[HN Gopher] Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move ... ___________________________________________________________________ Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of- stake Author : sfjailbird Score : 44 points Date : 2022-08-11 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com) | nodejsthrowaway wrote: | One of Ethereum's core goals is decentralisation. | | How does Ethereum plan to deal Proof of Stake naturally | monopolizing block creation and the Ether supply? In my | estimation there are many compounding factors such as MEV and | liquid staking with a massive economy of scale for first movers | that combined with staking interest might make the top staking | provider eventually hold the vast majority of Ether. | | If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating 99% | of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking with | a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next? | redox99 wrote: | The problem of pools getting too big (Lido, CeXes, etc) is | worrying. I think once withdrawals are enabled (shangai fork), | liquid staking won't be that attractive, so the situation will | improve. | ruuda wrote: | > If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating | 99% of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking | with a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next? | | The company that employs most of the Lido contributors is based | in a region where the US has little influence. But aside from | that, the Lido node operators (who operate the validators) | consist of more than a dozen companies, registered in various | countries, using servers in different locations. Diversity of | jurisdictions is an explicit criterion for node operator | selection. Possibly some of them could be forced to censor | transactions, but I think it's not the lowest hanging fruit | (going after the client software developers might be a more | impactful avenue, there are fewer of those than validators, | though fortunately Ethereum has multiple client | implementations). | | But suppose somehow 99% of the blocks are produced by | validators who censor certain actors. Then it depends a bit on | how far-reaching the censorship is. | | If validators refuse to include certain transactions in their | blocks, but still accept other's blocks for consensus, then I | expect that blacklisted actors will find it more difficult and | more expensive to get their transactions included, but it would | still be possible. If they offer a juicy transaction fee, they | will have to wait on average 50 blocks to get their transaction | in, but then a validator will be more than happy to include it. | | If validators refuse to include certain transactions in their | blocks, and also refuse to vote on blocks that do for | consensus, then they will be able to enforce their censorship. | One way to think about this, is that the censorship has been | built into the protocol, and the 1% of validators still willing | to include the blacklisted transactions, are producing what the | others consider invalid blocks. Consensus can tolerate 1/3 of | the stake misbehaving. | | 99% is an extreme case though; if the censorship is limited to | less than 1/3 of the stake, then the opposite happens. | Validators who refuse to vote on certain blocks don't fulfil | their duty of voting, which incurs a penalty. If the validator | is not allowed to vote on even a descendant of a block that | contains a blacklisted transaction, then effectively it will be | prevented from ever voting again, and its stake will slowly | evaporate due to penalties. | | An interesting case arises when censoring nodes control more | than 1/3 of the stake, but less than 2/3. This could result in | a liveness failure, where no blocks get finalized (because | neither the censoring nor the non-censoring nodes can get the | required 2/3 majority). This triggers an "inactivity leak", | where the stake of the misbehaving nodes gets destroyed, until | there is less than 1/3 of it left, and consensus can be | achieved again. Of course, who is "misbehaving" here depends on | your point of view, and the situation is symmetric, so this | would lead to the chain forking into one where the censors have | a supermajority, and one where the non-censors have a | supermajority. The side which had most stake will be the first | to achieve consensus again. | | (Because of this risk, there is an ongoing discussion in Lido | about whether it should self-impose a limit to not control more | than 1/3 of the stake. But it's a tough situation, because the | way it looks right now is that that stake would instead be | controlled by centralized exchanges who offer staking | services.) | sophrocyne wrote: | Your note on Lido being responsible for validating 99% may have | been hyperbolic, but just for reference - | https://beaconcha.in/pools | | There's an argument to be made that there is a centralizing | force in the role of the consensus/security layer for the | chain, because the asset being earned (ETH) can be staked and | earn further returns - However, this role and phenomenon is | mirrored in the PoW world. The difference is that the | centralization happens one step removed from the on-chain asset | - PoW miners consolidate profit into further mining | investments, such that an increasing amount of the hash rate is | owned by the largest miners, who can acquire improved access to | electricity and/or equipment relative to smaller miners. One | could argue that a PoS system actually has less room for | exploitation, however, since you can't restrict a solo-stakers | access to ETH, while you could restrict (or provide severe | barriers to entry) on the competition of electricity/equipment. | | The concern of the "top staking provider eventually holding the | vast majority of Ether" is highly unlikely. Given that the | asset will soon have ETH issuance cut by 90+% as part of the | merge, and the fact that there is no mechanism by which top | staking providers are incentivized more than the small solo- | stakers, this would soon enter the realms of the purely | theoretical, and seemingly take lifetimes to happen if one | could even envision it happening at all without a reallocation | into other investments. | | MEV is being democratized as well (whether a good thing or not, | will let you be the judge), with even solo-stakers being able | to use an MEV client alongside validation clients in order to | benefit from additional income on block proposals (see | Flashbots mev-boost client, releasing alongside the merge). | | Would love to better understand whether that better informs | your perspectives on the subject, or what other concerns you | still have. | game-of-throws wrote: | In PoW, mining has real-world ongoing costs (electricity, | hardware) and so miners need to continually liquidate their | earnings to stay afloat. This counterbalances the effect of | wealth centralization. If you try to remove real-world costs | from that equation, you lose the counterbalancing effect. | eterps wrote: | > This counterbalances the effect of wealth centralization | | Yes, this ensures a limited supply with PoW, right? | | > If you try to remove real-world costs from that equation, | you lose the counterbalancing effect. | | I assume you can't remove real-world costs in the case of | PoS, but yes I can see how the real-world costs will be | much, much lower. | | Are you saying that there is a good reason to keep those | real-world costs higher? (pardon my ignorance, I haven't | looked into the principle you describe here before). | yokem55 wrote: | At least in Ethereum - - Stakers earn far less then miners | since they aren't burning capital to validate. They only | need to be paid for their opportunity cost over putting | that capital to use elsewhere. - Their stake does not | automatically compound. Each validator maxes out at a | weight of 32 eth, and it takes 32 to get a new validator | going. - Earnings have to be skimmed back to the execution | layer in order to be manually re-staked (if there is 32 eth | worth). Those earnings then enter the 'dominion and | control' of the staker, so at that point taxes have to be | paid on that income. | | In contrast, mining can drastically improve the return on | capital by operating at larger and larger scales so as to | get better and better deals on equipment and electricity. | That kind scaling doesn't happen with proof of stake. | rcxdude wrote: | It's the same forces which push proof of work to the same | conclusion, so it's not made much difference to the problem. | Salgat wrote: | The difference is that if a miner does nothing, eventually | they stop making money regardless of how many coins they | have. If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and | collect even more indefinitely with no additional investment | beyond running a very cheap node (or just letting someone | else host it). Staking is just trivial in comparison, it's | apples and oranges. | yokem55 wrote: | The flip side of this though is that stakers can have their | capital burned because of misbehavior. If a staker gets