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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#351

Post by jefftk »

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.)

While resistive heating was state of the art for years, and you might as well do some computation with the electricity before turning into heat, we can now make systems that are far more efficient ("200%" and up) by moving heat instead of generating it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#352

Post by lambdadmitry »

Darkstryder wrote: post #328
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.

I'm saying that right now staking is an activity with a serious risk of losing all of the staked money, an undefined period of the money being inaccessible, and just 4% gross reward for that, which is so poor I can only imagine very specific people engaging in it. It doesn't make sense financially, so the people doing that are either foolish, enthusiasts, or looking for other ways to profit such as regulatory capture, which should not inspire confidence.

What's more, it's expected to change, changing the rules of a system relying on incentives to stay sound. In that sense it's not even releasing an alpha version, it's releasing a different product and promising to launch the announced one some time later.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#353

Post by pcthrowaway »

adh636 wrote: post #26
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…

PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly not rolling it back. It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current asset holders who reap the rewards. EDIT: Edited to include at least one source on the connections between PoW and renewable energy. This just scratches the surface though. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white…

Stockpiling food and lighting it on fire for warmth would incentivize more food production also, but if there are ways to generate warmth without wasteful steps, I think we can all agree they're unarguably better

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#354

Post by smcl »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #46
JonathanBeuys wrote: post #6

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.

>And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5% I live in Europe and the measures my county is taking to combat energy shortage are pretty wild like limiting the heating of apartments, indoor swimming pools, reducing street lighting, but nowhere was is stated "banning crypto mining". Pretty insane how we're just tolerating this massive energy waste just so some people and organizations can have something to speculate…

There are definitely cases where The Market doesn't magically fix things and regulation needs to be introduced to prevent bad behaviour (or encourage a societally beneficial behaviour).

However in this case with the high cost of electricity in Europe right now, isn't crypto-mining similar to lighting money on fire? I can't imagine it's profitable in many European countries, if any.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#355

Post by bsaul »

m12k wrote: post #349
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.

I'm a crypto skeptic, but I have to admit, one of the cool things about crypto-currencies is that they come with their own built-in bug bounty. If there's a bug, it will most certainly be found.

I'm not sure a criminal mind would advertize having found a bug in the algorithm. Instead it would probably try to capitalize on that bug for as long as possible while remaining quiet about it (assuming it's possible, of course).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#356

Post by miohtama »

andruby wrote: post #150
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…

I'm also expecting a lot of GPU's to flood the used markets. Coupled with the next generation of GPU's being released soon.

Ethereum miners can now play Cyberpunk 2077 for the rest of their lives.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#357

Post by lawn »

silisili wrote: post #57
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…

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.

Then I recommend the book "Why Cryptocurrencies?" That focus on use-cases of crypto.

https://whycryptocurrencies.com/

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#359

Post by 0xrips »

jongjong wrote: post #358

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. One of the largest financial events for sure, but technologically there is hardly any innovation there.

curious, have you looked into the years worth of research and work that actually went into the merge? it didn't materialize out of thin air, people had to build it first.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#360

Post by swyx »

birracerveza wrote: post #213
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…

>what kind of bull run ETH goes on The fact that the vast majority expects a bull run means that it's very likely it will crash instead.

this, this is the right response. this is the most telegraphed event in crypto, all the bulls are literally in eth for this, there is just as much likely to be a "sell the news" effect as there is a bull run. OP betrays his bias imagining only one outcome.
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