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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#591

Post by usehackernews »

root_axis wrote: post #582
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…

Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.

This isn’t crypto “hype.” It’s not going to impact the price of Ethereum. At least it’s not hype in my opinion. It’s just an impressive engineering feat.

Given crypto isn’t going to die tomorrow, it’s good to see Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum, reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is admirable.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#592

Post by kybernetikos »

jsmm wrote: post #527
kranke155 wrote: post #467

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…

There's a common misconception that once you have >51% you can do anything. This isn't true. There's plenty of mischief you might get away with (censoring, double spending), but you can't transfer other peoples money without their private key, and you can't change the rules of the protocol. You can probably tank the value of the currency by doing large enough double spends and causing problems, but in PoS importantly you're hurting yourself more than anyone else, while in PoW, you still have a bunch of useful hardware left over after the attack, and with hash power marketplaces you can attack a PoW chain while having more or less no investment in the chain itself.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#593

Post by mratsim »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #531
seydor wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chia plotting managed to get banned from all cloud providers in a month.

It's also wasting by actively destroying storage disks.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#594

Post by cypress66 »

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...

Bitcoin doesn't even use linked lists (it's merkle trees). Similar with other coins.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#595

Post by vsareto »

krferriter wrote: post #574
RunSet wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you want a majority of people using your thing, perception is important.

- Governments were pretty late to the party with regulations/law enforcement because they understandably didn't know if it was serious. This meant your average person who lost in a scam probably had no justice.

- The volume of scams made it seem that all of this was normal - best case was you did some research that found out before you put money in. This is partly because of governments but also there's no central authority from the crypto side to say what is safe and what isn't. "Buyer beware" with an every day currency/payment system doesn't really do you any favors in terms of adoption.

- People lost substantial real money to complicated technical issues on top of the scams

- All of this meant you had to do your research to fundamentally use the thing safely, which turned it more into an investing chore than payment convenience.

So it's actually pretty reasonable if someone has this impression

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#596

Post by jliptzin »

JeremyNT wrote: post #579
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…

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,…

Cash is still best for illicit activities

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#597

Post by Ntrails »

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.

Messaging and information on actual greenhouse gas emissions and impact have long been god awful, often to the point of borderline misinformation. It's a source of tremendous frustration, in part because spending enormous political capital solving the wrong problems is actively counter-productive

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#598

Post by tcgv »

JeremyNT wrote: post #579
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…

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,…

> So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators

You're right, it's an impressive piece technology that's been growing through questionable use cases. But that's not the fault of the underlying technology, but of the actors involved.

As long as blockchains are treated as a second class citizen, governments choose to ostracize it, financial oligopolies lobby against it, things won't change.

But imagine what could be accomplished if governments decided to embrace and properly regulate it, and what it could empower in our society in terms of a more open and acessible socio-economic environment.

Let's not blame the technology.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#599

Post by mratsim »

killerstorm wrote: post #415
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…

As someone who worked with blockchains & crypto for 10+ years, I'd actually recommend against reading "serious references". "What is going on now" is largely the same thing as before: * consensus / Sybil resistance / game-theory / "crypto-economics" * cryptography - signatures, data structures (e.g. Merkle tree) * p2p networking * deterministic computation / virtual machines If you have a solid CS/software engineerin…

consensus is strongly related to distributed computing fault tolerance and database or file systems' atomicity and integrity in case of crash. Basically problems that involve multiple readers and multiple writers.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#600

Post by silon42 »

jliptzin wrote: post #596
JeremyNT wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Cash is still best for illicit activities

and for privacy
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