too | entrenched and the other folks in the network don't want | them around anymore, their stake can be slashed. Proof of | work cannot destroy the equipment of a hostile miner, only | wipe everyone's equipment out with an algorithm change. | ruuda wrote: | > If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and | collect | | They do, but the supply of the token also goes up, so their | share of the supply doesn't grow as much, and relative to | other stakers, it doesn't grow in proportion at all. It is | true that inflation rewards effectively move value from | non-stakers to stakers, but nothing prevents most of the | supply from being staked, especially with liquid staking | derivatives. | | > Staking is just trivial in comparison | | I agree that staking is, but operating the node is not! | Operating a validator is actually more demanding than | operating a miner. For a miner, there is no disadvantage in | being offline except for the opportunity cost. But a | validator has a duty, and will be penalized for downtime. | (Granted, the requirements on Ethereum are quite lax -- on | purpose, to make it easier for enthusiasts and other non- | professionals to operate a node.) Operating a validator | requires monitoring and maintenance like any other | software. Your server will run out of disk space, your node | will disconnect if you don't update the node software in | time, etc. Most validators in most of the PoS networks are | operated by professional companies with dedicated SRE teams | because of this. | PretzelPirate wrote: | I don't have a source handy, but eventually block production | will centralize and the protocol will allow a "block proposer" | role which will require lower resources. The proposer will be | able to force a producer to include specific transactions and | if they aren't included, the producer will be punished (via | their stake being slashed). | | If a centralized entity is told to include transactions by a | proposer and they refuse for any reason, they will eventually | lose their stake and fall out of the producer role. | pa7x1 wrote: | What pushes towards centralization are two factors; economies | of scale and barriers of entry. For those mathematically | inclined you can imagine plotting economic reward (y-axis) vs | economic input (x-axis). Economies of scale determine the shape | and growth of the curve while barriers of entry determine the | cut with the y-axis. Obviously, the greater the barriers of | entry or the higher the reward as your economic scale grows the | bigger the push towards centralization. In the first case | because you forbid small actors to participate in the game, in | the second case because you reward bigger actors more | generously. | | So how does this graph look for Ethereum? Pretty simple, if you | have more than 32 ETH it's basically flat. You get the same APY | irrespectively of your size. And if you have less than 32 ETH? | Well, you can then stake with RocketPool (a decentralized | staking pool) in which case your APY is 0.85 the full APY. So | the graph for Ethereum is: | | - 0.85 * APY between [0 ETH, 32 ETH) | | - APY between [32 ETH, infty ETH) | | Where APY is the yield returned by the network which depends on | total amount staked in the network and network fee revenues. | | This is a remarkably flat curve, which highlights that there | are almost non-existent economies of scale in PoS as designed | in Ethereum. If you do the same analysis for PoW you will find | it requires significant investment in specialized HW (either | top of the line GPU or ASICS), and there are significant | economies of scale in the form of access to cheap or unusable | sources of energy. | anonymousDan wrote: | Interesting. Do you have any references to resources | describing the theory of how economies of scale/barriers to | entry interact? | ruuda wrote: | > You get the same APY irrespectively of your size | | On-chain, yes. But there is an off-chain cost to operating | the validators, and there is economy of scale there. You can | run many 32-ETH validators on a single machine using almost | the same resources as running a single one, so the amortized | cost of the hardware goes down. And when you do need to | expand to multiple machines, the same applies; you don't need | 10x the people to manage 10x the machines. Of course, you can | pay somebody to operate the validator for you, and those | parties benefit from economy of scale. | pa7x1 wrote: | Indeed. So let me flesh it out a bit more. You can run a | validator using 100W (conservative figure) of energy and an | Intel NUC with 2 TiB SSD (you can even run it on a | Raspberry Pi but no need to be too greedy in HW resources). | | That's 876 kWh in a year and 1000 $ in HW. Energy costs | vary from place to place but let's pick 0,2 $ / kWh. Which | results in 175 $/year in energy. The computer can easily | last you 5 years if not more, so 200 $ per year. Let's add | internet costs too. 30$ x 12 = 360 $ / year. | | Those are the operational costs. Once you have 32 ETH this | is pretty negligible. | ruuda wrote: | There is also the people cost. If you're a hobbyist you | could argue those are zero or there is only some | opportunity cost. But for a professional validator, SRE | salaries dwarf the hardware cost. | pa7x1 wrote: | True, but these are costs that affect large scale | operators so they are not a barrier to entry. If anything | they highlight that in some ways a small hobbyist is | positioned to be as profitable as a large scale operator. | ruuda wrote: | Yeah, that's true. | [deleted] | Hbruz0 wrote: | So if the graph is flat above 32eth, why not reduce that | amount to lower the barrier of entry ? | [deleted] | ecommerceguy wrote: | Does this mean I can finally sell the coins I inadvertently | locked up? After 10 plus years and no killer app I'm done | supporting crypto. It's a scam. | vlod wrote: | >It's a scam. | | Obviously you wouldn't want to profit from that. How about | donating your profits to a charity if you feel so strongly? | | Ethereum price ~10 years ago, probably less than a dollar. | | Ethereum price today, ~ $1900 | ecommerceguy wrote: | I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my | etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale | for that statement? | | Maybe I should be more clear, without ANY application or use | for ANY crypto besides pump and dump schemes, ALL crypto, | IMO, is a scam. Crypto has been a thing for 10 years, longer | if you count egold and liberty cash (or whatever that was | called). | | And to clarify again, my eth has been locked up in "staking" | for what 2 years now without me being able to sell it. I'm | looking forward to offloading it all and reap my gains, | doesn't change how I feel about it. | pa7x1 wrote: | The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof | of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of | ~2000 or 99.95%. | | You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. | | Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ | rglullis wrote: | To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of | validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by | them _while running_ is less than the energy consumed by | videogame consoles around the world _while idling_. | | Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much | energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to | eat their GPUs after the merge. | belltaco wrote: | >"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be | anti-crypto | | Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, | proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing | that. | baby wrote: | Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin | will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce | their computations, or users will be required to pay a | pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you | have bitcoin, that's my advice | Karrot_Kream wrote: | If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then | it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily | wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to | scrutinize Bitcoin. | rglullis wrote: | Then it is an issue of _bitcoin_ and all the PoW | blockchains, not of crypto in general. | | You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, | you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to | environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped | generalizing and became more specific about their | arguments. | belltaco wrote: | Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and | was also the first successful one. | rglullis wrote: | And Friendster was once the largest social network and | the first successful one. Your point? | | Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a | failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the | "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the | first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only | correlated with other stock prices. | | It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction | volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of | nodes participating in block validation) and so on. | Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin | than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really | want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin _today_ | is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum. | belltaco wrote: | Friendster isn't currently the largest social network. | The point is that people associate the biggest product of | the category with the category itself. Like web search is | synonymous with Google. | woojoo666 wrote: | Android has a far larger market share than iOS. And yet | people still voice their dislike of Android without | dismissing smartphones in general. | rglullis wrote: | Ether market cap _alone_ is about 50% of Bitcoin 's (~230 | vs ~470 billion USD). | | Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top | 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go | ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still | another ~$100B there. | | Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to | believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an | ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening | will come fast. | rcxdude wrote: | The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a | tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until | bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto. | rglullis wrote: | Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of | people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away | when we build an alternative that has (most) of its | (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks. | | IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on | criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, | otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican | standoff and you will never get the support to win the | good fight. | bilsbie wrote: | So proof of stake isn't a holy grail? It's completely achievable | technology? | wmf wrote: | Yes, PoS has been running safely for 1-2 years. (Ethereum isn't | the first working PoS chain but it will be the largest one by | far.) | 0x64 wrote: | There's a massive difference in the decentralization of | Ethereum's PoS implementation vs. Cardano, which uses | delegated PoS. | wmf wrote: | If only there were other PoS chains. | skizm wrote: | Random brain dump of questions: Does proof-of-stake generally | mean the more money you have the more influence you get over the | consensus? If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor | had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? Could they | theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line | and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? How does this | affect mining pools? Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different? | sschueller wrote: | Doesn't the same apply to PoW? The more money you have the more | HW you can buy/rent to mine. | latchkey wrote: | As someone with a huge number of GPUs and many megawatts of | power mining ETH for many years now... it isn't that easy. | rglullis wrote: | No, protocol changes are not affected by the amount of ETH | staked. | | > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different? | | Harder. With Ethereum's consensus, you need 2/3 of the | validators conspiring to produce an attack on the chain. | ruuda wrote: | You can halt the chain with 1/3 of the stake though. In | Ethereum, that would trigger an inactivity leak that eats | away your stake until it's less than 1/3 of the stake, and | consensus can be achieved again. | pa7x1 wrote: | Will try to answer some of the questions. | | > Does proof-of-stake generally mean the more money you have | the more influence you get over the consensus? | | Ethereum does not have on-chain governance, so having more | stake doesn't grant you more influence over the network or the | rules of its consensus algorithm. What it gives you is a higher | probability to be called to do your duty as a validator and get | rewarded for it. But what that duty entails is defined in the | protocol and implemented in code. | | > If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a | lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? | | You would need to get 33% or 66% of the total stake to be able | to do some damage. With 33% you can prevent the network from | finalizing, i.e. agreeing that a block is part of the forever | history of the network. With 66% you could write wrong blocks | and make them part of the forever history of the network. The | protocol has on-chain mechanisms to deal with the first | situation but there are no on-chain mechanisms to deal with the | second one and a solution would require social consensus off- | chain. | | > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the | front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own | transactions? | | Anyone creating a block is free to order the transaction | however they please and decide which ones are included. You | cannot not charge fees, though. To use the network you have to | pay certain amount of ETH and this amount gets spent or burnt | as it's also referred, it simply disappears from existence. | | > How does this affect mining pools? | | They disappear, there is no more mining. | | > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different? | | Different and harder. Different for some of the explanations | above (the % necessary are different and what can be done at | this thresholds also changes). Harder because it's much much | more expensive to acquire the stake necessary to attack, so the | chain is more secure. But also because an attacker will get its | stake slashed (destroyed) and will not be able to do it again. | While in PoW, once you have the hashrate you can keep attacking | the network ad infinitum or until the rest of the network gets | more hashrate than you. It's as if an attacker in PoS would | gets mining rigs burnt. PoW cannot do that because it delegates | its security to an activity outside the chain (burn energy with | specialized HW), but in PoS the stake is on-chain so there are | more tools to deal with nefarious actors. | ruuda wrote: | > If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a | lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? | | With the current price of ETH, it's unlikely that a single | entity could gain enough of the supply to do anything like | this, but it is a valid concern for smaller chains. | | > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the | front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own | transactions? | | Block proposers can already do this. How often you get to be | block proposer, is proportional to the amount of stake you | have. | ayoubbhihi wrote: | There is growing confidence that the Ethereum Merge, scheduled | for mid-September, won't be postponed after the Goerli merge went | smoothly. | jl6 wrote: | Clearly there is some group of people with the power and | influence to make this decision. How does that group compare to, | say, US central bankers, in terms of transparency and democratic | accountability? | | Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about banking operations, I'm | talking about decision making by central bank leadership. One of | the purported benefits of crypto is independence from the shadowy | cabals that run the US dollar. | | Except the Treasury isn't actually all that shadowy - the staff | have names, and are appointed through an ultimately democratic | process. Whereas I really have no idea who is pulling the strings | behind crypto and who they are accountable to. The original | vision was for decentralized finance where _nobody_ could pull | the strings, but the level of coordination on display here in the | PoW-to-PoS switch makes it obvious that strings exist and they | are capable of being pulled. | jakswa wrote: | At first bluff, I'd expect a ton of example and implementation | code to be open-sourced. I still don't know what nightmare code | is crawling CSV/ZIP (forget which) files daily doing ACH | transfers, but afaik that's still how electronic banking is | done? Would love to learn I'm outdated there. | mattdesl wrote: | The development is in the open, happening through PRs on GitHub | and across several independent client teams. You can join the | R&D discord (I'm there as a casual observer) and watch or | engage in technical discussions. You can propose EIPs or make | suggestions about how the chain should work, and everybody can | collectively decide it is a good or bad idea for the protocol. | | Overall it's very open, although they do have to draw the line | somewhere and I assume the core dev's weekly zoom calls and | standups are not open to everybody to join lest it degrade into | madness (these devs work across a range of independent | companies and orgs fwiw). Even these calls and notes are shared | btw. | MichaelZuo wrote: | Who will implement the final decision? | woah wrote: | Users and exchanges who choose to recognize the token of | this new chain as "real eth" | tomhallett wrote: | From