[HN Gopher] The Ethereum merge is done
___________________________________________________________________
The Ethereum merge is done
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 1160 points
Date : 2022-09-15 06:47 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
| swarnie wrote:
| Does this make ETH useful in the real world or is it still a
| tehcno-ponzi scheme?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's still not really used for anything that really matters to
| anyone (in a business sense). Until now the high cost and low
| transaction volume meant that it was just not really suitable
| for its intended use as a transactional store of ledgers of
| stuff unless the stored entries were extremely high in value
| and relatively rare.
|
| But on paper building something useful now is a bit easier as
| transaction cost is likely to come down and the network should
| support a more reasonable transaction volume.
|
| When your global transaction volume per hour is capped below
| what even a small web server running on a tiny computer would
| easily handle, there isn't much you can do with it in the real
| world. And when those transactions then cost you tens/hundreds
| of dollars and take minutes/hours to clear, any utility that
| might exist goes out of the window. It's a complete non starter
| for anyone looking to do some transactions that actually have
| business value. Why would you? It's many orders of magnitude
| worse than what a plain old database gives you on all relevant
| dimensions.
|
| That was the status quo up until the merge. Now that that is in
| the past, we'll see. I personally doubt Ethereum will be the
| tool of choice for this kind of thing. If you are serious about
| building something that does something useful, there are better
| tools available.
| seydor wrote:
| Now you can scam with clear conscience
| PanosJee wrote:
| Just Fiat 2.0
| kybernetikos wrote:
| It immediately improves the environmental story if you had
| previously wanted to use smart contracts but didn't think it
| was ethical for environmental reasons.
|
| ETH was already potentially useful in the real world if you
| were on an L2 like zksync - low fees, fast enough to work,
| decent UX with wallets like Argent. Only thing missing was wide
| adoption.
|
| Having said that, the merge is actually just the first of a
| multipart set of upgrades that should make the L2s massively
| better than they are today. We're still at the 'potentially'
| useful rather than the actually useful, but things improve the
| whole time.
| bosky101 wrote:
| Curious, what was the last block, can someone point me to it,
| want to see how close my few transactions were to the last block
| jongjong wrote:
| > The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the
| industry to date.
|
| One of the largest financial events for sure, but technologically
| there is hardly any innovation there.
| 0xrips wrote:
| curious, have you looked into the years worth of research and
| work that actually went into the merge? it didn't materialize
| out of thin air, people had to build it first.
| jongjong wrote:
| For sure there was a lot of work, but hardly any innovative
| work. Most of the work was busy-work/unnecessary complexity -
| As is almost always the case with mainstream blockchain
| projects. PoS was innovative back in 2016. Blockchain
| migration to a new tech and consensus mechanism is also not
| new; it has already been done by hundreds of projects over
| the last 5 years.
|
| One of the reserve banks' two mandates is 'maximum
| employment' - IMO, blockchain is one of the clearest examples
| were you can see the reserve bank's policies working as
| planned. There is no limit to the complexity and job creation
| potential of these over-engineered blokchain projects.
|
| Complexity compounds and so does the creation of (less-than-
| useless) jobs needed to handle all that unnecessary
| complexity... Solving problems while adding even more
| complexity on top.
|
| The only innovation is the financial innovation involved in
| convincing so many rich suckers to pour their money into
| something which is so inefficient and poorly designed...
| Somehow tricking them into thinking that the charitable
| creation of unnecessary jobs is a profitable long term
| activity.
|
| The real bright minds are those working for the Federal
| Reserve.
| neotrope wrote:
| Merge is confirmed. "It went as well as it could". It eliminated
| 0.2% of global energy usage (bitcoin at 0.5%)
| ews wrote:
| According to the call, I think it was 0.2% of global energy
| usage.
| neotrope wrote:
| You're correct! Thx
| patatino wrote:
| It didn't eliminated 0.2% of gloabal energy usage, it moved it.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| signa11 wrote:
| hopefully, this move will make lots of gpus redundant...
| salex89 wrote:
| Can we have our GPUs back now?
| timeon wrote:
| It depends...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844350
| AgentME wrote:
| ETC's block reward pays for a certain amount of mining to
| happen. If demand for ETC and its price stay about the same,
| then ETC's block reward won't change. Nearly all of the
| miners who quit mining ETH will find it not profitable to
| mine ETC. (If they all started mining ETC, then the reward
| would be split too many ways, it wouldn't be profitable for
| anyone, and people would exit until the reward was split
| less.)
| tootie wrote:
| "pointing out that it might make ETH, the network's native token,
| deflationary."
|
| Isn't deflation basically the whole point now? Anyone who buys
| crypto with the expectation of its price going up is essentially
| betting on deflation. That's what economists predicted when
| bitcoin launched and it seems to have held up. Most crypto
| (certainly BTC and ETH) have no intrinsic value. They pay no
| dividends, offer no equity. They are described as currency, not
| assets. So price fluctuations must be explained in terms of
| inflation and deflation. Rising price is deflation.
| akrymski wrote:
| Great, we've replaced regulated banks by a handful of unregulated
| and pseudo-anonymous entities (pools & brokers).
| rvz wrote:
| Good. The merge worked and they are not burning up the planet.
|
| Now when are those Deep Learning systems in these data centers
| going to stop incinerating the planet with their useless deep
| learning models that not only are broken but require constant
| retraining and wasteful CO2 energy usage for years without any
| efficient alternatives?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| They have largely already switched to renewable energy so they
| can operate cheaper. Depending on fossil fuels has been a bad
| business plan for quite a few years now and no new data centers
| are coming online that depend on it. Some of the older data
| centers are the exception to this rule. But even those are the
| target of massive efforts to de-carbonize as soon as possible.
| bambataa wrote:
| I do find it interesting that people hate on crypto for its
| energy consumption but ignore all the other wasteful
| computation.
| mrpopo wrote:
| Crypto has a far lower ratio on utility/speculation than
| other wasteful computations. Deep learning is changing the
| world in many visible ways (with a whole lot of speculation
| regardless).
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Your bias shines through here.
|
| What visible ways? Machine generated photographs? About as
| useful as NFTs...
|
| I can, right now, send liquid assets to any human being on
| the planet with an internet connection without asking a
| financial institution, government, bank, payment processor
| or phone company for permission. That's utility, that's
| changing the world in a visible way.
| mrpopo wrote:
| You make it sound as if financial institutions and banks
| didn't have a purpose. There is far more negative utility
| in this. Governments, banks and financial institutions
| prevent tax fraud, apply workers' rights, redistribute
| money, etc. Of course they're not perfect. In that case
| fix your government, not the money system.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| I get that financial systems have a purpose, I'd argue
| there's far more negative utility in them. They have
| positive effects, but a lot of their utility is not to
| protect people, but to control them to someone else's
| benefit. If they protected us without attempting to
| control us to the benefit of others, or brazenly looting
| us for our labor, nobody would be trying to build
| cryptocurrency in the first place.
| Shorel wrote:
| No one will ever say anything bad about game consoles, which
| consume much more electricity than cryptocurrencies =)
| kaba0 wrote:
| And affect multiple orders of magnitude more people,
| bettering their life quality. Hardly comparable in good
| faith.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Game consoles provide utility.
| Shorel wrote:
| To the gamers, yes.
|
| As these cryptocurrencies have provided utility to the
| miners in the past.
|
| My point is, everyone is arguing here thinking only about
| their own particular self-interest, while pretending to
| be arguing about some abstract universal good.
|
| And cryptocurrency energy usage is now a low-hanging
| fruit argument. If we really cared, we would cut much
| more than just that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| PoW is different to all other categories of energy usage
| and should be feared more. Ill let you have a think about
| what the reason for this is. If you need a hint, read the
| bitcoin whitepaper.
| Shorel wrote:
| That sounds like fearmongering to me. And also
| condescending fearmongering, as you assume I need
| 'hints'.
|
| Going back to your argument about all other categories of
| energy usage, transport using ICE should be feared more,
| in particular the way huge ships not only pollute the
| atmosphere but also the oceans.
|
| In fact, I believe you intended to mean only electricity
| in your comment, but the condescending got the best of
| you.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Huge ships are multiple times more efficient than the
| equivalent transport would be on roads -- so, don't throw
| out the baby with the bathwater.
|
| We should obviously try to cut back on transports of such
| huge distances, but when necessary, ships are currently
| the best way even with all the pollution they do.
| Nonetheless, their current use is still incomparably more
| effectful on our lives and live quality than cryptos that
| it can't be taken at face value.
| Shorel wrote:
| Yes and no. Because of the pandemic, and now the
| invasion, we have realized the world has too many
| unnecessary imports which could be produced locally.
|
| They were cheaper because all this contamination is
| called "externalities", which is a code word for "someone
| else's problem"; and because short term profit is king
| and responsibilities be damned. Also dumping, tariffs,
| dominant countries imposing free trade treaties on weaker
| countries, and so on.
|
| They still have a huge cost. There are of course things
| that need to be transported these distances, and with or
| without oil these need to be moved, but also a
| considerable percent is cheap plastic stuff from China.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| With PoW energy usage is roughly proportional to the $
| price of the asset regardless of the number of
| transactions it can process. A successful Bitcoin means
| higher and higher energy usage. Whereas anything else
| success means making it more efficient not less.
| Shorel wrote:
| And every four years it will double in price, and right
| now it consumes 0.5% of all electricity, which means in
| 56 years it will consume 82% of all electricity, assuming
| we produce roughly the same electricity as today.
|
| Is this your argument?
| kaba0 wrote:
| It consuming 0.5% is already such an absolutely huge red
| flag that I really can't fathom any reason to continue
| with it.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not really. It is more immediate than that. Right now we
| heavily rely on CO2 emitting power generation. And if
| bitcoin becomes wildly successful, or simply gets into
| another bubble, while trying to combat climate change,
| and it stays on PoW that is an issue.
| michaelwww wrote:
| Or king size refrigerators and secondary home freezer a lot
| of people feel the need to have
| cryptonym wrote:
| This remains a far better usage of energy than ETH. It's
| not optimal but at least it's preserving some food. You
| can hardly do worse than consuming energy just to
| eventually get a proof that you burned a big amount of
| energy.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or televisions and mobile phones and networks with their
| nearly constantly on transmitters...
| kaba0 wrote:
| Come on, do you seriously compare something that you and
| nigh everyone use multiple hours each day and effects you
| on a physical basis to something as useless as cryptos?
| andruby wrote:
| I think my iPhone SE has a ~7 Wh battery. It needs about
| 80% extra charge each day, which means its consumption is
| roughly 5.5 Wh per day or about 2 kWh/year.
|
| At the previous 112 TWh/year ETH was using before the
| merge, that would be the equivalent of 56 billion iPhone
| SE's. Think about that.
|
| The energy usage of ETH's POW used the equivalent power
| of 50B smartphones.
| dudebrooo wrote:
| Brother, put that interest to rest for all of eternity.
| Nothing is more important to the current power structure than
| control over the issuance of money. You'll never hear about
| any electric energy usage like this again.
| franga2000 wrote:
| All datacenters and network infrastructure in the world account
| for 2,5% at most (I don't remember the source anymore, I read
| this months ago) so I can't imagine machine learning is more
| than maybe 0,5% total.
|
| So instead of going after actually useful technology that
| consumes a tiny fraction, how about you look at some of the
| truly unnecessary users that consume much more than that. What
| if we added up all the electricity used by the entire supply
| chains of all the smartphones people throw away prematurely due
| to planned obsolescence? Or all the other unrepairable
| disposable devices? How about all the clothing that's made of
| increasingly shittier materials and often needs to be replaced
| every two years? Some estimates for the clothing industry are
| as high as 10% of global GHG emission, primarily from fossil
| fuel power plants. And don't get me started on all the cars
| that wouldn't need to be produced if we fixed public transport
| and americans stopped building cities like idiots.
|
| The only reason people go after the IT sector is that it's easy
| to stick a current probe on the wire and get a relatively large
| number. Turning it off is simple and makes the number, however
| small, go down. All the actual big users are complex systems
| that are difficult to analyze and "turn off".
| astannard wrote:
| This sounds fab, I worry all the energy saved in ethereum will
| just be transferred over to crunching bitcoin instead and no
| actual energy will be saved.
| [deleted]
| leroman wrote:
| Great!
|
| Unlike BTC the miners can sell their gear so they are not down on
| their investment.. I imagine BTC miners putting up a good fight
| if this was on the table and they stand to lose all their asics
| andruby wrote:
| Is there a real proposal to turn BTC into PoS?
| zionic wrote:
| Not yet, but when the combined effects of the merge + EIP
| 1559 drive ETH to flip BTC _and_ the ever-increasing "BTC
| wastes X countries worth of power per day" it will eventually
| happen.
|
| No chance at all while BTC remains top dog (in market cap)
| leroman wrote:
| If this works for ETH, I don't believe there's a real reason
| why this couldn't work for BTC **
|
| ** big asterisk here as I have spent no time trying to
| understand how they made it work for ETH and how/if this
| actually applies to BTC..
| valzam wrote:
| There are huge concerns over centralization. As it stands
| 2-3 entities (e.g. Lido, binance and Coinbase) over 50% of
| all validators. This is due to a mix of issues (no
| withdrawal making liquid staking very attractive, 32Eth
| limit leading to hugely inflates numbers of validators and
| no stake delegation creating the need for off chain pools).
| I would say there is about a 1-2% chance that BTC adopts
| PoS on a good day. Based on what Ethereum has delivered
| it's very close to 0.
| survirtual wrote:
| This is laughable.
|
| I support bitcoin because it is a pattern that allows value
| transfer absent intermediaries, binds value directly to
| energy and computational capacity (work), and has clear
| mechanisms for any new party to enter into consensus.
|
| In other words, if PoW is attacked by say a governmental
| entity, a massive mining op or central mining shuts down,
| it does not fail. The hash rate just gets distributed.
|
| I don't support bitcoin to get rich. I support it for
| freedom from tyranny. I support it for independence from
| oligarchs, banking authoritarians, and a corrupted monetary
| system.
|
| PoS is a carry over of aristocracy and oligarchs. The
| oligarchs are just called "stakers" now. And with a name
| behind the stakers, governments can enter and control the
| mechanisms. With a massive stake locked in an asset you
| become vulnerable to control from external forces.
|
| There are so many problems with this pattern one could
| write, at the very least, a very long article on it. But it
| would seem reason and freedom is as a fart in the wind
| these days.
|
| Tldr: Bitcoin will never move to PoS because it is
| inferior.
| tremarley wrote:
| Infinitely unlikely.
|
| Bitcoin is the representation of Decentralised Proof of Work.
|
| I couldn't imagine any Bitcoin loving person to ever consider
| a POS BTC reality.
| unboxingelf wrote:
| No.
|
| PoW enables real decentralization. No party/company/govt can
| control a PoW network like BTC. This is why it's considered a
| commodity by many.
|
| PoS is almost the opposite. A small group with stake control
| the network. This is why it's considered a security by many.
|
| For Bitcoin, PoW is a feature not a bug.
| friendzis wrote:
| One, they are going to sasturate the market which will drive
| the prices down significantly. They cannot not saturate the
| market, because GPUs age due to new developments by
| manufacturers. This already makes the prospect of recouping
| initial investments rahter dim.
|
| Consider that non-miner market has a huge distain for miners
| and are willing to pay premium on new cards just to stick to
| the miners. I don't think resale value is going to be
| spectacular.
| latchkey wrote:
| No, the most ROI efficient cards are 4-5 year old cards (like
| the RX480). ETH's algo, ethash, is memory hard, which means
| that it is a false narrative that buying the latest card is
| necessary. The bottle neck isn't the speed of the card, but
| the speed of the memory controller.
| friendzis wrote:
| This does not contradict my comment that resale value of
| those cards is going to be nowhere close original purchase
| price, though
| latchkey wrote:
| How would you tell that a GPU has been used for mining?
| Other than any vbios changes, which can be reverted
| easily, it would be impossible.
|
| ALL gpus are going to go down in price, just because the
| market is saturated, it has nothing to do with what
| workloads they happened to be used for.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Nobody cares about Eth's old mining algo anymore, it better
| be good at something else
| leroman wrote:
| I suppose they made some money by running these cards.. They
| stand to get SOME of the initial investment back, unlike BTC
| ASICs, they are basically worthless outside of BTC mining..
| b800h wrote:
| What I can't understand is that it hasn't affected the price.
| Surely something like this should increase confidence?
| durdn wrote:
| The date of the merge has been known for sometime, so the price
| increase has been mostkly priced in the previous weeks (see
| recent pumps). Unfortunately the recent US CPI info release has
| sent the markets (including crypto ones) into a frenzy. In any
| case I am optimistic that the price of Eth will explode once
| the better part of this "recession" is behind us.
| b800h wrote:
| Makes sense. The bit I didn't understand was that presumably
| there was uncertainty around whether the merge would be
| successful. But perhaps there still is, or like you say, the
| CPI info release has obscured things.
| throwamon wrote:
| You must be new to trading
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Bah, there goes the wonderful concept of energy backed money down
| the drain.
| Animats wrote:
| The bottom just fell out of the used GPU market. NVidia Tesla 80
| 24GB on sale for US$79 in quantity. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
| robotnikman wrote:
| Oh wow! I just ordered one to mess around with some machine
| learning stuff.
| freeqaz wrote:
| A nice human made a spreadsheet with a chart at the bottom to
| help answer this question:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zlv4UFiciSgmJZncCuju...
|
| In terms of ROI, the 3060 with 12GB of RAM seems to be the best
| one for cheap. The M40 has 24GB of RAM too but the core is
| super slow.
|
| I'm personally holding out for prices on 3090s to crash. Also,
| NVIDIA is rumored to be launching their new GPU series in 2
| weeks (there is a scheduled event already).
| Tepix wrote:
| The 2080Ti looks like the best bang for the buck according to
| that spreadsheet.
|
| However here in Germany they still cost around 410-450EUR
| used, not $350.
| [deleted]
| swalsh wrote:
| Major boon to AI
| lostmsu wrote:
| Tesla 80 is basically useless at this point. AWS stopped
| recommending it in 2017. It is nearly 10 times slower than
| 3090.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| And more than 10 times cheaper.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Would you buy Pentium 4 today? Besides, if you are to put
| any load on it, the electricity price will overtake the
| card price very quickly.
| franga2000 wrote:
| The 79$ one I see has over 300$ in shipping, which is a
| standard scam on eBay.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Outside the USA maybe? I see free shipping from seller
| fifakingdom, estimated delivery Sep 20-22.
| MrBra wrote:
| If you are only interested in Stable Diffusion there's no need
| to get up to 24 GB. Plenty of people are using a 12 GB RTX 3060
| (with that you could generate something like 4 simultaneous
| 512x512 images in a matter of seconds).
|
| Even the cheaper and recently re-released 12 GB RTX 2060 could
| be a good pick although the 2060 is generation behind and is
| less efficient in terms of electricity consumption.
|
| Of course with more GB you get higher resolution images, but
| plenty of people just generate at 512x512 and then use other AI
| projects (for example "real-ESRGAN") to later upscale their
| images, which will still let you achieve great results.
|
| I think a good advice could be to join Stable Diffusion Discord
| and talk to other users sharing their results and experiences
| there.
|
| By the way, IIRC (please double-check the following) it could
| be also worth noting that the guys behind Stable Diffusion
| (Stability.AI) declared that in the end they will eventually
| bring down the VRAM usage to approximately 5 GB.
|
| However more GB are always a good thing in general for Machine
| Learning...
| sertsa wrote:
| Is a card like this useful to run Stable Diffusion, etc?
| [deleted]
| guywhocodes wrote:
| From what I gather you would want the M40 if anything as it
| is a single GPU with access to all of the 24GB for SD
| inference. But if you are going to do smaller you might as
| well get a 3060 12GB as it will be about 3x faster.
| capableweb wrote:
| 12GB is on the lower end of what you want for SD though.
| Granted, optimizations are still happening, but if you
| wanna do something like 1024x1024 or higher, you should at
| least get 24GB.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 1024x1024 doesn't work very well in SD since it only
| iterates over 512x512 windows. For higher resolution
| images the best method is to use a different AI model for
| upscaling a 512x512 SD image.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| There are two interesting things I want to watch from this. The
| first is I'm interested to see what kind of bull run ETH goes on.
| The merge has been incredibly long coming, it has huge risks and
| I think that puts downward pressure on price, you really don't
| want to be doing stuff in ETH at the moment because there's a
| fairly good chance something goes wrong, someone stealds $XBn and
| runs off and the Ethereum guys go "Well I guess we're going to
| have a centralized intervention and reset the chain back to date
| Y" (this famously happened with the first DAO). So as that risk
| dissipates I would expect a decent price run. I'll be very
| interested if that doesn't happen since it says a lot about
| broader market conditions.
