Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

I'm talking about it scaling; not about the value of the token. Ethereum 2 tackles scalability through PoS and sharding. Hence the reported energy advantage. Ethereum 2 will be one of the largest proof of stake networks once it launches both by market value and by number of users and validators. The longer that stays up without incidents; the better. The market value means that every known angle towards possibly abusing/hacking the network will be pursued by countless very incentivized hackers. Them failing to get anywhere increases the level of trust people have in these networks.

In think your point of view is a bit comparable to late stage skeptics arguing against dot com companies 20 years ago. They were mostly right and yet the FANG companies booted (or rebooted) straight out of that. So clearly they were also wrong. Very wrong. Because those companies are now worth trillions. Looking at what came out of that bubble, it is hard to argue that there was nothing there. Of course there was. But of course there were many failures as well and lots of investors backing the wrong companies for all the wrong reasons. But the technology from that era bootstrapped a multi trillion dollar industry.

The blockchain space is very similar. Lots of obvious scams, naive companies, poorly thought through business ideas, half-assed technology, etc. And lots of investors getting rich on being there early and losing other people's money (which, lets face it, is how that greed fueled behavior works). It's a symbiotic relation ship between mediocre investors and mediocre entrepreneurs. That hasn't changed in the last 20 years. That bubble is going to pop at some point. But that does not mean it will drag all blockchains with it.

The thing with Ethereum is that is mostly not directly dependent on VC cash. And that's one of it's strong points. The wider ecosystem is of course. But people like Vitalik Butarik and his friends are not reporting to anyone financed by a VC because they are already financially independent. That's also the reason they have been moving slowly and carefully with Ethereum 2 for years rather than rushing it to market in a few months. They've been talking about proof of stake and sharding for years already. Before the first bitcoin bubble even (four years ago or so).

Blockchains are as strong as those running them. Ethereum 2 right now looks like it is happening and has staying power and will have quite a bit staked among quite a few users. I'd argue most of the Ethereum 1 value is actually based on that future potential.

For a technology to be falsifiable, there needs to be an agreed upon method of measuring its fundamental failure.

Even in cases like stablecoins where investors are provably losing millions of dollars on repeat oweing to fundamental design faults of the underlying protocol, the coins continue being traded nonetheless. The coins are still worth money despite the many instances of clear technical failures — “being worth money” appears to be the sole arbiter of “validity”.

How can the underlying tech really be disproven? Cryptocurrency is an effectively unfalsifiable technology. You could be selling a one-wheeled tricycle, and investors would still trade it based on one narrative or another. That is more or less the case with PoS.

But what's the cost of the lottery ticket? Is it a certain amount work done? That's "proof of work". Is it an amount of the currency? That's "proof of stake", kinda.

I haven't heard of any cryptos that require you to risk your coins to mine. Sounds like a neat gimmick, but hard to implement.

Source?

>doesn't using your own UNL basically equate to a hard fork in the event that the nodes don't agree?

Short answer: No, if one or a few dont agree they are just ignored. If the majority (>50%) does then it halts and if a quorum is reached (>80%) it could fork.

long answer: Its complicated. Under normal conditions nothing happens but in edge cases (large node outages/physical disconnection/like if and undersea cable is cut) it could fragment.

This can be avoided if the core of the nodes mostly has each other on the UNL. But since we cant and most importantly should not enforce that its encourages to create and publish an UNL if you think the existing UNLs are not good. Its also encourages to use an UNL with large overlap to other UNLs This leads to the assumption that almost everyone uses one of the published UNLs with minor changes (mostly additions) else if you had mayor changes you would publish an UNL to convince other to also drop/add specific nodes (after all if you have a reason you probably want to tell everyone)

Since the UNLs overlap the real nodes UNLs should too and forking is not possible with large overlap. On a high overlap it could only halt if too many nodes are separated/offline which is the wanted behavior rather than making uncertain progress.

There is a amendment coming (most likely) for negative UNL where nodes can signal that they lost contact to a node and temporary remove it form the UNL. This would reduce the risk of halting if large percentage of nodes are temporary lost. Instead of 20% it would tolerate more nodes to go offline before the network would halt. It basically adjust the 80% quorum requirement down with every node that goes offline but has a minimum of 60% of the original 100%. 60% is the minimum to prevent forking/fragmenting again. only 51% would be needed if the UNLs would had perfect 100% overlap, so its a bit higher to compensate for the fact that UNLs dont have 100% overlap.

https://xrpl.org/negative-unl.html