my very limited understanding, with Bitcoin the separation | of powers comes from the miners ability to reject an update. | With ETH Proof of stake, that is less clear - can the people | staking refuse to accept a new protocol version/update? | ruuda wrote: | The people who run the validators can, but validators on the | old version will be incompatible with the rest of the network | (if the rest of the network did update), and they will not be | able to sync. It's no different from Bitcoin in that sense. | [deleted] | bilsbie wrote: | Will existing coins be moved over automatically? | wmf wrote: | Yes. (There's actually no "over" since it's a continuation of | the same blockchain just with different consensus rules.) | BaseballPhysics wrote: | I confess deep ignorance, here, but: Why would miners go along | with this switch, given it's going to eliminate their profits? | Why wouldn't they just fork the chain and continue to run a PoW | version? What would force people to switch to the new PoS | version? | TGIF wrote: | They almost certainly will, as has happened before (see | Ethereum classic) but the Ethereum foundation and thus most of | the users will continue on to the proof of stake chain. | rawrmaan wrote: | There will be forks, but only the PoS one will have stablecoins | with actual backing (e.g. any value at all): | https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-p... | toinewx wrote: | justin sun has said his "stable" coin usdd will support the | pow fork | ecommerceguy wrote: | This made me chuckle. How anyone thinks Sun has any | interest in anything besides enriching himself is | delusional. Pro pump and dumper, thats all. He is an artist | at the top of his game, I'll give him that! | DennisP wrote: | USDD has a market cap of $745 million. By comparison, USDC | is at $54 billion, USDT is $67 billion, and both are only | supporting PoS. | | https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also- | confi... | baby wrote: | What an ass | ruuda wrote: | I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC | providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc., | wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It | might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value, | similar to Ethereum Classic. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | The world has changed a lot since then. | | If the crypto crash has demonstrated anything, it's that | there's an enormously incestuous relationship between these | organizations. We have exchanges running mining operations, | market participants investing in crypto mining companies, | etc. | | A massive economic implosion in the mining community is going | to have knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem, and I can | imagine market participants not wanting that to happen. | | In the end I suspect you're right, but I don't think it's | safe to say that only the miners are interested in preserving | the status quo, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion | that a major PoW-based fork won't live on and divide the | ecosystem. | eterps wrote: | > but I don't think it's safe to say that only the miners | are interested in preserving the status quo | | I also am sure the miners will keep the PoW based chain | alive. But I have trouble finding reasons why users, | developers and businesses would support the PoW based chain | in the long term. | WJW wrote: | From a user perspective it doesn't matter all that much | whether it's PoW or PoS, right? I see equally little | reason for a user to choose the PoS chain over the PoW | one. | DennisP wrote: | Usability is a little better on the PoS chain. Blocks | come out every 12 seconds, instead of randomly with just | an average time of 13 seconds. | | The PoS chain takes less than a minute to converge to a | state where it's very unlikely for your transaction to | revert, and in 12 minutes your transaction is finalized, | meaning it _can 't_ revert without destroying a large | percentage of staked ETH. | | PoS ETH will have the researcher and dev community | building on top of it for another decade or so. There's a | long list of further improvements in the roadmap, | including major increases in scalability. | | Most of the ecosystem is moving to PoS. The popular | rollups will be connected to the PoS chain, not to PoW. | Major stablecoins backed by off-chain assets have already | said they'll be backing the PoS chain, not PoW. Etc. | eterps wrote: | You're right, if users disregard the difference in energy | consumption there is little reason for them to choose the | PoS chain over the PoW one. For devs and businesses the | PoS one seems to matter though, I think it is likely the | activity and innovation will be there in the end. | | Also a user would have to make an effort to keep using | the PoW one AFAIK. | ruuda wrote: | Another reason that I've seen brought up is that miners | aren't so coordinated. Somebody will have to actually | fork the code, remove the difficulty bomb, change the | magic parameters to not interfere with the PoS P2P | network, etc. Then they have to get enough miners on | board to use _that_ particular fork. I think it's a weak | argument, but so far I haven't seen any coordinated | effort to continue mining after the Merge, so it could be | a factor. | | I think it boils down to a coordination/signalling | problem again. Miners want to mine on the fork that they | expect to succeed, but it will only succeed if it gets | listed on exchanges, exchanges will only list it after it | gains serious adoption, but it will only get serious | adoption if miners agree on a fork, etc. | | A historical example of this is SegWit2x in Bitcoin. It | was originally proposed as a protocol upgrade, seemed to | gain broad support, but miners and exchanges weren't | universally signalling that they would adopt it, and in | the end everybody chickened out, and the change failed to | be adopted. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | > But I have trouble finding reasons why users, | developers and businesses would support the PoW based | chain in the long term. | | I explained why: Cross-investment within the ecosystem. | | If, I dunno, say Coinbase has a large investment in a | mining operation (and I'm completely making this up, to | be clear), they're not gonna want a move to PoS because | it'll destroy that investment. | | We know for a fact that there's a ton of this type of | cross-investment in the ecosystem, as evidenced by the | ripple effects from the collapse of organizations like | 3AC. It's not at all unreasonable to conclude that | similar relationships could create incentives to keep the | miners solvent. | DennisP wrote: | Fwiw, Coinbase and Kraken both hold large amounts of | staked ETH for their customers, and skim off a percentage | of the staking rewards. They won't be able to access | those profits until about six months after the merge. So | they both have an interest in the PoS chain doing well. | | Anyone in the community who's been paying attention has | been well aware that staking was coming. The staking | network has been running in parallel since December 2020, | and about 12% of the current supply of ETH is deposited | on it. | tylersmith wrote: | Nothing forces people to follow any set of consensus rules. | There will be a fork that continues on with PoW, but most users | will choose to follow PoS because that's where all the business | and developer support is. | [deleted] | paconbork wrote: | Ultimately it would be the community deciding to value the PoS | fork as "real Ethereum". Something similar happened with ETH | and Ethereum Classic, where classic is the unforked version | that nobody cares about. A PoW fork will almost certainly | exist, but that doesn't mean anyone has to use it and indeed | some major players like Chainlink have already announced that | they will not support a PoW fork | TremendousJudge wrote: | Classic is the one that didn't rollback transactions after | the DAO scam right? | SeanAnderson wrote: | Correct. | yokem55 wrote: | To be pedantic - mainnet Ethereum didn't 'roll-back' those | hack transactions either. They are still there on etherscan | if you want to look for them. The DAO hard fork introduced | an unsigned transaction that moved the hacker's funds to a | refund to a refund contract. | TremendousJudge wrote: | I found about this fairly recently. You seem | knowledgeable about the topic. Can I ask you how did the | community react to this/what do they think of this | episode today? Because having full control over the coins | is one of the big reasons why proponents are against | regular banks and state-issued currency, yet here there | was a clear breach of that control. | yokem55 wrote: | The developers don't have full control like that. They | were only able to execute TheDAO hard fork because the | community was very small at the time and was reasonably | united behind the developers in carrying it out. It was | something of a unicorn of circumstances that it was even | possible because the funds were still locked up for a | period of time and the hacker couldn't sell