|
| The second thing I'm interested in is that ETH was the vast
| majority of revenue for GPU miners. I read an article on HN a few
| months ago about how once ETH is gone the rest of the PoS chains
| put together won't yield enough revenue to be profitable for the
| vast vast majority of current ETH miners. This alone could have a
| massive ripple effect on the used GPU market. Interesting to see
| where that goes.
| colinsane wrote:
| regarding price, one can argue it both ways. at the point of
| the merge, most assets on ethereum are risky: if you were a
| uniswap LP and the two assets you were pooling chose different
| forks as their "official" one (most meaningful for off-chain
| collateralized assets like USDC), you can bet arbitrageurs
| would have left you holding the worthless asset on _both_
| chains. accordingly, Eth became the "safest" asset during the
| fork, since both forks will recognize it. that would create buy
| pressure leasing up to the fork, which goes away after the
| fork.
|
| but there's a million arguments on both sides of that picture.
| i think the strongest argument for price direction is that PoS
| miners are less likely to sell their Eth immediately after
| mining it than PoW miners because the latter purchased mining
| equipment with USD and want to repay that, whereas the former
| are invested in Ethereum itself instead of their mining
| equipment. also it sounds like block rewards are decreased with
| PoS, so the currency itself is deflationary now (?)
| cowtools wrote:
| >So as that risk dissipates I would expect a decent price run.
|
| The risk you're describing is a social-political one. As long
| as the users do not fork with the etherium developers, that
| will not happen. Change to PoS has nothing to do with it.
|
| I look forward to the increased GPU supply.
| paulgb wrote:
| > The risk you're describing is a social-political one. As
| long as the users do not fork with the etherium developers,
| that will not happen. Change to PoS has nothing to do with
| it.
|
| Are you saying that the market did not price in any technical
| risk? I don't follow crypto markets closely (and don't own
| any), but given the number of crypto bug exploits and the
| unprecedented nature of this merge, that seems unlikely to
| me.
|
| Even a social-political risk averted is a risk averted.
| andruby wrote:
| I'm also expecting a lot of GPU's to flood the used markets.
| Coupled with the next generation of GPU's being released soon.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I don't. I expect the owners to switch to mining other PoW
| coins.
| miohtama wrote:
| Ethereum miners can now play Cyberpunk 2077 for the rest of
| their lives.
| birracerveza wrote:
| >what kind of bull run ETH goes on
|
| The fact that the vast majority expects a bull run means that
| it's very likely it will crash instead.
| swyx wrote:
| this, this is the right response. this is the most
| telegraphed event in crypto, all the bulls are literally in
| eth for this, there is just as much likely to be a "sell the
| news" effect as there is a bull run. OP betrays his bias
| imagining only one outcome.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| And 7 hours later, ETH is down ~10%.
| trsh wrote:
| The idea that because it's risky right now and that a decrease
| in risk will provide higher returns isn't necessarily sound.
| For example, playing a financial equivalent to Russian roulette
| won't give you higher returns. You can look at the countries
| titled with the euphemistic "developing markets" which have
| historically had extremely high risks AND a much lower return
| than in lower risk countries. The risk-return trade-off may be
| assumed often, but there are controversies, and it's underlying
| theoretical basis only holds in an efficient capital markets
| where market participants are capable of pricing risk. A bank
| can price the risk of a mortgage default, but how can you price
| the risk of anything in the Blockchain space, like say Ethereum
| getting completely wiped out by a hack, etc?
| killerstorm wrote:
| > You can look at the countries titled with the euphemistic
| "developing markets" which have historically had extremely
| high risks AND a much lower return than in lower risk
| countries.
|
| Hmm? Not sure what you mean. High-risk countries' bonds pay
| higher interest than low-risk countries' bonds. E.g. Ukraine
| was paying 10% interest in USD when US was paying 1%. Of
| course, expected value might be lower if you average over all
| such countries, but we are talking about a "happy case" here
| where a bad event did not happen.
|
| > how can you price the risk of anything in the Blockchain
| space, like say Ethereum getting completely wiped out by a
| hack, etc?
|
| Well, you can't calculate the risk but you can get 1000000%
| return (the actual return over 7 years for ETH presale). Or
| you can calculate the risk and get 5% return. It's your
| choice.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > Well, you can't calculate the risk but you can get
| 1000000% return (the actual return over 7 years for ETH
| presale). Or you can calculate the risk and get 5% return.
| It's your choice.
|
| "Past returns are not indicative of future performance" is
| a mantra you will see everywhere in the financial world. If
| not doing any risk calculation whatsoever gives you
| 1000000% return them you didn't "invest" anything, you just
| gambled with it.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Is startup investing gambling?
|
| Please do not substitute a statistical model of something
| for the thing itself.
| djhworld wrote:
| Does this mean GPU prices will go down? At least according to
| this article the validator nodes can be run on a Raspberry Pi [1]
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| GPUs are ridiculously cheap now, compared to how they used to
| be. You can buy a 3070 from newegg for $599 and they'll throw
| in a free monitor to sweeten the deal for you
| parkingrift wrote:
| MSRP is $499 and that's already inflated $120 over the
| previously established MSRP.
|
| I would consider a $3070 at $400 to be back to normal.
| aeyes wrote:
| The 3070 had a $499 MSRP when it launched, I wouldn't call
| this deal "ridiculously cheap".
| yoden wrote:
| GPU prices are already down. "Sell the rumor, buy the news" and
| all that.
| postalrat wrote:
| GPU prices have only started to go down.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Down in the short-term. They're still up overall since the
| 3000 series release.
| le-mark wrote:
| That's what I'm wondering. There are a few gpu mineable coins,
| will miners switch to those, and keep gpu prices high?
| muttled wrote:
| Most of the rewards in GPU mining were from Ethereum. There
| won't be enough money to go around to make it worth the
| electricity once ETH is no longer mineable. Lots of mining
| businesses are going to go out of business or switch to
| Bitcoin/ASICs, and they're going to dump those used graphics
| cards on the market as they do.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Intuitively to me it seems that PoS can never work.
|
| With PoW the physical reality of scarce energy secures the chain
| - you can't spend energy on one computation and another.
|
| With PoS we secure it by holding Ether, but what determines who
| holds Ether? The chain! But that's what we are trying to secure.
| Is this turtles all the way down? Can anyone enlighten me?
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| Ether is also scarce. You can't spend one Ether multiple times
| for staking.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Is ether really scarce? There is no limit to the amount of
| ETH unlike bitcoin, so scarcity doesn't seem to be built in
| in the currency as with BTC.
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| yes, ether is scarce at any given point.
| [deleted]
| 70rd wrote:
| Scarce energy does not secure PoW, the value of the mined
| currency does, in the same way that scarce supply does not
| secure the gold standard, it's the value of gold (the 'fiat'
| shared illusion that it's a reserve).
|
| I can fork a PoW chain with a difficulty bomb so that the
| difficulty is 1000x that of mainnet for any given hashrate.
| Energy is still scarce, you can't double spend energy on my
| chain and the 'real' one. Yet my chain isn't secure, because no
| one will recognize it as canonical: the rewards it yields
| aren't worth expending effort for.
|
| I think you're confused about what the chain is securing. It's
| not who owns what, it's who spends WHEN. Distributed consensus
| of ownership does not require PoW/PoS, these were invented to
| solve double spending/censorship attacks that were a problem in
| P2P networks.
|
| You can't attack a chain to muddle the past, only the present.
| A successful attack on ETH won't change who holds ETH, it will
| only prevent agreeing on who receives it.
| agentultra wrote:
| Now they're going to pay for the damage done to the environment
| for the last six years that they've profited off of, right? No?
| Oh okay so it doesn't matter. I guess the miners have stopped
| operations, sold off their businesses, and moved on then.
|
| Trouble is that governments and regulators are cracking down. I
| don't think it will be long before the SEC _finally_ makes moves
| that will blanket label cryptocurrencies as securities. And we
| will see more arrests and trials. Once NFTs and web3 and
| everything else is wiped off the market I doubt there will be
| much left here.
|
| It's always been a solution in search of a problem.
|
| _Update_ To clarify, what I 'm saying is that the environmental
| angle here of using less energy isn't a concern for the Ethereum
| project. If the merge didn't work and they had to delay again
| they wouldn't have hesitated to delay again and continue burning
| energy on PoW at all. And they're not going to pay reparations
| for the damage they _have already done_ because that 's not what
| this is about, is it?
| [deleted]
| lmarcos wrote:
| > The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the
| industry to date.
|
| I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to
| have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices,
| distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I
| didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you
| recommend serious references (preferably books and not random
| blogs) I could read to catch up with what's going on with crypto
| these days? I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to
| understand the technicalities.
| ebonassi wrote:
| > could you recommend serious references like books?
|
| we are writing history not books
|
| --
|
| beside jokes and comments. as any research field it's difficult
| to have books yet and catch-up with everything is hard, i feel
| your struggle. said that, as i can see from the comments, there
| are already some good resources where you can learn and catch-
| up.
|
| fwiw, i followed this in the 2018, i learnt foundations with
| the book mastering in ethereum and then by articles starting
| from a specific domain. like you would do in academic research.
|
| other resources i recommend
|
| - digest discussions https://t.me/lobsters_daily
|
| - digest events https://t.me/thedailyape
|
| - directory/kb https://thedailyape.com
| glintik wrote:
| They just mean "crypto industry", not all IT industry.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Another commenter posted an interesting article regarding how
| PoS works: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-
| stake
| asenna wrote:
| > preferably books and not random blogs
|
| The tech in Blockchain/Web3 world is changing and evolving
| incredibly fast (as is evident from this historic event today)
| and so by the time books come out, they already become
| outdated.
|
| I would highly recommend reading Vitalik's blog[1]. He talks
| about various topics and has a knack for explaining things
| brilliantly.
|
| [1] https://vitalik.ca/
| sanderjd wrote:
| The technology side of all this is definitely interesting, but
| don't be fooled into thinking it's _too_ interesting; you can
| read one guys book (the recommendations below are good) and
| understand how it works in enough detail. The basic idea is a
| series of data blobs with a cryptographic signature for each
| blob, with (importantly) the signature of the previous blob in
| the series included in the next blob. Then there is some
| distributed consensus mechanism (of which many have been
| devised) to come to consensus on which blob is canonically the
| next one in the series. Everything else is details or game
| theory.
| hartator wrote:
| Most people don't even read the original bitcoin whitepaper:
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
|
| In between a blog post and a book. I think it's a good starting
| (and ending lol) point.
| tcgv wrote:
| > I'm not planning to "buy" crypto; I would like to understand
| the technicalities.
|
| That's been my entrance into crypto as well. I really dislike
| the speculative, get-rich-quick, even casino like connotation
| crypto has (inevitably) acquired. It shades the incredible
| technology behind it.
|
| For a couple of years I have been studying and playing around
| with smart contracts in my free time, getting a better
| understanding of this paradigm (every smart contract can be
| seen as a singleton object "living" in the blockchain, with
| functions that are like API endpoints which you can interact
| with in a decentralized fashion), how it shapes applications
| built on top of it, and the possibilities ahead of us (ex: DeFi
| - Decentralized Finance).
|
| There's a lot of skepticism around crypto, like "it's a
| solution without a problem", but I don't buy it. Even if it
| were, it's a solution sophisticated, interesting enough, worth
| diving yourself into ;)
| imtringued wrote:
| The year of cryptocurrency is just as far away as the year of
| the linux desktop. I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm just
| saying that you will grow old while waiting for it.
| anhner wrote:
| don't worry, it's not "one of the largest technological events
| in the industry to date", they're just talking out of their ass
| Yuioup wrote:
| It's all bullshit.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Vitalik has a FAQ
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/12/31/pos_faq.html
| irae wrote:
| The Bitcoin Whitepaper is fairly small and quite an easy read,
| and it is the source of all this ideas. There is only a couple
| of math formulas that you don't need to fully understand to
| understand the paper itself. Some of the concepts on the paper
| deserve to be explored further and you can resort to Wikipedia
| to dive deeper.
|
| I find the book "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous a
| good read to break down those concepts. Nevermind the
| extremists or so called "maximalists" and their exaggerations.
| The book is a really good intro to macro economics and helps
| understanding why cryptocurrency is interesting as a store of
| wealth and/or money replacement.
| chx wrote:
| Nothing is going on.
|
| You are on the right track.
|
| There's an incredible amount of word salad piled on the fact
| that people are playing a _negative sum game_ when getting
| involved with _any_ cryptocurrency that has transaction fees.
| svantana wrote:
| Not true! Cryptocurrencies have real-world productive use
| cases such as money-laundering, ransomware, drug and weapons
| trade, terrorist financing etc. As well as some less-morally-
| wrong stuff like hiding from oppressive regimes. A bet on
| crypto is a bet on the future of these activities.
| anhner wrote:
| I think you forgot "contributing to climate change by using
| as much energy as a small country" which may not apply to
| ethereum anymore, but it sure still applies to bitcoin
| svantana wrote:
| True, but that's hardly a use case.
| jll29 wrote:
| Read 'Mastering Ethereum' https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-
| Ethereum-Building-Smart-Con...
|
| The short of it is:
|
| - The block chain is a distributed ledger database, where all
| peers hold a full copy to avoid manipulation (faking an entry
| is only possible by controlling >50% of machines in this peer-
| to-peer network).
|
| - Spending money is implemented by adding a transactional
| record to the blockchain ledger at the end saying X amount
| moved from account A to B. A block is like a page in a paper
| ledger and they are appended with cryptographic hashes to avoid
| improper interference.
|
| - Ethereum supports smart contracts, which are little scripts
| in a language called Solidity. So you can implement legally
| binding (and unstoppable) contracts along the lines of "if
| (condition) then (pay some money to someone)". Executing smart
| contracts cost a little bit of money. All Ethereum nodes
| collectively implement a distributed VM, and that money (called
| "gas") is the incentive to keep the network running. Smart
| contracts are highly interesting, and they have applications
| far beyond electronic currencies. For example, we played with
| implementing electronic rights management (https://link.springe
| r.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_... - which turned out
| to be less than ideal due to a stack size limit in the current
| Ethereum VM, but hey).
|
| - Whenever a new block (page in the ledger) needs to be created
| because the previous one is full, a randomized alg. determines
| who is permitted to do that ("mining"). The old process (proof
| of work) was environmentally a disaster (it still is for the
| Bitcoin ecosystem), which is why the Ethereum people
| implemented a smarter method (proof of stake -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| All very good, except whether the contracts are legally
| binding is _completely_ orthogonal to how they are
| implemented and executed.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > where all peers hold a full copy
|
| how large is a full copy these days?
|
| how are peers jump started and why is that mechanism trusted
| so well? like say I want to connect to the blockchain, I need
| to make an API request to some IP. how is that resolved and
| why is that regarded as "decentralized"? why is the mechanism
| for serving me peers trusted and why is every peer in the
| network trusted?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It's between 800GB and 1.2TB total, depending on whether
| you just need to validate future transactions or past txns
| as well.
|
| Source: https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault
| williamcotton wrote:
| I love this work on a general ledger for electronic rights
| management!
|
| A bit off-topic, but do you think this kind of rights
| management ledger is better stored and accessed in
| traditional data stores and managed by either a government
| entity or a private-public partnership of some sorts?
|
| It seems like self-signed authentication would still be
| viable but with the added bonus of a mechanism for dealing
| with lost private keys while at the same time allowing for
| individual entities to quickly and effortlessly exchange
| ownership.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > contracts along the lines of "if (condition)
|
| what are some examples of these conditions? how is it not
| like... i put money in escrow, if the buyer agrees i did my
| part, they click agree and that's the "condition"?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable)
| contracts
|
| I would just call that "automated decision" The legally
| binding contract is the one where the parties agree on using
| the implementation as their means to fulfill the contract.
|
| There is nothing legal related in that and no law in any
| legislation I am aware of giving it any special treatment.
| davnn wrote:
| I very much enjoyed Andrej Karpathy's ,,from scratch" bitcoin
| implementation [1]. I'm sure there are other projects on
| GitHub explaining blockchain concepts directly in code.
|
| [1] https://karpathy.github.io/2021/06/21/blockchain/
| jollybean wrote:
| "So you can implement legally binding (and unstoppable)
| contracts "
|
| No - they are not necessarily legally binding.
|
| They are just called 'contracts'.
|
| We have no idea what they mean, and each individual
| 'contract' will have to be scrutinized by the Judge, or else
| it's not 'legal' anything.
| imtringued wrote:
| Evil Supervillain: "Darn you jollybean! You have foiled my
| plan to make slavery legal via an unstoppable smart
| contract by stating the obvious. If only you didn't exist I
| would be the ruler of earth!"
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| Mastering Ethereum is great, and the high-level concepts all
| still apply, but I think it's important to mention that quite
| a bit of it is outdated. Basically, imagine you're reading a
| book on Kubernetes from a few years ago. Still applicable,
| but some of the details and API interfaces will have changed.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The old process (proof of work) was environmentally a
| disaster (it still is for the Bitcoin ecosystem)
|
| There's no problem with spending the energy if it actually
| buys us something. It's a disaster because it failed to
| actually decentralize the network.
|
| Instead of everyone with a computer being able to
| participate, we have very few people buying up all the
| hardware for their massive centralized mining operations. If
| that's how it's going to be, then we might as well move on to
| proof of stake.
|
| Monero seems to have a better designed proof of work system.
| It's ASIC and GPU resistant, normal people manage to use
| their computers to mine XMR. One CPU one vote, that was the
| whole point since the beginning.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| Excellent and very clear summary, as far as I can tell. My
| only niggle is that smart contracts are, in practice, neither
| legally binding nor unstoppable... the story of the DAO
| Hack/Hard Fork [0] proved that consensus can overrule "the
| invisible hand of the blockchain" during a particularly
| egregious incident.
|
| [0] https://ogucluturk.medium.com/the-dao-hack-explained-
| unfortu...
| fsloth wrote:
| The only reason contracts are binding is because they are
| enforced by courts. Legally enforceable contracts and the
| courts that enforce them was one of the killer features of
| western societies an a non-trivial reason for their
| economic success.
|
| I have no idea how smart contract could be globally
| enforced, or can they be, but if they can, the way I see
| it, this should create new prosperity for those who have
| been unable to enjoy access to fair courts and binding
| contracts.
| anony23 wrote:
| Smart contracts are NOT contracts. They are software that
| run on the EVM. That's it.
| legutierr wrote:
| You are downplaying the real impact of "software that run
| on the EVM."
|
| Absent the existence of a functioning and accessible
| legal system to mediate the resolution of disputes, smart
| contracts can serve the societal purpose otherwise served
| by traditional paper contracts.
|
| Yes, smart contracts are not paper contracts disputes
| over which are judiciable by a court, but in many
| situations smart contracts can replace paper contracts,
| reducing or eliminating the need for courts to intervene
| in the first place.
| anony23 wrote:
| I'm an Eth fanboy and I find this take hyperbolic. It's
| programmable money and often a security nightmare. In
| order for smart contracts to replace paper contracts in
| the way you describe, every participant needs to be a
| software engineer that can audit the code.
| legutierr wrote:
| Not every smart contract needs to be unique or original.
| A well-audited library of reusable smart contracts that
| is published and/or endorsed by a coalition of reputable
| entities can provide most of the functionality that most
| businesses and people would typically need. Think of the
| standard form agreements that are offered by companies
| like LegalZoom, etc.
|
| Yes, Ethereum's security model is a problem. There's no
| reason to believe, however, that it won't be improved
| upon.
| DennisP wrote:
| A lot of semantic arguments could have been avoided if
| they'd just called them "scripts" instead.
| trkaky wrote:
| legally binding scripts
| oblio wrote:
| You don't get to a multi billion scam, sorry, valuation,
| by calling them "scripts". The naming was very deliberate
| kortex wrote:
| Smart contracts are still contracts, just a different
| kind than the typical legal contracts. "Contract" has
| been used to describe API interfaces. Words can have more
| than one meaning. "Contract" is also a verb, with
| multiple meanings.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract
| DennisP wrote:
| Hah, that's a good point.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| It's money, they should not have been called contracts.
| Communication is a thing.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think we both know that they were called "smart
| contracts" to draft off the legal meaning of the term.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Guess smart scripts just doesn't roll off the tongue the
| same way.
| knicholes wrote:
| I interpret "contract" like a contract between two
| software components. e.g. This is the schema of what our
| endpoint returns. You can work off of that.
| irae wrote:
| For ETH contracts to be be binding to things outside of
| the digital world there will be need for courts. But for
| small transactions that can be expressed in software, ETH
| is just a way to enforce the algorithm both parties agree
| on using to be enforced by the network. So there is at
| least a small value there (or it was, depending on you
| trusting PoS as oposed to PoW).
