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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#361

Post by jongjong »

0xrips wrote: post #359
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.

For sure there was a lot of work, but hardly any innovative work. Most of the work was busy-work/unnecessary complexity - As is almost always the case with mainstream blockchain projects. PoS was innovative back in 2016. Blockchain migration to a new tech and consensus mechanism is also not new; it has already been done by hundreds of projects over the last 5 years.

One of the reserve banks' two mandates is 'maximum employment' - IMO, blockchain is one of the clearest examples were you can see the reserve bank's policies working as planned. There is no limit to the complexity and job creation potential of these over-engineered blokchain projects.

Complexity compounds and so does the creation of (less-than-useless) jobs needed to handle all that unnecessary complexity... Solving problems while adding even more complexity on top.

The only innovation is the financial innovation involved in convincing so many rich suckers to pour their money into something which is so inefficient and poorly designed... Somehow tricking them into thinking that the charitable creation of unnecessary jobs is a profitable long term activity.

The real bright minds are those working for the Federal Reserve.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#362

Post by Cederfjard »

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.

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

lambdadmitry is aware of that, they wrote "that is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw some time in the future".

>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.

They weren't saying that it definitely won't happen, their main point was "[the return] is laughably low for something that risky". Yes, you might be able to withdraw in the future, but it's not guaranteed and right now you can't, so there should be more attention paid to the risk as it stands.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#363

Post by squarefoot »

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…

POW incentivizes wasting energy for a practice that turns it into money without the in between steps of creating businesses and jobs (read: progress), and that alone is a huge minus point. That energy is then wasted for more POW currencies, which implies that those who make the most money out of it can dictate energy prices. The only way to bring back down energy prices isn't to create more, as it would quickly be allocated by highest bidders for more POW mining in an endless circle, but to reduce that toxic demand, and eliminating POW mining would represent a good start.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#365

Post by [deleted] »

mrcartmeneses wrote: post #292
funklute wrote: post #277

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”?

[deleted]

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#366

Post by Yizahi »

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…

And it will be the same group of people until the thermal death of the universe, because there are literally no mechanisms to separate those wallets from the tokens. The ultimate feudalism.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#367

Post by pharmakom »

Intuitively to me it seems that PoS can never work.

With PoW the physical reality of scarce energy secures the chain - you can’t spend energy on one computation and another.

With PoS we secure it by holding Ether, but what determines who holds Ether? The chain! But that’s what we are trying to secure. Is this turtles all the way down? Can anyone enlighten me?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#368

Post by Tepix »

funklute wrote: post #277
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…

> 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…

Which is what the Worldcoin project tries to do with their retina scans. The idea isn't bad in principle.

On the other hand they want the same amount of their virtual currency for themselves as 2 billion people.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#369

Post by LtWorf »

ilaksh wrote: post #183
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.

The main use case for a block chain is to ensure that a ledger is valid and not tampered with. The reason we want public ledgers is to keep track of financial transactions securely. Why can't we just use a bank? At some level there needs to be security for the bank's database. Blockchains are generally considered the best way to do this. So when legacy financial databases are replaced in recent years blockchains are…

Blockchains are certainly not the best way to do that. All the hash try and error is completely useless and put there just to create "value".

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#370

Post by williamcotton »

jll29 wrote: post #125
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…

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 love this work on a general ledger for electronic rights management!

A bit off-topic, but do you think this kind of rights management ledger is better stored and accessed in traditional data stores and managed by either a government entity or a private-public partnership of some sorts?

It seems like self-signed authentication would still be viable but with the added bonus of a mechanism for dealing with lost private keys while at the same time allowing for individual entities to quickly and effortlessly exchange ownership.

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