them, which | meant there was only a single loser in the fork (the | hacker), and a large community of winners or people who | weren't directly effected either way. I personally think | the refund stage of things should not have happened and | the funds should have been burned instead, simply as a | means to make sure the investors learned that risks of | interacting with ethereum contracts were still very real. | But that said I wasn't involved in crypto at all then, | so, what do I know... | prepend wrote: | The market cap of ethereum classic is $6B with $2B in daily | transactions. [0] | | Not as big as "real ethereum" but I wouldn't say no one | cares. | | [0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum-classic/ | Dma54rhs wrote: | Market cap doesn't mean anything when it comes to | cryptocurrency, especially when it comes to shitcoins. | the_duke wrote: | 33% of the market cap changing hands each day sounds | incredibly high. How does that happen? | ecommerceguy wrote: | Morons buy, miners sell. | ecommerceguy wrote: | ETC has been pumped lately by former eth miners. I know | because I've participated in this scam as a miner. ETC is | one of the more volatile top 50 "coins" or "cypto", | constantly being pumped and dumped, there is nothing | actively being "developed" for it and there never will be. | Just read the associated forums if you don't believe me, | it's a pump and dump. Simple as. | | Yes I've profited and no I won't give it to charity. | | My opinion will never change, it's all a scam for pump and | dumps schemes. There will never be a killer app attached to | crypto. NEVER. | arcticbull wrote: | The only fork that matters is the one Jeremy Allaire and | Paolo Ardoino back. | leashless wrote: | I introduced the Serenity (proof of stake) step of the Ethereum | release process in this 2015 blog post for the Foundation. You | might find it interesting to look back and see how we got here. | | https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process... | BucketsMcG wrote: | Interesting choice to name it after a Berlin park known for being | full of drug dealers, muggers and ne'er-do-wells. | rglullis wrote: | Gorli is also close to FullNode[0], the office building where | plenty of blockchain projects were based. | | [0] https://www.fullnode.berlin/ | gemduster wrote: | Oh please. Give me a break. As if the park doesn't have a | richer history than that. | morelisp wrote: | It, uh, kind of doesn't? For most of its life post-WW2 it was | a coal depot. The park was built ~1990 and by ~2005 it was | known for its drug culture. | | ETA: A defense of the "rich history" of Gorli is what finally | got you to comment after 3 years?! | alkonaut wrote: | Rinkeby is pretty rough, and has basically no other | reputation than being dodgy either. So someone likes to pick | the rougher spots. Maybe someone who likes rap and they are | mentioned in lyrics or something like that. | pa7x1 wrote: | Names of the Ethereum testnets were chosen after Metro | stations. Ropsten, Sepolia, Goerli, Rinkeby, Kovan... | gemduster wrote: | [deleted] | ChadNauseam wrote: | For anyone curious what the merge means, in my limited | understanding: | | 1. Transactions will get slightly cheaper, but only because | they're increasing the block rate from every 13 seconds to every | 12 seconds, not anything specific to the other cool stuff in the | merge | | 2. The network will switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, | meaning that there will no longer be GPU demand or substantial | energy consumption attributable to the Ethereum network. | | 3. For a cryptocurrency to be secure there has to be some barrier | to participating in consensus. Now, instead of having to have a | fancy GPU to run an Ethereum validator, the barrier will be that | you instead have to "stake" 32 Ethereum (and risk losing it if | your validator misbehaves). A staking reward of (I think) 5% a | year will be issued for your trouble. | | 4. The Ethereum network will be more resistant to "short-range" | forks, that is, forks that diverged from the proper chain | "recently". (More resistant in the sense that it will be more | expensive to execute an attack like that.) | | 5. Once you've staked your 32 Ethereum, you currently can't | "unstake" it. The ability to withdraw your stake will be added in | a future eth fork. It will have to be gated by some delay (maybe | you can only withdraw your stake 6 months after you staked it). | Attacking the chain via a "long-range" fork, that is, a fork that | diverges from the proper chain longer ago than the withdrawal | period, will be much cheaper or possibly even free. | | 6. Ethereum will still favor liveness over consistency. An | attacker can't stop the chain, but they can prevent it from | finalizing for a time (at expense to themselves). | | 7. Token issuance will go down, probably to below the burn rate, | so the base Ethereum supply will go down over time | | 8. The chain will get deterministic finality after some number of | blocks (I think something like a day's worth). That means that, | once a block is finalized, it will never be rewritten. Network | outages or attacks can prevent blocks from finalizing. | lostmsu wrote: | Is the staking reward locked together with the stake as | described in 5.? | latchkey wrote: | 1. Transactions won't change noticeably since the gas costs | won't change and the network won't have more capacity. | | 2. The 'demand' from mining for GPUs is over-rated. It was a | brief problem years ago. You are correct that energy usage for | validation will go down. | | 3. One difference between bitcoin and eth... ethash is a memory | hard algo so it doesn't require the fastest GPU. 4-5 year old | GPUs are more ROI efficient. Everything is bound in the speed | of the memory controller. | | 4. To be seen. | | 5. 'staking' today is just depositing ETH into an ETH1 contract | that doesn't have a withdraw function. It will require forks to | add that functionality. | | 6. Correct. | | 7. Correct. Although this likely won't have an impact on price | like people think. | | 8. A fork could always change things. | [deleted] | tomhallett wrote: | Honest question - if you get deterministic finality in a day | (#8), then how can you attack the chain with a "long-range" | fork (#5). Doesn't #8 solve #5? | Geee wrote: | Long-range fork is possible if network participants are | manipulated or forced to switch to another fork. In practice, | the correct fork is communicated from entities who control | the majority stake, such as exchanges. In the case of network | disruptions, there might be multiple valid forks, and | choosing the correct one is arbitrary, because there isn't | one. There's no objective consensus similar to proof-of-work. | baby wrote: | By the way I was under the impression that Ethereum will | still have forks, and thus probabilistic finality | narush wrote: | If you're running a node, and it finalizes a block, that | means your node will refuse to ever revert that block. | | A long-range attack is when a validator withdrawals their | stake, waits the withdrawal period (e.g. the 6 month delay | delay mentions above), and then creates a fake chain starting | from before they withdrew their staked eth. | | Because in the "real" history (e.g. the ones that most nodes | have seen over the past 6 months) the validator doesn't have | Eth locked up still, there's no way to punish them. Thus, | these long range attacks get very cheap (you could even | imagine someone who pays validators for old keys -- aka, you | don't even need to be a validator yourself). | | These two facts together mean that PoS blockchains require | some "weak subjectivity" - which pretty much means when you | download and start syncing your node, you need to know a | "finalized" block hash from the past 6 months (or within the | withdrawal delay). This ensures you won't get tricked by a | cheap long-range attack. | | In practice, I don't think this will be much of a problem - | clients can just do a new release with a new block has every | few months for new users! | ChadNauseam wrote: | The answer as I understand it, is that anyone who's | continuously running a node won't be confused by such a fork, | but someone who just joined the network has no way of telling | which fork is the true one. | | Put another way, if you know the true chain at time T, you | also know it at time T+1. But if you're just joining the | network, or you went offline for a bit, that means you don't | know which chain is the true one and need some outside-of- | protocol way of determining which fork to trust. | clemensley wrote: | What can users do to get certainty over which one is the | correct fork? In POW you can check the POW. Is there a | trustless solution for this in POS? Or is the only solution | essentially to ask around and hope that people aren't lying | to you? | DennisP wrote: | In practice, it's the same as with Bitcoin: you have to | get the correct, current software. It's just that the | software will include a block hash from a few months | back. | | You might argue that Bitcoin is defined as the chain with | the most