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| "this should create new prosperity for those who have
| been unable to enjoy access to fair courts and binding
| contracts. "
|
| This is the heady mythology of those who said 'Crypto
| would create XYZ for those who cannot'.
|
| Except it's been 10 years of Crypto popularity and they
| have no material function, are a huge drain of energy and
| human intellectual capital.
|
| Contracts are subject to legal oversight of a Judicial
| system, the credibility of which is require of a system
| to function.
|
| Digitization of a 'contract' really doesn't make sense so
| much at all in terms of it's 'legality'. The algorithm
| whether it's in regular code or Ehterium makes no
| difference.
|
| If someone really wanted to 'help those without legal
| recourse' they'd just use a foreign legal system for
| transaction record. So, contracts between 2 people in
| Haiti could be designated under 'Canadian Law'.
|
| But even that would be besides the point: It's not the
| 'legal system' that makes things work, it's the integrity
| of the system overall, maintained by a 'legal system'.
| Canada isn't rich because it has a 'legal system' -
| that's just one component. It's rich because people and
| groups act with integrity. The 'law' is involved very
| rarely.
|
| There's no technical utopia that will replace
| 'integrity'. Or frankly 'values'.
|
| Ehterium is a neat experiment, that's all it is for now.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > There's no technical utopia that will replace
| 'integrity'. Or frankly 'values'.
|
| This is so important.
|
| If someone is trustworthy, you need fewer checks in
| balances to be able to be confident that transactions
| with them will go well.
|
| If, on the other hand, someone is not trustworthy, all
| the systems in the world cannot guarantee good outcomes.
| [deleted]
| strogonoff wrote:
| In addition to not being fully effective and implicitly
| labeling[0] participants as untrustworthy, a system that
| _forces_ everyone to play by the rules without removing
| the factors that make people abuse the system in the
| first place only makes the abuse more attractive,
| consequential and inevitable. The most attractive
| position in such a reality would of course be the
| position of those who set the rules (I suspect the field
| in question is bustling in part because many see
| themselves within that elite, if only they could make
| this future come true)--and, of course, the rule-setters
| are never immune to the motivation for abuse either (only
| they may get away without it being labeled as such).
|
| On the other hand, if those factors are addressed, an
| intricate system of verifications and hash checks is just
| unnecessary friction and a source of added complexity to
| maintain.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeling_theory
| achr2 wrote:
| Ethereum contracts 'enforce' integrity the same way (but
| better) as escrowed down payments on housing purchases
| 'enforce' integrity - they allow a consequence if one or
| both parties do not fulfill the terms. They can also
| automate the financial transaction. Why anyone would read
| more into it than that is beyond me. These are not meant
| to replace laws or writ.
| legutierr wrote:
| > But even that would be besides the point: It's not the
| 'legal system' that makes things work, it's the integrity
| of the system overall, maintained by a 'legal system'.
| Canada isn't rich because it has a 'legal system' -
| that's just one component. It's rich because people and
| groups act with integrity. The 'law' is involved very
| rarely.
|
| You have flipped the direction of the causal arrow here.
|
| The existence of functioning and accessible court systems
| in the western world is one of the reasons that western
| societies have higher levels of trust--not the other way
| around. It's much easier to trust someone when you know
| that if they cheat you, you have recourse to pursue
| justice in the courts.
|
| In my experience doing business in both developed
| countries and less-developed countries, there isn't much
| difference with regards to individual human beings'
| "integrity". In fact, in countries without functioning
| judicial systems, business owners might demonstrate more
| "integrity" toward their customers, vendors and partners
| than we see in the US--but this has more to do with
| incentives than it has to do with people's character. In
| countries without functioning and accessible judicial
| systems, people typically do business with people that
| they have done business with before, because doing
| business with strangers is so risky. Reputation matters a
| bit more.
|
| > There's no technical utopia that will replace
| 'integrity'. Or frankly 'values'.
|
| Yes, as a general matter, many of the problems that exist
| in the less-developed world originate from deficiencies
| of trust [0]. But again, this is largely attributable to
| there not being reliable ways for people in those
| societies to mediate disputes.
|
| This isn't about utopia. If smart contracts can take the
| place of functioning court systems in commercial
| transactions--or at least can reduce the complexity of
| legal disputes and narrow the discretion of judges to
| influence dispute outcomes--a real problem is solved and
| an impediment standing in the way of economic development
| is removed.
|
| Smart contracts allow for certain types of commercial
| transactions to be conducted without the existence of a
| reliable judicial system, which transactions would
| otherwise be too risky to undertake. This incremental
| improvement will have a material impact on people's
| lives.
|
| [0] https://www.bi.team/blogs/social-trust-is-one-of-the-
| most-im...
| jollybean wrote:
| No, integrity was there before the legal system.
|
| My grandfather used to do business out of his wallet with
| cash and handshakes. He would do deals with farmers to
| make things in his workshop, and then get paid in
| pigs/parts of cows 6 months later. Farmers in particular
| are extremely reliable and credible people.
|
| People in agrarian areas didn't move around much and
| personal integrity was definitely a kind of currency.
|
| When you're dealing with industrial level trade and
| commerce, esp. with far flung traders and investors -
| yes, you're right.
|
| And you're right to point out the relationship on some
| level.
|
| But ultimately, Crypto is not going to add integrity to
| the system, and, integrity is essential.
|
| "Smart contracts allow for certain types of commercial
| transactions to be conducted without the existence of a
| reliable judicial system, which transactions would
| otherwise be too risky to undertake. This incremental
| improvement will have a material impact on people's
| lives."
|
| No - they do not.
|
| The naming of these things are a total misrepresentation.
|
| Contracts can _only_ exist within the context of a
| Judical system, otherwise, they 're not really contracts.
|
| No businesses on planet earth are going to allow their
| businesses to be managed outside the auspices of some
| kind of judicial oversight, and especially not in things
| that cannot be undone.
|
| The world is full of accidents, misinterpretations.
|
| Every situation we see a 'smart contract' there is
| probably room for a market maker, and/or just some kind
| of simple software that 'implements' a regular contact.
| legutierr wrote:
| > My grandfather used to do business out of his wallet
| with cash and handshakes. He would do deals with farmers
| to make things in his workshop, and then get paid in
| pigs/parts of cows 6 months later. Farmers in particular
| are extremely reliable and credible people.
|
| You don't think that this kind of trust exists outside of
| the developed world? Why do you think that your
| grandfather's experience is unique, compared to small
| farming communities anywhere else in the world where
| people have already known each other and done business
| with each other for many years?
|
| > When you're dealing with industrial level trade and
| commerce, esp. with far flung traders and investors -
| yes, you're right. And you're right to point out the
| relationship on some level. But ultimately, Crypto is not
| going to add integrity to the system, and, integrity is
| essential.
|
| The argument I am making is that at the industrial level,
| the existence of institutions capable of mediating
| disputes and enforcing agreements paradoxically increase
| levels of trust within society as a whole by reducing the
| need for counter-parties to depend on each other's
| personal integrity.
|
| Of course personal integrity is important in business!
| But it is not a difference in integrity between societies
| that explains differences in development. Rather,
| differences in development can be largely explained by
| different levels of trust, which are a function of the
| tools and mechanisms available to mediate disputes. You
| are going to trust people more if you believe that
| cheaters will be penalized somehow for their cheating.
|
| In traditional societies, cheating is punished by
| repetitional mechanisms within the community. The courts
| have served this function in modern industrial societies,
| and have thereby facilitated industrialization at a
| massive scale. Smart contracts can serve a similar
| purpose in places where courts are unavailable or cannot
| be relied upon today.
|
| > "Smart contracts allow for certain types of commercial
| transactions to be conducted without the existence of a
| reliable judicial system, which transactions would
| otherwise be too risky to undertake. This incremental
| improvement will have a material impact on people's
| lives."
|
| > No - they do not.
|
| > No businesses on planet earth are going to allow their
| businesses to be managed outside the auspices of some
| kind of judicial oversight, and especially not in things
| that cannot be undone.
|
| In some circumstances, it is better to have the option of
| taking a dispute to court. But even today in the US, most
| businesses try to avoid the courts and instead use
| arbitration to resolve disputes. In most of the third
| world, neither arbitration nor the government court
| system are available to most businesses.
|
| Around the world, I think there are a lot of businesses
| that would prefer to completely eliminate the kinds of
| ambiguities in paper contracts that lead to disputes, by
| opting instead to use a smart contract to specify the
| mechanism of a transaction. If you don't see it being
| done already, that is because there is still a lot of
| infrastructure that needs to be built out.
|
| > The world is full of accidents, misinterpretations.
|
| > Every situation we see a 'smart contract' there is
| probably room for a market maker, and/or just some kind
| of simple software that 'implements' a regular contact.
|
| Smart contracts are interpreted by machines, so there is
| no misinterpretation--if there is a problem, it is a
| problem with the implementation.
|
| Sure, you could delegate the responsibility of encoding
| the terms of a paper contract to some third party. But
| then all parties need to agree on and trust that third
| party, and the third party itself needs to agree and
| accept some risk. A smart contract is a better solution
| because there is no third party involved. Everyone gets
| to read the smart contract before the transaction is
| performed, and if all agree, the terms are set.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > You don't think that this kind of trust exists outside
| of the developed world? Why do you think that your
| grandfather's experience is unique, compared to small
| farming communities anywhere else in the world where
| people have already known each other and done business
| with each other for many years?
|
| You _just_ wrote that trust is thanks to judicial system
| and that 's what GP countered based on personal
| experience.
|
| > You are going to trust people more if you believe that
| cheaters will be penalized somehow for their cheating.
|
| Indeed. That's what we have with judicial system. And the
| opposite is true too, if cheating is not penalized if it
| was due to a maliciously crafted smart contract (because
| smart contact would be king) then I sure am going to
| trust everyone and everything much less.
| legutierr wrote:
| > You _just_ wrote that trust is thanks to judicial
| system and that 's what GP countered based on personal
| experience.
|
| I think both jollybean and I are drawing a distinction
| between traditional societies where high trust primarily
| exists within smaller communities, and industrial
| societies where trust operates at scale. I don't disagree
| with jollybean regarding how trust operates within
| smaller traditional communities.
|
| My point was that at the level of industrial societies
| with millions of people doing business with each other,
| high trust is maintained largely because of the existence
| and functioning of the judicial system, not due to some
| unique personality characteristic of the individuals
| living in that society. Smart contracts can serve a
| similar functional purpose in societies where ordinary
| people do not have access to a functioning judicial
| system.
|
| > And the opposite is true too, if cheating is not
| penalized if it was due to a maliciously crafted smart
| contract (because smart contact would be king) then I
| sure am going to trust everyone and everything much less.
|
| Certainly trust would work differently in an economic
| system that is mediated primarily by smart contracts. Do
| not forget, though, that you currently have the advantage
| of living in a society which has a functioning and
| accessible judicial system. Your level of trust is
| already very high. People who live in societies that
| don't have the same advantages are starting at a lower
| trust threshold.
|
| Using imperfect smart contracts to mediate commercial
| transactions might be a step down for you. For other
| people, waiting for a perfect system does nothing but
| stop them from improving things right now.
| tornato7 wrote:
| Everything comes down to social consensus at the end of the
| day. But for 99.9999% of transactions you can count on
| immutability.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "99% of the time it works every time"
| nisegami wrote:
| That's substantially higher than the legal system in any
| country
| Intermernet wrote:
| "One in a million chances come up nine times out of ten"
| jollybean wrote:
| Except when you can't and you must undo a transaction,
| and if you can't, you can't use it.
|
| Like for example in the world of finance, where you have
| to be able to backtrack.
|
| Meaning such 'contracts' are _least useful_ for things
| like, well, 'currency' and 'stores of value' ... hmm ...
| syzygyhack wrote:
| Sounds like you haven't wrapped your head around the
| basics of smart contracts.
|
| Yes, a blockchain gives you an (ideally) immutable
| foundation. No, that doesn't mean that every transaction
| that invokes a smart contract has to be immutable. If a
| smart contract for a particular use case needs to have
| the ability to "backtrack", so it can, there's nothing
| stopping it.
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| Great reply, the rule for thumb of 'anything that can be
| done manually can be automated' applies here.
|
| Needs backtrack, code it in, then everyone knows how the
| rules work and there isn't any side deals or exceptions.
|
| Cheers!
| bko wrote:
| The problem with exploitable systems is that the 0.00001%
| is not random. It's not like a random 1 in a million
| transactions is dropped.
|
| I think the bigger issue is that the system is somewhat
| arbitrarily controlled by the large players. That could
| work out well in some cases (funds hacked are returned)
| but it could also be less optimal (e.g. you're thrown on
| some list and all of a sudden your transactions are not
| valid). We've already seen hackers and obviously
| malicious actors dinged, which is good. But this opens up
| an avenue for things like forcing participants to go
| through regular banking protocols that starts to affect
| more and more people (e.g. political dissidents). By then
| you just recreated the modern financial system with all
| its flaws and gatekeepers, except its less efficient.
| mightyRodri wrote:
| I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used
| "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders.
| When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides
| "yep, its a linked list allright".
| pbak wrote:
| Yeah,
|
| Fully distributed consistency algorithms running on N nodes
| on linked list in which each node is a Turing-machine program
| run concurrently on N nodes, whose consistency shall also be
| insured, and which can write on said linked-list. Everything
| has absolutely tons of edge-cases related to the distributed
| nature of the thing to take care of.
|
| Of course, I haven't even begun anything about the whole
| "crypto" part, and minimizing power usage.
|
| Absolutely no meaning besides "linked lists", riiiight...
| somenameforme wrote:
| The internet is fundamentally little more than the ability to
| send 1s and 0s from point A to point B.
|
| So you mean like me calling you and saying 0 1 0? Well, yeah
| kind of, but faster! And we can even have conference calls!
| It's going to change the entire world! Yeah, ok... Well, I'm
| going to leave now. Wait, sorry... I mean I'm going to '0 1 1
| 0' now. Wow, I can feel the world shifting already.
|
| The applications of a technology often are far greater than
| the most simplified fundamental upon which it is built.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| _bonk_
| lmarcos wrote:
| I thought the same at the beginning. Yet somehow I think I'm
| missing something a bit more complex (complicated?) than just
| "linked lists". I don't want to understand only the theory
| but also the "practice" (e.g., one could read all about
| distributed systems... But one really gets the gist of it
| until one has to deal with real world networks in the cloud
| or on prem, dealing with real systems)
| mightyRodri wrote:
| Have you seen the "Line goes up" summary by Dan Olson? It
| puts the crypto sphere into context. From that many
| descisions and marketing practices start to make sense.
| fastball wrote:
| Crypto being full of grifters does not mean that the
| actual developers in the space are using "technobabble"
| in order to sound smarter without actually introducing
| new concepts. Crypto _is_ actually innovating in ways
| that are broadly applicable to computer science in
| general, e.g. with all the work being done on Zero-
| Knowledge Proofs. And those innovations require new words
| because they are new concepts. I think it should be
| somewhat obvious to anyone that has _actually_ looked at
| the space that devs are not just re-naming existing
| ideas.
| LtWorf wrote:
| > Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly
| applicable to computer science in general
|
| Most of it is just companies putting blockchains
| everywhere because VCs give them money in that case.
| Nothing scientific about that.
| AgentME wrote:
| In that video he searches for the griftiest projects and
| treats them as defining the whole technology. Suggesting
| it as an answer here is like responding to a question
| about how eBay is engineered and showing off the
| scammiest eBay auction pages you can find by searching
| for the lowest-rated users.
| jekrb wrote:
| Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being
| informative about a class of technology, its about
| generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and
| youtube ad payments.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I actually thought Line Goes Up was pretty well informed
| and well-presented. It's definitely one-sided, but I
| think there were only a couple of statements that I found
| questionable.
|
| I work in the crypto industry, and definitely agree
| there's a ton of innovation in the space, but the
| innovations lie at an incredibly technical intersection
| of cryptography, game theory, and distributed networks.
| Get marketing, sales, and investment capital involved in
| the mix (which almost every project has), and you have a
| bundle of products being thrust in front of the public
| which they can't rigorously evaluate, and because
| everything is directly incentivized, _tons_ of scammers,
| grifters, liars, and fraudsters.
|
| When my non-technical friends ask me about crypto, I'm
| happy to tell them some of the things I think are really
| cool about it. But I don't recommend buying anything
| based on my perspective; it's basically gambling (even if
| you're well-informed)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Try to imagine you are building a new banking system, and
| you want it to be secure.
|
| How would you
|
| A) allow for secure payments without giving away something
| like a bank account # or debit card number
|
| and
|
| B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there
| was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just
| deciding to initiate an account with one million?
|
| Generally speaking the way to handle those requirements is
| by employing cryptographic signatures and public
| blockchain(s), and the result is usually referred to as a
| cryptocurrency.
| cowtools wrote:
| There's also chaum's e-cash
| AgentME wrote:
| It relied on a central authority to work, and that's very
| related to why it no longer works.
| wruza wrote:
| _David Chaum opined then "As the Web grew, the average
| level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to
| explain the importance of privacy to them"_
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
|
| Not sure how this opinion relates to failure, but just in
| case, things only got worse since.
| Nursie wrote:
| > A) allow for secure payments without giving away
| something like a bank account # or debit card number
|
| We have a whole bunch of these systems, like Open Banking
| payments in the UK, Pix in Brazil, and to a lesser extent
| stuff like Apple/Amazon pay and other payment proxies
| which don't require you to expose account numbers to
| merchants. Physical credit-card transactions work this
| way too, as the chips have built-in cryptographic
| processors.
|
| > such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an
| account with one million?
|
| This is not a problem people really have. Having a
| limited quantity of your means of exchange is not a
| desirable quality in a currency.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Credit card transactions may at some point involve
| cryptography, but at the bottom is the credit card
| number, and that can still be exposed.
|
| Cryptocurrencies don't necessarily have to operate on an
| (effectively) fixed supply, and actually if you are
| concerned about modifying the supply frequently it is
| possible to design a cryptocurrency that gives you much
| better control over that.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Credit card transactions may at some point involve
| cryptography, but at the bottom is the credit card
| number, and that can still be exposed.
|
| That's not really "at the bottom of things", for
| physical, customer-present transactions which I was
| talking about there. At the bottom of things are private
| keys stored on the card, which sign the transaction.
| Exposing the credit card number gets you no more than
| having someone's cryptocurrency wallet address, in fact a
| lot less as you can't look up their balance. The idea
| that credit card transactions are simply the handing over
| of a number, that a merchant can then do with whatever
| they like, is _very_ outdated, though I guess still makes
| sense in countries that haven 't moved on from magnetic
| strips.
|
| Yes, plugging in your card number online to buy things is
| still distressingly popular for various reasons, I agree
| we should definitely get rid of it. And we can! Either by
| reforming the credit card payment process in the sort of
| way Apple Pay online payments and Paypal already have
| (though they still use the numbers themselves, it's
| true), or by ditching cards entirely and going with
| things like open banking payments and pix, which tend to
| have OAuth under the covers (among other measures) that
| don't involve 'card' infrastructure at all.
|
| The question was how you design a system from the ground
| up that will "allow for secure payments without giving
| away something like a bank account # or debit card
| number". Well, I would use these sorts of technologies
| (that already exist and are in widespread use), rather
| than a blockchain.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's amazing how well you seem to understand some of this
| stuff but aren't able to apply that knowledge in a
| holistic way.
| tpxl wrote:
| > A) allow for secure payments without giving away
| something like a bank account # or debit card number
|
| You can use PKI for this. The public key is public and
| the private key never has to be online. That's how
| (most?) crypto works, but the system doesn't have to be a
| cryptocurrency to work like this.
|
| > B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure,
| there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank
| just deciding to initiate an account with one million?
|
| You can have public ledgers without crypto, there's
| usually no reason to do so, and good reasons not to do it
| (privacy, funnily enough).
|
| Crypto is _a_ solution for this, not _the_ solution, and
| not even the best solution at that.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Since you are using PKI but not a blockchain, it sounds
| like half a cryptocurrency to me.
|
| I didn't actually say "cryptography" for the block chain.
| What do you propose other than a block chain for the
| public ledger? And if your system uses cryptography for
| the transaction security and has a public ledger, why
| would you not call it a cryptocurrency? It would seem to
| be in the same category if you ledger was secure.
| tpxl wrote:
| > What do you propose other than a block chain for the
| public ledger?
|
| A csv file, SQLite file, mysql database dump, ... The
| blockchain is a _distributed_ , _trustless_ ledger, which
| is not necessary for most applications.
|
| If I may paint a picture of why this matters with an
| example from the gaming industry - simply because I'm
| familiar with it: There are projects being made where the
| inventory/achievement/whatever system lives on a public
| blockchain, so that you may use/display it in another
| game, website, whatever.
