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The Ethereum merge is done

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331–340 of 1001 posts

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#331
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…

Monero is the only cryptocurrency that is fulfilling its original promise (basically digital cash, untraceable) and that is being banned left and right by exchanges these days. ETH is more of the old power balance with slightly new players without all the previous regulations (i.e. scams everywhere).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#332

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…

Transition to proof of stake consensus doesn't make a byzantine fault tolerant system anymore or less accessible to the everyman, it simply replaces depending on electricity to depending on investing directly into the protocol.

One may see the 'wealthy' as getting more 'say' but in reality they could (and did) just buy hardware that produces higher hashrates.

This performative ceremony is gone now to the benefit of all

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#333

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 feel like you have an overly emotional attachment to this, given your need to make this comment. People say things that turn out to be wrong all the time, but you seem to have become resentful that they disbelieved this would happen.

Odd way to approach a technology.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#334
post #125
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…

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…

I very much enjoyed Andrej Karpathy‘s „from scratch“ bitcoin implementation [1]. I‘m sure there are other projects on GitHub explaining blockchain concepts directly in code.

[1] https://karpathy.github.io/2021/06/21/blockchain/

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#335
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…

1. Energy is limited.

Sun’s mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 * 9e16).

Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year increasing energy output by 5%.

How long will it take till we use-up whole sun?

ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years

How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12 solar masses)

ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799

How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg)

ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years

Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not sustainable even on universe’s scale. Eventually we will reach hard wall.

2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for humanity to do.

3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto heating raises energy prices for others.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#336
post #186

ELI5 anyone?

No more mining for ETH. And all other crypto together (not counting Bitcoin, which uses ASIC) have 20x less daily mining reward compared to ETC. That means a lot used GPU cards will hit the market, since huge part of pie just disappeared.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#337

I assume it has been debated again and again, but since I don't know the answer I'm going to ask: We often complain people hold cryptocurrencies instead of using them as money. Isn't this change going to make this worse ?

Ethereum isn't supposed to be money (though it can be), it's fuel you use for doing other things. Do people use less oil because it's deflationary and gets consumed when used? No, because it's useful now. The most likely end game for Ethereum is being a replacement for all backend financial systems. Instead of having to hire teams of people to verify things or integrate various legacy systems together, everyone can b…

Wait, so this cryptocurrency was never supposed to be... ...a currency?

In this case, the crypto-not-currency community really needs to work on branding.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#339

Congrats to the devs. This is a historic moment for computing and distributed tech, and will pave the way for Ethereum’s next updates: scalability, privacy, stronger censorship resistance, easier UX and account abstraction.

> This is a historic moment for computing

A) Really? B) Bit early to be proclaiming historic events. On account of, well, history is very much post-tense.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#340

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.

> Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never happen.

If software development has taught me anything, it's to never depend on the anticipated future kindness of software projects I don't control.

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