hashpower, period. That would remove all | subjectivity from Bitcoin, but it would mean that a 51% | attacker could arbitrarily change the rules and steal | people's funds. That's not how it actually works; a 51% | attacker still has to follow the rules of the protocol | for their blocks to be accepted by the non-mining nodes, | and that means there's social consensus on the correct | software to run the protocol. | baby wrote: | It's the same as with Bitcoin: | | - wait a bit to make sure that you can talk to different | people on the network and see what each of them see | | - check checkpoints on twitter or websites like etherscan | (are they seeing the same thing I'm seeing?) | | In projects like Mina, since you do not download the | history of the chain (there's a single zero knowledge | proof of a few kB that covers the whole history) you must | rely on a marker for "chain quality " to differentiate | potential forks. | | Note that there was also some research on how to get | signal from the transactions you see that you're on the | correct fork (from some ex colleagues working on libra): | https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1440.pdf | tromp wrote: | > to be secure there has to be some barrier to running a | validator | | There only has to be a barrier for receiving rewards. Bitcoin | full nodes validate everything but receive no rewards, and need | no barriers. | ChadNauseam wrote: | True, my phrasing was misleading (I used the Ethereum | terminology, where a validator is not just any node that | validates the chain, but one that participates in consensus). | Edited my comment accordingly | getcrunk wrote: | Thanks for this. Can you further explain the part about forking | being easier from point 5? | yokem55 wrote: | In theory, a very large staker could run a large share of the | network, exit (either normally or get slashed), then rewind | the chain prior to the exit, run it on their own | independently, and then pop up after a while with a competing | fork. This makes syncing from the beacon chain's genesis | risky because you could end up following the attacker's fork. | | To make up for this risk, Ethereum then relies on | distributing recent 'weak subjectivity' snapshots (through | other known nodes, block exploers, baked into client | releases, etc) to make sure new folks can join the legitimate | network and ignore an attacker's. Those snapshots basically | rely on social legitimacy to help folks get going with the | 'legitimate' chain. It is a trust assumption. | | In contrast (at least in theory), in a proof of work network | you can 'objectively' determine which of competing forks of a | chain is the legitimate one by a simple metric, the 'longest | chain with the highest difficulty'. The presumption made here | though is that you will have an open internet and honest | client software that will not censor the legitimate chain. A | trust assumption is still made that those that introduce you | to the p2p network aren't hiding a longer chain from you. | cypress66 wrote: | Something to keep in mind is that you already mostly need | such trust. | | You are using that "social legitimacy" to know you are | downloading the legitimate software, or viewing the | legitimate source code, or documentation. | | Your computer can't calculate if ethereum.org is the | legitimate "Ethereum", or it's ethereum.io (just making it | up). | ChadNauseam wrote: | For sure. In this comment I'll be using "validators" to mean | "nodes participating in consensus". | | The "true" chain according to the new protocol is the one | that has more signatories. Validators sign blocks as they're | produced, and when a block gets more than 2/3rds of the | signatures, it's finalized on the chain and won't be | rewritten. (Well, it's much more complicated than that, but | that's the general intuition.) When you sign a block, you get | a reward on that chain, to incentivize people to participate | in consensus. | | So the question is, when there's a fork, what stops people | from just signing blocks on both forks so they get the | signing reward no matter which fork "wins"? | | The protocol disincentivizes this by requiring validators to | put up a stake of 32 eth, that gets "slashed" if you do that. | Put another way, if there's a fork and you sign blocks on | both sides of the fork, you lose part of your stake. | | But that threat only works if you actually have a stake to | lose. If it's been ${withdrawal_delay} months and you no | longer have any eth staked, you can start signing blocks from | a long time ago and the protocol can't slash you as | punishment. So a group of 2/3rds of the former-validators | could freely start a fork from ${withdrawal_delay} months | ago, sign a bunch of blocks on it, and if their fork loses | they'd face no penalty. Someone currently participating in | consensus can see this is happening and won't be confused, | but someone just joining the network will be. | | The solution is pretty easy, if inelegant. When entering the | network for the first time, if there are multiple competing | forks, you'll just find someone you trust IRL and ask them | which chain is the real one. If you've been offline for less | than ${withdrawal_delay} months, you won't have to worry | about this, but it is a problem for fresh users. | | If you set ${withdrawal_delay} to infinity, this isn't a | problem, but probably you don't want to do that. Once | withdraws are enabled, there'll be some tooling to make it | easy to figure out which chain is the real one, but I don't | expect there'll be many forks that are remotely convincing. | olouv wrote: | Regarding unstaking it will be capped by a queue of around | 900/day similar to what is used for staking. There won't be an | arbitrary delay. | mFixman wrote: | Is there anywhere I can read a technical version of how proof- | of-stake work? | | I'm still confused at what happens if you create a valid block | with the Ethereum you stake and then that block doesn't end up | being part of the main branch. | pa7x1 wrote: | You get assigned by a random number generator to create the | next block. If you fail to create it your only penalty is the | opportunity cost (i.e., you miss on the reward that you would | have gotten for creating one). | | So at any given time only one validator is going to create a | block. If you create it, it's going to be included in the | blockchain. If you don't create it (or you create but due to | network problems fail to communicate it), then the blockchain | skips a beat and someone else will create the next one. | | If you want a user friendly introduction I recommend you Ben | Edgington's book (WIP): https://eth2book.info/altair/ | | Or straight from the source: | https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs | baby wrote: | In proof of work the leader election (the thing that decides | who gets to write the next page/block of the ledger) is based | on how much money you can put in computing power or how big | your mining pool is. The more computing power, the more | lottery tickets you get to write the next block. | | In proof of stake, the more crypto tokens you have, the more | lottery tickets you get to win the right to write the next | block. | | In PoW the lottery is solving puzzles, that's the energy | inefficiency, in PoS the lottery is decided like a real | lottery: with a random number generator (a distributed one at | that, so that people agree that it was generated honestly) | mavu wrote: | I am looking forward to the moment, when all the people who | consider this the 2nd coming of christ equivalent for the crypto | world realize that it's just business as usual. | mFixman wrote: | I'm excited about this. | | Bitcoin and crypto use an obscene amount of energy and are | basically impossible to ban. A working proof-of-stake system in | a non-shitcoin will pile pressure on all cryptocurrencies to | move to that system to use less energy. | wmf wrote: | IMO the Merge will "prove" that PoS works and thus bring a lot | of pressure to bear on PoW coins for being obviously wasteful. | tmalsburg2 wrote: | Hasn't Cardano already shown that POS works and it did not | have the effect that you predict? I'm afraid most people in | the crypto world don't care one bit about the carbon foot | print of these technologies. | cypress66 wrote: | I don't agree that stopping gigawatts of power from being | "wasted", same with GPUs, is business as usual. | boppo1 wrote: | I read the Bitcoin whitepaper+some other technical document (I | think) and have a real solid grasp on how that works. Ethereum, | although I have used defi/erc20/uniswap/etc, I've got no idea how | it works. Validators, shards, miners... is there a single source | I can go to to learn it all? I've got a pretty high technical | threshold so if it gets mathy I'm not intimidated. I just want to | finally know how it works. | mattdesl wrote: | There are _many_ parts to Ethereum and it's PoS system so I | don't think you will be able to grasp it all in a short read. | This is a good start: | | https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__forewor... | [deleted] | asteroidb612 