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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#321

Post by lambdadmitry »

roenxi wrote: post #228
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.

What's more, it's still impossible to withdraw from staking. Which means there will be another massive change of incentives some time later.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#322

Post by dmitriid »

Quindecillion wrote: post #278
bambax wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Let's talk about this in 10 years when it becomes plainly obvious that that is exactly what it's going to do. In the meantime you could actually do some research on it and discover that you might not have a clue what you're talking about. Or don't, it makes little difference to the outcome. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-03/methan... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/23/lancium-raises-150-million-f...…

> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-03/methan...

"Bitcoin is solving the issue of brning gas flares by buying that gas and burning it ... thereby reducing emissions"

> https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/23/lancium-raises-150-million-f...

Lancium raises 150 million dollars to build windfarms 100% of whose output will be wasited on mining Bitcoin and not on, you know, actually producing electricity that people can use.

> https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-mary-fo...

"Bticoin will save the climate by replacing the financial stranglehold on our planet with a financial stranglehold that consumes ever increasing amounts of electiricty and gobbling up more and more resources (such as solar panels and windfarms that could be used elsewhere) to keep running". Also, "For a habitable future, we must stop financialization" says the article describing a system where profits are paramount.

----

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

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#323

Post by ur-whale »

bsaul wrote: post #170
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

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.

>ly not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs

The one nice thing about crypto is that if there are bugs, the incentive to exploit them is large, they will get found quickly.

How the problem is dealt with after the fact (e.g. ETH Classic hard fork) i.e. the governance model is the real interesting part.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#324

Post by boltzmann-brain »

olalonde wrote: post #157

A good moment of humility I hope for all those HN experts who implied Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake would never happen.

I'm just glad I renamed the word for staking in Tezos from "forging" to "baking". There's now about a million companies with names referring to baking in some way. I don't think there would be a lot of financial companies that have forging in the name. It might well have been a detractor for Ethereum PoS as well.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#325

Post by kaba0 »

Shorel wrote: post #50
bambataa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find it interesting that people hate on crypto for its energy consumption but ignore all the other wasteful computation.

No one will ever say anything bad about game consoles, which consume much more electricity than cryptocurrencies =)

And affect multiple orders of magnitude more people, bettering their life quality. Hardly comparable in good faith.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#326

Post by bitL »

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…

I wouldn't rely on experts being able to navigate through complexity as it happens quite a bit that a major bug in a protocol obliterating it completely is found 15 years after its inception...

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#327

Post by altacc »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #315
salmonlogs wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority control over the network. "64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities" https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...

That's like saying "100% of USA controlled by one entity" - except that in the US people are stuck with one president for four years no matter what, and when staking users can go stake with someone else at any time at all.

The difference is that between centralised banking and cryptocurrency, only one of them is claiming to be decentralised and it isn’t the bank.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#328

Post by Darkstryder »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #316

What boggles my mind is that there is no withdrawal from staking and almost no one talks about it. That is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw some time in the future and returning only about 4% gross annually, which is laughably low for something that risky. It's well hidden in Ethereum press releases, the only mention I can quickly find is the FAQ entry titled 'Misconception…

Withdrawals haven’t been enabled _yet_. Per your own link it will be enabled in an upcoming upgrade.

Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade, and this one did happen in the end.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#329

Post by boltzmann-brain »

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…

As much as I'd like this to be the case, that's not a valid argument. If you're a random person who wants to fund a certain organization, you're going to have to buy the cryptocurrency somehow. For anything except tiny amounts this is going to require you to do KYC at some point. Every transaction on a blockchain is recorded forever and traceable back to you and the legal ID that you used during KYC. No one's going to mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.

The way covert funding of illegal or unpopular operations or bribes _actually_ works in the real world is different. It often involves stuff like gambling, getting a thousand pre-paid cards, having a bank that issues credit cards (eg Russian-owned MyWireCard which now dissolved issued huge, prepaid, free cards to EU politicians), or "ant work" such as hacking or grinding up game accounts and selling them for profit. That's the covert and difficult part - not having a blockchain. Before you could get paid for your OF leaks with Ethereum, you'd get paid with Amazon prepaid card codes. The tender being on a blockchain doesn't improve anything at all for those performing the payment or those receiving it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#330

Post by Yizahi »

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,…

Decentralised self governing communities probably can't function as imagined or advertised.

First problem is that the owner(s) of majority of voting tokens can unilaterally decide anything in the community. Because they work on "winner takes it all" principle. This means they are not self governing (because minority stakers are effectively excluded from any governing), and they are not decentralised.

Second problem is that there are no "people"/"humans" in the token infrastructure, there are only wallets. And there is no public mapping between wallets and humans (unless they expose themselves). This leads to the ability of "oligarchs" who own the majority of tokens (see problem #1) to obfuscate their existence. Creators of the community will false advertise that "oh no, we have no majority stakers, here people can truly decide anything by voting", but in reality there can be majority staker who owns majority of voting tokens, just spread out across the several wallets.

Basically these DAOs are recreating feudal fiefdoms in the digital realm but obfuscated by lies or omissions of information.

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