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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#541

Post by elevaet »

Waterluvian wrote: post #451
ineedasername wrote: post #444

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…

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

Agreed. My top concern with cryptocurrency is the huge waste of energy inherent to PoW. It's really, really good to see ETH pull this off. There are a pile of other problems in crypto, but it's fantastic to see this biggest (IMO) issue addressed by the #2 cryptocurrency. I actually thought it might never happen. It's a day to celebrate for sure.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#542

Post by viscanti »

bertman wrote: post #536
sfjailbird wrote: post #526

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.

The ETH core team who pulled off a very ambitious migration to POS might be different than the run of the mill scammers who are involved with crypto. Seems weird to group them all together when they appear to be very different.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#543

Post by majinuub »

hwillis wrote: post #511
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB. Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to p…

> Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.

Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.

> No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

> Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#544

Post by hwillis »

andsoitis wrote: post #523
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions. This statement caused me to do some light research. I discovered that methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

https://climateer.substack.com/p/methane-lifetime

> Methane emissions decay gradually, with an average lifetime of about 12 years (“perturbation lifetime”, which is what matters for climate purposes).

> This will increase by roughly 35% if methane concentrations double, or decrease roughly 25% if concentrations return to pre-industrial levels.

Methane is actually 150x-ish worse than CO2, but it breaks down over time. Ameliorated over a long time it's 25-30x worse.

Rough part is that breaking down methane depends on OH radicals in the air, of which there are a fixed amount. The more methane there is, the slower methane is broken down. If there were a sudden massive release of methane, it would stay at that 150x potency for a very long time. Fun!

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#545

Post by [deleted] »

sbf501 wrote: post #539
sfjailbird wrote: post #526

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#546

Post by reggedtorespond »

once_inc wrote: post #469
Waterluvian wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

I looked into your statement about bitcoin mining preventing methane emissions and it doesn't add up to me. Oil drillers already flare the methane, which turns it into carbon dioxide. The solution these bitcoin miners are implementing is to burn the methane in a controlled manner so they can harness the energy produced for electricity to mine bitcoin. The same chemical reaction occurs, converting methane into carbon dioxide. The companies internal research claims this reduces carbon dioxide equivalent units, but I'm pretty skeptical. Of course, they would want their research to show they are doing something good. Sure, I guess it is more useful to harness the energy than to just burn it fruitlessly, but I don't see how it reduces emissions. Is there something I'm missing as to why this would make sense?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#547

Post by RunSet »

sfjailbird wrote: post #526

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 merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country.

Indeed. If someone claimed that Ethereum is a scam and Vitalik Buterin is a scammer I would need them to substantiate that claim.

https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all...

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#548

Post by majinuub »

hoosieree wrote: post #532
neprotivo wrote: post #457

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...

The only purpose of a blockchain is to decentralize the storage and validation of data. It only makes sense if the decentralization is worth the loss in efficiency. Using a blockchain just to store data and perform computations when you have no reason to decentralize will only result in a crappy, slow database.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#549

Post by ouid »

dylkil wrote: post #537
sfjailbird wrote: post #526

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

i have as much of a problem with wealth inequality as you do, but wealthy people have as much of an advantage playing the crypto game as they do the regular game, because its just a market.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#550

Post by svnt »

sfjailbird wrote: post #526

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 audience here probably holds a disproportionate amount of newly less-profitable GPUs.

PoS has been the clear future for better than five years and huge credit to the ETH team for making this happen.

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