|
| But this already exists without blockchain! If you play
| Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you get a hat in
| Team Fortress 2. There are various third-party websites
| where you can display your Steam/Team Fortress/Dota/LoL
| achievements, inventories, ... because those 'ledgers'
| are public already. You can trade Steam items on third-
| party websites (which interfaces with steam underneath)
| that dodge Steam's 30% store tax and will actually pay
| money out unlike Steam.
|
| The above applications only require public (or even just
| shared) ledgers. Distributed and trustless is not a
| requirement for these use cases.
|
| > And if your system uses cryptography for the
| transaction security and has a public ledger, why would
| you not call it a cryptocurrency?
|
| You could just as easily transfer USD, GBP or EUR using
| such a system. The currency itself need not be 'crypto'
| for the system itself to use cryptography for
| transactions. You wouldn't publish such a ledger for
| obvious reasons, but technically you can.
| zeroclip wrote:
| > If you play Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you
| get a hat in Team Fortress 2
|
| A centralized MySQL database is not a "public ledger" in
| the same way that a decentralized blockchain is
| considered a "public ledger."
|
| In the former, the database can be removed or censored
| easily by the central entity controlling it. This
| includes issuing API keys: the central controller decides
| who has permission to access, use, modify, and even
| retrieve the data.
|
| In the case of a "decentralized, permissionless, public
| ledger" blockchain, no single entity controls the data
| structure.
| tpxl wrote:
| > A centralized MySQL database is not a "public ledger"
| in the same way that a decentralized blockchain is
| considered a "public ledger."
|
| A public ledger is just that, a public ledger. It need
| not be distributed nor trustless to be public. The
| novelty of blockchain is the distributed and trustless,
| but most applications (as I outlined in the example
| above) only need to be public.
|
| Trust me, I understand that a database dump is very
| different from a blockchain ala bitcoin, in exactly the
| ways you described, but that doesn't mean we need to
| shove blockchain everywhere.
| zeroclip wrote:
| I concede with this and your earlier point, you don't
| _need_ a blockchain to build a new banking system. The
| current banking system is evidence of that: there is no
| blockchain needed when you ask your bank sends your funds
| to another bank.
|
| But if you want to build a system that is not wholly
| dependent on "banks" and centralized actors securing
| consensus of financial transactions - which is
| effectively Proof of Authority - you end up having to
| look at alternative consensus mechanisms like Proof of
| Work or Proof of Stake.
|
| The same logic applies to something like game assets.
| People buy and sell game assets already without a
| blockchain, but they do so only through centralized
| custodians and intermediaries.
| JulianHC wrote:
| >But this already exists without blockchain! If you play
| Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you get a hat in
| Team Fortress 2. There are various third-party websites
| where you can display your Steam/Team Fortress/Dota/LoL
| achievements, inventories, ... because those 'ledgers'
| are public already. You can trade Steam items on third-
| party websites (which interfaces with steam underneath)
| that dodge Steam's 30% store tax and will actually pay
| money out unlike Steam.
|
| That ledger is controlled/can be edited/changed by Vavle.
| Valve can delete your inventory and there is nothing you
| can do. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having a
| public ledger that no one can modify on a whim?
| onion2k wrote:
| The first one is easily solved with one-time-use card
| numbers, which credit card companies have offered for
| well over a decade.
|
| The second one is a dubious benefit if you're at all
| interested in stopping crime (eg money laundering is very
| easy if no party can block a transaction.)
|
| Thats not to suggest there's no benefit to ETH, or even
| that crypto might be better than traditional money in
| some ways, but those two specific points are fairly
| easily argued.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Second issue is more political-ideological. Stopping
| crime is just an excuse. Current states will never allow
| a competing currency (against Fiat).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The mark of ignorance is to dismiss things you "think" are
| beneath you before any real consideration.
|
| In my opinion too, the crypto crowd is typically one I like
| to avoid. But to dismiss the tech behind it as babble is sad.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| There's a lot of slang and jargon (metaphors, some good,
| some silly), to the point where most crypto projects are
| scams, hiding what's going on (many DeFi projects built on
| Ethereum).
|
| And this is my opinion as someone who loves the value
| proposition of what cryptocurrency was supposed to be (see
| first line of Satoshi whitepaper), and care more about
| seeing the technology gain mindshare than hype cycles and
| price movement.
| Tenoke wrote:
| What technical projects have no impenetrable to outsiders
| terms at first glance? Try to read information on React,
| Django, Tensorflow or whatever software project you like
| from the PoV of an outsider and tell me you won't find
| plenty of jargon, metaphors etc.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| You're not wrong.
|
| But those also aren't ponzi schemes offering 1000's of %
| APY based on convoluted multi-token staking schemes,
| minting, etc. that directly interact with money (as
| tokens) you send it, potentially breaking SEC rules
| because of what it means to be a money transmitter (low
| bar).
|
| (Overall I'm talking about a bunch of tokens/dapps on
| Ethereum, not Ethereum itself, BTW.).
| mratsim wrote:
| You also have MLM and Ponzis with cash, stocks (pump and
| dumps), diamonds, art, fine wine, gold and jewellery.
|
| Anything of values get its share of fakes, even dev
| shops.
| AgentME wrote:
| A randomly chosen crypto project (including ones that use
| Ethereum) will probably be mostly nonsense, but Ethereum
| itself is a serious project with interesting deep
| engineering.
| preseinger wrote:
| I can assert with absolute authority that the tech behind
| crypto is inarguably "babble". There is no "there" there.
| desindol wrote:
| It's 12 year old tech that gets propped up as innovative
| every 2 months. I can understand his sentiment.
| fastball wrote:
| A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer
| science. There aren't _that_ many novel / widely adopted
| computer science ideas introduced each year.
|
| B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in
| computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when
| the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published.
|
| C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS
| research that is broadly applicable to the entire
| industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain
| development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
| retcore wrote:
| Proof of stake is a application not computer science.
| What fundamental new knowledge into computing are you
| thinking about attributing?
| fastball wrote:
| PoS is an application of what?
| sterlind wrote:
| to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic
| breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science,
| strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus
| algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is
| aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a
| group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by
| subverting the rules.
|
| I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally
| proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did
| for Paxos.
| DennisP wrote:
| BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF
| standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support
| over a million staking nodes.
|
| BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to
| verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n
| aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2
| pairings instead of n+1.
|
| https://ethresear.ch/t/pragmatic-signature-aggregation-
| with-...
| nwiswell wrote:
| You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own
| facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and
| Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot
| of other hard problems solved since then.
|
| There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too.
| Privacy coins in particular look very little like what
| was envisioned in Satoshi's paper.
|
| Whether that's all worth anything from an _economic_
| perspective, I 'm not sure (and even less sure whether
| it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately
| a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard
| problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad
| to see people minimizing it on Hacker News.
|
| Especially since this _particular_ innovation is
| ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is
| the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away,
| and isn 't it just open source software that we're
| talking about here?
| josh2600 wrote:
| This is the thing I don't get about HN.
|
| Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right
| now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but
| hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch.
|
| Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers
| have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent.
|
| Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the
| Internet if you look in the archives.
|
| Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of
| every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in
| the history of computer science and tell me that the
| Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the
| chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes
| boring, and then we do the dance again.
| desindol wrote:
| It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of
| people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was
| in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
| redditor98654 wrote:
| I have a question to people who were around and have a
| memory of the times because I don't as I was not born
| yet. But does the crypto thing feel similar to how the
| internet started in the late 80's and early 90's before
| finally taking off?
|
| I recall some videos/articles dissing internet as a
| passing fad at that time - does anyone who remember what
| it was like then think the crypto industry going through
| something similar?
| Nursie wrote:
| God no.
|
| The utility of systems like email was very quickly
| apparent, and while the 90s web was much more about
| publishing structured information than any sort of
| interaction, again it was pretty immediately recognised
| as a powerful, useful thing.
|
| I don't recall any negativity to "the internet", but a
| lot for the dot com hype cycle, which is what I think
| cryptocurrency most closely resembles, but it has dragged
| on for _years_
| mratsim wrote:
| - https://www.newstatesman.com/science-
| tech/2016/08/25-years-h...
|
| "The Internet, bah. Hype alert"
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
|
| "What is the Internet, Anyway?"
| birracerveza wrote:
| Since 2012 the situation has changed quite a bit.
| Adoption has increased massively. It's just doing it so
| slowly you aren't noticing it's happening.
|
| Not to mention the adoption possibly going on behind the
| scenes.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Adoption has increased massively._
|
| Adoption has mostly increased thanks to centralization,
| via exchanges, which seems antithetical to Bitcoin's
| foundation. What's the number one use case? Speculation
| and scams.
|
| I'm not sure it's going in the right direction.
| badpun wrote:
| > Adoption has increased massively.
|
| Adoption? More like, speculation. I still don't know
| anyone who's doing any real world transactions with
| crypto, but I know people who hold it for speculation
| purposes.
| croak3r wrote:
| Seems to me like adoption has gone backwards in some
| regards. Look at companies like Steam which at one point
| were accepting bitcoin but then pulled the plug on it. I
| also don't know anyone that owns crypto for any reason
| other than as an investment.
| sam_goody wrote:
| > It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of
| people on this planet.
|
| To be fair, so is Linux.
| Steve0 wrote:
| Feels like arpanet atm, so give it some time.
| https://online.jefferson.edu/business/internet-history-
| timel...
| Fiahil wrote:
| HN is -in essence- a collection of vocal minorities. Post
| something on Kubernetes, and you'll get every Linux
| Sysadmin complaining about how it was better before the
| age of containers and we didn't invent anything new. Post
| something on cloud infrastructure management, and you'll
| get people somewhat angry about its cost. Post something
| on Electron apps, and you'll get everyone to talk about
| how C++ and QT apps outshine them in 2022. Post something
| on crypto, and, you know, it's going to be about how it's
| not used, too complex, or too energy inefficient.
|
| Good news is, those topics change and become more
| accepted after some time. It's an endless cycle of Bash-
| and-Move-on. If something is "too popular", then it's
| obviously the worse technology ever, according to HN.
| threeseed wrote:
| Kubernetes solves a widespread problem. Cloud solves a
| widespread problem.
|
| What is the widespread problem crypto is solving ?
| swalsh wrote:
| Users rights
| 0xrips wrote:
| sending money to family in countries with harsher
| financial systems, being able to donate to causes you
| support without it being traceable to you (through
| tornado cash and zcash/monero), being able to move large
| amounts of money instantly with minimal fees and no
| intervention, etc.
| oblio wrote:
| Ever wonder why we want to trace transactions? KYC, AML,
| all that jazz?
|
| Hint: darkness and obscurity most of the time don't hide
| shy virtuous people.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Yeah, the one and only crypto use case: go around
| financial regulations.
| threeseed wrote:
| > The beginning of every new era of protocols is always
| like this.
|
| No it's not.
|
| Web2 exploded largely because of XMLHTTPRequest which
| from the second it was released was simple to understand,
| simple to use and solved an immediate problem.
|
| To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3
| solves uniqely well other than money laundering,
| sanctions evasion etc.
| mratsim wrote:
| > To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3
| solves uniqely well other than money laundering,
| sanctions evasion etc.
|
| Many of cryptographical constructs of the past 4 years
| were and are spearheaded by blockchains, in particular
| fast signature aggregation, threshold signatures
| protocols and zero knowledge proofs. This translates to
| protocols for:
|
| - voting.
|
| - splitting a critical company secret between say the
| CEO, COO, CFO, Head of HR, Compliance, Legal and
| requiring 4 out of 6 to sign off critical actions,
| without ever revealing that secret.
|
| - proving that you did or you own something without
| revealing what. Which could be quite interesting for law
| enforcement for example.
| omginternets wrote:
| Most people here aren't hackers; they're corporate
| employees. And you're right. It shows.
| jll29 wrote:
| Although reluctant to substantially invest (and hence
| still working for others ;-), I know some of the people
| involved.
|
| They're as smart as they come.
| desindol wrote:
| So it's 10 years got it.
| miohtama wrote:
| PeerCoin was the first proof-of-stake system, not
| deletegated proof of stake system, in 2012.
|
| Here is some more history on early cryptocurrencies and
| blockchains:
|
| https://twitter.com/moo9000/status/1389573901815066627
| cowtools wrote:
| I don't understand why people are so excited about
| computers, integrated circuits have been around since the
| 60's. You have companies like Intel and AMD coming out
| every year with announcements like it's some new thing.
| desindol wrote:
| Because computers changed the world in the first decade,
| even the first year they came about. Crypto did not.
| cowtools wrote:
| I remember the silk road, and bitcoin donations to
| wikileaks, and bitcoin pizza. I think it all got bogged
| down after that with the irrational exuberance of the
| bull run, and everyone was too distracted to pay
| attention to the XT dispute when it really mattered. But
| it is getting better now, I am optimistic that the crash
| will continue and we'll see sanity returned to
| cryptocurrency.
|
| The problem is fundamentally that cryptocurrency requires
| network effects to work. Cryptocurrency is not an easy
| thing to explain to most people, and it can be quite
| dangerous, so the best thing you can do for new users is
| tell them to stay away.
| sterlind wrote:
| imo, Silk Road deserves the credit for solving Bitcoin's
| chicken-and-egg problem with network effects.
|
| a single enterprising dealer could have started it off -
| exchange rate basically didn't matter, as long as someone
| was buying and selling BTC, it'd work to keep the
| dealer's identity private. SR tapped into a massive new
| market, regular people started learning about crypto so
| they could buy drugs, this created a flow of money
| through the market. honestly, I was excited to see my
| friends using Tor and buying BTC for cash - it's the
| gritty, cypherpunk dream!
|
| whenever there's a real market opportunity like that,
| network effects don't seem to get in the way. Monero and
| Zcash got very popular from all the ransomware, though
| I'm admittedly less exuberant about hospitals being
| ransomed than drugs.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero
| knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of
| years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that
| deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is
| barely 2 years old.
|
| The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out
| were only just created in the last few years (that's why
| Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making
| changes to the design as new research came out).
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| smart contracts offer legitimate efficiency gains over some
| traditional models
|
| Even something like a Dex can be far superior to traditional
| order book exchange models in some cases
| capableweb wrote:
| I could say the same thing about reading fields I don't
| generally understand, and it can seem like "technobabble"
| because I don't understand the meaning of words they are
| using, since some things are written with a certain audience
| in mind that possesses the knowledge to understand the
| content, like many academic papers.
|
| However, I don't regularly dismiss fields like that, but
| rather I understand that not everything is meant for me to
| understand without a deeper meaning. Not sure why anyone
| would treat the (technical) ecosystem of cryptocurrencies
| differently. Seems like a non-curious way of acting.
|
| Just like I realize the problems pornography introduces to
| the world, but reading and speaking with engineers working at
| those companies are still a fruitful endeavour for me.
| retcore wrote:
| Genuine research states claims for the methods and
| discovery, making it often quite easy to work backwards
| from the conclusions to the theory. No such logic seems to
| exist in the crypto culture.
| 0xrips wrote:
| are you gonna cite any examples or just say things
| paulgb wrote:
| Here's an example of a well-hyped, well-funded crypto
| startup being loose with words that have well-understood
| technical meaning outside of crypto.
|
| > The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS
| network, which right now has significant advantages over
| 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its
| partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G
| because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean
| anything.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-heliums-new-5g-network-
| just-ho...
|
| Helium was, until recently, one of the companies bound to
| come up if you asked around for real-world use cases of
| crypto.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Helium has given up on blockchains because they realized
| it added no value: https://medium.com/helium-
| foundation/hip-70-helium-core-team...
|
| > In the current architecture, specific transactions,
| including Proof-of-Coverage and Data Transfer Accounting,
| are processed on-chain unnecessarily. This data
| bottleneck can cause efficiency issues such as device
| join delays and problems with data packet communications,
| which bloats the Network and causes slow processing
| times. HIP 70 proposes transferring these processes onto
| Oracles which will resolve these issues and further
| stabilize the Network.
|
| There's a bunch of jargon, but for "Oracle" read "EC2
| instance".
| 0xrips wrote:
| thought we were talking about open source community
| research. i'm not here to get into the debate of if
| crypto has a scam problem, it does. but that isn't
| research.
| paulgb wrote:
| The comment you accused of "just saying things" was
| referring to crypto culture, rather than research
| specifically. I picked Helium because it was something
| that the web3 community glommed onto as a "successful"
| use case.
| preseinger wrote:
| It cannot possibly be controversial that the crypto
| ecosystem is ahistorical.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a
| difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges
| morelisp wrote:
| But cryptocurrency doesn't really solve these in a
| technically interesting way, as it's neither consistent nor
| available under partition. The pressure to keep the chain
| consistent and unified is a purely social one - your BTC is
| only valuable to other people on the same chain as you.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't know, looking into the papers that are written in
| crypto research, especially in academia, it seems like
| there is a lot of very technically interesting stuff
| going on, especially with zero knowledge proofs for
| example...
| morelisp wrote:
| These are largely (if not completely) applications of
| existing zero-knowledge algorithms to blockchain data,
| not the application of blockchains to solve some
| difficult ZK problems or make a useful-outside-of-
| blockchain novel ZK construction.
| bowsamic wrote:
| And? Applications of research brings new insights into
| that thing.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified
| is a purely social one
|
| So then the innovation of cryptocurrency was an economic
| one.
|
| It does have the word "currency" in it, so that should
| not be surprising.
| morelisp wrote:
| I'll leave the question of whether it's economically
| interesting to economists and sociologists (though I
| suspect the answer is it's not at least in this regard,
| as the pressure to use the same non-blockchain currency
| seems not too different across the sweep of history). The
| claim was:
|
| > It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually
| a difficult problem that involves very interesting
| challenges
|
| It's not that.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > It's not that.
|
| Are you saying it's easy? The PoS algorithms I've read
| seem quite complicated, and honestly quite interesting.
| Also there is a lot of academic research about this
| stuff, some of it private, some of it public.
|
| I mean, I know there are people out there who think that,
| for example, particle physics is totally uninteresting,
| and you are of course free to decide that a given
| research area is totally uninteresting, but you can't
| expect others to agree. It is just your opinion
| LtWorf wrote:
| The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is
| computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic
| value". There is no computer science innovation there.
| Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it
| made no sense.
|
| And it all went downhill from there.
| 0xrips wrote:
| not only is this provably wrong, but the entire point is
| also negated through the merge which this post is about.
| bowsamic wrote:
| No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal
| was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the
| chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say
| that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".
| LtWorf wrote:
| And a digital signature couldn't be used because?
| bowsamic wrote:
| A digital signature alone cannot prevent double spending
| LtWorf wrote:
| No, going back in the list of transactions can.
| bowsamic wrote:
| What are you alluding to? Drop the cryptic bs and just
| say it
| preseinger wrote:
| Don't feel ashamed. The entire ecosystem is unsound, and the
| "technicalities" are the stuff that CS201 courses dismiss as
| irrelevant. There's no reason for a technologist to care about
| it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's because eth is a hype train. If you're a distributed
| systems engineer you definitely grasp it
| killerstorm wrote:
| As someone who worked with blockchains & crypto for 10+ years,
| I'd actually recommend against reading "serious references".
|
| "What is going on now" is largely the same thing as before:
| * consensus / Sybil resistance / game-theory / "crypto-
| economics" * cryptography - signatures, data structures
| (e.g. Merkle tree) * p2p networking * deterministic
| computation / virtual machines
|
| If you have a solid CS/software engineering background, you
| probably already know 90% of it.
|
| I guess crypto-specific consensus might be new, but you can get
| a good grasp reading few articles. And that part is actually
| opinionated, so you need to decide on a camp before you read
| materials. Bitcoin people would likely disagree with anything
| written about PoS.
|
| Another fun thing is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). That's
| actually quite new, complex and might be interesting.
|
| The rest can be rather boring. Users submit cryptographically-
| signed commands (transactions) which processed in a
| deterministic fashion. I'm not sure it's worth reading a whole
| book about it.
| mratsim wrote:
| consensus is strongly related to distributed computing fault
| tolerance and database or file systems' atomicity and
| integrity in case of crash. Basically problems that involve
| multiple readers and multiple writers.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Distributed computing research is focused mostly on
| increasing throughout, reducing latency and enabling
| parallelism and concurrency.
|
| OTOH cryptocurrency consensus is mostly about answering a
| question: "How do we prevent bad guys from stealing money
| or doing other nasty things?"
|
| While a concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance was known
| before Bitcoin, it was never really applied in practice
| AFAIK - people thought it's overkill. Also I'd say doing it
| within a private network is one thing, and doing it with
| random weirdos on internet is completely different.
|
| Distributed computing researchers like Lamport were
| considering models where e.g. up to 30% of nodes are
| compromised, that won't work on internet where an attacker
| can potentially simulate billions of fake nodes. Nakamoto
| consensus is really elegant as it combines Sybil
| protection, incentivization and consensus into one thing.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Mastering Ethereum is pretty good
|
| Came out about 4 years ago
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| The official Ethereum docs [0] are a good starting point. There
| are a lot of good resources under the "Learn" tab as well.
