term, as e.g. state expiry get implemented.

I’d recommend an Intel NUC. They use laptop CPUs, so electricity consumption is around 5–20 watts. For networking, you’ll need around 5 Mb/s up and down after the initial sync.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#290

Post by preseinger »

Hendrikto wrote: post #192
bsaul wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making PoS scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes with commodity hardware is not simple though. Few projects managed so far, and Ethereum wasn‘t designed for it from the outset, so it‘s even more difficult.

But of course no system can scale to O(100k) nodes and retain reasonable availability and consistency properties.
Post reply on HN