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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#621

Post by johannes1234321 »

viscanti wrote: post #542
bertman wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the whole crypto/fin tech space is such a rotten cesspool of scammers and blowhards that it's becoming very difficult to take anything they do and say seriously.

The ETH core team who pulled off a very ambitious migration to POS might be different than the run of the mill scammers who are involved with crypto. Seems weird to group them all together when they appear to be very different.

The coreteam actively support building a platform which is to 90% or somused by scammers. They might be technically curious and not be scammers themselves, but this is a bit like Wernher von Braun's Statement that he is just building the rockets for the Nazis and makes them manoverable, what payload is loaded and where they are aimed at is "not my [his] department"

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#622

Post by [deleted] »

drawnwren wrote: post #573
smoldesu wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work rendered.

I mean, 1 —- HN is largely populated by big tech coders who decided selling out the entire world population for a mid $100ks salary from the surveillance state sounds like a good deal. But 2, there are liquid markets for crypto. So, while you might feel good typing out how you value crypto —- it simply doesn’t matter. Put your money where your mouth is. Short it.

[deleted]

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#623

Post by soulofmischief »

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…

Friend, blockchains were designed to circumvent centralized regulation. Fraud is still illegal whether or not you use a funny internet cryptography tool, we don't need to be regulating our tools.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#624

Post by WanderPanda »

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,…

worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor seems much more akin to the HN culture than whorshipping the regulators to me

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#625

Post by scambier »

sph wrote: post #251
scambier wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Ethereum blockchain alone was consuming 0.5% of the world's total energy?

Wait until you hear how much of the world's total energy is wasted on ads (manufacturing, transmission, power usage) or spam email.

- "X is extremely wasteful"

- "Wait until you hear how much Y is more wasteful"

Ok?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#626

Post by alwayslikethis »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #329
syl_sau wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly w…

As much as I'd like this to be the case, that's not a valid argument. If you're a random person who wants to fund a certain organization, you're going to have to buy the cryptocurrency somehow. For anything except tiny amounts this is going to require you to do KYC at some point. Every transaction on a blockchain is recorded forever and traceable back to you and the legal ID that you used during KYC. No one's going t…

> mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.

Am I missing something here? This is the main use case for Monero. You can just buy it with your credit card or after buying bitcoins thru a KYC'd service. That's the point - once you got Monero, it is practically untraceable by the authorities or anyone else interested. No one can see who sent or received money without a view key. The same cannot be said for most other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH, since once you buy these from a KYC service, it's tied to your identity forever.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#627

Post by lottin »

usehackernews wrote: post #591
root_axis wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.

This isn’t crypto “hype.” It’s not going to impact the price of Ethereum. At least it’s not hype in my opinion. It’s just an impressive engineering feat. Given crypto isn’t going to die tomorrow, it’s good to see Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum, reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is admirable.

Not wasting electricity is absolutely good news for the environment. At the same time, they were wasting electricity before... so I don't know about admirable, they've stopped doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#628

Post by alwayslikethis »

nicbou wrote: post #264
syl_sau wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly w…

Pseudonymous, not anonymous. It's only anonymous while you take steps to make it so, and only until you make a tiny mistake.

Monero is close to anonymous by default. You generate wallet, and send money there. While this first step can be tracked, you can just transfer the XMR from the first wallet to a new one. This time, no one can see your transactions or associate this address with you (unless you, for example, publish it next to your name).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#629

Post by jasonsync »

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,…

But doesn't a lot "good tech" have nefarious roots?

The internet got its start as a government weapon in the Cold War?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#630

Post by liuliu »

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,…

> dodging regulators ...

With The Merge, that no longer the case, and this is good for Ethereum and for cryptocurrency community.

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