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Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

launchpad.ethereum.org

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Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#71

Post by pa7x1 »

beaner wrote: post #27
viraptor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proof-of-stake rewards those who already have enough to stake As opposed to people who have money buying mining hardware to make more money that can be invested into mining hardware?

Yes, that's how most businesses work. You start with a capital investment, often times through a loan, and through smart management, make a profit on the margin , that you can choose to reinvest to stay competitive. Proof-of-stake is completely unlike this. People who "have" are not required to exchange any effort to reap new reward. They retain purchasing power while the "have-nots" lose purchasing power. I dunno if…

This is a very poor analysis. What matters for the "haves" and "have nots", to keep using your terminology, are the entry costs. That's what separates the ability to become a "have" or "have not".

Entry costs in PoS are significantly lower; you just need a consumer-grade computer, broadband and the electricity to power a consumer-grade computer (i.e. of the order of 100 W). In PoW, you need specialized equipment (ASICs), larger amounts of energy (of the order of 1000s W) and broadband, this equipment will also need be renewed every few years.

The minimum stake of 32 ETH (in the case of Ethereum) can be avoided by using pooled mining, so that's not a true barrier of entry.

Being a validator still requires effort, you need to set-up and maintain the infrastructure and guarantee sufficient availability (higher than 2/3 of the time) to avoid being penalized. As with any economic activity where there is ample competition in the end the profit margins will be quite thin, so presenting this as free-money for the "haves" is just dishonest. If staking rewards are too high, more people will be tempted to stake, reducing the staking rewards, if they get too low some people will be disincentivized to stake and stop doing so, raising the rewards. This will tend to balance around just marginally profitable. This also happens in PoW mining. Main difference being that due to the low entry costs in PoS this economic activity is accessible to a much larger amount of people.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#72

Post by mikkelam »

keymone wrote: post #67
mikkelam wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real global-level scale. With PoW no cryptocurrency was really scalable to some meaningful transactions per second.

there already are cryptocurrencies claiming the same thing: iota, eos, tron and probably thousands more. so what's different this time? to me it seems ETH is always overpromise, always underdeliver kind of project. they promised global scalable world computer since inception in 2015, now they say it was never possible with ETH1 and they need to hardfork to ETH2. why do you have any confidence in their statements?

Is one not allowed to learn ? I'm not familiar with eth foundation's statements but they have matured a lot since 2015 and i wouldn't say they underdeliver, there are 100s of real world applications that are using eth dapps already today. I believe it's different because i understand the tech. It's feasible. Assuming PoS works, it will scale.

Eth2 is also not hard fork. The old chain will be attached to the new chain

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#73

Post by keymone »

ethereum moving to pos is less important than and obscures their admission of failure at developing a scalable "world computer" as described in original "whitepaper". they've moved on from maintaining essentially a serializable database to some "sharded" contraption with vague description of how cross-shard synchronization should work and how conflicts will be resolved. and most importantly, none of this has been tested in real world, so i'm grabbing some popcorn and getting ready for the show.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#74

Post by globular-toast »

alexmingoia wrote: post #51
mikkelam wrote: post #39

I honestly think eth2 will have an incredible effect. Think of all the developing countries or countries without proper financial infrastructure, even places where you do not trust your local currency. All these places will benefit hugely from a bootstrapped currency ready to be deployed for very little effort. Launching an ecommerce will suddenly be much easier for a many more people. I'm also very interested in see…

E-commerce doesn't require digital currency. I live in a country without digital payments infrastructure, and there's lots of e-commerce (primarily via Facebook). It's all cash-on-delivery. I've ordered food, furniture, baby supplies, medicine, etc. from businesses on Facebook and pay on delivery.

Very interesting perspective. Most people who live with bank money can't even imagine a world without it.

There is one thing a centralised digital currency makes far easier, though. It makes it easier to "print" new money and cream that off into bankers' pockets. Most of the richest people in the world are in finance.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#75

Post by The_Colonel »

beaner wrote: post #35
brazzy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing particularly robust or renewable, or "future" about it.

Necessarily renewable because it is the cheapest possible energy long-term; you only need to pay for upkeep, not for resources to convert. Maybe this depends on whether you think renewables will become cheaper than coal/gas, and maybe you're pessimistic about that. I'm not. Robust because the phenomenon can begin detached from the energy grid by profit-seeking entities with capital to invest. Doesn't need permission,…

What has even higher potential to be cheap is nuclear energy - when you don't care as much about (operation, storage) safety, a lot of costs fall out ...

Nuclear energy has high fixed costs but then scales pretty well. As crypto currencies with PoW become a major industry, it's not difficult to imagine it might be cost-effective to build huge nuclear plants in some corrupt African country. (Africa has also huge untapped uranium ore deposits)

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#76

Post by keymone »

mikkelam wrote: post #72
keymone wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there already are cryptocurrencies claiming the same thing: iota, eos, tron and probably thousands more. so what's different this time? to me it seems ETH is always overpromise, always underdeliver kind of project. they promised global scalable world computer since inception in 2015, now they say it was never possible with ETH1 and they need to hardfork to ETH2. why do you have any confidence in their statements?

