Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum 2.0 launches

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 639 posts

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#81

Post by nickik »

xiphias2 wrote: post #52
louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

Ethereum is very different from Bitcoin, so this comment is offtopic, and it's tackling a different problem space, but if you are really interested, I'm reading the Bitcoin Standard book, and I can recommend it if you really want to understand what problem Bitcoin solves. There's no simple answer, only learning about the history of money and monetary theory from a non-Keynsian view. https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Sta…

It has nothing to do, absolutely nothing, with non-Keynsian history of money. Keynes didn't even write about history of money. Keynes in is book even assumed the gold standard for the most part anyway.

As somebody who studies history of economics and history of economic of thought the Bitcoin community has taken up very strange ideas about money and some views that are simply wrong.

Bitcoin is a basically a quasi-commodity and behaves much in the same way.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#82

Post by xorcist »

mckirk wrote: post #45
ichbinwiederda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah cool. Makes sense.

I mean, it really shouldn't make sense, because Bitcoin is a completely separate currency from ETH... but it's still way too deeply connected to 'anything crypto' in people's minds, it seems.

Why would it make more sense to price it in USD?

Bitcoin is the de facto base currency for all cryptocurrency exchanges.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#83

Post by speeder »

louwrentius wrote: post #61
speeder wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for Ethereum itself: It is basically a distributed computing platform designed to handle money, idea is you make a program that handles money, and it runs in a decentralized manner, this way noone can interfere with it, for example you could make a program that tells the users the password to login on a dissident newspaper if they donate something, since it is decentralized the government would have a harder time…

I read a lot of difficult words that I can't relate to. What does this mean for the average citizen in America or Europe? Also, I read this: > Ethereum clients use a listener (TCP) port and a discovery (UDP) port, both on 30303 by default. > If you need to run JSON-RPC, you'll also need TCP port 8545. Note that JSON-RPC port should not be opened to the outside world, because from there you can do admin operations. So…

"Just cut off internet" indeed would work... but it would work for a lot of things.

But saying that is same saying that a normal bank is useless because the government can just "just cut off the power" and thus the bank servers would be down.

And indeed in some siege situations, that would be possible, but Ethereum never promised to be siege-proof.

As for what it means to the average citizen in America or Europe? Well, one of the popular uses of Ethereum is gambling, that in some places is legal, in some others is not. Another use is create business that can't operate in some jurisdictions for whatever reason (for example because sanctions, or just plain old outdated laws that were forgotten).

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#84

Post by seibelj »

louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

Ethereum is a platform for decentralized computing. It's like a web server that is always on, never goes down, and you only pay for exactly what services you use (and no more). It is also uncensorable and perfectly immutable - which as a consequence is very useful for money. So one of the high-value services Ethereum supports is moving money and applications around money. This "money" is sometimes referred to as "tokens", which are like digital equity, bonds, currency, but are very hard to put in a single bucket and kind of operate like all of them at once. One interesting aspect is they are bearer instruments, meaning no one can seize them from you.

It's an alternative financial system that anyone can hack on and no one can prevent you from using. Many, especially on HN, quickly lose their Hacker ethos and revert to being state worshippers when it comes to the monetary system, for reasons I don't fully understand. But there is a sizable community of programmers around the world that value a completely open, transparent, hackable, and protocol-oriented financial system. Its network effects have allowed it to be greater than the sum of its parts, and novel financial applications continue to be constructed on it.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#85

Post by newswasboring »

louwrentius wrote: post #54
xiphias2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum is very different from Bitcoin, so this comment is offtopic, and it's tackling a different problem space, but if you are really interested, I'm reading the Bitcoin Standard book, and I can recommend it if you really want to understand what problem Bitcoin solves. There's no simple answer, only learning about the history of money and monetary theory from a non-Keynsian view. https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Sta…

I'm not looking for links to books. I'm looking for an explanation in plain English that shows why any of this matters.

I am not arguing either way about the need for crypto currencies, but don't you think its an unfair thing to ask for a new technology [1]? Not everything can be explain in simple terms, not if you really want to explain those things. Sometimes it takes time to figure out the language to explain stuff.