|
| [0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/
| lmarcos wrote:
| Thanks. I know the official docs. They just feel to me like
| the official docs of K8s (they are good, but not great. Great
| in the sense of "Brian Kernighan" or "Stevens" book kind of
| great). I guess there are not many more options out there I'm
| afraid.
| ricochet11 wrote:
| Ben Edgingtons notes are good, its a work in progress but
| the anotated spec section i found interesting :
| https://eth2book.info/altair/
|
| other than that https://ethereum-magicians.org/ and github.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| I may be able to recommend other resources if you tell me
| what "kind" of docs you are looking for. Maybe an example
| from another field?
| lmarcos wrote:
| Perhaps it's due to my ignorance in the field or perhaps
| it's because the field is pretty young: I would like to
| read something from the Linus Torvalds/Brian
| Kernighan/Richard Stevens of the crypto world.
| creatonez wrote:
| I wouldn't say Vitalik Buterin is _anywhere near_ as
| legendary as the names you dropped, but he 's the closest
| to what you described, in terms of being as close as
| possible to the underlying tech rather than just being
| associated with the hype train (and scam train) riding on
| top of it.
|
| Vitalik's original Ethereum whitepaper, updated to be
| relevant in 2022 - https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
|
| Vitalik's blog - https://vitalik.ca/
| jlokier wrote:
| In that case I suggest https://vitalik.ca/ and dip into
| articles with titles that appeal to you.
|
| He covers a range from high level opinion essays to
| (imho) good technical simplified explanations of the
| special kinds of low-level cryptography. I've personally
| found the articles on how SNARKs and STARKs work very
| helpful.
|
| Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract"
| blockchains which link general program execution with
| transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the
| other "money only" blockchains.
|
| I also suggest https://ethereum-magicians.org/ if you
| want to get more into the guts of protocol discussions or
| just see them, and the Eth R&D discord.
| AgentME wrote:
| >Note that Ethereum and the other "smart contract"
| blockchains which link general program execution with
| transactions, are very different from Bitcoin and the
| other "money only" blockchains.
|
| Smart contract blockchains like Ethereum have a lot that
| classic blockchains like Bitcoin don't have, but all of
| the lessons of classic blockchains are relevant to
| Ethereum. The original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi is
| still a strong introduction to the goals and basics of
| cryptocurrency; understanding the goals of Bitcoin and
| the idea of solving double-spending in a decentralized
| manner is critical to understanding cryptocurrency. (But
| anyway after reading the Bitcoin whitepaper, just move on
| to reading docs about other projects like Ethereum.
| There's little interesting to Bitcoin beyond its initial
| invention.)
| 0xrips wrote:
| the closest you'll get to that is probably vitalik
| buterin's upcoming book "proof of stake: the making of
| ethereum and the philosophy of blockchains"
| v64 wrote:
| Vitalik has a book coming out at the end of this month
| which includes many of his blog posts and explains the
| narrative from Ethereum's creation to the work on the
| Merge: https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Stake-Ethereum-
| Philosophy-Block...
| lloppal wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
| im3w1l wrote:
| Here's your executive summary. Proof of stake...
| is much cheaper - less inflation. is more environmentally
| friendly. with PoS, only people who already own ethereum
| can mine. Rich get richer. has less desirable consensus
| properties. Many people keep coins on a handful of
| exchanges - now those will control the network.
| Nothing-at-stake attack.
| staringback wrote:
| You have no idea what you're saying
| silisili wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being
| ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value.
| I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is
| interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those
| criteria -to me-.
|
| That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it
| will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than
| crypto. Guess we'll see.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Not sure your logic makes sense, you rather keep being
| ignorant about a topic you dislike and feel so secure about
| saying it has no value. I would take your beliefs with grain
| of salt.
| fallat wrote:
| 100% this. They're basically saying "I know nothing about
| it, but from afar it looks disgusting."
| rkangel wrote:
| I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement
| for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I
| don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a
| niche position in the long term.
|
| The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed
| consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of
| applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing
| handover of shipping containers in ports
| (https://www.maersk.com/apa-tradelens). This is an
| international problem with a lot of it happening in countries
| with a lot of corruption (i.e. you can't rely on legal
| mechanism). Not being able to forge who is responsible for
| which container eliminates a lot of problems.
|
| Ethereum does something even more interesting, which is that
| the network can agree on the result of computations (these
| are called dapps for "distributed apps"). These can be used
| to implement simple "smart contracts" for financial purposes
| but they have a much broader applications. To some extent I'm
| slightly underwhelmed by the things people are doing with
| them, but the potential is enormous.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I am still waiting for a compelling argument why
| distributed consensus about me buying some bread this
| morning is important. What does it gain that mere non-
| repudiation doesn't?
| wpietri wrote:
| I've been looking for years, and aside from
| cryptocurrencies, I can't find a single practical use for
| blockchains that couldn't be done better with more boring
| technologies.
|
| The Maersk thing is a fine example. It's one company. They
| already have the trust relationships and legal power that
| make distributed-consensus approaches unnecessary. That
| "blockchain" is involved makes no practical difference. It
| was a shiny bauble that got a lot of consulting hours for
| IBM, and surely helped getting the project approved because
| Maersk execs were seeing "blockchain" in the news a lot
| when it was kicked off.
| gbersac wrote:
| I'm on the opposite side of yours. I believe that
| blockchain has a bright future as a currency, but not in
| logistic. Blockchain money is great because its inflation
| is very predictable, everyone can use it without permission
| (versus the slow banking system). I don't believe in
| blockchain in logistic because database corruption has
| never been an issue, the problem has always been that
| people did not insert any data or corrupted data in the
| database. Blockchain only insure that the database won't be
| corrupted (not that the data it uses are correct), so it
| doesn't solve the main issue of logistic.
| joppy wrote:
| The slow banking system? Don't crypto transactions (on
| bitcoin or ethereum) take 5-10 minutes to complete,
| whereas I can tap my credit card to make a transaction
| more or less instantly?
| [deleted]
| zeven7 wrote:
| A transaction on the Bitcoin base layer takes 10 minutes
| to be confirmed once. There is second layer tech
| available to allow faster transactions (Lightning).
|
| A transaction on the Ethereum base layer takes _12
| seconds_ to be confirmed once. There is a vast variety of
| second layer tech available to allow faster transactions.
|
| There are very different amounts of risk associated with
| accepting a transaction on the base layer of Bitcoin vs
| Ethereum after n blocks. For example, Coinbase accepts
| Bitcoin deposits after 3 confirmations (30 minutes) and
| Ethereum deposits after 35 confirmations (7 minutes).
|
| Compare to traditional banking: Coinbase accepts ACH
| deposits instantly (up to a limit) and wires of any size
| can take 24 hours.
| oblio wrote:
| SEPA transfers are instant.
|
| Secondly, is Bitcoin + Lightning in combo decentralized
| in practice?
| zeven7 wrote:
| > Secondly, is Bitcoin + Lightning in combo decentralized
| in practice?
|
| I don't know. I'm much more interested in Ethereum,
| personally.
| [deleted]
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Time to transaction finality in Crypto vs Banking:
|
| Solana: 0.12 seconds
|
| Bitcoin: 1.2 seconds (on Lightning)
|
| Ethereum: 12.0 seconds
|
| Banking System: ~30 days (2 hours to 5 days for usable
| funds)
|
| Payment Card Industry: 180 days (2 seconds to a few
| minutes for usable funds)
| kosolam wrote:
| Tx finality is immediate in banks, payment cards and
| blockchains in the same manner. The difference is in
| network finality. Network finality in Eth2 is around 15
| minutes.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The first problem that cryptocurrency solves is, how can to
| securely make transactions without giving away our secrets
| such as critical account numbers. It accomplishes this using
| cryptographic signatures.
|
| Other systems that do not use cryptography and instead often
| rely on trust in exchanging critical secrets, such as how the
| banking system generally works, are outdated.
| lxgr wrote:
| > to securely make transactions without giving away our
| secrets such as critical account numbers
|
| This describes any "push" payment system where you instruct
| your bank, service provider, wallet, device etc. to
| transfer funds, rather than providing the payee with your
| information, as well as any pull-based system with
| additional verification (such as 3DS and PIN-based payment
| cards), and isn't unique to crypto at all.
| AgentME wrote:
| I'm a fan of cryptocurrency but I don't think this is a
| great description of it. Its primary goal is finding a way
| to make transactions work, given that you don't want to
| involve a central authority. Cryptocurrency works the way
| it works specifically because of that desire to work
| without a central authority. It's perfectly possible to
| create payment systems involving cryptographic signatures
| involving a central authority (with the downsides a central
| authority involves).
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically
| because of that desire to work without a central
| authority.
|
| The word _works_ is doing a lot of work there. Every
| compromise, hack, scam, theft, and weird "oops I sent
| the crypto to an address that doesn't exist and now it's
| gone forever" incident _screams_ for central authority.
| Even what we call Ethereum is a rage-quit to pretend the
| DAO thing didn 't happen.
| [deleted]
| silisili wrote:
| There are a plethora of transfer systems in the banking
| world that do the same, assuming you are talking about ACH
| info. Venmo, Cashapp, Paypal et al.
|
| You could argue the intermediary knows the info, but most
| crypto buyers also use an intermediary.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Venmo, cashapp, and PayPal all have geographic
| restrictions (only one of those works where I live), and
| also pretty shit reputations - PayPal routinely just
| dicks its users and freezes their funds indefinitely.
|
| Crypto doesn't give a shit about borders, there's no
| intermediary who can freeze your assets (unless you
| decide to leave them on am exchange), etc.
| Melchori wrote:
| This is not a new feature of crypto.
|
| It's ignorance.
|
| You can easily do that with other tech.
|
| Crypto right now is just to new to have been properly
| regulated yet.
|
| And while you are true that you can run your own wallet,
| you are depending on the decentralized network, you do
| need a certain amount of stabity and you need to make
| sure you can recover and keep your wallet.
|
| Enough people demonstrated at least with the last point
| and millions lost in locked away wallets that there are
| still fundamental problems.
| SamPatt wrote:
| You cannot easily make payments to or from certain
| places, or based on certain activities, with the dominant
| payment technologies.
|
| Yes, this is due to regulations, but it's also due to the
| centralized nature of the technology which requires
| permission to use.
|
| Even when more regulation is forced onto
| cryptocurrencies, the architecture will always be
| permissionless, as it's a decentralized network. That is
| a fundamental difference.
| Melchori wrote:
| You can't do that with crypto either.
|
| Because you actually need to convert your Fiat into
| crypto first.
|
| The current limitations are real and the theoretical
| possibility is equally good of what currently exist: a
| black market.
|
| In Iran everyone took euros or exchanged them on the
| spot. Even when the currency shop was closed people were
| waiting outside for us
| [deleted]
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Umm can't I do the same via paypal, without giving away my
| password? What feature does cryptography give me here?
| yellowapple wrote:
| You might want to ask the folks behind Flipper Zero how
| relying on PayPal worked out for them:
| https://www.dailydot.com/debug/flipper-zero-paypal/
| egeozcan wrote:
| How can you do any transactions at all without trusted
| intermediaries? You have to trust government, banks,
| paypal... something.
|
| Or you can start trusting the individuals at the other
| side of the transaction. Perhaps these folks who do not
| have experience can also benefit from your exp... Oh
| wait, you've become an intermediary?
|
| Cryptocurrency is just an asset that you can sell nearly
| everywhere in the world. But it depends on electricity,
| is volatile in value, and has long transaction times.
| It's just an inferior cash, except the fact that it's not
| physical so border control can't take it away from you.
| If you are optimizing for that... Maybe there can be a
| simpler solution? Buy art shares? I don't know.
| grog454 wrote:
| > You have to trust government, banks, paypal...
| something.
|
| In the case of crypto you're trusting that an adversary
| won't be able to control 50% of the computation power on
| the network for a substantial amount of time (and
| cryptographic theories, but you're trusting those
| whenever you use the internet anyway). Generally you're
| not even trusting the other party.
|
| Yes, it depends on electricity, but so does 95%+ of the
| modern economy.
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2003-blackout-
| fiv...
| egeozcan wrote:
| You trust in the sense that you will get the
| services/products that you paid for.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Except you don't even need to completely trust them like
| you are probably thinking of.
|
| Depending on the level of trust you are willing to give
| the other party, you could use one of many automated
| eskrow services (that kick back to a human when one or
| both parties dispute the transaction), or on the other
| end of the spectrum, you can have a mostly automated
| smart contract with built in refund mechanisms where all
| of the rules of the transaction are declared upfront.
|
| At the end of the day, reducing the number of parties you
| need to trust for a transaction to succeed is a strictly
| better outcome than the status quo (or expanding the
| number of parties that need to be trusted).
| egeozcan wrote:
| > you could use one of many automated eskrow services
| (that kick back to a human when one or both parties
| dispute the transaction)
|
| How do you think that would be better than paypal, ebay,
| or anything else? Do you think people who use
| cryptocurrency escrow services have less problems than
| people who use anything else?
|
| I just searched and the first service I found had already
| exited the business after stealing the coins of many
| people: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1260582.0
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Paypal arbitrarily suspends accounts and steals funds, so
| yes... practically anything is better than that. They
| don't discriminate by size, as even I have been digitally
| mugged by that mob. Most recently they have given Flipper
| Zero the same run-about. [1]
|
| Ebay isn't a payment provider, as far as I'm aware, so
| I'm not sure why they are relevant. They have certainly
| focused on the digital to physical mapping, but are
| overall rife with buyer and seller scams and they aren't
| really offering a solution beyond their easily gamed
| reputation system.
|
| >Do you think people who use cryptocurrency escrow
| services have less problems than people who use anything
| else?
|
| Typically, yes, the people using escrow have less problem
| by virtue of there being far less reports within the
| crypto community of actual escrow services being bad
| actors.
|
| You brought up a random company from 2015 that happened
| to have eskrom in its name. That was not an eskrow
| service in the crypto sense of the word. If you are
| sending your crypto to a stranger and hoping they do the
| right thing, it's no eskrow. The typical eskrow setup
| will be some kind of multi-sig wallet (e.g. 2 of 3
| signature) where the buyer, seller and eskrow service
| provider have a signature each, and two are required to
| release the funds.
|
| Note: Eskrow systems are the very lowest tier of "zero-
| trust" when dealing with services or physical goods. It's
| a sliding scale of effort versus security, where a smart
| contract would be the "gold standard", and the eskrow is
| "better than nothing".
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610
| 465281
| egeozcan wrote:
| PayPal probably has many orders of magnitude more
| customers than any escrow service could imaginably have.
|
| Also, you are still trusting humans, or a company as a
| trusted intermediary (and in the case of escrow services,
| most likely with no course of legal action if things go
| wrong). My argument still stands.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Why are you fixated on the lowest tier of "zero-trust",
| that is eskrow? And why does the number of people using a
| service or technology have to match what Paypal clears to
| be an improvement on the status quo? At the end of the
| day, we were talking about the concept of trust, and it
| seems pretty straight forward to me that lowering the
| number of parties involved in a transaction reduces the
| number of parties that need to be trusted.
|
| Paypal doesn't even appear on the radar (even if you
| overlook their outright predatory and scummy behaviour)
| when there is the option to outright remove the payment
| provider from the equation and reduce the number of
| involved parties by one, while still allowing for a
| third-party (a human for eskrow, or an oracle with human
| fallback for a smart contract) to arbitrate if necessary
| if one or both parties are malicious.
|
| Also who says there is no legal action if it goes wrong?
| It's better to set things up such that things can't go
| wrong, but if they do, the rule of law doesn't cease to
| exist just because it happened online.
|
| I haven't seen a coherent argument yet, but maybe I'm
| missing something...
| egeozcan wrote:
| > it seems pretty straight forward to me that lowering
| the number of parties involved in a transaction reduces
| the number of parties that need to be trusted
|
| It increases how much you have to trust them. You can
| also build the same escrow system with anything. You
| don't need cryptocurrency for that.
|
| > the rule of law doesn't cease to exist just because it
| happened online
|
| Is there any legible escrow businesses for
| cryptocurrencies? If yes, how are they "less amount of
| parties involved" in comparison to Paypal?
|
| > I haven't seen a coherent argument yet, but maybe I'm
| missing something...
|
| Maybe you don't want to?
| 8note wrote:
| I didn't initiate or authorize the transaction though,
| how am I to decide what the rules of transaction are when
| somebody else set up the transaction and authorized it?
|
| The trust is that the bank recognizes when a transaction
| looks off, and holds it/notifies me, without my
| involvement
| irae wrote:
| In otehr words: You have "faith" that cryptocurrencies are a
| fad, right? Some people spent dozens, maybe hundreds of hours
| understanding everything behind it, and those people
| colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it is today. You can
| continue to have "faith" in this having no value. But if
| everyone around you start using Bitcoin, would you rather
| switch your faith to what the others around you believe? Or
| you rather chase knowledge of why this is the case?
| xenospn wrote:
| I can promise you that 99.9% of the people trading bitcoin
| have zero understanding about the underlying technology.
|
| I don't need to understand how an internal combustion
| engine works to know cars are not a fad. Same way I don't
| need to know how to reverse-engineer a distributed ledger
| system to know crypto is.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >and those people colectivelly made Bitcoin worth what it
| is today
|
| No, rampant speculation made that.
| swalsh wrote:
| I think there are a few common misconceptions that make
| people not understand the real value crypto is bringing to
| the table.
|
| Many in tech look at crypto, and blockchain specifically as
| if it is another technicalogical capability they can
| integrate into their enterprise architecture. From that
| perspective blockchain in general doesn't really make sense.
| As cool as the composability of tokens and smart contracts
| are, that's not a capability only blockchain can deliver (in
| fact that's not the blockchain at all... that's the standards
| that have been built on top of it).
|
| Others in tech look at blockchain as a currency to replace
| traditional currencies issued by governments. A reasonable
| world view, as that's kind of how it's been sold for a very
| long time, but it's pretty clear to me at least, that's not
| really possible. The US Gov is always going to require taxes
| to be paid for in dollars. The US, EU, China... everyone,
| they're not going to give up monetary sovereignty.
|
| So what does crypto provide then? In my opinion, the sole
| thing the blockchain provides, when sufficiently
| decentralized is digital sovereignty... but more importantly
| an unlimited amount of digital sovereignties. Opt-in self
| governing communities that can decide for themselves what's
| fair. An enforcable user bill of rights that's global in
| nature. This doesn't replace the real-world sovereign
| nations, it's like a new layer in the digital world for
| digital applications. I've personally come to realization
| that Crypto doesn't really work well in the physical world.
| But in the digital world, it's proving quite adept...
|
| Technology is still evolving, ETH2 is a huge leap forward...
| and glad to see it. Personally, I'm still attached to the
| Avalanche community because I personally think the technology
| is still superior. But the technology is kind of not the
| important part. It kind of just needs a minimunm spec, and
| then it's not important. It's how you treat the users who are
| using the stuff built on top of the technology. Libertarians
| were the first to understand that (though i'd argue they fail
| to understand that need to have a foreign policy, and real
| world governments are legitimate trading partners that you
| need to negotiate with. Their insistence on idelogical purity
| will be their undoing) But crypto is big enough for all kind
| of communities to crop up, and you can choose to join or not.
|
| That's ultimately the thing, any app you can build in Web 3,
| you can replicate in Web 2 with a single server. But in Web3,
| the users can own it, and they can decide for themselves how
| to govern themselves. That's the value. We live in feudal
| system, a world dominated by Web 2 companies. Web3 in my
| opinion is the way we can build a diverse economic ecosystem
| of free (as in speech, not beer) digital services.
|
| One thing I Think a lot about... today, all people in crypto
| are dual citizens. They have citizenship in their geogrpahic
| world, and in the digital world. But there's a future where
| AI can be pure digital citizens (citizens who have needs,
| such as compute, and they will trade their AI skills for that
| compute). I view a lot of the debate around crypto as a
| debate about foreign policy, and that gets really interesting
| when it's AI on the other end.... maybe a free AI :D
| Yizahi wrote:
| Decentralised self governing communities probably can't
| function as imagined or advertised.
|
| First problem is that the owner(s) of majority of voting
| tokens can unilaterally decide anything in the community.
| Because they work on "winner takes it all" principle. This
| means they are not self governing (because minority stakers
| are effectively excluded from any governing), and they are
| not decentralised.
|
| Second problem is that there are no "people"/"humans" in
| the token infrastructure, there are only wallets. And there
| is no public mapping between wallets and humans (unless
| they expose themselves). This leads to the ability of
| "oligarchs" who own the majority of tokens (see problem #1)
| to obfuscate their existence. Creators of the community
| will false advertise that "oh no, we have no majority
| stakers, here people can truly decide anything by voting",
| but in reality there can be majority staker who owns
| majority of voting tokens, just spread out across the
| several wallets.