Is one not allowed to learn ? I'm not familiar with eth foundation's statements but they have matured a lot since 2015 and i wouldn't say they underdeliver, there are 100s of real world applications that are using eth dapps already today. I believe it's different because i understand the tech. It's feasible. Assuming PoS works, it will scale. Eth2 is also not hard fork. The old chain will be attached to the new chain

PoW has nothing to do with scaling and so PoS isn't a way to address it. if you're making this claim, i would suggest to reconsider your belief that "it's different because i understand the tech".

PoW and PoS are algorithms to order transactions, but how many transactions and how often to order them are just tunable parameters.

the real scalability "tech" that is being sneaked in while everybody is busy talking about PoS is sharding, which essentially means abandoning the idea of serializability of the underlying database, leading to vastly more complex failure modes, reliance on very tight clock synchronization and zero real world testing of such approach.

so yeah, good luck...

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#77

Post by beaner »

rglullis wrote: post #70
beaner wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That there exist other ways to make money besides mining it, also does not mean that mining is not a conversion of energy into money.

> conversion of energy into money. You are treating this is a some function of fundamental physics. It's not. We are only talking about "conversion of energy into money" because that is what the best current implementation of a BFT system is using. It's accidental. You are focused on the "Work" part of "Proof-of-Work", when what we care about for solving consensus in distributed part is the "Proof".

> We are only talking about "conversion of energy into money" because that is what the best current implementation of a BFT system is using.

Yes, that's my point isn't it? I said "Bitcoin's proof of work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money." I did not say "all systems for ensuring the soundness of proofs in blockchains are a conversion of energy directly into money."

What we care about is trust minimization. It just happens that the first system utilized, proof-of-work, provides the best-yet incentives for ensuring trust minimization, and the most equitable distribution of coin. It being accidental does not mean it is not the the best method for securing "proof." (Which isn't to say that it is necessarily the best of all possible methods, only that the simple fact of it being first and accidental does not negate that it may be.)

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#78

Post by dmos62 »

brazzy wrote: post #22
beaner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to riff on this idea, despite inevitable pushback: Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically a conversion of energy directly into money. This pushes competition towards cheaper and cheaper sources of energy. First it's finding jurisdictions that subsidize it, then it's creating your own cheaper energy sources. Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. The penultimate phase is custom off-grid min…

> Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment. Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there. > The endgame is that all energy companies will primarily be Bitcoin mining companies, feeding their excess renewable energy into the grid to power homes, etc. Absolute insanity straight out of postapocalyptic SF. "The ancients destroyed their civilization by funelling an ever increasing share of re…

>> Proof-of-work incentivizes cheap & renewable energy investment.

> Cheap yes, renewable no. Complete non sequitur there.

That's the main point. There's no inherent incentive to use clean energy for mining. There's opposite stories about obsolete aluminum plants staying alive in China by just using their energy allocations to mine Bitcoin.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#79

Post by tikej »

dane-pgp wrote: post #32
tikej wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, except so-called renewable energy sources still built using non-renewable materials. There also physical limits to efficiency of energy transformation and slightly less heat loss per unit of energy with much more energy production is not exactly what climate needs right now.

"The estimated calculations presented in this work prove that the total power produced by us was 0.0414% in 2000 and 0.0577% in 2017 of the global solar power reaching the Earth’s surface"[0]. So even if Bitcoin mining were to cause global electricity production to increase by an order of magnitude, it would still be a rounding error compared to the amount of global warming caused by the Sun directly. Thinking about…

Ok, of course true that sum of heat from sun that reaches earth remains constant no matter whether we use it. However, how it’s stored/used on the earth is another matter. E.g. if it’s absorbed by plants/fungi/other life forms and stored as biomass, part of it doesn’t contribute to heating of the atmosphere/oceans, contrarily to when it’s converted to electricity (where large part is lost due to heating of the solar panels) and then used to computing, where from physics perspective it’s mostly heating (only tiny part is converted to useful work).

Also what about the Manufacruring/production of devices to convert solar/wind energy to electricity and to mine bitcoins? It’s based on non-renewable elements (of course any chemical process is reversible given enough energy but Entropy still grows mercilessly) and requires a lot of extra energy.

EDIT: as far as we know, thermodynamically all energy will become heat at the end (although not sure if it should be called heat, since there will be no flux). However, we as humanity are/should be quite concerned first about decades and earth’s atmosphere/oceans (and connected parts) not millennia and energetically balance Earth as whole to come.

In principle energy from sun could also be stored in form of chemical bonds energy (as it’s the case for biomass) or even nuclear energy (yup, sun-powered nuclear fusion sounds unlikely but why not ;). Then biomass (less efficiently) or nuclei/atoms could be ejected from earth allowing to disperse sun’s thermal energy somewhere else.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 – Minimum deposit reached

#80

Post by brazzy »

keymone wrote: post #68
brazzy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that mining can never reduce its energy usage. Any efficiency gains are necessarily eaten by increased difficulty. And in fact, energy usage has to incease in proportion with the value of the network.

you're on to something here. what if i told you that the constant level of energy spent is the level of security bitcoin users demand by virtue of buying it at current price level? would you say constant provision of certain level of security is waste?

> what if i told you that the constant level of energy spent is the level of security bitcoin users demand by virtue of buying it at current price level?

I'd say that you're wrong because security is not the primary thing they're buying.

> would you say constant provision of certain level of security is waste?

I would say that doing so through a constantly increasing level of energy use is indeed a waste.

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