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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#711
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

> If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, that is not tied to resources. You mean like a democracy?

IDK democracy is the best way to ensure prosperity and wealth. It's basically the idea that the 51% can rob the 49%. Preservation of wealth arguably can be better preserved if taking from the 49% results in their violent frustration of those efforts, and enabling that may require some constitutional republic, benevolent dictatorship/monarchy, or ancap kind of situation.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#712

There are two interesting things I want to watch from this. The first is I'm interested to see what kind of bull run ETH goes on. The merge has been incredibly long coming, it has huge risks and I think that puts downward pressure on price, you really don't want to be doing stuff in ETH at the moment because there's a fairly good chance something goes wrong, someone stealds $XBn and runs off and the Ethereum guys go…

>what kind of bull run ETH goes on The fact that the vast majority expects a bull run means that it's very likely it will crash instead.

And 7 hours later, ETH is down ~10%.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#713
post #709

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.

Yes. At the moment the marginal cost for the average ETH miner is higher than the marginal revenue of any GPU minable chain.

Unless you’re stealing power.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#714
post #145
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…

Here's your executive summary. Proof of stake... is much cheaper - less inflation. is more environmentally friendly. with PoS, only people who already own ethereum can mine. Rich get richer. has less desirable consensus properties. Many people keep coins on a handful of exchanges - now those will control the network. Nothing-at-stake attack.

You have no idea what you're saying

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#715
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…

Ethereum Classic’s hash rate has gone up by about 25% of Ethereum’s hashrate, so at least for now it looks like a lot of the energy use is just moving as miners point their GPU rigs at alt coins. Very curious to see if ETHW, ie Ethereum without the merge, maintains a significant amount of hashing power. Another thing to watch will be if those alt coins are profitable to keep mining or if miners will start selling their rigs.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#716

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.

What about Monero? Isn't that PoW and asic resistant?

Although irc you need to use a cpu, not a gpu to mine it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#717

For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake

I have a question if I may. What mechanism is deciding who pays inactivity leaks? It says that if a minority stop attesting then they will leak until eventually the attestors get to a supermajority. That makes sense. It also says that, if a dishonest minority start a soft fork, the fact that they stop attesting on the honest fork means that they eventually leak out until the honest fork gets a supermajority. That imp…

In case anyone's interested, from what i can tell from reading other writeups, there is no "honest fork" check. Each fork will independently deal with inactivity until they're able to finalise.

If that's the case, the article is correct in saying that a minority honest fork will finalise as would an honest supermajority fork. What it didn't mention is that the respective dishonest forks would too. If I've understood correctly.

Not really sure I get why this is a good thing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#718

I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was decided a transaction w…

Ungovernable doesn’t mean that the people involved can’t decide what to do. “Ungovernable “ meeans an external party can’t force them to do something they don’t want. The dao fork proves this because some people decided not to roll back and forked the chain instead. The ecosystem decided which fork was the main fork but they both live on.

The Dao hard fork was not a roll back. The original hack transactions still exist on chain and are executed by every node which syncs from genesis.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#719

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.

I think this is potentially the most interesting comment in here. If all of those GPUs just flipped to another cryptocurrency, global energy reduction would be zero.

In the short term, that's true because the GPUs are already purchased. In the long run, people will invest in new cryptocurrency mining rigs very much in proportion to the profitability of running one.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#720

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…

>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.

In the prior state, the folks with control were the ones willing to invest in it. In the after state, the folks with control are the ones willing to invest, OR the ones willing to get others to invest - i.e. coinbase.

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