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The Merge

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Re: The Merge

#11

Post by kranke155 »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

“The idea of apolitical money is a fantasy”

Yannis Varoufakis, London, circa 2017

Either crypto follows the law or it gets banned. IMO this was inevitable.

Re: The Merge

#12

Post by foepys »

kranke155 wrote: post #7
boh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…

NFTs work and they allow artists to - make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.

> - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art

Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.

Re: The Merge

#13

Post by klez »

kranke155 wrote: post #10
boh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…

Im not sure what you mean by perpetual controversy either. What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically. Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did) In blokchain / decentralis…

> people can always access the data that’s on chain

Doesn't that have heavy privacy implications? Or is this a solved problem the solution to which doesn't get much publicized?

Re: The Merge

#14

Post by ctxc »

kranke155 wrote: post #10
boh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…

Im not sure what you mean by perpetual controversy either. What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically. Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did) In blokchain / decentralis…

- Who pays for the low latency high capacity data storage costs? - The ad-model subsidizes almost all costs for the end user. I couldn't even DREAM of storing an arbitrary amount of photos and videos and text spanning years, highly available all the time, ability to search and communicate with anybody etc for free without this. There are huge costs involved with this that the "data moat" subsidizes.

Note that I'm not referring to the "morals" of doing this, my question is pragmatic.

- Why will say, a Facebook do this with "decentralized data"? - How do they pay their bills, what monetization structure do you envision? - Will people pay for something they have always had for free? It won't be a nominal amount since they have to bear the costs of running the service, there's no subsidization.

Re: The Merge

#15

Post by foepys »

koolba wrote: post #9

Assuming a fork is expected and the PoW chain is running alongside the PoS chain, wouldn’t this cause a massive run up in ETH holdings to end up with assets on both chains?

This already happened multiple times, e.g. Ethereum Classic and for Bitcoin with Bitcoin Cash a few years back.

It created quite a bit of drama when exchanges refused to give customers the respective forked coins.

Re: The Merge

#16

Post by kranke155 »

klez wrote: post #13
kranke155 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure what you mean by perpetual controversy either. What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically. Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did) In blokchain / decentralis…

> people can always access the data that’s on chain Doesn't that have heavy privacy implications? Or is this a solved problem the solution to which doesn't get much publicized?

That’s a good point I don’t have a rebuttal to.

The potential dystopia is that crypto can lead to something like a digital society that’s completely naked to the nation state and everyone knows what everyone else has done, forever, always. Every transaction, movement and digital app usage would be in a transparent public ledger with everyone’s IDs attached to it.

It’s not a good scenario and which is why I feel like any idea that CBDCs are a good idea seem delusional.

Re: The Merge

#17

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

kranke155 wrote: post #3

People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners and having full open source code.

How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects running a distributed VM. There is nothing in blockchain (nor immutability generally) that actually addresses the underlying issues here, and if anything I would expect the requirement to cryptographically validate all data committed to the chain to make inefficiencies related to synchronization orders of magnitude worse, not better.

Re: The Merge

#18

Post by scyclow »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

Re 2b: While the scenario you're outlining certainly isn't ideal, I don't think it's fair to say that the transactions are "censored". All they can do is not validate blocks with this transactions in them. It's only a matter of time though before a block is validated by someone not under the purview by OFAC.

Re: The Merge

#19

Post by jrsj »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's also something Bitcoin maximalists have been warning about for a long time.

Re: The Merge

#20

Post by thematrixturtle »

koolba wrote: post #9

Assuming a fork is expected and the PoW chain is running alongside the PoS chain, wouldn’t this cause a massive run up in ETH holdings to end up with assets on both chains?

No, because the merge in itself does not create new value, it simply splits existing value in two. So 1 old PoW ETH today will be worth (say) 0.9 PoS ETH and 0.1 PoW ETH tomorrow.

To be clear, that's the theory, reality is a little more complicated. This happened earlier with ETH and ETC, as well as BTC and a whole bunch of forks, and in practice there was always a bit of "value" created from thin air, at least temporarily, with original + fork > original before fork.

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