671–680 of 762 posts
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Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.
What is this? Hacker news or china propaganda?
Happy?
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Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography. Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before. There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of mult…
Consensus is not the hard part. By "game theory", you mean "agree with everyone else, or we'll take your Eth away". The hard part is figuring out how to execute arbitrary code and synchronize it across all shards, without removing the benefits of having shards in the first place.
Around the same time is the migration to data sharding, which multiplies data storage by 23X initially. That's without code execution on the shards.
Zkrollups in production now do the execution off-chain. On chain, you store compressed state data and a compact proof that everything executed correctly. That's good for a couple thousand tx/sec today, and 23X that after data sharding. Given that, Vitalik has argued that shard execution may not even be necessary; it wouldn't add nearly so much transaction capacity as we'd have already.
Here are the papers on how Ethereum consensus actually works:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052
And here's more detail on rollups:
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There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it. The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.
You’re confused. They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so. And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends…
It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.
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I think you are the one not thinking it through properly. Yes, humanity will use energy. But it is kind of by design that bitcoin uses more and more energy, and that just doesn't make sense. Sorry. Bitcoin is not humanity using energy. It is humanity flushing energy down the drain.
I find the "Bitcoin burns energy" argument completely laughable. With all due respect, your skepticism appreciated; let me explain. A more useful perspective is "humanity uses more and more energy for computation". The many devices which enable us to post these comments burn energy. The astronomically high video-traffic these days burns energy. Modelling early universe, protein folding, advanced chemistry... every da…
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How would that be possible?
If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.) Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.
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The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…
Bitcoin is magic cards without the game, that takes the power output of a medium sized country to maintain.
Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…
Nvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?
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> the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources So where exactly did you read that in the Bitcoin whitepaper? Because everything else is just guessing.
Here are a couple of 2010 Satoshi forum posts on the topic: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...
"Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.
I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste."
I think we're long past this point and we have better alternatives to PoW now.
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Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.
You don't do bitcoin. Bitcoin is impractical. We are talking about crypto in general, not just bitcoin. Nowadays you can for example get xlm from a cex, move it to your wallet and send that. It's fast and with very low fees( lower than paypal etc). There's even a stablecoin you can exchange it for so you dont have to worry about price swings.