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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#641

Post by unboxingelf »

andruby wrote: post #182
leroman wrote: post #111

Great! Unlike BTC the miners can sell their gear so they are not down on their investment.. I imagine BTC miners putting up a good fight if this was on the table and they stand to lose all their asics

Is there a real proposal to turn BTC into PoS?

No.

PoW enables real decentralization. No party/company/govt can control a PoW network like BTC. This is why it’s considered a commodity by many.

PoS is almost the opposite. A small group with stake control the network. This is why it’s considered a security by many.

For Bitcoin, PoW is a feature not a bug.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#642

Post by Psyladine »

jasonsync wrote: post #629
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,…

But doesn't a lot "good tech" have nefarious roots? The internet got its start as a government weapon in the Cold War?

Any tool is a weapon proportional to its power & utility. Beyond that, there's nothing nefarious inherent in weaponry, the DARPA initiatives that birthed the internet were based in defense, against nuclear annihilation. Seems like a win-win, politics non-withstanding.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#643

Post by shemnon42 »

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,…

Yes, we should focus on surveillance capitalism instead. Perfectly legal.

If you want to talk about actively making the world worse look at most web2 "algorithms" and how the push to the extremes is tolerated by "but numbers go up."

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#644

Post by browningstreet »

Are there resources that tell you how to do moderately complex things in ethereum/crypto properly/safely?

I've dug in every once in a while, but the people doing things in crypto seem to have crypto "stacks", and those stacks aren't transparently obvious. I haven't been able to find the useful entry point into these things.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#645

Post by TheDudeMan »

apeace wrote: post #634

> It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland? Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand? Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible? I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised…

If you were a crypto miner and had a pile of GPUs would they be powered-off right now? Of course not.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#646

Post by MrSqueezles »

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...

This article was the first I read that describes the new system. It appears designed to benefit Etherium banks. The more you hold, the more you get.

> Miners are replaced by validators – people who “stake” at least 32 ETH by sending them to an address on the Ethereum network where they cannot be bought or sold. These staked ETH tokens act like lottery tickets: The more ETH a validator stakes, the more likely one of its tickets will be drawn, granting it the ability to write a “block” of transactions to Ethereum's digital ledger.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#647

Post by matheusmoreira »

jll29 wrote: post #125
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…

Read 'Mastering Ethereum' https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con... The short of it is: - The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-to-peer network). - Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional record to the blockchain ledger at the end sayin…

> The old process (proof of work) was environmentally a disaster (it still is for the Bitcoin ecosystem)

There's no problem with spending the energy if it actually buys us something. It's a disaster because it failed to actually decentralize the network.

Instead of everyone with a computer being able to participate, we have very few people buying up all the hardware for their massive centralized mining operations. If that's how it's going to be, then we might as well move on to proof of stake.

Monero seems to have a better designed proof of work system. It's ASIC and GPU resistant, normal people manage to use their computers to mine XMR. One CPU one vote, that was the whole point since the beginning.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#648

Post by jarboot »

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…

HN is also a forum launched in 2007 and likely skews older and more financially conservative

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#650

Post by ryyr »

seydor wrote: post #535
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…

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.

ethereum is a political system, it exists to recreate the present arrangement with dlt and the extra niceties that it gives those in power. excuse the paranoia. anyway, definitely an achievement in my book
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