The Merge
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The Merge
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Re: The Merge
#2This disclosure should be at the top of the article:
> Disclosure: My family and USV have large holdings in ETH and other crypto assets and may continue to add to them in the coming weeks, months, and years.
Re: The Merge
#3People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract.
Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.
Re: The Merge
#4People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…
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Re: The Merge
#5People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…
People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer communities of every major cryptocurrency.
Re: The Merge
#6People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…
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Feel free to do a point by point rebuttal.
Re: The Merge
#7People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…
People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…
NFTs work and they allow artists to
- make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art
Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.
Re: The Merge
#8No mention of sanctions?
It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either:
1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC.
or:
2. Refuse to sign these transactions.
2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until they no longer have a 33% stake. Billions of dollars of customer funds could be lost.
2b. If > 67% of the network refuses, transactions can be successfully censored. Now we no longer have decentralized ETH, we have "USA coin", where the government can censor anyone with a quick email to Brian Armstrong.
I don't see a way out. It doesn't look like the network is actually decentralized enough to handle a nation-state attack. This was not an issue with the old proof of work scheme. I'll be amazed if the merge is not delayed while they work on a solution to this.
EDIT: If Coinbase does lose that money, you could say the network is operating as designed in the presence of a hostile validator. But a LOT of people are not going to be happy with the result.
Re: The Merge
#9Assuming a fork is expected and the PoW chain is running alongside the PoS chain, wouldn’t this cause a massive run up in ETH holdings to end up with assets on both chains?
Re: The Merge
#10People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually…
People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…
Im not sure what you mean by perpetual controversy either.
What I mean by “less terrible” is socially, not technically.
Centralised datacenter based development leads to digital feudalism, where the owners of the datacenters take control of the “digital land” and build moats around them (often fake, imaginary - see how text messaging has no interoperability anymore when 10 years ago it did)
In blokchain / decentralised databases development this is not possible - people can always access the data that’s on chain, and they can extend your code, see it, change it (depending on the license even copy it and just make a slightly different product, a la Uniswap V2 and Sushi Swap). This leads to a real free market for applications, instead of the digital feudalism that naturally results from centralised data centers.