A good moment of humility I hope for all those HN experts who implied Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake would never happen.
Is Ethereum Classic going to be relevant?
The Ethereum merge is done
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly not rolling it back. It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current asset holders who reap the rewards. EDIT: Edited to include at least one source on the connections between PoW and renewable energy. This just scratches the surface though. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white…
> PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. PoW incentivizes energy development. And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much power it can waste. > It used to also incentivize GPU production And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the fitness function is how much e-waste it can produce. It's for these reasons…
To me in the current age also appears crazy to think that we need incentives for energy development, as without crypto PoW we have enough energy
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".
It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges
The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense.
And it all went downhill from there.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#204I assume it has been debated again and again, but since I don't know the answer I'm going to ask: We often complain people hold cryptocurrencies instead of using them as money. Isn't this change going to make this worse ?
Ethereum isn't supposed to be money (though it can be), it's fuel you use for doing other things. Do people use less oil because it's deflationary and gets consumed when used? No, because it's useful now. The most likely end game for Ethereum is being a replacement for all backend financial systems. Instead of having to hire teams of people to verify things or integrate various legacy systems together, everyone can b…
Banks would never switch to a system that makes all transactions publicly traceable, and they shouldn't.
The industry has investigated blockchains for many years, since distributed consensus for transactions is a problem they actually have. They might run their own private chains. But it won't be ETH.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced. You might want to adjust your force sensitivity. The merge doesn't simply GPU mining will stop, simply that the PoS chain is now merged with the PoW chain. You'll still be able to PoW mine with your GPU until they remove PoW fully, which is due to happen sometime around Q3 2022.
We are already very close to Q3 2022. Unless you meant another year.
Isn't September even Q4?
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#206Congratulations miners, validators, and hosted validator services! Big win for sustainability and industry!
A recent study by an American governmental organisation (I don't remember which) recently showed that Bitcoin can be used to reduce methane emissions. This in turn would make Bitcoin mining and Proof-of-work net carbon negative (significantly so if my memory of the graph accompanying the news isn't letting me down). edit: also, this is a new frontier that combines the best of both worlds for energy suppliers, bitcoin…
Let’s talk about modern technologies pls
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.
The first problem that cryptocurrency solves is, how can to securely make transactions without giving away our secrets such as critical account numbers. It accomplishes this using cryptographic signatures. Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the banking system generally works, are outdated.
I'm a fan of cryptocurrency but I don't think this is a great description of it. Its primary goal is finding a way to make transactions work, given that you don't want to involve a central authority. Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. It's perfectly possible to create payment systems involving cryptographic signatures involving a central authority (with the downsides a central authority involves).
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#208This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not. I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin and Ethereum's existence.
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”
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#209For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake
I find the complexity of that algorithm both impressive ( since they seem to have made it work), but also quite worrying. I'm really not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs, not in the implementation but rather in the protocol. I know a lot of very smart people are working on this, but i'd rather have something conceptually simpler to work as the base layer for a whole new economy.
Agreed that conceptual simplicity is always best, and the current Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST doesn't have provable guarantees yet (though seems to be working in practice). I'm excited to see slight modifications to the consensus/forkchoice algo that do have provable guarantees, like [Goldfish](https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/09/goldfish) from Paradigm Research.
Re: The Ethereum merge is done
#210This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not. I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin and Ethereum's existence.
> I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.
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