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The Ethereum merge is done

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681–690 of 1001 posts

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#681

I assume it has been debated again and again, but since I don't know the answer I'm going to ask: We often complain people hold cryptocurrencies instead of using them as money. Isn't this change going to make this worse ?

ETH as cryptocurrency mainnet still has the same high gas fee when it was PoW. Some layer 2 solutions will have the utility to use their token as cryptocurrency because low gas fees.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#682
post #259
post #8

I’m really curious what the GPU miners are going to be doing with their cards. Today may be as big a moment for gamers as it is for ETH devs.

Check out the hashrate for Ethereum Classic [0], it doubled overnight. Would be interesting to see if it's sustained. [0]: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/ethereum-classic/hashrate-ch...

3x hash rate @ same $USD value == 1/3rd the rewards per hash

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's virtually no other ASIC resistant (i.e. can use GPU) PoW coin left to mine. There's the proof-of-work ETH fork, but it only has a market cap less than 2% of than real ETH. So even though they juiced the block rewards, miner rewards are more than 90% lower, which isn't enough to pay for electricity of the previous hash rate.

ETH classic hash rate went from 50 to nearly 300 Th/s. https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#684

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…

> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration.

I'll take this one step further.

My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One time they even had the card - they had stolen it that night and tried to use it at a local gas station. A fraud alert woke me up.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#686
post #679

Why did the price drop? If the merge went successfully, I'd expect people to have more confidence in the future, and thus buy - driving the price up.

Sell the news.

Besides, BTC and ETH care tightly coupled. Perhaps some people sold BTC because they think it is now at a disadvantage compared to ETH and bizarrely it caused ETH to drop in price as well.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#687

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…

I’ve given up on HN understating crypto before they mint some Giga unicorn and everyone understand where the future is. The hive mind here is dangerously anti crypto. It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. It’s basically become a forum for your average developer. I’d bet a lot of folk who don’t understand crypto at all are web developers or something wher…

> It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all.

It HAS been the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the LAST decade , along with Bitcoin.

They are now both priced for world changing paradigm shift and perfect execution doing so. Which means that there is no wealth producing opportunity at all considering that you need everything to pan out great just to mantain the current valuation.

Also everything is an S-curve and once you arrive to 750bn (or whatever they crypto-marketcap is) there is physically nowhere to go to from there.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#688
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority control over the network. "64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities" https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...

It should also be said that the biggest entities are staking pools/providers. If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools in PoW.

I think it's worth mentioning that a pool large enough to do malicious things on the chain and get away with it is strongly disincentivized from doing so.

It would take billions of dollars worth of ETH to do such a thing, and then doing it would destroy confidence in the coin and absolute tank the price, costing the evil pool hundreds of millions.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#690

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?

Not yet, but when the combined effects of the merge + EIP 1559 drive ETH to flip BTC _and_ the ever-increasing "BTC wastes X countries worth of power per day" it will eventually happen.

No chance at all while BTC remains top dog (in market cap)

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