wrote: | This is a recent guide that attempts to cover everything in | depth: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the- | hitchhikers-gui... | DennisP wrote: | If you really want to dig in, here are the key papers on the | PoS algorithm: | | https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 | | To learn about the sharding plan and various other stuff in the | roadmap, this is a great technical overview: | | https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui... | LittlePeter wrote: | Off-topic. What's up with that giant meaningless Ethereum logo | image occupying 90% of my screen. Why are websites doing this? | timbit42 wrote: | Are you using NoScript or an adblocker? It is probably blocking | a third-party script from loading that the site needs to render | the rest of the page. | upupandup wrote: | who builds on Ethereum that doesn't involve pump and dumping or | some elaborate ponzi scheme? I fail to see any significant | adoption after a decade and Solidity and Smart Contracts simply | isn't used as widely as its proponents have argued for. | | I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head hunters | increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on | resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto is souring. | During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether | they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being | blacklisted. | carlosdp wrote: | There's a whole ecosystem of devs working on interesting stuff | that have nothing to do with finance, they just don't get | mainstream headlines today. | | Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some | projects to check out: | | - Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: | https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top | of Polygon. | | - Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes | a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless | identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently | decentralized" way. | | - ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system. | | - Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for | tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc. | | - Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github | basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git | HEAD of a "project" essentially. | | - Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently | using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has | secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory. | yardstick wrote: | " Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently | using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network | has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory." | | 2 issues spring to mind: | | - What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg | child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not | censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot | expunge data like this won't be around for long. | | - Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have | they got financing arranged (and already in trust | funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this | storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next | 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute | resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious, | irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years, | what's the odds that I will still be able to access them? | bsamuels wrote: | RE the first point: you don't have to store/host 100% of | the data, content can be blocklisted based on hash or other | attributes so your node doesn't replicate or retransmit it. | The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 | node on the network willing to host your content. | | RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the | arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing | mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next | 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec | plans for 200). | carlosdp wrote: | > dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200). | | The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe. | seibelj wrote: | It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters, | it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?" | | You can't argue in good faith with people who don't want to | learn. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | > It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto | haters, it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?" | | We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good | answer. | cdiddy2 wrote: | When Vitalik goes to Argentina this is the response. http | s://twitter.com/OctaBidegain/status/1473508689101348868 | | Just because you come from a place of great financial | privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have | no use for a censorship resistant form of money. | | Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto- | afghanistan-sanct... | | Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 | | Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny- | ally-urges-dono... | | Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto- | currency-yout... | | Nigeria: | https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks- | shut... | | Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees- | to-poland-wi... | | https://www.financialinclusion.tech/ | pa7x1 wrote: | You can think of Ethereum as a DB+VM existing in the | extreme end of the High Availability spectrum and whose | operation is uncensorable and unstoppable by any actor. | Obviously many use cases do not require this kind of | characteristics but it's very hard to argue that these | properties serve no use for any use case. | | A global financial system could very likely be built on | top of a system like this. A global identity/credentials | system could also benefit from such kind of properties. | | If you disagree it would then be interesting you | explained where you put the cut-off, i.e. define how many | sigmas should be enough for any use case and define who | should we be willing to trust the operation. | seibelj wrote: | Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with | promise, but again, the HN crypto hater doesn't care. | | USDC is over $50 billion - | https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly | the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on | crypto rails. | | But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS | HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting | to try and argue. | pram wrote: | We just had a $30B PoS coin/stablecoin platform evaporate | into thin air this year, don't even need to bring up Visa | lol | seibelj wrote: | And Deutsch Bank laundered hundreds of billions of euros | for drug lords. What system is flawed again? | whaaswijk wrote: | Is there a mechanism in place to stop people from | laundering money with ethereum? This is a serious | question, I'm a total noob when it comes to crypto. | seibelj wrote: | You can't stop crime, otherwise murder wouldn't happen. | If you give people a modicum of freedom then some amount | of them will act with criminal intent. | | Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting | money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial | system. | pram wrote: | I can think both are bad. | 10hr wrote: | The other side of the table is so clearly entrenched in | their viewpoint that I just laugh now. | | Someone asking me at the bar "but what's the value?" when | they are an experienced technologist does not get my | engagement. They haven't done enough homework to even | propose a potential answer to the question they're | nongenuinely asking | | It has been interesting. The liberal technology community | is so emboldened by "muh environment" FUD this cycle that | they're actually more blind to the growing sector than | ever before. | | Ultimately, for the finance-minded developer, there is a | gargantuan shortage of web3/crypto devs. I'm not talking | about scammy VC web3. I'm referring to the people capable | of building what's coming. Overnight, every company is | gonna need devs and the shortage will be exaggerated. | fleddr wrote: | It's all optics, their supposed "progressive" view. | Wealthy people angry that GPUs got so expensive, | overpowered energy suckers they'd gladly use for high-end | gaming whilst having the AC on full blast. Nobody cares | one bit about high energy use. Calling out crypto is a | great distraction though to virtue signal that you're "on | the good side". | | As was the case with the Mozilla incident. Mozilla had | been accepting crypto donations for many years. Until | somehow this got back into the news and some influential | "progressives" applied the very typical mob pressure, | forcing Mozilla to stop. | | And all is right again in the world. Except that people | willing to give crypto (which is a form of money) now | won't or can't. Less income for Mozilla whilst crypto in | itself is in absolutely no way harmed. It's still there, | same energy use, I guess it will now be spent elsewhere. | | That's the new progressive. Obsessively cleaning your | self-image, whilst outcomes are completely ignored or | achieve the exact opposite. