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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#971

Post by remram »

miohtama wrote: post #848
Salgat wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That defeats the point. People keep forgetting that the single innovative aspect of cryptocurrencies was the invention of a way to do completely anonymous and trustless transactions. That's it. The second you wrap that in a layer that eliminates that, you're better off just skipping the blockchain altogether since it's an otherwise extremely awful performing persistence.

Here is another thread from HackerNews today: ”Stripe nuked my business” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528 Visa/MasterCard is never going to be a solution for everyone, everywhere, even if it is a solution for a particular Orignal Poster.

As a business you'd have to pay taxes, deal with customer support, accept multiple currencies, etc, so even when accepting cryptocurrency payments it's likely you would use a payment processor. Those payment processors would probably be just as reliable as the fiat ones... (hell they'll probably be the same companies)

Remember, Stripe is not known to be reliable, just convenient. People will go for the convenience with cryptocurrency as well, there is no reason to believe otherwise.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#972

Post by psychlops »

dleslie wrote: post #947
psychlops wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because your losses are comfortably socialized, it's a good system?

Yes? I don't see how helping my fellow citizens, and myself, at a vanishingly, immeasurably small cost to myself is a bad thing.

I agree with your sentiment, but my credit card fees are definitely measurable.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#973

Post by FabHK »

pikelet wrote: post #935
Salgat wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That defeats the point. People keep forgetting that the single innovative aspect of cryptocurrencies was the invention of a way to do completely anonymous and trustless transactions. That's it. The second you wrap that in a layer that eliminates that, you're better off just skipping the blockchain altogether since it's an otherwise extremely awful performing persistence.

I'm not sure what makes you think that is the 'single innovative aspect' (besides, unless we're talking about Monero, most crypto transactions are not anonymous). One of the reasons I'm excited is for truly borderless transactions with friends and family overseas without every bank in the middle taking their (unknown ahead of time) cut. Even Wise incurs extra costs, as it doesn't support their native currency and USD…

> I'm not sure what makes you think that is the 'single innovative aspect'

Because that is the single innovative aspect of crypto: circumventing regulation (by virtue of not having a central authority). Every single other thing can be done better by a non-decentralised system.

> much of the cynicism around crypto comes from a position of privilege.

Boo-hoo. I would think that more rich people are circumventing capital controls in China, Korea, and Argentina using crypto than poor, unbanked people are using crypto.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#974

Post by helen___keller »

kodah wrote: post #860
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

Question from a non-crypto person. Why did you assert so plainly that Bitcoin scales linearly with transactions? Even I know that's not true. Things I'm curious about: - Where'd you learn this? - Have you read any academic material about Bitcoin? (eg: Bitcoin white paper, etc) - Why did you post five times on a thread about something you know very little about? Edit: it concerns me that people are so passionately pos…

in PoW, energy consumption scales linearly with the block reward value which is denominated in bitcoin thus scales with value of btc. Reward for mining is [ ( your hashrate / network hashrate) * block reward ].

so it's not usage that scales energy consumption, it's value of btc. Arguably though the two are intrinsically related (this should be obvious - if bitcoin somehow becomes the defacto global currency, a shitload of investment will pour in and bring its value much much higher)

in truth it's a moot point. even with lightning protocol, bitcoin as a protocol couldn't handle that much capacity. If a few hundred million people just wanted to publish a single transaction (putting money in a wallet and thereafter doing everything on lightning protocol), it would take literally years to process that many transactions.

Edit: just to be explicit, the reason energy consumption scales with block reward value is because it becomes very profitable to buy more mining equipment and mine more if the reward say doubles. It’s not an instant effect of course because there’s capital acquisition and operational capacity involved

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#975

Post by wing-_-nuts »

razemio wrote: post #771
oliwarner wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

That is rude. I care about the environment, still I am mining. How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid. If I would not do th…

are you connected to the grid? if so, not mining would resell that power back to the grid. I'm honestly more interested if you're off grid

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#976

Post by ashwagary »

wruza wrote: post #957
dinobones wrote: post #920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, most "crypto haters" on HN are just regretful no-coiners. Crypto is exactly the type of thing you would except HN to love, it ticks the box in so many ways, except for the one where... They forgot to buy some and are forever resentful. I honestly struggle to believe this group of people truly care that much about crypto's effects on the environment; from the people I've spoken about this with personally…

Seems like you’re trying to make fun of non-gamblers, but being resentful is exactly the key part of this disorder.

People working on cutting edge technology are all speculators in one way or another even if they don't realize or can't quantify the opportunity cost.

The one thing I will agree with the OP about is, HN had some of the earliest posts about Bitcoin and it was generally poo pood by the audience potentially due to an inadequate analysis. The long term HN readers that missed the boat may suffer from some forms of regret which can surface as disdain or hatred.

I mean, how many assets that come across this site have 20,000,000% to 69,000,000% returns and just require you to pay attention to benefit?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#977

Post by SilasX »

presentation wrote: post #956
SilasX wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one with any influence thinks about that. Have you see the typical CPU/network overhead of an application compared to what it accomplishes? :-p

People definitely think about it RE mobile apps and battery life. As well as just leaving electronics on all day vs at least sleeping them. But yea purely for energy cost of using apps, that’s pretty fringe.

I know at least one clear counterexample for mobile: MetaMask, a widely used crypto wallet app, noticeably drains battery while it's in use. Usually down 3% within a minute of opening, and it's been like that for a while.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#978

Post by sam0x17 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #794
apeace wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha, thank you! I felt like this change should be visible in some kind of graph somewhere, and you're right, the ETC hashrate has roughly quadrupled in the span of two days: https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate And here is the ETHW hashrate: https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate EDIT: Better links

There will probably be some really interesting network effects with this. Since a lot of the other PoW coins that are ETH-hardware compatiable have low volume, I think we're going to very rapidly see the profitably of mining these go way down (to the point of going negative in some cases) as all these extra miners suddenly start mining these coins, but this takes time. So in other words, I would expect the real globa…

update: I guess I was right sooner than I thought. PoW GPU mining is unprofitable as of today!

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#979

Post by mr_woozy »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#980

Post by idiotsecant »

lmm wrote: post #923
idiotsecant wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they needed to do some physical work Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? PoW is PoS, it just has some extra steps that have the minor side effect of using huge amount of resources for no reason.

> Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? They can, but so can the rest of us. Unlike under PoS.

So you can rent time in a mining farm with money but you can't buy ETH with money? Why not?
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