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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#611

Post by m12k »

jliptzin wrote: post #596
JeremyNT wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised,…

Cash is still best for illicit activities

Money laundering cash at scale is much, much, much harder than money laundering crypto.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#612

Post by soulofmischief »

sfjailbird wrote: post #526

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

Hacker News is an amazing place filled with visionaries and world-class thinkers.

Until you bring up crypto.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#613

Post by solardev »

tcgv wrote: post #598
JeremyNT wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised,…

> So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators You're right, it's an impressive piece technology that's been growing through questionable use cases. But that's not the fault of the underlying technology, but of the actors involved. As long as blockchains are treated as a second class citizen, governments choose to ostracize it, financial oli…

> Let's not blame the technology

That sounds like something people say to defend guns, nukes, and crypto. Why wouldn't you blame a technology whose primary use is malignant?

It's not like the crypto hellscape we have now was an accident of its evolution. It was the inevitable and predictable outcome of a decentralized and poorly regulated system built atop complex code that the average person has little chance of properly evaluating.

From all appearances, this is exactly how they were designed and exactly the point, to extract money from fools and funnel it to a select few crypto bankers. That's not a good thing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#614

Post by parkingrift »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #514
djhworld wrote: post #475

Does this mean GPU prices will go down? At least according to this article the validator nodes can be run on a Raspberry Pi [1] [1] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

GPUs are ridiculously cheap now, compared to how they used to be. You can buy a 3070 from newegg for $599 and they’ll throw in a free monitor to sweeten the deal for you

MSRP is $499 and that's already inflated $120 over the previously established MSRP.

I would consider a $3070 at $400 to be back to normal.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#615

Post by rco8786 »

sfjailbird wrote: post #526

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

It was an amazing feat to do. But the question of “so what?” remains unanswered.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#616

Post by soulofmischief »

JeremyNT wrote: post #579
sfjailbird wrote: post #526

This thread is HN jumping the shark for me. The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies. This was originally a forum for hackers…

So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this? It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised,…

Oy, friend, you ever heard of a prototype? Or burgeoning technology? Do you remember the history of the internal combustion engine?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#617

Post by jqpabc123 »

binibus wrote: post #530
jqpabc123 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? Don't look now but "decentralization" and "power to the people" are already gone in the crypto market. Blockchain is a novel accounting system. But has any organization * ever * derived any real power from an accounting system? Are Google and Apple and Amazon market leaders because of a novel accounting system? I don't…

> What are "the people" going to do about this? What does blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing. You have Coinbase, Kucoin, Gateio, Crypto.com, Kraken, Bitfinex, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap, ... Competition is also a form of decentralization.

Yes. Just like Amazon has lots of competition in ecommerce.

Whoever controls the majority of the trading volume sets the "market" price. The "competition" has little choice but to follow along.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#618

Post by Gwypaas »

andsoitis wrote: post #523
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions. This statement caused me to do some light research. I discovered that methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Which is why oil production without a gas connection tends to flare the methane. With the renewable transition we will in a not too distant future just leave the oil in the ground instead.

https://www.iea.org/reports/flaring-emissions

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#619

Post by openfuture »

funklute wrote: post #277
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…

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Yeah exact. Proof of trust, web of trust,... datalisp.is

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#620

Post by zonotope »

Geee wrote: post #464
funklute wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

Not so fast. In both networks, the ultimate control is held by those who run end-user nodes. These people create demand for the asset, and creating demand is ultimately the way to control the asset. An end-user node is like a device, which verifies that bank notes are genuine or that gold coins are pure. If everyone can independently reject bad money and accept good money, the good money will have more demand and the…

> An end-user node is like a device, which verifies that bank notes are genuine or that gold coins are pure. If everyone can independently reject bad money and accept good money, the good money will have more demand and therefore be more valuable.

The key word there "independently". Proof of resources is one way to tell if an individual node is actually independent.

Proof of resources gives an individual who has more invested in the network more weight in deciding which "bank nodes are genuine". Those individual's votes in theory deserve more weight because proof of resources assumes those individuals are harder to influence (or bribe) and have a stronger incentive to keep the network functioning because they have more at stake. These systems are trying to ensure that the nodes that have the power to accept or reject "money" only accept "good money" and always reject "bad money", and they're using demonstration of resources as a proxy of trustworthiness and independence.

Whether someone ties a bunch of money into specialized ASIC chip that's really only good for mining bitcoin, or they tie a bunch of money into staking eth is an implementation detail.

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