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | > Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with | promise | | We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be | nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to | "projects that lived up to their promises". | | So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling | and a truly astonishing amount of fraud. | | So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five | more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the | faith is unshakeable? | seibelj wrote: | It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the goal | posts never stop moving. | | Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd | thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth | hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not | backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This | alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN | crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of | "success" is constantly moving. | | Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot | of applications built on digital financial rails | (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, | derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist | that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely | Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you. | | One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe | is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, | yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability | to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of | course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to | put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing | incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and | cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on | pure computer science and economic principles created by | mysterious cypherpunk, who cares". | BaseballPhysics wrote: | > It's hard to argue with your philosophy because the | goal posts never stop moving. | | I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're | the one who described them as having "promise", not me. | | If there's some projects out there that have lived up to | their promises and aren't just gambling enablement, | please, list them! | | I'll take a quick crack at a few: | | Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a | real-world impacting product? Fraud. | | NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug | manufacture (not in the textile sense). | | Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of | gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers. | | Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like | Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some | way. All failures, some comically so. | | Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc. | | Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile. | | Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions? | Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc). | | And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of | my head. | | The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a | massively speculative market during a period of | historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of | wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will | always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of | actual _value_ or _success_ , unless your measure of | success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a | lot of losers". | | So what am I missing? | enlyth wrote: | It's hard to argue with them because they have a | financial stake in the system, it's in their interest to | spread it as far and wide as possible because it will | enrich them. Money clouds judgement. The hope for global | adoption just means "I got in first so I deserve to be | rewarded". An honest answer would be that no one care | about all the technology as long as number goes up. Now | as they usually say, cope and seethe, nocoiner. | WFHRenaissance wrote: | > You can't argue in good faith with people who don't want | to learn. | | You can't argue in good faith with people who don't agree | with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a | "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for | primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm | here for the ideas and the possibility of a different | world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and | SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They | simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is | offering developers/users. | kanzure wrote: | > It doesn't matter how much you argue with HN crypto | haters, it's always "bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?" | | (plug warning) | | Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat | positive to me at least: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951 | jejeyyy77 wrote: | have you been paying attention at all? | crypto_mogul wrote: | Indeed, according to our colleagues from The Block, several | assumptions have been made by Ethereum developers regarding | the tentative timeframes for The Merge's implementation. | yieldcrv wrote: | there is plenty of work within web3, at least for the engineers | and advisors. support staff and marketing personnel are the | ones being laid off with less prospects, from what I can tell. | | its also pretty common to form a resume for the job you want, | omiting less helpful or unrelated things. | | I went the whole decade never telling any web2 startup I worked | for about crypto, who cares if its another bear market and | people are yet again souring on it | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: | >During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether | they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being | blacklisted. | | Good. Nature is healing. | game-of-throws wrote: | I can't wait until engineers go back to working on tracking | and ads, just as nature intended. | dangerwill wrote: | "I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on | a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted." - If | widespread this is the best sign of health for the tech | industry I have seen in years | EddySchauHai wrote: | > I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head | hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain | keywords on resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto | is souring. During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes | to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects | being blacklisted. | | Some of the best engineers and researchers I've ever worked | with were in the blockchain space. Companies that do this are | shooting themselves in the foot. I work for a pretty cool | startup in the defense sector that appreciated the experience | I've had in distributed systems from my several years working | on projects like Cardano. | Ferrotin wrote: | The guy you're replying to is just making this up. One of | many accounts trying to foment sentiment against working for | certain employers. | upupandup wrote: | > Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. | | Not companies that care about PR and want to distance | themselves from crypto space. Those engineers and researchers | unfortunately have been tricked into thinking that crypto | would be here to stay as were the hundreds and thousands of | investors that were duped into an elaborate Rube Goldberg | machine that serves no real purpose other than the monetary | incentives of a closed few. | xur17 wrote: | Crypto prices have gone down a bit from their peak, but it | sure seems like crypto is here to stay. In fact, I'd be | happy to make a bet that the crypto industry will exist in | 10 years, and will have a larger market cap than it does | today. | EddySchauHai wrote: | What companies are those? I can see people who worked at | Terra Labs having issues but I don't know if it'll be any | harder for them to find work than say those at Theranos | when it closed - high profile fraud will impact you sure. | kevinventullo wrote: | _> HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity | /Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes_ | | I am about as bearish on crypto as it gets but I have a very | hard time believing this. It's definitely not true at the major | tech companies. | rglullis wrote: | Please tell me which companies are doing that, I also would | like to put them on a "places I never want to work" list. | carlosdp wrote: | For those interested, this is a site that predicts when the merge | will happen based on the current hash-rate. Currently looking | like September 15! https://bordel.wtf/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-11 23:00 UTC)