Interesting that it has started deflating already!
Merge soon
111–120 of 137 posts
Re: Merge soon
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have more specifics in what you are referring to?
Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors. Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.
It's not passive though. You get paid for running a node and validating transactions. You stake ETH as a surety bond that you'll do it correctly.
Re: Merge soon
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, that's just wrong. If you don't upgrade your software your money is not gone.
If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.
I think it's just as simple as "if you want to interact with people through software you have to use the same software as them." Nothing controversial about it, its just that the interaction isn't chatting over telegram, it's transacting.
There's nothing stopping you from selling your ether to someone who wants it and deploying that capital on something else. Or ignoring it and forking the chain and keeping your fork ether. "But it's valueless" I hear you say, see my above paragraph for the answer to that one.
Re: Merge soon
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. This is a triumph and the entire open source community should be celebrating
Disagree. This is a centralized project forcing a set of breaking consensus rule changes on users. Literally "upgrade your software or your money is gone" Bitcoin has hard guarantees of user rights. Ethereum is a centralized project masquerading as decentralized.
Bitcoin has had hard forks before as well man.
Re: Merge soon
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
exactly! hence why I think this must be the most harrowing software upgrade of all time.
Re: Merge soon
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.
Re: Merge soon
#117My intuition is that PoS isn't economically stable model. In PoW, the miners had interest in stability of prices because their costs were anchored in reality by the mining rig. So once you had expended the real life cost of a mining rig, your interests were to only increase the price of the coin. Whales might have wanted to manipulate prices but they ran the risk of bankrupting miners (many of them were miners). Now…
Well, they can only move the price by whatever percentage they hold in ETH. I would assume, maybe naively but not unreasonably, that a holder with no plans to sell would see staking as a mostly risk free way of generating return. So I'd assume that these big guys would be putting most, if not all, of their capital into staking. Therefore I wouldn't expect their ability to move the market to be significantly higher than total staked ETH as a percentage of total supply.
Again, naively, people panic and a smaller but substantial move could cascade, but a news article could do that as well. Stakers don't have a monopoly on the ability to cause a stampede.
Last I read on the mechanics of all of this, the emission rate, burn rate, fee burn and staking requirement were designed in such a way as to keep a certain amount of total ether staked. I don't recall what that percentage was, I think around 10% and it's not exact, this is game theoretical after all and incentives are what drives this so it will fluctuate a bit.
There are problems with not having an ongoing cost to validation, and not having assets external to the system at risk, a big one is the so called "nothing at stake" problem which ethereum claims to have solved (and have a compelling case as to why if you read about it) but I don't believe this problem you speak of is one of them. I am somewhat concerned that these metrics to maintain a certain percentage at stake will not shake out the way they planned and have to be adjusted with a hard fork, this happens in ethereum all the time with incentive structures.
Re: Merge soon
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily — commodities like gold have similar properties and they are also generally given a market cap.
However commodities also have inherent utility that cryptocurrency doesn’t.
Ethereum has actual users who pay to run applications built on top of it.
Re: Merge soon
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
Several reasons come to mind: - Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems. Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. And they can be done asynchronously, at the discretion of the user. If you think about it, deployment for this type of software boils down to uploading build artifacts into a public folder. - Most other massively deployed software is developed by a singl…
> Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems
This is a hilarious statement.
> Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement.
Only to be followed by this.
Re: Merge soon
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors. Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.
It's not passive though. You get paid for running a node and validating transactions. You stake ETH as a surety bond that you'll do it correctly.
Those things are not as coupled as you make them sound: the vast majority of people getting paid interest on their ETH won't be running a node. They'll be receiving interest passed on by exchanges or other centralised entities that are staking their ETH.