701–710 of 1001 posts
"That innovation was the essential ingredient behind decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs"
as if defi was already globally in use! And later:
“Rightly or wrongly, she'd absorbed a very toxic environmental narrative,”
I am actually very glad that new generations have a much better understanding of environmental risks and I find very difficult to sympathize for a ecosystem that is such energy greedy.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from the investments of future investors. That's not how PoS works. In Ethereum, everyone is diluted to pay stakers and the time of their investment does not matter.
You're confused. In The Ethereum Ponzi, early token holders 'stake' their tokens and are paid by future transactors. But here's the funny thing that no-one gets: all assets are a ponzi scheme (stocks are only worth something now because future rubes will buy them for more later), what makes bad ponzi schemes is when the underlying asset that everyone is speculating on doesn't do anything useful.
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…
Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms.
My young son the other day said “I’ll get money from the store and buy what ever I want”.
I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work for the store, then they give you money to buy things.
Then I thought about how banks or large lenders just give people money. They magically create a loan, which people have to pay back with interest. The bank assesses the risk they won’t and profit they want and that’s the interest rate. The FED works the same way, just handing out money. Those people don’t work for their money. They just get free labor for controlling the money.
Here it’s like the store printing money at 5-8% a year or what ever just for having money in the bank. They can then spend 4% or what ever of that and still always guarantee growth in their money supply. It’s the exact same.
Theoretically, someone can make something the store finds valuable enough in the real world to trade their reserves. However, they’d have to find it more valuable than the static growth rate.
The difference in POW is that anyone can enter the market. And large lenders won’t have an advantage. Sure they could PAY for more processing power, but they have no advantage of printing money over the next guy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from the investments of future investors. That's not how PoS works. In Ethereum, everyone is diluted to pay stakers and the time of their investment does not matter.
You're confused. In The Ethereum Ponzi, early token holders 'stake' their tokens and are paid by future transactors. But here's the funny thing that no-one gets: all assets are a ponzi scheme (stocks are only worth something now because future rubes will buy them for more later), what makes bad ponzi schemes is when the underlying asset that everyone is speculating on doesn't do anything useful.
Stocks are valuable because they are a claim on the assets and future profits of a company, as well as a claim on the ownership and control of the company.
Some people buy stocks just in the hope that a Greater Fool will buy them for more money later, but that's not the same thing as calling stocks in general a "ponzi scheme".
A good moment of humility I hope for all those HN experts who implied Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake would never happen.
I feel like you have an overly emotional attachment to this, given your need to make this comment. People say things that turn out to be wrong all the time, but you seem to have become resentful that they disbelieved this would happen. Odd way to approach a technology.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.
I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a niche position in the long term. The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping container…
The Maersk thing is a fine example. It's one company. They already have the trust relationships and legal power that make distributed-consensus approaches unnecessary. That "blockchain" is involved makes no practical difference. It was a shiny bauble that got a lot of consulting hours for IBM, and surely helped getting the project approved because Maersk execs were seeing "blockchain" in the news a lot when it was kicked off.
> 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.