Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum 2.0 launches

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 639 posts

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#321

Post by michaelsbradley »

togs wrote: post #314
michaelsbradley wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you mean transaction fees on the Bitcoin and Ethereum (or similar) networks: Transaction fees are an important economic inventive for persons or organizations who run the “nodes” that make up the network. The hardware, electricity, and maintenance by humans needed to run those nodes cost money, and running them is not an altruistic endeavor. One of the goals is to make a profit; staking/mining rewards and tr…

Aren't transaction fees economic incentives for persons or organizations who run banks that make up the "nodes" of our current network? So everyone is now a bank? Or rather, anyone can choose to run a bank? But then as time passes some banks will get big, and it becomes impractical for anyone else to choose to run a bank, but now the New Big Banks are not accountable to any government as they (technically) are today.…

Yes, it allows anyone in the world with the means and know-how to become part of the “banking infrastructure”, i.e. to run one/more nodes that make up the network. This is the most fundamental and important aspect of the technology.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#322

Post by sickygnar »

KSteffensen wrote: post #278
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No KYC Offline account creation Instantly liquid programmable assets Programmable banking Financial censorship resistant Micro finance Anyone can use it, it’s surprisingly simple You could create your own company+shares if you want and they can be instantly available on any market. Ever tried trading a penny stock, or an international stock? It takes forever to open an account at a brokerage where they may or may not…

> No KYC I don't know what KYC is but I'm not US based. Sounds like some fee that's peculiar to US banking environment (which I have heard is extraordinarily bureaucratic). >Instantly liquid programmable assets Another example of opaque blockchain jargon. Maybe it makes sense, but not as a way to convert the sceptical. >Programmable banking I can currently program transfers to happen regularly every month on a certai…

KYC = know your customer = anti money-laundering. Yes, it is bureacratic, and it can be a pain for regular, non-money-laundering customers. With crypto, you can instantly create an account offline and trade around the globe.

As far as programmable banking, I meant it in the sense that people can create "bank apps", aka contracts. It goes way beyond simple routing of funds, since it's turing complete.

Financial censorship is a feature, since the finance industry does exclude people and countries. For example, in the US you need to have a $1M net worth or something to be an "accredited investor" which grants you certain privileges. Ethereum doesn't make such distinctions - you can interact with and create any financial product/contract (depending on its rules). Brokerages also regularly halt trading, and make you answer a bunch of questions before trading certain financial products. There are 2 sides to the financial censorship coin so I'm not going to pretend this is always a great feature.

I'm focusing on finance because so far it is the main use case for ethereum. There are a lot of decentralized financial products and derivates now, that even trade in a "USD"-backed crypto (USDC, DAI). Honestly, it all works pretty well, but its not without its downsides and pitfalls.

One of my favorite things about the whole thing is that it gets rid of ACCOUNT CREATION. It's so nice to visit a website/app and just approve it with your wallet. It's the ultimate SSO - there is no email verification crap, its all so instant and frictionless to play with financial products that would otherwise be a bureacratic maze. It's even easier than logging into hacker news.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#323

Post by brandonmenc »

joeblau wrote: post #219
earthtolazlo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin wastes an obscene amount of energy for a theoretical maximum of seven transactions per second globally. How is that even remotely scalable?

I'm not a Bitcoin advocate, I just recognize the value the invention provided and I recognize that this whole cryptocurrency space relies on it being successful for long enough for anything else usurp it. If Bitcoin got hacked right now, everything crashes with it. Compared to Bitcoin, there are consensus mechanisms that are a lot faster (3 orders of magnitude), cheaper (almost free transaction cost), near instant fi…

> there are consensus mechanisms that are a lot faster (3 orders of magnitude)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this still falls far short of like, VISA.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#324

Post by latchkey »

flixic wrote: post #264
eric_cc wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see it. Bitcoin could be forked to no longer use PoW if it became an existential threat.