|
| Basically these DAOs are recreating feudal fiefdoms in the
| digital realm but obfuscated by lies or omissions of
| information.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Your core assumption isn't true - you don't need to have
| 1 token 1 vote, communities can create literally any
| voting procedure they like. Including NFT based voting,
| multiple governance houses like optimism, quadratic
| voting like Gitcoin.
| Yizahi wrote:
| That changes nothing until wallets != humans. You can
| have own multiple NFTs by the same person. So the
| organisation is either oligarchy or not private.
| silisili wrote:
| Thanks for the well thought out response.
|
| Perhaps my biggest issue then is I'm not all in on the
| purely digital world that you describe and admit doesn't
| really exist, yet. That is to say, my plumber doesn't care
| about any of this and just wants cash. In the future, that
| can and probably will change, of course.
|
| But today, in our current world, very few industries and
| virtually no blue collar industries accept such currency.
|
| So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert
| coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency.
| Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits.
| But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has
| any real value. There are no armies or economies validating
| it.
|
| I think in simple terms, perhaps I'm a luddite. If someone,
| say completely disconnected from modern conveniences, were
| selling an item, I could perhaps trade physical goods for
| it. Or perhaps shiny metals, and explain why they're
| valuable(assuming they didn't know). Or explain dollars,
| and the guarantee behind them. How would you sell them on
| cryptocoins having value? The tech doesn't matter a ton
| here to a person, so onto the value. Why are bitcoins worth
| more than say, beanie babies of yore? Both seem to be run
| purely on speculation, at this point.
|
| Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have
| faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our
| awful inflation). If someone gave me 10k in bitcoins, I
| have zero faith it would be worth anything tomorrow.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| I don't really agree with the original post and I don't
| buy into the "purely digital world" argument. I'm excited
| about crypto for different reasons. But a few thoughts:
|
| > So then the question becomes, what is the value of
| <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or
| efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk
| tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince
| me that it has any real value. There are no armies or
| economies validating it.
|
| Why are stocks without dividends worth anything?
| Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as
| well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which
| provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real
| value"?
|
| > Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I
| have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring
| our awful inflation)
|
| 10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an
| example of why people care. You only trust your cash
| because you trust the US government, which may be
| reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't
| trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0].
| Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we
| have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're
| no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad,
| you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like
| this has happened before, in many countries. And you
| can't do anything about it other than watching your
| savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A
| government-independent monetary ecosystem. Nobody can
| lock you out. I trust the "Ethereum government" more than
| most centralized governments due to the transparency,
| global footprint, and aligned incentives. I can hold my
| savings in a USD-backed stablecoin as long as I believe
| in the US government's monetary policy. If that changes,
| I can swap into something else in a matter of seconds,
| and I don't need permission from any government to do so.
|
| My experience has been that the value people see in
| crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much
| they believe in their government and whether they have
| experienced governments being malicious due to misaligned
| incentives. Most middle-aged people in the US don't fall
| into this category - they have never experienced war or
| malicious governments because they were lucky being born
| at just the right time and place and enjoyed nothing but
| prosperity. Convincing them about crypto is hard.
|
| [0] https://devonzuegel.com/post/inside-argentina-s-
| currency-exc...
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| >My experience has been that the value people see in
| crypto is directly inversely proportional to how much
| they believe in their government
|
| That's an interesting thesis and 'feels' true, but I have
| a hard time reconciling HN's (seeming) indie ethos with
| it's cryptoskepticism if that's the overriding factor.
| Have you any theories to explain the seeming disconnect?
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| I don't think HN can be considered indie these days. It
| was 10+ years ago. Now it's as mainstream as it gets. You
| rarely see something here that's not an echo chamber or
| the same as mainstream tech media. Just a result a of
| tech/startups being a lot more mainstream now than they
| were 15 years ago when HN launched.
|
| I think many of the more "indie communities" are now
| assembling in Discord, subreddits, etc.
|
| I'm also somewhat surprised at the extreme crypto hate on
| HN, but I'd attribute that to demographics. I do think
| that quite a large number of HN users are middle-aged
| Americans significantly above middle class. They probably
| started using it when they were early 20s interested in
| tech/startups and YC, which means they're now ~35-40 and
| have probably made a decent amount of money in tech. And
| that demographic doesn't really benefit from crypto for
| the reasons above...
| swalsh wrote:
| > purely digital world
|
| The world doesn't need to be purely digital, and crypto
| doesn't need to be the entire worlds economy. In fact, my
| argument is that it's NOT. It's something seperate, and
| unique and new. It's not a replacement for the economy,
| it's an addition to it. Though i'm sure a plumber could
| find a useful digital service hosted in crypto... i'd
| argue crypto isn't for plumbers. Not their plumbing
| business at least.
|
| Imagine a git + smart contract service (this doesn't
| really exist today, and it's my side project i'm trying
| to build) which is integrated with a hosting service like
| Akash (cosmos). You can build new digital
| services/games/worlds that are governed in a
| decentralized way. You could build a new Facebook for
| example. The difference here, are changes are voted on by
| the owners of the token. I'm not even sure the token
| would be worth a whole lot monetarily (depends how the
| owners). But as a user, how much is having control over
| the social media you use daily worth? To me, A lot.
|
| Everything in crypto is open source, but unlike the open
| source world today, crypto provides a mechanism and
| culture to pay contributors. So a lot of crypto
| applications are designed to capture that value in a
| communial way to pay people (or bots) for their work. The
| value of the crypto is access to these services. It's no
| different from the value our digital economy today
| provides. Just governed differently. Instead of Zuck
| controlling the digital service, the users can control
| the digital service.
| silisili wrote:
| But why/how? Online services today already saw that
| nobody wants to pay. That explains the fast death of
| journalism, news sites, etc. That also explains why
| scummy ads currently act as the financier to most sites.
|
| Given that people won't pay when it's easy, why would
| they suddenly start paying when the barrier of converting
| cash to crypto is added on top?
|
| Perhaps I'm misunderstanding and you're instead referring
| to actual ownership of said services. How does that
| differ from written agreements or stocks today?
|
| What you may be describing seems similar to how Brave
| sees the world. I respect that and love the product, but
| don't see it as a reality.
| swalsh wrote:
| "How does that differ from written agreements or stocks
| today" I think of it more like a PTA organization than a
| stock and a corporation. The goal of a stock is to create
| a profit stream for the owners. The goal of a crypto
| service is to build a useful utility for the owners.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| The obvious difference is it's permissionless and global
| - this may surprise a lot of US citizens on this site but
| it's actually _really_ hard to buy and hold shares in US
| companies today even in many developed countries, let
| alone the developing world.
|
| NFT projects have demonstrated new forms of monetization
| that don't need ads or all users to pay, we can now
| experiment with these now that we have a value layer for
| the internet.
| CMCDragonkai wrote:
| Nice comment. That's basically the same conclusion I came
| to as well. Crypto's real impact is political-economical.
| The tech doesn't matter too much. The whole point is that
| users get to own a portion of the systems they interact
| with.
| [deleted]
| Melchori wrote:
| So digital like nft?
|
| I'm waiting for a good relevant use Case.
|
| Haven't found one yet which is purely digital.
| unionpivo wrote:
| That's what peeked my interest in crypto in the first
| place, and is also the reason I am no longer on that
| bandwagon.
|
| Because you don't really own it in web3 either. Until
| normal people get comfortable with self hosting their own
| stuff there will always be gate keepers and places where
| governments can apply pressure.
|
| You don't really own your crypto coins unless you have your
| own wallet on your own hardware (with proper backups as
| well). And for most normal people even just that is too
| much.
|
| And we are rapidly approaching a point where we don't
| really even own our hardware any more.
|
| And everything else, that is build on top of that needs to
| run on top of some machine somewhere and unless you own it,
| you can't really rely on it. It's all encrypted so they
| can't steel from you (unless bugs), but they can also shut
| it down. Sure there are plenty(and jet still not enough) of
| nodes on ipfs system now. But many someone's need to run
| them and it's always possible that people will loose
| interest or economies will change and number of nodes goes
| down enough that it becomes practically unusable.
|
| Same problem is with much of the other web3 stack. With few
| companies controlling much of the developers/stack and
| infrastructure needed.
|
| Sure it's all open source and distributed, but even
| nowadays in early stages, before the masses come in, we are
| talking about lot of infrastructure needed to run
| everything.
|
| And right now there are VC's putting billions in
| investments in this space, so having lots of infrastructure
| for "free" seems like it works. But sooner or later this
| people will want their money back, with interest, and
| regular people will be even more screwed, because this is
| completely unregulated (which is why VC's love it so much )
| as a design principle.
|
| On the other hand if you are technical enough to be able to
| self host your own stuff, boring old federated systems,
| like smtp, jabber , matrix, ... are a lot easier, cheaper,
| with a lot less moving part - easier to administer etc.
|
| I am all for federated content and people owning their own
| digital features in their own hands and I think crypto
| chains are a distraction/overcomplication at best and could
| possibly be a trap for ultimate corporate walled gardens.
|
| So my focus is on boring old self hosted federated
| services.
| swalsh wrote:
| "You don't really own your crypto coins unless you have
| your own wallet on your own hardware"
|
| Well, that's the thing about freedom. It's a pretty big
| responsibility. You can't offload the responsibility and
| still be free. True in the real world, and true in
| crypto.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| That seems like a huge obstacle to your vision reaching
| critical mass. The last thing your everyday person wants
| is more responsibility.
| swalsh wrote:
| Frankly, I'm not interested in "critical mass" whatever
| that means. I want the benefits of free (as in speech not
| beer) digital products and services. I don't need a
| critical mass of the population to do that. Bitcoiners
| talk about critical mass adoption because they want to
| replace the existing system. I view crypto as in addition
| to it, not instead of it.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Well, if there isn't much adoption, there likely won't be
| many products and services for you to use. You may be
| fine with that, but it's not necessarily congruent with
| the enormous amount of hype this whole experiment has
| received in the last decade or so.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Do you own a internet provider? DNS servers? Chip
| manufacturer? Do you grow your own crops?
|
| You always need to rely on third parties for finance
| (even if you manage your own crypto wallet) and for other
| stuff in life.
| cinquemb wrote:
| Agree wrt avalanche, ava labs however... would be great if
| people could do some kind of pow to the decide to pos with
| avalanche tech, would have been better than current
| distribution of supply of validators and where those
| machines are running (like +70% on aws, ovh, etc..., though
| probably would have taken longer to grow)... which i wonder
| about what will it look like for eth now.
| lawn wrote:
| Then I recommend the book "Why Cryptocurrencies?" That focus
| on use-cases of crypto.
|
| https://whycryptocurrencies.com/
| dmihal wrote:
| You should check out the Zero Knowledge podcast
| (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)
|
| It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's
| focused around the advanced technology that makes up the
| ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party
| computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new
| blockchain programming languages, etc).
|
| Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside,
| some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the
| technical nature.
| ilaksh wrote:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800070.802212 Probabilistic
| Encryption & How To Play Mental Poker Keeping Secret All
| Partial Information
|
| https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-...
| Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies
|
| http://people.csail.mit.edu/silvio/Selected%20Scientific%20P...
| A DIGITAL SIGNATURE SCHEME SECURE AGAINST ADAPTIVE CHOSEN-
| MESSAGE ATTACKS*
| gjs278 wrote:
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Really? I feel like the article explained most of the terms.
|
| I remember having a similar feeling when NFTs were getting big.
| It turned out that I did understand the terms, there just
| wasn't enough actually _there_ , triggering a feeling that I
| must have been missing something despite my eyes telling me the
| emperor has no clothes.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is nothing new in cryptocurrency. The only real
| difference is the ability to flout the law. Having escape
| hatches is nice but glorifying the escape hatch of the week
| is odd.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Given your background, you likely already understand all the
| individual components of how a blockchain like Ethereum
| functions, just disparately or in different contexts.
|
| I'd recommend just taking look at the documentation / code.
|
| Here's some sample ones:
|
| Ethereum - https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/
|
| Solana - https://docs.solana.com/cluster/synchronization
| baby wrote:
| I've started a podcast exactly for people like you:
| https://cryptologie.net/article/567/im-launching-a-podcast-t...
|
| They are 20min episodes that build up to explain the
| foundations of cryptocurrencies.
|
| If you have any suggestions for future episode let me know. I'm
| thinking of spending a bit more episodes on Bitcoin to talk
| about bitcoin scripts, layer 2 apps, UTXOs, etc. Before talking
| about ethereum
| cowtools wrote:
| Here is a good video that basically explains everything:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
|
| This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can
| have a "currency" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users
| simply sign "transactions". The problem is that you need a
| central authority to confirm the order of transactions,
| otherwise the recipient of a "transaction" will not know if the
| funds associated with that transaction have already been spent
| to someone else ("double spending"). You can solve this using
| hashcash to make the transaction order hard to reverse-
| creating a "proof-of-work" by doing something that is easy to
| verify but hard to determine (like reversing a hash function).
| Another method is "proof-of-stake" wherein transaction order is
| not signed by a central authority but instead general users
| that are guided by some internal incentive structure.
|
| Cryptocurrency is often expensive to run or use because a
| cryptocurrency transaction has to be synchronized across the
| entire network of that cryptocurrency, and there are incentive
| structures like fees to prevent people from spamming the
| network.
|
| There is also tech like zero-knowlege-proofs, multisig, etc.
| that can do interesting stuff. But this is the basic concept.
| wruza wrote:
| Is there any research on cryptomoney _with_ central
| authorities, but also with reduced attack surfaces on a whole
| system? E.g. authority may be cryptographically bound in some
| way to only store the database and emit new tokens, but
| cannot spend them because they get freeze-signed by a
| receiver to their wallet. Then when you get a payment you
| check the path of money and algorithmically accept that path
| only. Anyone who accepts a similar subpath is on their own,
| because it _is_ double-spending. Subpaths within few minutes
| self-cancel to prevent instant double-spend.
|
| This is just a vague example, not a working idea. The point
| of it is that the level of security and trustlessness is not
| always required to be absolute. E.g. even with fully-secure
| pow crypto we still have to trust non-crypto claims about
| usdt, [non?]shitcoins, "hot" wallets, and other maybe-not-
| ponzis.
| chpatrick wrote:
| If you have central authorities there's no need to have the
| massive complexity that comes with crypto.
| spiralx wrote:
| Perhaps CBDCs (Central bank digital currencies) are close
| to what you're looking at, the concept being digital money
| issued and verified by a central authority. There's been a
| bunch of research done by the central banks of various
| countries e.g.
|
| https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/digital-currencies
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-
| currency...
| cowtools wrote:
| Yes, see David Chaum's original pre-bitcoin "e-cash" and
| the more recent GNU Taler project: https://taler.net/en/
|
| The problem is that banks won't implement these systems
| unless they're forced to. They seem to benefit from the
| insecurity, surveillance, and bureaucracy of the existing
| system. So we will have to make new banks...
| Zamicol wrote:
| As a cryptocurrency veteran, I consider this to be the most
| concise (1:12 long) explanation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4APcgsRdW6w
| jonasbostoen wrote:
| There is a good course by Tim Roughgarden: Foundations of
| Blockchains
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJGPI0fuFA&list=PLEGCF-
| WLh2...)
| status200 wrote:
| Reading this will get you more informed than 90% of the
| commenters on this particular topic:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| mightyRodri wrote:
| (albeit with some compromises)
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| mightyRodri wrote:
| I will do as the article after that sentence and just stop
| elaborating.
| rblion wrote:
| ELI5 anyone?
| rieTohgh6 wrote:
| No more mining for ETH. And all other crypto together (not
| counting Bitcoin, which uses ASIC) have 20x less daily mining
| reward compared to ETC. That means a lot used GPU cards will
| hit the market, since huge part of pie just disappeared.
| can16358p wrote:
| Ethereum was using an algorithm called "Proof of Work" to
| secure the blockchain's state and it was using huge amount of
| energy as it literally was using hashing power of GPUs to
| verify/generate Ethereum "blocks" (immutable units containing
| transactions) to get Ether as rewards.
|
| The Merge changed this algorithm to "Proof of Stake", killing
| the GPU mining and the energy consumption completely (at least
| for Ethereum) and the new algorithm secures the network by
| giving incentives to Ether stakeholders (anyone can be, by the
| way) to secure the network instead of computing hashes on GPUs.
| This single event reduced world's energy usage by 0.2%
| overnight.
| jlkid225 wrote:
| So Nvidia stock tanking?
| apeace wrote:
| > It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid
|
| So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one
| Finland?
|
| Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some
| power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced
| demand?
|
| Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time
| frame we expect it to become visible?
|
| I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised to not
| see more coverage of that in this article, nor here in the
| comments. Energy efficiency is largely the point of this major
| change. Shouldn't there be graphs of the power grids everywhere
| showing a big drop? Maybe my expectations are just off on that.
| technolo-g wrote:
| This would provide visibility into Texas:
| https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d...
| Perhaps there are other such dashboards around? (Link was from
| HN a while back)
| dogman144 wrote:
| There is a X Moonshot Factory or w/e the google incubator is
| called for unified power grid visibility. It is supposedly hard
| to do.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| No, that is more diffuse.
|
| Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC
| variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and
| should harm people using energy in this way.
|
| But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics
| that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is
| not profitable for alternatives.
| ajross wrote:
| In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount
| of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the
| value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is
| that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a
| functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is)
| will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy
| devoted to it will drop in tandem.
|
| It's also true that there are second order effects, like for
| example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to
| find a new home, which will depress prices for new mining
| hardware for "chains that are hardware-compatible with old
| ETH", and thus probably support their prices a bit.
|
| [1] And do, I think. IIRC there was a stat rolling around a
| few months back showing electrical grid usage dropping due to
| the crypto crash, but can't remember where it was or how
| reliable the source seemed.
|
| [2] Though AFAICT no one is tracking exchange rates for it
| yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to its value.
| shagie wrote:
| > like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH
| needs to find a new home
|
| https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate and
| https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/difficulty
|
| A blockchain compatible with old ETH is old ETH... the
| classic one.
| teawrecks wrote:
| > The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is
| exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined.
|
| That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional
| to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic
| value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In
| reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because
| they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.
| Edman274 wrote:
| Why would they mine it at a loss relative to the market
| when they could just buy it at whatever the current
| market price is, if they think it's going to go up in the
| future?
| teknopaul wrote:
| If nobody mines the coin dies. I can imagine people mine
| to keep coins alive. Probably bounce money between
| wallets for the same reason.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > I can imagine people mine to keep coins alive.
|
| I don't think that's a solid argument. Some coins were
| structured such that there would be a finite supply (21M
| in the case of bitcoin IIRC). The health of a coin seems
| to me to be its transaction volume, and somewhat related
| its ability to be directly exchanged for physical goods
| or services.
|
| So back to a previous user's suggestion: instead of
| buying energy to mine coins at a loss, one could instead
| buy the coins at a lower price which seems on many levels
| to make more sense than to continue mining.
| samatman wrote:
| There's a whole wasteland of people mining to keep coins
| alive. But not very many people. If ten people are
| running one graphics card each, out of nostalgia or just
| in case it catches a rocket to the moon, this is no
| environmental catastrophe, any more than a personal
| Minecraft server is.
| ajross wrote:
| > If nobody mines the coin dies.
|
| Exactly! Which is why we expect the energy expended on
| mining PoWETH to drop to zero as the coin dies due to
| lack of interest, which was the upthread point you were
| arguing against.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I think their argument against this is that while that's
| the logical conclusion, trusting crypto to follow any
| sort of logic is not that reliable.
|
| It's possible to justify reasons to continue. Bad
| reasons. But how many miners care?
| gjs278 wrote:
| synu wrote:
| Wouldn't you have better luck speculating if you just
| used your money to buy the coins directly, instead of
| buying GPUs and then paying more than the cost of the
| coin in electricity to mine it?
| ajross wrote:
| I don't understand your point. If you want to speculate
| on crypto you can hand a credit card to Coinbase at near-
| zero cost, you don't need to buy mining hardware to do
| it. If miners are buying electricity to speculate,
| they're making stupendously bad decisions. They should
| sell that hardware and buy crypto; their leverage will be
| much higher and their costs will be vastly lower.
|
| No, mining is economic activity, not investment. You pay
| stuff to get stuff. Whether you then invest your profits
| in crypto has nothing to do with where you got them.
| teawrecks wrote:
| True, and yet nearly every original bitcoin millionaire
| became one specifically because they decided to mine
| something that was worthless at the time. Sometimes you
| don't have money, but you have a GPU and someone else is
| paying for your electricity. I understand that doesn't
| describe most mining these days, but the point still
| stands: people will speculate at a loss.
