Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#861

Post by knicholes »

Frost1x wrote: post #815
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're the type of person who poured capital into mining hardware and you own it, which you likely do because it's more cost effective, you still have all that hardware sitting around. You're going to repurpose it to other mining endeavors or quickly find a way to try and eek more money out of if, because you were already that type of person. I don't keep up with crypto and mining but until it becomes unprofitable…

Yeah, I've got 21 3080s/3090s, and I'm still mining (NiceHash switched algorithms for me automatically). But I've also listed my machines on vast.ai to rent out for deep learning. When they're not being used by a client, they're mining still. My electricity is super cheap, though $0.0875/kWh. That said, it's hardly profitable at all. I'm just speculating and breaking even at this point.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#862

Post by Dylan16807 »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #797
webinvest wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum miners were using GPUs. AMD, Nvidia, and others. They could switch their GPUs from mining ethereum which is about $1500 per coin to Ethereum classic but that is only about $40 per coin. I’d guess that wouldn’t be worth continuing with since it would be much less than than their electricity bill. They could sell their GPUs on EBay or other secondary markets, switch to protein folding, cloud-based password cra…

In case of Ethereum that wasn't true afaik, a lot of it was mined in the US for example. Since Ethereum wasn't all ASICs like Bitcoin, there was more decentralization in that sense with individuals running miners from home, not always at the highest efficiency. Your first paragraph is correct regarding profitability for most miners though, based on the numbers I've seen. One thing that I find interesting in the elect…

I think that pattern of tire slashing is rational. Old cars will die, and the thing you want to hurt most is the incentives for making more oversized vehicles.

If it's a hybrid SUV then it's more complicated, but a gas SUV makes sense as a target even with an engine tuned for efficiency.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#863

Post by fcantournet »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #828
galaxyLogic wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments The difference between business and governments is that in business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every adult has a vote. "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people should be liberated from go…

> "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy If 51% democratically voted to enslave the other 49%, that would be a working democracy but far from "liberation of people".

No it wouldn't. There is no definition of democracy where 51% of the people enslaving the 49% would constitute a democracy. Except the one you just imagined for the purposes of "winning" an argument on the internet.

This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#864

Post by moffkalast »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #698
giaour wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if “goat load” was a typo, but I love it. Although you can put significantly less on a goat than you could on a boat.

But if you're trying to go up a mountain it can't be bleat.

Baaaad

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#865

Post by colordrops »

ineedasername wrote: post #765
colordrops wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed, indicating that you want a human layer of control that is currently missing. This is a conflating of layers and evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of of how it works. The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted to the top of HN that make…

>You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with the most money, and history has show as that transactions __can__ be reversed when those large players throw their weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way. I'm also saying that I don't mind there be…

The reversal was not great, but also just a one time thing that still required the concensus of many entities and widespread code change and deployment distributed across countless nodes. If it was a bad call then it wouldn't have been adopted or would have forked the network in a more serious fashion than ETC. If reversals a regular occurance, then ETH would not be trusted and it would lose traction. It's like comparing an asteroid strike with a car accident. The DAO reversal is a single event and says almost nothing about the general reversibility of individual small transactions. Future reversals are very unlikely now and would have to be some huge event and gather concensus like any other change to the protocol.

A singular huge change is just not comparable to credit card chargebacks that can be executed by anyone. Not comparable at all. Chargebacks are part of the CC protocol. Eth has no such mechanism.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#866

Post by idiotsecant »

seydor wrote: post #512
ineedasername wrote: post #444

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…

How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first. I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.

>they needed to do some physical work

Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm?

PoW is PoS, it just has some extra steps that have the minor side effect of using huge amount of resources for no reason.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#867

Post by pclmulqdq »

bravetraveler wrote: post #747
kenforthewin wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

Depends on the hashing algo -- some make sense for GPUs, others not so much. I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still relatively viable for example. Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to CPUs , which everyone seems to have forgotten about.

RandomX is pretty GPU-hostile. If you have a lot of VRAM, you could theoretically make it work okay, but I don't know of a GPU miner that has any semblance of performance (or perf/watt) that is close to a CPU.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#868

Post by timbit42 »

andruby wrote: post #150
SilverBirch wrote: post #115

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…

I'm also expecting a lot of GPU's to flood the used markets. Coupled with the next generation of GPU's being released soon.

I don't. I expect the owners to switch to mining other PoW coins.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#869

Post by IAmGraydon »

anonporridge wrote: post #804
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…

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…

>News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context.

With the media tactics out of the picture, you don't think this is a huge amount of electricity for crypto alone to have been using? Seriously? 0.3% of global electricity use is ABSOLUTELY HUGE.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#870

Post by staringback »

qznc wrote: post #683
dcolkitt wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And the price remained the same, so it is now 6x less profitable to mine than before (it was barely profitable before this)
Post reply on HN