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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#411

Post by irae »

lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

The Bitcoin Whitepaper is fairly small and quite an easy read, and it is the source of all this ideas. There is only a couple of math formulas that you don't need to fully understand to understand the paper itself. Some of the concepts on the paper deserve to be explored further and you can resort to Wikipedia to dive deeper.

I find the book "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous a good read to break down those concepts. Nevermind the extremists or so called "maximalists" and their exaggerations. The book is a really good intro to macro economics and helps understanding why cryptocurrency is interesting as a store of wealth and/or money replacement.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#412

Post by johannes1234321 »

jll29 wrote: post #125
lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

Read 'Mastering Ethereum' https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con... The short of it is: - The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-to-peer network). - Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional record to the blockchain ledger at the end sayin…

> you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable) contracts

I would just call that "automated decision" The legally binding contract is the one where the parties agree on using the implementation as their means to fulfill the contract.

There is nothing legal related in that and no law in any legislation I am aware of giving it any special treatment.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#413

Post by morelisp »

bowsamic wrote: post #171
mightyRodri wrote: post #36

Earlier 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

But cryptocurrency doesn't really solve these in a technically interesting way, as it's neither consistent nor available under partition. The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one - your BTC is only valuable to other people on the same chain as you.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#414

Post by capableweb »

guywhocodes wrote: post #151
sertsa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a card like this useful to run Stable Diffusion, etc?

From what I gather you would want the M40 if anything as it is a single GPU with access to all of the 24GB for SD inference. But if you are going to do smaller you might as well get a 3060 12GB as it will be about 3x faster.

12GB is on the lower end of what you want for SD though. Granted, optimizations are still happening, but if you wanna do something like 1024x1024 or higher, you should at least get 24GB.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#415

Post by killerstorm »

lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

As someone who worked with blockchains & crypto for 10+ years, I'd actually recommend against reading "serious references".

"What is going on now" is largely the same thing as before:

  * consensus / Sybil resistance / game-theory / "crypto-economics"
  * cryptography - signatures, data structures (e.g. Merkle tree)
  * p2p networking
  * deterministic computation / virtual machines
If you have a solid CS/software engineering background, you probably already know 90% of it.

I guess crypto-specific consensus might be new, but you can get a good grasp reading few articles. And that part is actually opinionated, so you need to decide on a camp before you read materials. Bitcoin people would likely disagree with anything written about PoS.

Another fun thing is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). That's actually quite new, complex and might be interesting.

The rest can be rather boring. Users submit cryptographically-signed commands (transactions) which processed in a deterministic fashion. I'm not sure it's worth reading a whole book about it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#417

Post by me_me_me »

Shorel wrote: post #39
JonathanBeuys wrote: post #6

It worked. And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%: https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046 I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.

And a million gamers are still waiting for reasonable GPU prices. Nvidia really milked that cash cow.

I have a massive full tower case, it is housing my 3rd rig currently.

The first one was standard pc and the motherboard with gpu looked tiny in it,

I got 3070 recently and it barely fits (with hdd cage still in place), it looks ridiculously big. The card is so big it comes with a special bracket to be mounted below to support its weight.

Those cards are not going down in price any more than they already are.

Also worth mentioning $1,000 in 2000 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $1,719.92 today, it feels like those cards are getting expensive but part of it is cost of inflation.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#419

Post by iSnow »

salmonlogs wrote: post #279
phartenfeller wrote: post #273

I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was decided a transaction w…

Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority control over the network. "64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities" https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...

It should also be said that the biggest entities are staking pools/providers. If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools in PoW.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#420

Post by chpatrick »

wruza wrote: post #256
cowtools wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a good video that basically explains everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can have a "currency" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users simply sign "transactions". The problem is that you need a central authority to confirm the order of transactions, otherwise the recipient of a "transaction" will not know if the funds associated…

Is there any research on cryptomoney with central authorities, but also with reduced attack surfaces on a whole system? E.g. authority may be cryptographically bound in some way to only store the database and emit new tokens, but cannot spend them because they get freeze-signed by a receiver to their wallet. Then when you get a payment you check the path of money and algorithmically accept that path only. Anyone who…

If you have central authorities there's no need to have the massive complexity that comes with crypto.
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