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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#531
post #512

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first. I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.

Chia solves this pretty well with a one time POW then POS in the form of presolved hashes.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#532

It looks like the new Blockchain is quite centralized. 45% of blocks are mined by just two addresses: https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1570339602346684416...

I'm still flummoxed why people use blockchains for any kind of data or computation. Fundamentally isn't blockchain a tech stack built on a linked list with mandatory network calls in every operation? It seems purposefully inefficient. At least in theory it had a point (decentralized control). In practice, however...

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#533

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

To be fair, the article talks about none of that and focuses on the high-level traders perspective. I'd bet that a write up of the process of the merge would be a huge hit on HN.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, they are going to sasturate the market which will drive the prices down significantly. They cannot not saturate the market, because GPUs age due to new developments by manufacturers. This already makes the prospect of recouping initial investments rahter dim. Consider that non-miner market has a huge distain for miners and are willing to pay premium on new cards just to stick to the miners. I don't think resale…

No, the most ROI efficient cards are 4-5 year old cards (like the RX480). ETH's algo, ethash, is memory hard, which means that it is a false narrative that buying the latest card is necessary. The bottle neck isn't the speed of the card, but the speed of the memory controller.

This does not contradict my comment that resale value of those cards is going to be nowhere close original purchase price, though

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#535

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

But this is the opposite of hacking. Feels like turning ETH to a political system. Soon you ll have the "republican party of ETH" forming. Those are natural self-organized outcomes when groups of humans are trusted with power.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#536

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

Well, the whole crypto/fin tech space is such a rotten cesspool of scammers and blowhards that it's becoming very difficult to take anything they do and say seriously.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#537

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

the servile class learned how to program

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#538

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

This is still a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work rendered.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#539

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#540
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very large numbers of users. Seems the most likely explanation. The idea that this isn’t true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild fiction to me.

You may be right that the majority is probably an exchange. But is there something in the protocol specification that prohibits such majority? Then it raises a question, can an actor such as a government (which may have unlimited resources) to hold large numbers of ether (> 51%) to add blocks to their advantage? Perhaps, it's my ignorance about this technology that makes me question and prevent me from adopting this…

The short answers is yes, there are various safeguards and countermeasures in place, some on the protocol and some on the social/incentive layer. But it would take dozens of pages to explain all of these in detail, so if you are truly interested in this you can search for "proof of stake security" or "proof of stake centralization risk" and you will find a huge number of resources.
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