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Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

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Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is five times the price of Etherium because it was the first cryptocurrency and everyone knows its name. It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of either.

I generally agree with this. But Ethereum is "less finished" than Bitcoin. I feel like this situation might be different in a year or two once ETH2 is fully rolled out. Right now, ETH is a bit more risky. There's no doubt that more economic activity is happening on the ETH chain, though

It'll take longer than a year or two for something as complex as ETH2 to mature to a point where it can be considered as finished as Bitcoin.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying a significant number of people who gathered behind the maxim "code is law" for money may have signed onto what the code was doing and not what the long-term social plan was? Quelle surprise!

Well, the code never guaranteed that people would not merge the PoW chain to the PoS chain :)

At the end of the day, this consensus system will rule by consensus.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#513
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Crypto literally is the best thing that happened carrier wise to my life. From the wild wild west in the early days that allowed anyone to make some beermoney then (and be rich today if they holded) to the immense community we have today that turn simple products/dapps/whatever into millions strong businesses over night. Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the people (for a while at least)…

The issue is that exact story is “get rich quick”. A good predictor on how jaded you are towards your reaction to it is “did you get rich?”

I dont own a ferarri or tesla, but i havent had a regular job in years parts to crypto.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#514
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?

IRS has entered the chat. Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.

Transaction fees for sums above lets say $500 are way cheaper than most banking fees especially assuming different currencies. Even more when we compare to western union or even paypal

Let me give you a real world example. You buy something for $10. Then ethereums $5 fee sounds crazy compared to 3% or so for creditcard or paypal. However transfer $1000 and those 5$ suddenly sound a lot better than the 30$ the creditcard or paypal charges.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#515
post #327
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast. Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee. Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example. Even if the crypto marke…

do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?

[deleted]

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#516
post #327
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast. Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee. Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example. Even if the crypto marke…

do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?

Ahh what i ment is using tether or usdb instead of usd. Which is instant and decentralized and widely accepted crypto bound to the usd value. It just saves you from up and downs, its still crypto

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the classical distributed consensus fallacy. Law is only law if there's consensus around it. The "original" law still lives on in the form of ETC, but it happens that the other one generates way more consensus around itself, and thus that's the more valuable one. Distributed consensus means no one can change the rules unless there's a "majority" defined by PoW, PoS, PoA, or something else, that chooses to cha…

Which means there's as many "legitimate" chains as there are ways to define a majority, and as blockchain entries increasingly denote external assets things are about to get very messy. In the end disagreements will probably be adjudicated by traditional governments based on regular contract law (in the best cases) or individual physical force (in the not-exactly-so-formal ones), and after a few instances of that may…

This is mostly true, but I'd argue legitimacy is harder to achieve than it seems, because of network effects.

That said, the current NFT craze is idiotic. As you point out, there's lots of people trying to try external value to a blockchain using what is more or less nothing more than a "super pinky promise". And that's supremely stupid. Today's valuable blockchains have value by themselves. Linking blockchains to external properties, assets, certificates or capabilities is still an ongoing problem. Only after the identity problem is solved and standardized will NFTs linked to external things be worth anything.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#518
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: Will there be a chain split - will we end up with 'ETH classic' and 'ETH proof of stake' after the upgrade or how does it work?

It would be more difficult these days to get much marketcap on the minority chain, now that Ethereum hosts tokens representing a variety of off-chain resources like fiat money and bitcoins. Those things will have to pick one chain whose claims will be honored. Same for some NFT projects. Anything involving data feeds won't necessarily support the minority chain either, though in principle they could.

This is weird. So NFTs don't do anything? I mean you can always fork ETH and then transfer ownership of all NFTs to yourself on the fork. So basically the value proposition of NFTs is tied to the chain they exist on. It's not the NFT that gives it value, it's the combination of NFT+ETH that gives it value. That's extremely absurd.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#519
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video wouldn't be valuable, because it's trivial to duplicate. However, should it be impossible to copy videos and the only way to do a video would be to capture the events as they happen, then perhaps your video would have value.

I'm surprised there aren't a ton of NFTs for videos of people digging holes and filling them up, riffing on both "proof of work" and keynesian ideas.

The reasoning behind keynesian gold digging is that rich people will not accept that the government hands out money to poor people because that would threaten private businesses who are dependent on cheap labor. To make sure that the government money doesn't compete with private money you just force people to do worthless work so that working as a waiter for minimum wage is still more attractive than digging holes in summer heat. The entire point is that digging holes sucks. Meanwhile cryptocurrencies glorify digging holes.

Re: Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a deeper problem with PoS, which is about where the value of the staked token comes from in the first place. PoW ties this to the burning of real-world value, specifically electricity which is about as close to distilled economic value as you can get. Ethereum is trying to bootstrap value with PoW and then switch, but I have strong doubts that this is a sustainable solution.

It's the same when currencies around the world stopped using the gold standard and became floating across each other. I'd say the value of currencies is that you have to pay your taxes in one that is legal tender. In that case, the value of Eth is that you have to pay transaction fees in Eth. You decided how valuable those transactions are.

When you sell your Bitcoin for Ethereum you have to pay taxes in dollars. The specific value is dependent on the ability to exchange it for goods and services but the fact that it will remain valuable (but not how valuable) in the future is secured by taxation. Who knows what is going to happen with Bitcoin? It may get replaced by Ethereum entirely.
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