| ajross wrote:
| Again, you're confusing "mining" (economic activity that
| produces new coins and fees that happen to be measured in
| BTC) with "investment" (acquiring BTC via any means with
| the intent to hold).
|
| They are not the same concept, in fact they're completely
| orthogonal. You don't mine to get coins for investment,
| because you can get coins much (MUCH!) more cheaply via
| other means. You mine to get income in the present.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is
| exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined
|
| This is a bit trickier. If they have equipment already then
| it changes situation.
|
| Cost of computing hashes includes mostly energy and
| hardware.
|
| As long as it can pay for operating costs, they will
| continue to do this, even if buying electronics for that is
| no longer profitable
|
| (unless selling equipment is more profitable)
| oliwarner wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| With ETH off there's going to be a significant loss of profit
| to be had and people stopping because the expected value of
| mining has gone negative. Store stocks of graphics cards are
| booming. There absolutely will be a reduction in PoW power
| usage globally.
| pkulak wrote:
| Maybe. What are they gonna move to though? If everyone moves
| to some other coin (not Bitcoin, because that's different
| hardware), it'll quickly become unprofitable to mine. They'll
| just sell their hardware, most likely. Hopefully.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Well, there are options. I do not want to point to obvious
| candidates, because I am biased and it could easily be
| misconstrued, but RVN just just saw a decent influx of
| those ETH miners based on recent spike.
|
| Life hates vacuum. Short of outright ban, nothing will
| change in that space.
| dwild wrote:
| > RVN just just saw a decent influx of those ETH miners
| based on recent spike
|
| That influx won't increase the revenue though... more
| miners doesn't produce more coins, it's just more secure.
|
| Considering how thin theses margins can be for miners,
| some will need to stop their production.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I will admit that it is hard for me to make a good
| prediction here. I ridiculous amount of it boils down to
| psychology and perception and not any kind of
| fundamentals. The following statement can be true in some
| instances, but I am not sure if it is true across the
| board.
| razemio wrote:
| 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 this, our new heating system wouldn't be financed yet.
| mnadkvlb wrote:
| You should also go burn entire forests for energy and then
| invest the profits to plant forests to restore what you
| just did.
|
| Dont want to be snarky, but thats the summary of what you
| just said.
| razemio wrote:
| I forgot to mention that I only use solar energy from our
| roof. I updated my comment. Wrote the initial comment in
| a rush. Sorry for that.
|
| So no, I only use overproduction to mine and only a
| fraction of it. Everything else goes back into the grid.
| tbalsam wrote:
| Please keep conversation productive on HN, thank you.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Pointing out the absurdity of someone's position via an
| apt analogy seems productive to me. Certainly more so
| than dismissive cries to hn guidelines.
| zdragnar wrote:
| When someone says
|
| > Dont want to be snarky, but...
|
| it's a bit like saying "no pun intended" right before
| intentionally saying a pun. It is literally easier to
| _just make the point_.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That's good on you. And yet, obviously, not what is
| happening on average with crypto mining.
| razemio wrote:
| You are certainly right. However I am under the
| assumption that you only mine where electricity is cheap.
| If you are not stealing it, there is only nuclear, wind,
| water and sun produced energy left => Miners are kind of
| forced to use environment friendly energy.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's better for the environment if we build expensive
| cables to send that power to areas still emitting CO2,
| instead of selling it cheaply to miners. At least up to
| some pretty large distance.
|
| There's a case to be made for using the spikes of solar
| power to run miners, on a grid dominated by renewables,
| but that requires the economics to work out just right
| with very cheap silicon that can sit idle a big majority
| of the time.
| scoofy wrote:
| Unless your "new heating system" is a euphemism for a gpu
| array, you're being pretty dishonest here.
|
| Mining takes energy that is likely created by fossil fuel,
| that would otherwise be used to some necessary purposes,
| and burns it.
|
| Unless you are generating green energy yourself, you're
| likely hurting the environment.
|
| I'm not saying you need to stop, and I'm not saying mining
| rigs are the end of the world (lord knows at least they
| aren't frivolous airline flights), I'm just saying the
| previous poster isn't being rude... it's a valid point.
| phantomwhiskers wrote:
| I was under the impression that when they said "This is a
| fraction of the amount I put back into the grid", it
| implied that they are generating their own electricity to
| use for this, most likely from solar panels.
|
| This is an assumption though, they could be running a
| large diesel generator for all we know.
| razemio wrote:
| Yes, what you are impling is correct. Forgot to mention
| that we have a 8kw solar system on our roof.
|
| I updated my comment.
| [deleted]
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > Only if the next-best thing is still marginally profitable.
| nostrademons wrote:
| They've actually forked Ethereum to keep the original mined
| version, ETHPoW ($ETHW). They'll keep mining on the original
| PoW chain as long as it remains profitable.
|
| https://blockworks.co/proof-of-work-ethereum-fork-pow-
| rally-...
|
| I'd expect the value of ETHW to crash fairly rapidly, though,
| because there are not many buyers interested in buying into a
| deprecated chain without official support or ecosystem buy-
| in, and lots of sellers who need to sell their mined ETHW to
| fund mining operations. Then we'll see miners shut off and
| leave the network, as the mining rewards can no longer
| support the electricity costs of mining. At some point it
| might get 51%'d, but at that point nobody will care.
| webinvest wrote:
| With the price of ETHW currently at $22.80 and the price of
| ETH at $1500, I can't imagine mining ETHW would even cover
| the electric bill. It's also not clear to me what
| advantages ETHW would over ETC which is about $37 ea.
|
| Previously ETC was often used as a lower cost dev-testing
| server for ETH applications that might not be ready for the
| main-net.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32853080.
| dheera wrote:
| If the PoW markets collapse they'll just invent new PoW
| shitcoins that will go up.
| kenforthewin wrote:
| My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs
| whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is
| not as interchangeable as you're implying.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Depends on the hashing algo -- some make sense for GPUs,
| others not so much.
|
| I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still
| relatively viable for example.
|
| Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to _CPUs_
| , which everyone seems to have forgotten about.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| RandomX is pretty GPU-hostile. If you have a lot of VRAM,
| you could theoretically make it work okay, but I don't
| know of a GPU miner that has any semblance of performance
| (or perf/watt) that is close to a CPU.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| There are a 1000 other coins using GPUs for mining. E.g.
| "Ethereum Classic". Miners will switch to these. There are
| ETH ASICs btw, they just aren't as dominant as BTC AntMiner
| ASICs.
| DennisP wrote:
| Yes but Ethereum accounted for 94% of GPU hashpower. The
| other coins can't absorb all that and stay profitable.
|
| ETH ASICs weren't much better than just getting the
| latest GPU.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| There are lots of other coins that still use GPUs to mine,
| though. I imagine most people who are running profitable
| operations will switch coins. Hopefully the popular coins
| will switch to PoS and the mining operations cease their
| profitability and shut down.
| felipelalli wrote:
| But there are a lot of sh1tcoins that is similar to ETH POW
| and then can be exchanged to the real asset: Bitcoin.
| physicsguy wrote:
| It is only worth it though if the shitcoin is worth more
| than the cost of electricity used to generate it. At the
| moment and for many miners, that just won't be the case.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Most shit pins probably have few miners, and are pretty
| susceptible to market manipulation. I large influx of
| miners across the market could dramatically change the
| price.
|
| Also, many miners are already using software that
| automatically changes their hardware to target whatever
| coin has the most profitability. It's expected that this
| will continue just without ETH
| Frost1x wrote:
| If you're the type of person who poured capital into mining
| hardware and you own it, which you likely do because it's more
| cost effective, you still have all that hardware sitting
| around. You're going to repurpose it to other mining endeavors
| or quickly find a way to try and eek more money out of if,
| because you were already that type of person.
|
| I don't keep up with crypto and mining but until it becomes
| unprofitable or you can't pull money for and start operating in
| the red, you're going to continue consuming similar power.
| knicholes wrote:
| Yeah, I've got 21 3080s/3090s, and I'm still mining (NiceHash
| switched algorithms for me automatically). But I've also
| listed my machines on vast.ai to rent out for deep learning.
| When they're not being used by a client, they're mining
| still. My electricity is super cheap, though $0.0875/kWh.
| That said, it's hardly profitable at all. I'm just
| speculating and breaking even at this point.
| TylerE wrote:
| Power demand varies wildly during the day (Like +/-50%, maybe
| more depending on climate). A 1% change will get lost in the
| noise of "Oh, it's 3 degrees warmer today... HVAC working
| harder"
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output
| as a reaction to reduced demand?
|
| Not likely. We'rein an energy crisis and it just started
| getting cold. So, the opposite.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output
| as a reaction to reduced demand?
|
| No, because ETH mining is/was quite distributed globally, let's
| say across thousands and thousands of power grids. A single
| grid or power station shouldn't be able to notice the
| difference.
|
| Think about it this way: all of a sudden, domestic fridges
| consume 1/100th of electricity, compared to before.
|
| Fridges are 0.1% of average power consumption. Thousands of
| fridges in a given area are powered by the same power station.
| The power station barely notices the ~0.1% reduction in power
| consumption, compared to the day before. Shrugs.
| mrb wrote:
| << _Shouldn 't that be observable somehow?_>>
|
| No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed
| their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or
| ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of
| Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second,
| contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only
| represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity
| consumption: only 0.1%. Yes that can be a "country's worth of
| electricity" but in relative terms, 0.1% would be barely
| visible on charts you might examine.
|
| Also, digiconomist, an often quoted source of Ethereum miner's
| energy consumption statistics, was grossly overestimating the
| figures. The actual consumption was probably around 20-30
| TWh/year instead of the ~80 TWh/year figure they estimated.
| Just look at their chart: it made no sense, for example between
| Sep 2020 and May 2022 Ethereum hashrate grew 5-fold from 200 to
| 1000 TH/s, whereas in that same time-frame digiconomist
| estimated the consumption grew 15-fold from 6 TWh/year to 90
| TWh/year. If anything, hardware has become (a bit) more
| efficient over time, it didn't become 3 times less efficient...
|
| But that's not too surprising, given the author of digiconomist
| has a history of exaggerating his figures, like he did for
| Bitcoin see https://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
| But nowadays his Bitcoin estimate is more in-line with more
| reputable estimates such as Cambridge's https://cbeci.org/ Last
| time I looked he was within +-30%
| anonporridge wrote:
| > First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine
| other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we
| have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms
| moved to ETC over the last 24h.
|
| We'll see if this is maintainable.
|
| Miners can't mine if the reward doesn't cover their costs.
| So, the only way the mining remains sustainable is if these
| tokens rise drastically in value.
|
| It is possible that many miners are huge holders of ETH, in
| which case we may see them massively dump ETH and buy ETC to
| try to invert the price and keep their business going.
| anonporridge wrote:
| The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity
| every year.
|
| Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
|
| An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over
| the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error
| on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
|
| News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of
| electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the
| average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are
| meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while
| Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists
| in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
|
| And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage
| total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from
| transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more
| carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our
| electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar
| and wind.
| elil17 wrote:
| 0.3% is a rounding error if you look at the electricity
| generation of a region, but it's huge if you look at the
| impact it will have over many years. That's 0.3% less of the
| global energy supply that needs to be replaced with nuclear
| or renewables+storage. It's like getting ten free nuclear
| plants.
| oblio wrote:
| 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 imagine.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You don't understand how any of this works, do you?
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a
| common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does
| not scale with the number of users. The transactions per
| second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If
| your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be
| transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.
| ithinkso wrote:
| > or Coinbase
|
| If the transfer was not done on a blockchain but only in
| the database of some company, are you really using any
| new technology?
| jknoepfler wrote:
| No.
| oblio wrote:
| Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of
| large players does not make it decentralized.
| gjs278 wrote:
| manquer wrote:
| Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms
| of free market capitalism.
|
| You cannot have decentralized money without distributed
| wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a
| successful form of socialism ( none have proven
| successful, or looks likely to do so today)
|
| This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with
| wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether
| it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled
| by few .
| staringback wrote:
| > This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with
| wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether
| it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled
| by few .
|
| Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works,
| Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of
| miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting
| them with free money nor can they force anyone else's
| wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private
| key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include
| transactions in your blocks for as long as you are
| controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor
| to include your transaction and it will finalize.
| manquer wrote:
| The technical protections are just paper shields, they
| can be changed if the community has consensus, you can
| refuse to do so and create forks like EthereumPOW but if
| the major exchanges refuse to carry it, you lost access
| to the community and become irrelevant as it happening
| with many Ether forks
|
| People who control 51% or any significant percentage of
| the coins for that matter have no interest in taking over
| the rest, it would crash the market value of the coin,
| and kill any value they hold.
|
| The value of the system is not some inherent residual
| utility of the coin, value is only there if people
| trusted it and stored wealth or used it for transactions,
| any sort of takeover talk like 51% attacks will
| completely destroy that trust so more you own/control
| there is less financial incentive to do this kind of
| attack .
|
| People with capital in the system control and influence
| how the system works and change the rules to suit their
| interests, that is one of the key reasons why Ethereum
| has moved to PoS in the first place, or why transaction
| velocity increases plans in Bitcoin or other coins can
| face stiff opposition from vested parties with
| significant capital which requires high fees to keep
| afloat.
| int_19h wrote:
| How long do the Zapatistas have to be around before we
| consider them to be "proven successful"?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Using the words "centralized" or "decentralized" when
| describing crypto (and probably many other tech things)
| is perhaps frequently the worst oversimplifications one
| can engage in.
|
| I think what you want to discuss when using these words
| is the extent to which it is either likely or possible
| that a small number of players can unduly influence a
| thing, but there are frequently MANY MORE FACTORS at work
| here than "that number." You have to look at how the
| thing is set up, what governance looks like, what
| technical limitations there are, and -- perhaps most
| importantly -- what incentives are there in place for the
| players to do so.
|
| A lot of the "centralization" fears are bad because
| they're the sort of thing, that -- if executed -- would
| destroy the value of the thing to the centralizers
| themselves, and thus they would literally never do it.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| The lightning network is, yes.
| curlftpfs wrote:
| Are zero-knowledge L2 blockchains decentralized?! By
| definition...
| splintercell wrote:
| It's actually a worse situation that bitcoin synergy
| usage scales with its price. So same number of people
| could be using bitcoin but if the price jumps up by 10X,
| then over a period a few months it's energy usage would
| also go up by 10X.
| conductr wrote:
| This is exactly what you'd expect to see with market
| manipulation. It's the pump before the dump. Or less
| cynically, it's just herd mentality seen through data.
| anonporridge wrote:
| > If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use
| Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the
| supermarket
|
| Beyond your misconception that work scales with users
| rather than value, it's also a misconception that bitcoin
| is competing with technologies like Visa and Paypal. It's
| not supposed to be an alternative payment system.
|
| It's competing with gold and sovereign currencies.
|
| Your grandma won't ever use it directly.
|
| Your government might.
| kodah wrote:
| 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
| posting misinformation on this post.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Misinformation, both from proponents and opponents is the
| name of the game in crypto.
|
| It's incredibly difficult to find the truth from either
| side, especially if you're a lay person who doesn't have
| any grasp of how the technology works.
| osrec wrote:
| Given that Visa does around 1,700 TPS, I imagine it's
| probably lower than that.
| e1g wrote:
| "a few thousand transactions per second" is all of
| Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just "a few" and ETH is barely
| "a dozen".
|
| Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data!
| The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000
| transactions per second each.
| azylman wrote:
| I can pretty confidently say that all of Visa+Mastercard
| is way more than a few thousand transactions per second,
| I'm familiar with several companies that push hundreds of
| transactions per second through Visa+Mastercard and
| there's no way they're a significant portion of their
| business.
|
| This article claims Mastercard alone is 5k:
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-
| vs-...
| manquer wrote:
| Imagine we can achieve that throughput with a single
| server without breaking a sweat![1]. The number of
| economic transactions all humans engage everyday
| including cash is perhaps 100x of that: so just in order
| of 500,000 TPS or less that feels quite small to be
| honest.
|
| [1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed
| and have lot of checks and balances and the actual
| transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in
| hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the
| world.
| e1g wrote:
| Capacity/peak vs average tps.
|
| Visa says they process "150 million transactions every
| day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.co
| m/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's
| ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would
| be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still
| fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".
| azylman wrote:
| That doc is from 2013, so it's pretty out of date.
| e1g wrote:
| True. The latest financial report from Visa [1] says
| 164.7B transactions in 2021, or ~5,000 per second. This
| number is 3x larger! Mastercard is slightly smaller, but
| comparable at 140B [2].
|
| [1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx
|
| [2] https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/
| 2022/q2...
| azylman wrote:
| Yup, that's a lot closer to the kind of numbers I would
| have expected. And if you look at peak it's probably at
| least 10k tps for each of them.
| oblio wrote:
| I doubt that for credit cards. Carrefour or pick your
| favorite supermarket chain alone probably generate
| hundreds of transactions per second worldwide during peak
| periods, and there are tens of major supermarket chains
| you've never heard of. Add regular grocery stores,
| cinemas, etc, I'd be really interested in an order of
| magnitude, but at peak times it has to be in the tens of
| thousands if not low hundreds of thousands.
|
| For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know
| they're incredibly slow.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The rate of customers served and the amount who use a
| credit card would filter those down to tiny numbers.
|
| A large coffee shop chain would crush any supermarket in
| volume.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > probably
|
| Do you have any information or just speculation?
| irusensei wrote:
| Comparing visa and Mastercard transactions with Bitcoin
| is something that doesn't make a lot of sense. Do people
| really think visa settles transactions between two
| different bank accounts? Those card transactions can take
| days to settle.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| As a user,this is a feature and a positive.
| consp wrote:
| On the busiest day of the year at peak hour here in the
| Netherlands the debit card transactions (creditcards are
| uncommon) reach just over 700/s. [Search for 'pin
| transacties per seconde' for news items covering this]
|
| Maybe around Christmas it will be in the 10k+
| DennisP wrote:
| Zkrollups on Ethereum can do a couple thousand tx/sec,
| without security compromises. The plan now is to use the
| base layer mainly to support rollups, and use data
| sharding on the base layer to multiply the capacity of
| rollups. That should get it to about 100,000 tx/sec. That
| will be a pretty big change, but not as big as what they
| just did, and they've already got the design mostly
| worked out.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks,
| crooks and marks
|
| Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required
| to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips".
|
| Let's try nuanced criticism please, crypto needs it.
|
| > Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I
| imagine
|
| Quite an imagination! You're _very_ far off, do you have
| any experience in this space?
| oblio wrote:
| > Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is
| required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips"
|
| Thank you, I'm trying to come up with an "anti bullshit
| bingo" since the bullshit bingo from cryptocurrencies has
| already managed to raise tens of billions of dollars.
| Glad you like it.
|
| > Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have
| any experience in this space?
|
| I was trying to be generous since crypto supporters
| always like to point to the newest barely working
| bleeding edge centralized "layer" called lightning or
| thunderbolt or some other electricity derived thing,
| which is supposed to greatly accelerate the glacial rate
| of crypto transactions.
|
| Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at
| the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at
| the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| Crypto needs _nuanced_ criticism. Your "muh
| speculation!" comment is more reddit-level.
|
| >> You're very far off
|
| > I was trying to be generous
|
| Or you just _had no idea_. (Elsewhere you asked "is the
| second layer decentralized?" lending credence to this
| theory.)
| capableweb wrote:
| > Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts
| at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at
| the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
|
| Probably not, but you can neither use USD (or any sort of
| dollar) for that either. In Bucharest you'd use Romanian
| leu (RON) and in Djibouti you'd use Djiboutian franc
| (DJF).
|
| It's all about finding people in the middle, to agree on
| what you both have. In this case, you wouldn't be able to
| buy anything in those locations.
| spread_love wrote:
| What single currency allows you to buy peanuts in
| Bucharest and popcorn in Djibouti right now? (You seem to
| believe the US dollar for some reason)
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Most of my credit cards will without a fee on my side,
| based on my understanding.
|
| Sure, I'm not paying dollars necessarily, but that's how
| it's treated on my side. But I never used my ccs in
| person overseas yet
| burner000 wrote:
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| You can do both of these things in El Salvador right now.
| john_alan wrote:
| But but crypto is bad right?
| adfgiaonio wrote:
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of
| electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the
| average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers
| are meaningless out of context.
|
| With the media tactics out of the picture, you don't think
| this is a huge amount of electricity for crypto alone to have
| been using? Seriously? 0.3% of global electricity use is
| ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
| marksmith2996 wrote:
| Is it just me or does that sound like an insignificant amount?
| Finland has a tiny population, if ETH mining only used that
| much electricity sounds like it it was pretty great to begin
| with.
| webinvest wrote:
| Ethereum miners were using GPUs. AMD, Nvidia, and others. They
| could switch their GPUs from mining ethereum which is about
| $1500 per coin to Ethereum classic but that is only about $40
| per coin. I'd guess that wouldn't be worth continuing with
| since it would be much less than than their electricity bill.
