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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#431

Post by b800h »

durdn wrote: post #427
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.

Makes sense. The bit I didn't understand was that presumably there was uncertainty around whether the merge would be successful. But perhaps there still is, or like you say, the CPI info release has obscured things.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#432

Post by hugocbp »

valzam wrote: post #270
presentation wrote: post #124

> “Proof-of-stake is like running an app on your MacBook,” he said. “It's like running Slack. It's like running Google Chrome or running Netflix. Obviously, your MacBook plugs into the wall and uses electricity to run. But no one thinks about the environmental impact of running Slack, right?” People do think about that. But definitely an improvement!

It's also completely untrue. Staking is unprofitable if you cannot guarantee uptime of your node. In fact Ethereum includes slashing for inactivity, so not only do you lose out on rewards if you shut of your MacBook, you run the risk of losing Ethereum. Unless of course you stake with a centralized pool, which defeats the whole purpose.

I think that specific part is meant more to be read as "consume as much energy as an app running on your MacBook", not "you can stake your ETH in your notebook".

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#433

Post by irae »

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…

Miners need not only to spend money on hardware, but also the upkeep of earning money by mining is expensive (electricity, or the cost of electricity generation).

Thus, Proof of Stake let the rich grow their richness for doing nothing. In Proof of Work they need to continue working to make their money grow. Not to mention that they removed the miners from the equation, proving that in ETH system the poor and the people don't have power at all, whereas in BTC no one ever had any such power.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#434

Post by polygamous_bat »

killerstorm wrote: post #421
trsh wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

"Past returns are not indicative of future performance" is a mantra you will see everywhere in the financial world. If not doing any risk calculation whatsoever gives you 1000000% return them you didn't "invest" anything, you just gambled with it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#435

Post by anony23 »

fsloth wrote: post #227
FearNotDaniel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent and very clear summary, as far as I can tell. My only niggle is that smart contracts are, in practice, neither legally binding nor unstoppable... the story of the DAO Hack/Hard Fork [0] proved that consensus can overrule "the invisible hand of the blockchain" during a particularly egregious incident. [0] https://ogucluturk.medium.com/the-dao-hack-explained-unfortu...

The only reason contracts are binding is because they are enforced by courts. Legally enforceable contracts and the courts that enforce them was one of the killer features of western societies an a non-trivial reason for their economic success. I have no idea how smart contract could be globally enforced, or can they be, but if they can, the way I see it, this should create new prosperity for those who have been unab…

Smart contracts are NOT contracts. They are software that run on the EVM. That's it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#436

Post by 70rd »

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?

Scarce energy does not secure PoW, the value of the mined currency does, in the same way that scarce supply does not secure the gold standard, it's the value of gold (the 'fiat' shared illusion that it's a reserve).

I can fork a PoW chain with a difficulty bomb so that the difficulty is 1000x that of mainnet for any given hashrate. Energy is still scarce, you can't double spend energy on my chain and the 'real' one. Yet my chain isn't secure, because no one will recognize it as canonical: the rewards it yields aren't worth expending effort for.

I think you're confused about what the chain is securing. It's not who owns what, it's who spends WHEN. Distributed consensus of ownership does not require PoW/PoS, these were invented to solve double spending/censorship attacks that were a problem in P2P networks.

You can't attack a chain to muddle the past, only the present. A successful attack on ETH won't change who holds ETH, it will only prevent agreeing on who receives it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#437

Post by rkangel »

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.

I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a niche position in the long term.

The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping containers in ports (https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens). This is an international problem with a lot of it happening in countries with a lot of corruption (i.e. you can't rely on legal mechanism). Not being able to forge who is responsible for which container eliminates a lot of problems.

Ethereum does something even more interesting, which is that the network can agree on the result of computations (these are called dapps for "distributed apps"). These can be used to implement simple "smart contracts" for financial purposes but they have a much broader applications. To some extent I'm slightly underwhelmed by the things people are doing with them, but the potential is enormous.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#438

Post by konschubert »

Yizahi wrote: post #366
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.

Just like with Bitcoin.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#439

Post by franky47 »

Quote from the article:

> “I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week." -- Edgington

There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Both are critically necessary and complementary, but I don't see how Edgington thinks that switching off PoW suddenly makes Ethereum carbon-negative.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#440

Post by jqpabc123 »

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?

Don't look now but "decentralization" and "power to the people" are already gone in the crypto market.

Blockchain is a novel accounting system. But has any organization *ever* derived any real power from an accounting system? Are Google and Apple and Amazon market leaders because of a novel accounting system? I don't think so.

In a capitalist system, real power is derived from marketplace control. Accounting is just a way of keeping score.

Likewise, in the crypto market, Binance has now consolidated it's power position as marketplace leader and has effectively become the "central bank" of crypto with the power to mint it's own currency (Tether and BUSD) and use it to manipulate the marketplace at will. In a brazen demonstration of their power, they plan to crush other stable coins by simply replacing them with their own.

https://fortune.com/2022/09/06/binance-moves-against-rival-s...

What are "the people" going to do about this? What does blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing.

Power to the Binance! They are now driving the crypto bus and everyone else is just along for the ride.

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