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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Like with ballots tied to people’s real identity in some kind of “polling station”?

If you're willing to admit a central authority to authenticate who can and cannot vote, cryptocurrency becomes easy.

Really bitcoin is fundamentally trying to solve the problem that its impossible to tell who is a "real" person on the internet. If you dont have that problem everything is trivial.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#302
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now all we need to do is shutdown the gaming industry. It’s so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be playing chess or Yazee instead.

Indeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our problems, we should stop generating and using energy altogether. I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant ! Why does people complaining about…

I think you're reading the situation completely wrong here. Yes, we should make energy cheaper, cleaner and more abundant. I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is rallying against that fact.

The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value. It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable purposes; things essential to our survival both on an individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in medicine and the like).

Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage. Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to accelerate our technological progress.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#303
post #8

I’m really curious what the GPU miners are going to be doing with their cards. Today may be as big a moment for gamers as it is for ETH devs.

I have a very very large GPU farm. We switched to ETC, for now. Why? Because it is the easiest one that doesn't require retuning everything. GPUs are like snowflakes and each one of my cards are tuned for hash/power/stability, individually. It is an insane amount of work to do this because the failure mode is that the card (and machine) crashes.

But, do you believe ETC has future? I think the current increase in ETC GPU mining is due to people trying to squeeze the last bits of money return of their farming investment until they could sell/repurpose (I mean non-crypto) their rigs.

I honestly don't believe ETC has any practical future value, and any increase in valuation these days will result in a bigger crash of ETC value in a few days/weeks as people get out of the GPU mining ecosystem.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#304
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…

In addition to the APY described by sibling comment, validators can also run MEV-Boost to increase their APY:

> You should run mev-boost to earn a fair share of the MEV extracted in the blocks you propose. Connecting your consensus client to mev-boost allows you to get full blocks from a network of block builders optimized for MEV extraction. This can increase validator rewards by 75.3%, or give an APR of 12.86% rather than a non-MEV APR of 7.35% from staking eth.

https://boost.flashbots.net/

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#305

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.

You honestly say it with a straight face that 0.5% of the total electricity used by the word is not an unfathomably large number that was wasted for years with no good reason?!

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mark of ignorance is to dismiss things you “think” are beneath you before any real consideration. In my opinion too, the crypto crowd is typically one I like to avoid. But to dismiss the tech behind it as babble is sad.

I can assert with absolute authority that the tech behind crypto is inarguably "babble". There is no "there" there.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#308
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now all we need to do is shutdown the gaming industry. It’s so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be playing chess or Yazee instead.

Indeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our problems, we should stop generating and using energy altogether. I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant ! Why does people complaining about…

Although there are better reasons to reject crypto, energy usage for crypto has few benefits aside of speculation/gambling for material gain. In Europe, energy bills for most people have tripled so reducing energy demand is a priority right now. I think there are less harmful ways to gamble. You could try a casino perhaps or buy futures contracts on ornamental gourds.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#309
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…

There are even larger areas in cryptography where if you don't do it right the whole thing will work, and after a few months someone will make $1B by crashing your currency into oblivion.

Edit: if you want to see how that can happen, I like to take apart weak cryptocurrencies and show what's wrong with them. Someone paid me to do a public review of a thing called Stratis a while back, and I went to town. Here's a highlight. https://twitter.com/PLT_cheater/status/1235036182284820481

I still accept commissions doing code review. It's just too much fun.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#310
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Ethereum blockchain alone was consuming 0.5% of the world's total energy?

Wait until you hear how much of the world's total energy is wasted on ads (manufacturing, transmission, power usage) or spam email.

While I hate ads with a burning passion, they do affect multiple orders of more people than cryptos ever did, even if that effect is far from positive (but not blanket negative either).
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