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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#571

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.

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#572

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

First one is Lido and second one is Coinbase both of them are pools. Lido is more decentralized than Coinbase as the stake is spread across many different staking providers. In any case the situation is not ideal and a bigger uptake of solo staking and truly decentralized staking solutions like RocketPool would be beneficial.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x388c818ca8b9251b393131c08a736...

https://etherscan.io/address/0x4675c7e5baafbffbca748158becba...

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#573

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.

I mean, 1 —- HN is largely populated by big tech coders who decided selling out the entire world population for a mid $100ks salary from the surveillance state sounds like a good deal.

But 2, there are liquid markets for crypto. So, while you might feel good typing out how you value crypto —- it simply doesn’t matter. Put your money where your mouth is. Short it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#574
post #547

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...

Unfortunately all the NFT scams (most of which were run on top of ethereum) and smaller coins/networks created and promoted solely for pump-and-dump schemes (not ethereum) got conflated in some people's heads with everything else in the cryptocurrency space and now they think it is all just a scam that doesn't do anything besides trick people into losing money.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#575
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother paying more for a slow database if you’re not going to rely on the one feature which can’t be done faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?

Because it gives people options and increases competition in the financial system. It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.

Everything gives people options: the question of whether those options actually increase competition comes down to what a particular option does better than the alternatives. For example, if I'm not in the business of selling blockchain services I don't care about Visa's backend infrastructure. I care about things like how much overhead I'm paying on each transaction, how hard it is for my customers to use, how quickly transactions go through (especially in retail settings – I don't want someone blocking the line while they wait for a miner to approve a block), and the cost / risk of fraud.

Currently, it's by far easier for everyone to use Visa: most people have access to that system, services are widely available for businesses of all sizes, etc. The primary drawbacks are transaction costs and businesses being on the hook for most fraudulent transactions.

Switching to Ethereum would make things slower, but that could improve. Since it's not tied to a hard currency, however, there's a much bigger problem cost management: I know exactly how much a Visa transaction will cost but gas fees are unpredictable and volatile, and the exchange rates for ETH vary both independently and more than most currencies. Similarly, there's a real appeal to not automatically being on the hook for a disputed transaction but that's significantly undercut if you have to worry about being one mistake away from irrecoverably losing everything in your account and so far customers have not been jumping to take on more personal risk either.

The big question here is also what competitive businesses do in response: for example, if at some point in the future Ethereum actually became cost-competitive what happens when Visa simply lowers their transaction fees until that's no longer the case again? They have a lot of margin to do that and the merchants don't need to change anything about how they do business. Similarly, Ethereum is nowhere near the speed of a traditional credit card transaction but even if it hit that speed it'd be playing catch-up with Apple/Google Pay – businesses care a lot about things like that since it's often highly visible to customers and can affect things like retail lines, so the question is whether that can be improved faster than companies like Apple/Google, Stripe, Square, etc. can improve their services.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#576

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 article can give you some insight as to why HN reacts the way it does: https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-dismiss-bitco...

I just want to check in and make sure you understand that the fundamental principle of how a Con Game works is that the mark thinks they know something that no one else knows.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#578

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.

> We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work rendered.

Every person that took equity in a startup that then went out of business would love to talk with you. Believing bitcoin will be valuable for some people isn't really any different than believing pets.com will be successful or that tesla will actually be able to make electric cars and taking equity instead of cash for compensation.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#579

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…

So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this?

It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#580

Does this mean GPU prices will go down? At least according to this article the validator nodes can be run on a Raspberry Pi [1] [1] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

GPUs are ridiculously cheap now, compared to how they used to be. You can buy a 3070 from newegg for $599 and they’ll throw in a free monitor to sweeten the deal for you

The 3070 had a $499 MSRP when it launched, I wouldn't call this deal "ridiculously cheap".
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