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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#421

Post by killerstorm »

trsh wrote: post #250
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…

The idea that because it's risky right now and that a decrease in risk will provide higher returns isn't necessarily sound. For example, playing a financial equivalent to Russian roulette won't give you higher returns. You can look at the countries titled with the euphemistic "developing markets" which have historically had extremely high risks AND a much lower return than in lower risk countries. The risk-return tra…

> You can look at the countries titled with the euphemistic "developing markets" which have historically had extremely high risks AND a much lower return than in lower risk countries.

Hmm? Not sure what you mean. High-risk countries' bonds pay higher interest than low-risk countries' bonds. E.g. Ukraine was paying 10% interest in USD when US was paying 1%. Of course, expected value might be lower if you average over all such countries, but we are talking about a "happy case" here where a bad event did not happen.

> how can you price the risk of anything in the Blockchain space, like say Ethereum getting completely wiped out by a hack, etc?

Well, you can't calculate the risk but you can get 1000000% return (the actual return over 7 years for ETH presale). Or you can calculate the risk and get 5% return. It's your choice.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#422

Post by valzam »

Hendrikto wrote: post #192
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.

Making PoS scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes with commodity hardware is not simple though. Few projects managed so far, and Ethereum wasn‘t designed for it from the outset, so it‘s even more difficult.

Of course they aren't really scaling to hundreds of thousands of nodes. At any given time only 120 nodes are involved in consensus.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#424

Post by bitL »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #402
bitL wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> the only cryptocurrency that is fulfilling its original promise What was the original promise again? I don't see original Bitcoin whitepaper mentioning traceability or untraceability. There is a chapter about privacy features and no sane person would see a promise of untraceability in that chapter. It seems that shills and spin doctors pumping their own crypto coins twist the history to their needs.

It's not how it was spelled out in the Bitcoin whitepaper, but how it was sold to the public - privacy was among the biggest draws initially if you remember.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#425

Post by irae »

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.

In otehr words: You have "faith" that cryptocurrencies are a fad, right? Some people spent dozens, maybe hundreds of hours understanding everything behind it, and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today. You can continue to have "faith" in this having no value. But if everyone around you start using Bitcoin, would you rather switch your faith to what the others around you believe? Or you rather chase knowledge of why this is the case?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#427

Post by durdn »

b800h wrote: post #407

What I can't understand is that it hasn't affected the price. Surely something like this should increase confidence?

The date of the merge has been known for sometime, so the price increase has been mostkly priced in the previous weeks (see recent pumps). Unfortunately the recent US CPI info release has sent the markets (including crypto ones) into a frenzy. In any case I am optimistic that the price of Eth will explode once the better part of this "recession" is behind us.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#428

Post by polygamous_bat »

iSnow wrote: post #419
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...

It should also be said that the biggest entities are staking pools/providers. If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools in PoW.

1. There is no mechanism to unstake yet.

2. Having a centralized staking pool means that there could be governmental sanctions a la tornado cash coming on such "validators" for facilitating North Korean payments and such. Once again, not a good look.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#429

Post by tomtomistaken »

pharmakom wrote: post #367

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?

Ether is also scarce. You can't spend one Ether multiple times for staking.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#430

Post by DonHopkins »

bambax wrote: post #243
Quindecillion wrote: post #232

Great, now all that energy can be "wasted" rendering pixels with GPUs instead. This was always going to happen. Eth was never going to realistically compete with Bitcoin for energy. Now Bitcoin is the only PoW network remaining, as it should be. 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-neg…

> 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.

It's like people bragging about lighting their farts in crowded elevators instead of not farting in crowded elevators.
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