Migrating from PoW took about 2-3 years for Ethereum, required massive changes to economic model, and developing all new clients. Ethereum leadership is still somewhat centralized, so this did not lead to multiple competing forks. Doing the same for Bitcoin would be very hard, and if it simply follows Ethereum's footsteps, then it is unclear why even use Bitcoin. But -- I hope we see this fork sooner rather than late…

ETH2 has been in discussions and development for more than 3 years.

ETH is still on PoW and will continue to be on PoW for many more years.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#325

Post by nwah1 »

markkat wrote: post #125
louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

It makes me sad, because I expected a comment like this to be the highest on HN. In the case of Ethereum, digital scarcity secured by a blockchain enables a turing complete state machine that the world can use. In the most basic terms, this will remove clearing houses for transactions of assets. In the long term this will lead to novel types of assets, and make ownership extremely liquid. Imagine using your phone to…

You can already buy shares of things, crowdfund, buy real estate, invest in REITs, and a million other financial instruments.

Since real estate is a physical thing, it needs to interface with the legal system, the recorder of deeds, etc.

The goal of all this is to circumvent the legal system, but it will never happen for anything physical. Won't even happen for ownership of music groups if anyone ever hopes to use a court.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#326

Post by konschubert »

hollerith wrote: post #311
konschubert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are n…

>Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. I always thought the hardwired reward for mining, namely, X btc every 10 minutes, is the cause of Bitcoin's wasting electricity. The electricity used is roughly proportional to the hashrate, which in turn is roughly proportional to the price of btc -- until the next halving, which I think is more than one year but…

If the hash rate goes down as you predict, then the network will become insecure. Double-spending attacks will destroy the trust in the network and people will stop relying on it.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#327

Post by konschubert »

hanniabu wrote: post #303
tromp wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW can work fine with the inflation rate going to zero, and without relying on transaction fees. All it needs is a constant (or an eventually constant) block reward. An effective zero inflation is already achieved when the new emission merely balances the amount of coins getting lost.

Sorry but this is a ridiculously stupid reasoning. You're relying on coins being lost (unknown amount) to counteract rewards and closing there's no inflation due to that. This also assumes that miners will be holding enough bitcoin that price increases alone will not only pay for their operations but also cover a reasonable interest in their holdings. It's not logical to think this will happen. And even of it does, y…

I think your second paragraph is wrong, since the parent suggests that a block reward will still be paid through newly minted coins.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#328

Post by nootropicat »

jsmith45 wrote: post #221
jules-jules wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to start here, focusing on the transformation of ethereum's ecosystem [0] >ETH 2.0 is finally here and will transform Ethereum as we know it. But what is the philosophy underpinning ETH 2.0? And what is Ethereum building towards? It all starts with the idea that Ethereum is the foundation of a social contract for the global economy. >Ethereum is a global public good that is open, borderless, neutral, t…

Is that $1 trillion only ETH transactions, or it is counting the huge number of other "coins" (tokens) or assets implemented as ETH smart contracts that act like mini-ledgers? (I'm assuming the latter.)

Eth and stablecoins if I remember correctly

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#329

Post by 1996 »

DennisP wrote: post #271
flixic wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I know about cryptocurrencies makes me think you and parent are completely right, and PoW cannot work without inflation (or even with very low inflation, that does not justify the cost of running hardware in the absence of transactions). Just relying on transaction fees should lead to downward spiral of use, where fees are way too high to maintain use, or network security is too low to protect value. I'd l…

There's actually research out of Princeton, that says blockchains destabilize if the rewards are dominated by fees. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...

No, it's very short sighted and wrong: their whole analysis from 2016 depend on a high variance of rewards, which completely ignores the reality of 2017 clogged mempool where miners chose the highest tx fee.

Selfish mining is possible, at least for a short period of a time, but sunk costs are eventually sunk costs and you compete for the next block.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#330

Post by nikolay »

One question - why didn't Bitcoin drop to zero? I know, VHS survive and Betamax didn't, but unlike Betamax, Ethereum is pretty popular for everything, not just for low-class commodity speculation.
Post reply on HN