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Merge soon

ultrasound.money

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Re: Merge soon

#91

Post by meowkit »

pavlov wrote: post #83
chrisco255 wrote: post #68

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.…

> 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.

Feel free to come back to these comments in 10-20 years, but one of the moonshot goals is to make blockchain networks base layers for all financial processes in the world and implement all the things you want from any asset class as applications on top of a globally distributed virtual computer.

Additionally, the same arguments can be made of any fiat currency. The US dollar doesn't represent anything except >faith in a systemfaith in it as a system<.

Re: Merge soon

#92

Post by jlokier »

cflynnus wrote: post #81
jlokier wrote: post #70

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? 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 "Th…

> 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).

It's not actually that simple. After the merge, non-upgraded PoW nodes will automatically wind down and self-destruct according to the built-in difficulty bomb curve which is part of PoW.

For PoW Ethereum to continue running in a useful way to whoever wants to use it, a majority of PoW users would need to upgrade to a new PoW fork that changes the difficulty bomb curve. They have to coordinate and agree that fork, as different bomb curves are incompatible.

That would require a majority of PoW users to perform a coordinated softare upgrade, agreed with each other. There's no default PoW Ethereum that can keep working for a long time if people don't deliberately agree on and roll out a new fork.

> Bitcoin is very different.

Bitcoin has a difficulty bomb too (when coin issuing stops), so Bitcoin may eventually self-destruct too, if nobody steps up to coordinate a new fork of Bitcoin and a majority of users accept the new fork.

Re: Merge soon

#93

Post by capableweb »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #80
RestlessMind wrote: post #11

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?

Eh, what's the worst that could happen? If they mess up they can just roll back the immutable blockchain again, same way they did it last time

The project was way smaller back then and it was easier to coordinate the community (which was required for a rollback like that). It's highly unlikely to ever happen again.

Re: Merge soon

#94

Post by capableweb »

jhugo wrote: post #53
dmak wrote: 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.

> Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset

Buying Eth will be the same as before. What you could say, is staking Eth is what makes it an interest-bearing asset, not just buying Eth.

Re: Merge soon

#95

Post by capableweb »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #45
thrdbndndn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a vague idea of ETH merge, but not sure what this ultrasound money site is about. From Q&A: > Ultra sound money is an Ethereum meme focusing on the likely decrease of the ETH supply. > If capped-supply gold is sound, decreasing-supply ether is ultra sound. I have no idea what this last sentence means.

Maybe there is more to it but isn’t that just a wordplay wherein sound means both what music creates and a word signifying something making sense? Or so you mean something related to the supply?

Yes, there is more to it. "Soundness" is a specific term in computer science regarding a program being unable to end up in a invalid state. Usually used in type systems to describe a type system that makes your program unable to be "wrong".

The idea of "soundness" is based on this seminal paper: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milne...

Re: Merge soon

#97

Post by Nursie »

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but it is good to see one of the major ones move away from endlessly thrashing hardware and consuming huge amounts of energy.

So congrats, that's one major negative externality tackled, assuming that this all works out.

Re: Merge soon

#98

Post by CastFX »

lacker wrote: post #36

I have been skeptical for a long time that the transition to proof of stake would actually happen. It just seemed like the project was delayed and delayed, and there are so many fundamental development problems with this sort of decentralized migration. Nothing quite like this has ever worked before. But here we are and there is no obvious problem in sight. I'll keep my fingers crossed, and if it goes off without a h…

Thank you! After having seen so many pessimistic comments about the merge it's refreshing to see someone willing to change its mind.

Re: Merge soon

#99

Post by knocte »

jlokier wrote: post #92
cflynnus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Th…

> 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). It's not actually that simple. After the merge, non-upgraded PoW nodes will automatically wind down and self-destruct according to the built-in difficulty bomb curve which is part of PoW. For PoW…

> Bitcoin has a difficulty bomb too, so Bitcoin will eventually self-destruct, if nobody steps up to coordinate a new fork of Bitcoin and a majority of users accept the new fork.

What bullshit is this? bitcoin doesn't have a difficulty bomb

Re: Merge soon

#100

Post by Tenoke »

zionic wrote: post #10
jitl wrote: 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…

>despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away

Weird since Vitalik said it will take 'maybe a year' and can be ready 'as early in 2018' in 2017. He has admitted many times he had and promoted much shorter timeframes than reality even calling it his biggest mistake in his Twitter AMA last year.

https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-p...

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