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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#901

Post by kromem »

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…

"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."

You just made a great case for why crypto as a backend for balance transfer that's abstracted by centralized payment options built on top of the transfer network for funding balances but directly interfaces with POS outside the crypto network will almost certainly continue to grow into a thing as crypto grows.

Get rid of bank accounts, and then firewall balances behind 3rd party abstractions powered by your crypto wallet.

By all means charge my vendors 3.25% of the transaction to firewall and insure my wallet against theft.

Give me 1-2% cash back and I'll be even more excited about the prospect.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#902

Post by jereees »

max51 wrote: post #453
funklute wrote: post #277

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…

With proof of work, you have to spend your pile of money if you want to influence a vote. Whatever the cost of a 51% "attack" would be, the attacker has to actually spend that money to do it. With proof of stake, having that money is enough to vote and you don't need to spend or waste it. In fact, you get paid for having that money sitting in the account.

Recommend you read about slashing staking and zero-knowledge proofs to understand why this is not a problem at least from theoretical point of view

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#903

Post by SilasX »

presentation wrote: post #124

> “Proof-of-stake is like running an app on your MacBook,” he said. “It's like running Slack. It's like running Google Chrome or running Netflix. Obviously, your MacBook plugs into the wall and uses electricity to run. But no one thinks about the environmental impact of running Slack, right?” People do think about that. But definitely an improvement!

No one with any influence thinks about that. Have you see the typical CPU/network overhead of an application compared to what it accomplishes? :-p

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#904

Post by lanstin »

eric_cc wrote: post #778
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…

It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin. If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really…

Who is going to run a bank without fractional reserve banking, and how can you do that with BTC?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#906

Post by baby »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #343
baby wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been using it for 10 years, yet it still doesn’t have any usecase. It’s like saying “I don’t get tiktok”

Using it for what. I see that 99% of use cases are "speculation to get rich on the basis of telling bigger fools to buy and HODL LOL". People have been using heroin for years, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

What do people use tiktok for?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#907

Post by landemva »

reggedtorespond wrote: post #546
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

I looked into your statement about bitcoin mining preventing methane emissions and it doesn't add up to me. Oil drillers already flare the methane, which turns it into carbon dioxide. The solution these bitcoin miners are implementing is to burn the methane in a controlled manner so they can harness the energy produced for electricity to mine bitcoin. The same chemical reaction occurs, converting methane into carbon…

I have been on oil and gas pads and drill sites. Flares have significant incomplete combustion. A financial incentive (lots outside north America) to pipe it into a generator encourages those with troublesome gas leaks to fix it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#908

Post by aaroninsf »

Stake or work,

smart contracts remain not just a failed experiment, but a horribly horribly horribly failed experiment with a lot of broken dreams and broken people in their wake.

And Ethereum's transaction rate necessitates a bunch of hacks rife with their own grift, vulnerability, opacity, and manipulation.

Yay for removing one of the more egregious of the ten things fundamentally wrong with this, I guess.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#909

Post by landemva »

matkoniecz wrote: post #660
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative Phrasing in this way suggests that Bitcoin is already net carbon negative or can plausibly become it. That is not true. > Using electricity isn't the problem. It is, as electricity is fungible and wasting it on bitcoin increases prices for everyone else and encourages greater degradation of shared resources.

Ok, fungible electricity. And unless it is consumed immediately it expires. Electricity doesn't magically transport itself to where people can use it.

BTC miners can be put near the oil pad to consume the electricity there.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#910

Post by Salgat »

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…

That's because they're far more convenient and user friendly, and the fraud detection makes up for that compromise in security. As far as user experience goes, it's a win-win and a superior experience to paying with cryptocurrency.
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