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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#961

Post by kranke155 »

longtimelistnr wrote: post #609
kranke155 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve given up on HN understating crypto before they mint some Giga unicorn and everyone understand where the future is. The hive mind here is dangerously anti crypto. It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. It’s basically become a forum for your average developer. I’d bet a lot of folk who don’t understand crypto at all are web developers or something wher…

Laughable to suggest that everyone is wrong (except you of course) and that not worshipping crypto makes you an “average developer”

That’s not what I said (of course). Multiple others in this thread decry the same thing.

And you can be a great developer and still misunderstand crypto. But I really struggle to see how you can be a great innovator and fail to see cryptos potential at this point.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#962

Post by kranke155 »

simonw wrote: post #664
kranke155 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve given up on HN understating crypto before they mint some Giga unicorn and everyone understand where the future is. The hive mind here is dangerously anti crypto. It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. It’s basically become a forum for your average developer. I’d bet a lot of folk who don’t understand crypto at all are web developers or something wher…

> It’s the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next decade or two and HN doesn’t get it at all. Help me understand where that wealth comes from. Because as far as I can see the only wealth that gets generated is from people who got in earlier selling their bags to people who got in later.

I would say you haven’t looked into smart contracts, NFTs and distributed apps enough.

Look into Uniswap, Balancer, Curve, Compound, MakerDAO. Read what Vitalik Buterin has written on his blog and watch some podcasts with him.

For people outside of the art world the narrative around NFTs is “it’s all fraud / it’s all silly pictures of apes”.

This is demonstrably untrue but its hard to show this to the hive mind here since they want to believe that it is true. But a lot of folks in the digital art world will tel you that NFTs have been a godsend.

Basically you are looking at tokens (99% of which are a scam) instead of looking at applications (99% of which are also a scam). The fundamental problem with crypto right now is the lack of regulation - without regulation it’s become a free for all for all kinds of scams and ponzis. If you were a criminal today the best way to make money is crypto. There is no regulation. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff but the chaff is humongous due to the lack of regulation. This gets a lot of people confused and they just end up dumping the whole space (unfortunate but understandable).

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#963

Post by mort96 »

mrb wrote: post #926
ninkendo wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only 0.1% 1 out of every 1000 watts of energy produced in the whole world going to ethereum mining is tragic. It’s an absolutely massive waste, and the fact that crypto miners think a number like that isn’t a big deal is horrifying to me.

You care about 1 in 1000 ? Did you know that 660 out of 1000 watts of primary energy used to create electricity are wasted by the time the electricity arrives at the customer meter? (source: https://www.enerdynamics.com/Energy-Currents_Blog/How-Much-P... ) Logically, you should be 660 times more "horrified" by this waste than by cryto mining, and yet you are not. In fact most likely until today you were not even awar…

Your 66% number includes generation losses. You're literally arguing that we should be horrified that solar panels don't produce 1 watt of electricity for every watt of light which hits them.

Would it be great if solar panels and wind turbines and nuclear reactors converted 100% of the heat/light/wind energy into useful electricity? Sure. But that's also not something we have the technology to achieve, and likely never will. People are constantly researching ways to improve power plants, but they will never reach 100% efficiency.

What we _do_ have the technology to achieve, however, is turning off things which use a ton of energy but provide no value. Saving 1‰ of earth's global electricity consumption just by turning off a useless gambling toy is a huge win, and the fact that it was allowed to use 1‰ of our global energy use in the first place is horrifying.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#964

Post by [deleted] »

notch656a wrote: post #823
dang wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you keep posting this sort of low-value flamewar comment we are going to have to ban you. We have cut you miles of slack for years, but the slack is not infinite. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I know this sounds harsh, but there's a ton of history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687129 .

>If you keep posting this sort of low-value flamewar comment we are going to have to ban you. We have cut you miles of slack for years, but the slack is not infinite. Turnabout should be fair play here. Dang's continual low-value abuse of users to enforce suppression of seibelj and others' speech should be met with flagging and every possible option to reduce the effect of these threats. If it is possible to ban dang…

[deleted]

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#966

Post by BlueScreenDeath »

Waterluvian wrote: post #451
ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#967

Post by delaaxe »

ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

Was mining really done in "data centers"?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#968

Post by tomhallett »

exabyte wrote: post #933
elevaet wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. My top concern with cryptocurrency is the huge waste of energy inherent to PoW. It's really, really good to see ETH pull this off. There are a pile of other problems in crypto, but it's fantastic to see this biggest (IMO) issue addressed by the #2 cryptocurrency. I actually thought it might never happen. It's a day to celebrate for sure.

Imagine trying to quantify the amount of energy that goes into the current financial system with all its inefficiencies and manpower, time and energy that it takes. I would love to see this number compared to the amount of energy PoW consumes.

While I can’t compare “manpower” energy, someone did the math comparing ethereum to ec2 - ethereum was 1 million times less efficient in processing power, network costs, and storage.

Those numbers were obviously from the POW network, so unknown how they will change post merge, but arguing that current systems waste energy too seems a bit biased.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#969

Post by FabHK »

once_inc wrote: post #469
Waterluvian wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it

That would be so if all externalities were priced in properly, which is not the case.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#970

Post by remram »

colordrops wrote: post #723
bcrosby95 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. I'll take this one step further. My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One ti…

There can't be fraud of the sort that you get with credit cards on a blockchain unless you leak your private keys. The fact that security is built around a 16 digit number and 3 digit pin that you share with everyone and can be reused is embarrassing for credit card companies, not a win. Amazing.

What usually happens is buggy contracts, or compromised contracts.
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