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Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#131

Post by jihodl »

rglullis wrote: post #70
beaner wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That there exist other ways to make money besides mining it, also does not mean that mining is not a conversion of energy into money.

> conversion of energy into money. You are treating this is a some function of fundamental physics. It's not. We are only talking about "conversion of energy into money" because that is what the best current implementation of a BFT system is using. It's accidental. You are focused on the "Work" part of "Proof-of-Work", when what we care about for solving consensus in distributed part is the "Proof".

There actually is a fundamental linkage between the computational work of mining (which the Bitcoin network treats as money) and energy. E = kB T ln 2, Landauer's Principle [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#132

Post by globular-toast »

ehou wrote: post #93
globular-toast wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that happened then we'd just start using the electricity for something non-essential instead. Humanity is not interested in efficiency for the sake of reducing footprint. Humanity is only interested in more. If anything, fridges using more electricity means less electricity wasted (assuming refrigeration is essential and not a waste). This pattern seems to be everywhere. Cheaper electricity: more electricity used.…

Light bulbs. I do not want or have “more light” in my house but do have a lower energy bill after replacing them by LED versions

And the money you saved will just sit in an account until you die, I presume?

What's more likely is you have spent the money saved on something else.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#133

Post by vvillena »

woahAcademia wrote: post #116
tromp wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with uncapped supply. It's still disinflationary. In fact, it ends up with zero inflation when tail emission matches inevitable coin loss. There is however something wrong with defaulting on promises made at launch.

Yes this is precisely the issue. I don't mind various types of currency, but when you buy 50 of the ~100M ethereum you expect it to remain somewhat proportional in value. That didn't happen, mere years after its launch they blew through the cap and are already 15% over.

Remember that all cryptocurrencies run under a consensus agreed between all its participants. This consensus is always subject to change: the Bitcoin network could decide to allow for 10 million more BTC at any moment. They just choose not to do it.

Ethereum builtin limits work as an incentive to force timely decisions. The initial 100M limit, and the difficulty bombs (which cause "ice ages") ensured that the initial versions of Ethereum wouldn't be able to run forever: mining rewards would stop, or mining would be too difficult to be profitable. This impending doom ensures the protocol needs to be updated, and once that conversation regarding the new consensus is active, it is easier to bring in new changes and improvements too.

One final point: whoever bought ETH at any point up to mid 2017 has seen massive returns. It could be argued that this is precisely because of the changes Ethereum has undergone over time, and that keeping close to the initial design would have been worse.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#134

Post by koheripbal »

smarx007 wrote: post #122

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/vision/ for those who like me need an explainer what Eth2 is.

> The Beacon Chain lets us randomly assign validators to different shards

This is interesting. Cross-shard attacks were a major flaw in shard designs. How is this solved exactly and who is "us" in this sentence? How can the network force a miner/validator to use a specific random shard?

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#135

Post by koheripbal »

newyankee wrote: post #3
drcode wrote: post #2

TLDR; The transition from Eth1->Eth2 requires the following steps: 1. Network operators (stakers) deposit at least 524,288 ETH in a special contract 2. The early Eth2 blockchain (the "beacon chain") launches Dec 1st 3. The Eth1 blockchain will be merged into Eth2 (details TBD) 4. Other features will be added to make Eth2 fully functional (sharding being the biggest feature) Just a few minutes ago, step 1 has been acc…

Does this mean no more mining and waste of electricity ?

That is generally true of any proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#136

Post by keymone »

_2d30 wrote: post #97
keymone wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zero electricity is wasted on PoW cryptocurrencies. energy consumption is equivalent to constant maintenance of security at the level demanded by market.

I mean I guess this depends on how one defines waste but under definitions I generally come across, if you could get the same level of security for less electricity in a new scheme, then the old scheme is wasting electricity.

sure, if you could. but the value is in the eyes of the beholder. if the market genuinely believed that to be the case - PoW currencies wouldn't be worth anything, so far that isn't the case, so claiming that PoW is wasteful is disingenuous at best.

p.s. somebody really dislikes my opinions, as i'm banned from commenting on HN for the last couple hours or so :D

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#137

Post by keymone »

brazzy wrote: post #80
keymone wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're on to something here. what if i told you that the constant level of energy spent is the level of security bitcoin users demand by virtue of buying it at current price level? would you say constant provision of certain level of security is waste?

> what if i told you that the constant level of energy spent is the level of security bitcoin users demand by virtue of buying it at current price level? I'd say that you're wrong because security is not the primary thing they're buying. > would you say constant provision of certain level of security is waste? I would say that doing so through a constantly increasing level of energy use is indeed a waste.

> security is not the primary thing they're buying

sounds like speculation. it's a major desirability factor in bitcoin.

> constantly increasing level of energy use is indeed a waste

the more money you store in a vault - the more security it needs for you to sleep well. you wouldn't lock a $5000 bike with $5 lock. so difficulty increase correlates very much with amount of wealth poured into bitcoin.

edit: typo

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#138

Post by lawn »

thojest wrote: post #105

[I deleted this post because it probably is against the HN guidelines]

There's plenty of misinformation on Twitter and Reddit too. In fact they're overflowing with trolls, shills and censorship and you need to be very particular in the way you approach the information if it's to be at all useful.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#139

Post by [deleted] »

beaner wrote: post #11
mayank wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Or you could just skip the Bitcoin part...

I guess you could. But the presence of Bitcoin and proof-of-work actually speeds up the competition in the renewable energy space by making it more profitable than it otherwise would be. That's a good thing, it gets us to the world we want more quickly.

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#140

Post by zilebune »

smarx007 wrote: post #122

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/vision/ for those who like me need an explainer what Eth2 is.

I think with Eth2 we're possibly seeing a the first attempt to address the Innovator's Dilemma[0] in the blockchain environment. I've been following the Eth2 progress for a few months now and from the outside it really feels like trying to swap out the engine of a running racecar.

Definitely worth to follow how the Eth1->Eth2 evolution will play out, but I wonder if is not too late for Ethereum while newer kids on the block [1], much more agile due to lack of legacy overhead, have already launched solutions for many of the problems (PoS, sharding, scarcity, WASM smart contract infra, super-high TPS etc.)[2] that Ethereum will be trying to...in the next year or so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

[1] https://elrond.com/assets/files/elrond-whitepaper.pdf

[2] https://elrond.com/blog/its-time-to-build/

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