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Merge soon

ultrasound.money

81–90 of 137 posts

Re: Merge soon

#81
post #70
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?

> What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? > How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems? The code size for the core software of Ethereum isn't huge. It's possible for one person to understand it, and it's much simpler than iO…

> It's also a software upgrade because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago.

"upgrade" is the wrong term. Not 100% of users will accept the new software so after this event called "The Merge" there will be 2 competing Ethereum networks (actually 3 because there's already "ethereum classic" from the last time Ethereum forked). The correct term is "fork." Yes the Vitalik endorsed fork will acquire most of the economic value, but that just highlights the degree to which Ethereum is centralized. There are key figures in ETH that force breaking rules changes on users. Bitcoin is very different.

Re: Merge soon

#82
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. What nobody pays attention to is that the entire thing is a cartel and only incentivizes restricting freedom over time and automating turmoil. It’s a complete disgrace to what cyberspace represents. It’s an opportunistic, exploitative, incompatible, deprecated, deficient paradigm stuck in a physically-constrained view of the future perpetually hindering progress due to preventing the mind in being ab…

bitter about something?

Some things warrant bitterness

Re: Merge soon

#83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that. The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update. Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash,…

It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap. Is Apple really worth $2.5 trillion? I dunno, seems like a lot, but the market determines what things are worth. But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc).…

> "It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap."

This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense.

Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares.

There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.

Re: Merge soon

#84

An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should be celebrated here. Else, what is the point in calling ourselves "Hacker" News?

It's just another cryptocurrency fork. It's not particularly more work or harder impact than your average Debian point release, with the most obvious difference being that there are fewer users affected.

Re: Merge soon

#85
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your average software update does not put 200B at risk.

Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that. The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update. Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash,…

> Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that.

Would you apply same reasoning to NASDAQ stocks? Or Gold market cap?

Re: Merge soon

#86
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.

There only needs to be a single miner that uses PoW and you can freely move your funds to other wallets. You can even start the miner yourself. So no, your funds are definitely not lost. You might be the only one connected to the "network" but wasn't this the promise of cryptocurrency decentralization?

well the PoS fork tokens will acquire 99% the value of the current ethereum tokens, so if you want to access that you've got to upgrade your software. You are right tho you'll continue to be able to interact with the PoW network.

Re: Merge soon

#87
I don’t even understand what I’m looking at on fake money websites anymore. A bunch of graphs that don’t correspond to anything at all? The title doesn’t even appear on the page. There’s no text content indicating what this is about. Y’all have fun with your gambling, I guess.

Re: Merge soon

#88
post #53
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have more specifics in what you are referring to?

Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors. Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.

> Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.

This. Of all comments this is the centralization risk on top of proof-of-stake which will have a more involved focus on staking with it being highly likely that it now passes the Howey test that ETH looking more like a security, with the Ethereum Foundation at the center of all of this.

Re: Merge soon

#89
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap. Is Apple really worth $2.5 trillion? I dunno, seems like a lot, but the market determines what things are worth. But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc).…

> "It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap." This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense. Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares.…

Not necessarily — commodities like gold have similar properties and they are also generally given a market cap.

Re: Merge soon

#90
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My stance has been “I’ll believe it when I see it” after years of the merge being “months” away. I’m a skeptic but happy to see a major cryptocurrency switching off the planet burner.

>after years of the merge being “months” away It's only been months aways for a few months though. I have endured years of gaslighting comments like this _specifically_ from this asymmetrically moderated community, despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away. The "maybe this year" started in Jan 2020. COVID happened. They didn't start saying "within a year" again until end of 2021. Meanwhile the _beac…

It's been a few months away since at least 2018 - https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-po...

And I can find talk about it being 'soon' from 2016 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ether...

So I think it's perfectly good faith to say we've been hearing about the 'imminent' switch to PoS for several years now.

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