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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#851

Post by oblio »

e1g wrote: post #824
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

“a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.

I doubt that for credit cards. Carrefour or pick your favorite supermarket chain alone probably generate hundreds of transactions per second worldwide during peak periods, and there are tens of major supermarket chains you've never heard of. Add regular grocery stores, cinemas, etc, I'd be really interested in an order of magnitude, but at peak times it has to be in the tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands.

For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know they're incredibly slow.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#852

Post by oblio »

bitcoin_anon wrote: post #841
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is us…

Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of large players does not make it decentralized.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#853

Post by jasonshaev »

zeroclip wrote: post #746
bcrosby95 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ti…

This is not a shining example of the security of credit cards, but an example of how insecure they are. We regularly carry passwords into our bank accounts in our pockets, and punch them into random ATM machines on the street in a foreign country, say them over the phone, or type them in while using the coffee shop WiFi. It is no wonder our cards are frequently compromised and the total cost of card fraud is many doz…

Perhaps, but it IS a good example of a system that protects the end user from monetary loss in the event of fraud due to leaked credentials (in this case the card number + CVV + exp date). In my opinion, any system that seeks to replace credit cards needs to have a similar ability to recover user funds in the case of inevitable security leaks, which is something many crypto systems struggle with.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#855

Post by colinmhayes »

lostmsu wrote: post #842
Animats wrote: post #22

The bottom just fell out of the used GPU market. NVidia Tesla 80 24GB on sale for US$79 in quantity. [1] [1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

Tesla 80 is basically useless at this point. AWS stopped recommending it in 2017. It is nearly 10 times slower than 3090.

And more than 10 times cheaper.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#856

Post by warkdarrior »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #849
jll29 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> where all peers hold a full copy how large is a full copy these days? how are peers jump started and why is that mechanism trusted so well? like say I want to connect to the blockchain, I need to make an API request to some IP. how is that resolved and why is that regarded as "decentralized"? why is the mechanism for serving me peers trusted and why is every peer in the network trusted?

It's between 800GB and 1.2TB total, depending on whether you just need to validate future transactions or past txns as well.

Source: https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#857

Post by dmihal »

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…

You should check out the Zero Knowledge podcast (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc).

Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#858

Post by ithinkso »

bitcoin_anon wrote: post #841
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is us…

> or Coinbase

If the transfer was not done on a blockchain but only in the database of some company, are you really using any new technology?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#859

Post by marksmith2996 »

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…

Is it just me or does that sound like an insignificant amount? Finland has a tiny population, if ETH mining only used that much electricity sounds like it it was pretty great to begin with.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#860

Post by kodah »

oblio wrote: post #817
anonporridge wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year. Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year. An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change. News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to th…

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

Question from a non-crypto person. Why did you assert so plainly that Bitcoin scales linearly with transactions? Even I know that's not true.

Things I'm curious about:

- Where'd you learn this?

- Have you read any academic material about Bitcoin? (eg: Bitcoin white paper, etc)

- Why did you post five times on a thread about something you know very little about?

Edit: it concerns me that people are so passionately posting misinformation on this post.

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