[1] I know this thing is more than a decade old, but new and old are very distorted terms in technology and honestly only become apparent post facto.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#86

Post by NotUsingLinux »

louwrentius wrote: post #65
csolorio wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first used it to pay a contractor in Argentina, since then I stick with the store of value hypothesis. It’s like gold but easier to hold and trade without having the government devalue it by printing more dollars. Or put another way, why does a dollar have value?

We already have solutions for paying people in other countries. Why would I use this one? I read a lot of difficult words I don't understand. It doesn't explain anything to me.

Today’s (normal)money system is complex and still many of it is not transparent to the public. Ethereum is trying to build something with more transparency but also tries to create a space in which people can experiment with funding. ( see quadratic voting experiments)

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#87

Post by jules-jules »

louwrentius wrote: post #46

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things alr…

You might want to start here, focusing on the transformation of ethereum's ecosystem [0]

>ETH 2.0 is finally here and will transform Ethereum as we know it. But what is the philosophy underpinning ETH 2.0? And what is Ethereum building towards? It all starts with the idea that Ethereum is the foundation of a social contract for the global economy.

>Ethereum is a global public good that is open, borderless, neutral, transparent, and censorship-resistant.Ethereum provides a system of property rights, rules, and economic opportunity for anyone in the world with an internet connection. With Ethereum users and builders are sovereign and able to determine their own economic destinies.

>This is important in an age of declining trust in institutions where many people don’t have access to stable systems of property rights or economic opportunity. With this in mind ETH 2.0 was designed with five key principles:

- Simplicity - Long-term stability - Sufficiency - Defense in depth - Full light-client verifiability

>Simplicity - Allows ETH 2.0 to minimize development costs, reduce its attack surface, and clearly convince users that protocol parameter choices are legitimate because they’re easier to understand (key for credible neutrality).

>Long-Term Stability - Although Ethereum so far has favored evolution over stability, ETH 2.0 is designed with the idea that once built, there should be little need to change it for long periods of time - a necessity for Ethereum to serve as public infrastructure.

>Sufficiency - Blockchains must be powerful enough for it to be possible to build trust minimized layer2 protocols on top of it. In order to achieve this blockchains must include an expressive programming language, scalable data availability and computation, and fast block times.

>Defense in Depth - Blockchains must work well under a variety of possible security assumptions. A key way to achieve this is to design the system so that it is as decentralized as possible to prevent faults, collusions, and attacks. And in the case where harmful collusion does take place, it’s important to make it extremely expensive for those colluding and easy for non-colluding participants to recover the system.

>These are the core reasons underlying Ethereum’s shift to Proof of Stake.

>Full Light-Client Verifiability - Many users will only interact with Ethereum through light clients. Thus it’s important for those users to be able to verify that the data in the full system is available and valid, even under a 51% attack (under certain assumptions).

[1] Ethereum is on course to settle $1 trillion in one year more than double the transaction volume of Bitcoin.

[0] https://twitter.com/RyanWatkins_/status/1333588739277414401 [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-set-to-become-first-...

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#89

Post by prussian »

mikro2nd wrote: post #60
louwrentius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not looking for links to books. I'm looking for an explanation in plain English that shows why any of this matters.

The world needs a form of money that is not under the control of any one sovereign power or group of sovereigns. Understanding this may necessitate reading some books, but in short, sovereigns have historically proven to be untrustworthy, so a trust-free form of money is a powerful notion.

so instead of sovereign powers, we should hand our monetary policy to the neo-nobility that is large stakeholders (PoS) or the sovereign granted patents in ASIC mining in PoW coins? I feel like we're just shifting who to trust and not the fact that we all have trust; haven't even touched the whole idea of having to on-ramp/off-ramp fiat on central exchanges with sovereign backed currencies.

Re: Ethereum 2.0 launches

#90

Post by faitswulff »

SCHiM wrote: post #69
louwrentius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not looking for links to books. I'm looking for an explanation in plain English that shows why any of this matters.

In simple terms. The currencies, and related technologies al deal with the problem of transferring of money/services between parties where no centralized trust/power exists. This is, in the words of their proponents to prevent abuse by the trusted party: Credit card companies blocking transfers to legitimate companies on the basis of pressure from the US gov. Banks printing money and devaluing currency of currency ho…

It seems like the benefit of not having to trust world governments or their currencies isn't that compelling for most people, who I presume almost universally already participate in said social contracts.
Post reply on HN