| They could sell their GPUs on EBay or other secondary markets,
| switch to protein folding, cloud-based password cracking, or
| SETI sky scanning. Maybe they use them to play high resolution
| video games like most people. Some smaller percent might notice
| next month when they eventually see that their ETH wallet
| hasn't grown over the next month and Google why that's the
| case.
|
| Crypto mining occurs mainly where electricity is either cheap
| or free. Hydroelectric and Geothermal tends to produce the
| cheapest energy so many large mining outfits were relocated
| next to Hydroelectric and Geothermal plants. Many are in remote
| northern areas where computer cooling costs are less expensive
| too. $HIVE blockchain technologies was running enough ethereum
| miners to mine 7675 ethereum ($11.5 Million dollars worth)
| during the 3 month period ending in June 30, 2022 according to
| their quarterly earnings report. 100% of all of their miners
| used renewable energy sources.
| evolve2k wrote:
| I'm guessing it'll shortly be an excellent time to pick up a
| second hand graphics card.
|
| Which ones we looking for?
| phatfish wrote:
| I guess hydro/geo is better than them firing up a coal fired
| power station to do the job. But all the "mining" nonsense
| just sucks up clean power than could be used in the real
| world which hopefully pushes out more polluting sources.
|
| All to supposedly create artificial scarcity for .jpg files.
|
| At least that illness is over now somewhat. Hopefully all the
| miners go bankrupt.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| In case of Ethereum that wasn't true afaik, a lot of it was
| mined in the US for example. Since Ethereum wasn't all ASICs
| like Bitcoin, there was more decentralization in that sense
| with individuals running miners from home, not always at the
| highest efficiency. Your first paragraph is correct regarding
| profitability for most miners though, based on the numbers
| I've seen.
|
| One thing that I find interesting in the electricity debates
| is that if we took the gaming example and looked at the
| collective consumption of all people playing video games
| around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers of
| power usage and emissions. Yet this isn't ever discussed,
| even though an immutable public ledger like Bitcoin arguably
| has more utility for society than playing games. A lot of HN
| users probably play video games, CO2 emissions are of course
| mainly an issue caused by other people and activities oneself
| doesn't take part in. In Europe, there's also a trend of
| public anger against SUVs and there are groups slashing tires
| of cars, simply based on the shape and ignoring the actual
| energy efficiency. Happened to a friend of mine who couldn't
| understand why they targeted her car and left 30 year old gas
| guzzlers in the same street alone. I think a lot of it has to
| do with emotions more than rational considerations around
| sustainability.
| salawat wrote:
| >One thing that I find interesting in the electricity
| debates is that if we took the gaming example and looked at
| the collective consumption of all people playing video
| games around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers
| of power usage and emissions.
|
| Okay, this is the second time I've seen an argument of the
| form: If you're not okay with the energy consumption of PoW
| cryptocurrencies, you can't be okay with X.
|
| The first time I called it out, was someone pointing at the
| energy consumption of making, transporting, and storing ice
| cream. You are bringing up gaming.
|
| You are advocating for making our children's/descendants
| lives worse, our lives worse, and trying to throw a
| valuable industrial subsidizer of the state of the art in
| many sub-fields of computer science...
|
| ...to defend the least efficient, wasteful,least empowering
| form of computation we've ever discovered. You're taking
| and making hostages of something that has objectively
| wrought joy and innovation to millions of lives.
|
| If you find yourself on one side of an argument, and ice
| cream/video games on the other... I'd recommend having a
| long hard think about how you managed to get there.
| piyh wrote:
| >even though an immutable public ledger like Bitcoin
| arguably has more utility for society than playing games
|
| Video games' secondary impacts to simulation, film making,
| and modeling have and will provide more benefit per energy
| used than any proof of work system ever will.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I think that pattern of tire slashing is rational. Old cars
| will die, and the thing you want to hurt most is the
| incentives for making _more_ oversized vehicles.
|
| If it's a hybrid SUV then it's more complicated, but a gas
| SUV makes sense as a target even with an engine tuned for
| efficiency.
| samatman wrote:
| Stop justifying criminal vandalism. Thanks.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Ethereum Classic's hash rate has gone up by about 25% of
| Ethereum's hashrate, so at least for now it looks like a lot of
| the energy use is just moving as miners point their GPU rigs at
| alt coins. Very curious to see if ETHW, ie Ethereum without the
| merge, maintains a significant amount of hashing power. Another
| thing to watch will be if those alt coins are profitable to
| keep mining or if miners will start selling their rigs.
| apeace wrote:
| 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
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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 global energy usage reduction to happen weeks or
| months after the merge since it will take a while for all
| the altcoins to get overmined.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, with all the new hashers coming from ETH, ETHW still
| has an order of magnitude less activity than ETH had before
| the change. Evidently it didn't absorb all the hardware.
|
| The question if it is visible in the electricity generation
| numbers is still very relevant. (If it is, we will probably
| only be able to see it in an year, when international
| organizations compile their numbers.)
| cliftonk wrote:
| ETHW and ETC will not be economical to mine unless your
| electricity is free
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| If you were a crypto miner and had a pile of GPUs would they be
| powered-off right now? Of course not.
| shabbatt wrote:
| well it certainly won't be used to mine Ethereum anymore and
| if this is the trend we will see more "high volume" coins see
| dropping PoW even further.
|
| Those pile of GPU are going to be a write off since prices
| are dropping and supply issue improves as well.
| mox1 wrote:
| if you are part of a mining pool, its possible they just
| auto-switched you to mine another coin (Ethereum Classic,
| LiteCoin, etc)
| dcolkitt wrote:
| There's virtually no other ASIC resistant (i.e. can use GPU)
| PoW coin left to mine. There's the proof-of-work ETH fork,
| but it only has a market cap less than 2% of than real ETH.
| So even though they juiced the block rewards, miner rewards
| are more than 90% lower, which isn't enough to pay for
| electricity of the previous hash rate.
| qznc wrote:
| ETH classic hash rate went from 50 to nearly 300 Th/s.
| https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate
| samatman wrote:
| Reality will set in eventually. It was just the lazy
| place to point the cards, the pools will get tired of
| wasting that money pretty fast.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Yep. But with that the difficulty is going through the
| roof and earnings are dropping. Ethereum had A LOT of
| hash power while ETC isn't really used by anyone so where
| are the earnings supposed to come from. It's not going to
| be economically viable because the electricity is a fixed
| cost, even if some individual miners are trying it out.
|
| There is a new PoW fork that was started by miners that
| want to continue mining. Some of the work could go there
| assuming it doesn't tank. I personally don't see the
| utility though, doubt it will be able to attract many
| users.
| staringback wrote:
| And the price remained the same, so it is now 6x less
| profitable to mine than before (it was barely profitable
| before this)
| Iolaum wrote:
| What about Monero? Isn't that PoW and asic resistant?
|
| Although irc you need to use a cpu, not a gpu to mine it.
| crowhack wrote:
| True, there are not many (or any) that will be as
| profitable but some still exist such as ergo,
| https://ergoplatform.org/en/get-erg/#Mining .
| xiphias2 wrote:
| My friend sold most of his GPUs a few weeks ago and you can
| see it in GPU prices.
| blihp wrote:
| Turned off is more profitable than running at a loss for
| miners that need to fund their opex by selling what they
| mine.
|
| It looks like it's already happening. After the merge there
| were a number of coins that saw huge spikes in hash rate
| which drove them to absolutely unprofitable levels. A lot of
| that hash rate has since gone elsewhere (most likely offline)
| and it looks like many coins are settling at a level in the
| short term that is breakeven at $0.06-0.08 kWh which many
| (most?) miners can't be profitable at as that is below their
| electric rate.
| josu wrote:
| Yes. At the moment the marginal cost for the average ETH
| miner is higher than the marginal revenue of any GPU minable
| chain.
| bredren wrote:
| Unless you're stealing power.
| ajross wrote:
| It will if you can't mine enough to cover the cost of the
| electricity required to run it, which is true if you want to
| mine BTC with it, for example.
| wpietri wrote:
| Not necessarily. It's true if the person making the
| decision is getting paid directly from the mining. But
| perverse incentives abound in the cryptocurrency space. For
| example, consider Celsius:
|
| https://amycastor.com/2022/09/11/crypto-collapse-celsius-
| voy...
|
| https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/11/crypto-
| colla...
|
| As they thrash around in bankruptcy, they have proposed
| that they will mine their way out of the hole. Will this
| work? I doubt it. But will it let the CEO stay in charge
| for a while longer, taking in more investor money and
| continuing to get paid? Possibly! So actual economic
| efficiency may not matter.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| I think this is potentially the most interesting comment in
| here. If all of those GPUs just flipped to another
| cryptocurrency, global energy reduction would be zero.
| mcherm wrote:
| In the short term, that's true because the GPUs are already
| purchased. In the long run, people will invest in new
| cryptocurrency mining rigs very much in proportion to the
| profitability of running one.
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| Also a great comment. :) Good points on both short- and
| long-term effects.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I find it incredible how many arguments rely on a uniform
| distribution assumption here. There are markets where crypto
| miners are double digit percentage of utilization. They have
| very favorable conditions for mining, like the Pacific North
| West. The "one Finland" isn't smeared over all power
| consumption, it's highly congregated in a relatively small
| number of locations. The argument that a sudden devaluing of
| the use of electricity has no impact in the power
| infrastructure where it's concentrated is absurd. I'm not
| saying it has or hasn't happened - I've no idea. But it will be
| news if it does happen because operators will see double digit
| drops in demand locally and it'll be noteworthy. But I don't
| think it'll be like energy prices in the EU improve - the
| mining happens in places with huge gluts of power they can't
| otherwise sell or distribute for more.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Apparently the global reduction was 0.2%. That is not
| negligible, but not nearly enough to see power plants shutting
| down.
| shabbatt wrote:
| I wonder what will happen now that the ponzi structure is now
| gained new velocity as energy constraints have shut down proof
| of work mining. PoW creates centralized collusion between those
| who can afford the best miners and this helped the velocity of
| the chain itself since it is only as good as the last mined
| block.
|
| Now that layer is gone, its this proof-of-stake which is a bit
| funny since, Ponzi schemes are also proof-of-stake, where the
| previous investors stake's performance signals the next until
| the order books flip to a highly skewed with a very long til,
| it results in the last group who were late to the party, get
| caught with the bags.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there are many whales dumping as
| they would know (and I hope so) what the new paradigm shift is
| in this digital ponzi gold rush.
|
| Also rather anxious for these fellas who promoted _securities
| written on ethereum_. The SEC flat out came out and said almost
| all cryptocurrencies passes the howey test recently. This PoS
| seems perfectly timed for the occassion.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from
| the investments of future investors. That's not how PoS
| works. In Ethereum, everyone is diluted to pay stakers and
| the time of their investment does not matter.
| shabbatt wrote:
| > You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid
| from the investments of future investors.
|
| so you mean like pre-mine token sales? wait aren't those
| securities because there is an expectation of returns from
| the work of others?
|
| what you write here could be used against you, consult your
| lawyer before you admit anything!
| mgraczyk wrote:
| A pre-mine might make it a security, but it's basically
| the opposite of a ponzi. Not everything is a ponzi. I
| think you're just confusing different financial
| constructs with one another
| shabbatt wrote:
| It's worse than ponzi, its securities fraud.
| mightypirate wrote:
| Terr_ wrote:
| > in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from the
| investments of future investors.
|
| Also, a Ponzi scheme requires fraud, where the earlier
| investors are being lied-to about where the money comes
| from in order to paint a false financial picture of the
| company.
|
| Not directly related to your point, but I wanted to put
| that out there since it's a pet-peeve of mine that "Ponzi"
| gets frequently misused as a label for anything the speaker
| thinks is unsustainable.
| miohtama wrote:
| By the OP definition, pension funds would be ponzis.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| You're confused. In The Ethereum Ponzi, early token holders
| 'stake' their tokens and are paid by future transactors.
|
| But here's the funny thing that no-one gets: all assets are
| a ponzi scheme (stocks are only worth something now because
| future rubes will buy them for more later), what makes
| _bad_ ponzi schemes is when the underlying asset that
| everyone is speculating on doesn 't _do anything useful._
| Arcuru wrote:
| > stocks are only worth something now because future
| rubes will buy them for more later
|
| Stocks are valuable because they are a claim on the
| assets and future profits of a company, as well as a
| claim on the ownership and control of the company.
|
| Some people buy stocks just in the hope that a Greater
| Fool will buy them for more money later, but that's not
| the same thing as calling stocks in general a "ponzi
| scheme".
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >what makes bad ponzi schemes is when the underlying
| asset that everyone is speculating on doesn't do anything
| useful.
|
| Also, what's your comment on the multiples expansion that
| all stocks have seen since the 1990's?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| But no, that's not the same. If the owners of a stock
| received a fee when somebody used the company's product,
| that wouldn't be a "ponzi". It lacks the key element that
| earlier investors are paid via the investments of future
| investors. That's just not what happens on Ethereum.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > It lacks the key element that earlier investors are
| paid via the investments of future investor.
|
| Are you under the impression that you can buy Ethereum
| without paying transaction fees to stakers?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I am, because it's true. For example I own a lot of
| Ethereum and didn't pay any transaction fees to obtain
| it. Most ETH transactions work this way because they
| happen on centralized exchanges.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >Most ETH transactions work this way because they happen
| on centralized exchanges.
|
| Well then what does Ethereum _do_ actually? And why
| exactly can 't those centralized transactions be
| denominated in "Coinbase points" without all the crazy
| "Proof-of" code?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Because if Coinbase did that, nobody would use them, but
| people do use Ethereum.
|
| Btw, Binance has done this with BNB and their USD stable
| coin, and they are top ranked coins by market cap, so in
| fact sometimes it is the case that having a highly
| centralized and liquid coin backed by a major player is
| good enough.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >Because if Coinbase did that, nobody would use them, but
| people do use Ethereum.
|
| And that doesn't feel _anything_ like a ponzi scheme to
| you? Because, again, as you state, people are not _using_
| Ethereum (that would require paying fees to old
| investors) they are _buying_ it (in hopes that they aren
| 't too late to become an old investor themselves).
|
| Or are you literally saying that the value of ETH is that
| "Aesthetically, it's nicer to see 'ETH' at the end of an
| account balance than it is to see 'USD'"?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| What? No that's not what I said at all.
|
| People are using Ethereum, they are paying transaction
| fees to use it. Those fees mostly do not go to stakers,
| they are mostly burned. Even if that weren't the case,
| it's not even close to a ponzi because the stakers aren't
| paid out by future stakers, they are paid out by diluting
| everyone and via fees for usage.
|
| Also to address your second point, I'm not saying that,
| but that would not make it a ponzi at all. Art has this
| property, art isn't a ponzi.
| everfree wrote:
| Edit: Was replying to comments too fast, misread what I
| was replying to.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The people paying a fee are not investors. This is like
| saying the grocery store is a ponzi because customers pay
| the shop owner, who was an early investor.
|
| The people paying a fee do not expect to make a profit
| off of holding ethereum. (Some of them do, but that's a
| coincidence in the same way that a shop owner might shop
| at their own store).
| presentation wrote:
| > "Proof-of-stake is like running an app on your MacBook," he
| said. "It's like running Slack. It's like running Google Chrome
| or running Netflix. Obviously, your MacBook plugs into the wall
| and uses electricity to run. But no one thinks about the
| environmental impact of running Slack, right?"
|
| People do think about that. But definitely an improvement!
| valzam wrote:
| It's also completely untrue. Staking is unprofitable if you
| cannot guarantee uptime of your node. In fact Ethereum includes
| slashing for inactivity, so not only do you lose out on rewards
| if you shut of your MacBook, you run the risk of losing
| Ethereum. Unless of course you stake with a centralized pool,
| which defeats the whole purpose.
| hugocbp wrote:
| I think that specific part is meant more to be read as
| "consume as much energy as an app running on your MacBook",
| not "you can stake your ETH in your notebook".
| pshc wrote:
| The validator of the first proof of stake block earned just over
| 45 ETH as everyone clamored to get their transaction in this
| historic block:
|
| https://etherscan.io/block/15537394
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The validator is randomly chosen, no? So we essentially have a
| lottery as a banking system now?
| duskwuff wrote:
| Worse: a lottery for the rich. Validators are required to
| stake at least 32 ETH (~$52k USD) to participate.
| AgentME wrote:
| There are validator pools that let people stake smaller
| values.
| tsujp wrote:
| This is categorically incorrect. You can have any amount of
| ETH (up to 32 because there's no value in going higher) and
| be a validator participant if you partake in a pool.
| duskwuff wrote:
| As I understand it, staking ETH in a pool doesn't mean
| you get to act as a validator in any capacity. That's
| handled by whoever is running the pool.
| rakoo wrote:
| And more money at stake gives you more participation. It's
| not just a lottery for the rich, it's Capitalism unmasked
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean......isn't that any lottery? People who buy 100k
| lotto tickets have an undeniably higher chance of winning
| than people who bought a single ticket. Here it's the same
| - the higher your stake the higher the chances. But you
| don't need to stake all 32 eth to participate.
| miohtama wrote:
| It's not "lottery as a banking system", because there are
| rules for validators for failing over and others replacing
| them. This is what complex consensus mechanisms are about -
| how to have 100% uptime instead of few nines. The system has
| built in incentives for the operators to keep it running
| smoothly, but still not being unable to change or reject the
| transaction payloads, like PayPal or banking system could.
| ch33zer wrote:
| That was true with proof of work too. The merge doesn't
| change it.
| once_inc wrote:
| In theory, yes. But in practice, most miners have joined a
| mining pool. Mining pools allow miners to share in the
| rewards, which means they have a vastly more predictable
| income per block. A solo miner would probably not have a
| statistically significant chance of finding a single block
| for the next 100 years, while pooled miners earn bitcoin
| through finding blocks roughly equivalent to the mining
| pools relative size compared with the total hash rate.
| Since mining is a cutthroat, bleeding edge,
| hypercompetitive system, that means dependability and
| stability are very important.
| konschubert wrote:
| PoW was a system where you could buy lottery tickets by
| investing capital.
|
| PoS is the same, except it doesn't ALSO burn electricity
| that needs to be paid for by parts of the mining rewards.
| bowsamic wrote:
| PoW was worse because it had an economy of scale. For
| example, it is far cheaper to add mining power if you
| already own a big mining centre or buy ASICs in bulk.
|
| PoS does not have this: your rewards are always linear to
| the amount of ETH you stake.
|
| This means that, while PoS is still controlled by those
| with the most money, it does not trend to centralisation
| as harshly as PoW.
| konschubert wrote:
| Yes, that's correct.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Pos is controlled by those with the most money, and they
| continuously gain more money through staking rewards
| (i.e. the rich control the system and automatically get
| richer).
|
| With PoW, you have to sell/spend some of the coins you
| earn in order to pay for operation expenditures.
|
| PoS is more centralizing.
| somebodythere wrote:
| I don't see how it is beneficial to anyone (other than
| ASIC developers and energy companies) to build a tax paid
| to ASIC developers and energy companies into the
| protocol.
| jcbrand wrote:
| The energy expenditure anchors the money into the real
| world, making it a hard money like Gold, and it also
| facilitates decentralization.
|
| Energy is naturally decentralized all over the world.
|
| A "tax to energy companies" is a subsidy from the energy
| company's point of view. If you want more of something,
| subsidize it. A world with more energy is better than a
| world with less, as we're all in the process of
| relearning.
| bowsamic wrote:
| There is no evidence that the exchange value of any PoW
| coin has anything to do with the energy used to mint it.
| In fact we have counter evidence, for example that there
| are PoS coins that have value
| jcbrand wrote:
| You're arguing against a point I never made.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean then
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| PoW is just PoS with an extra step.
|
| As long as Bitcoin doesn't implement ASIC-resistance,
| it'll always be a rich gets richer.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's the same in both cases. Both times you are turning
| money into more money. Literally the only difference is
| that in PoW you have external costs. But since these
| costs are physical and out of the scope of the chain,
| they do not scale linearly.
| jcbrand wrote:
| With PoW you had capital expenditure, but also
| operational expenditure (e.g. electricity costs). Your
| capital also depreciates over time.
|
| With PoS, you don't have any operational expenditure, and
| the sticker price of your capital expenditure stays the
| same, and you can get it back when you unstake.
|
| They're not the same.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| That's not true. There is operational expenditure, like
| electricity cost, internet data, hardware that holds the
| client softwares, etc.
|
| It's just that the depreciation is slower, and less
| expensive over time than GPUs or ASICs.
|
| Maybe this isn't the case with some of the other DPoS
| chains out there, where people can delegate their stake
| to validators, making it unnecessary to run any hardware.
| koolba wrote:
| > and you can get it back when you unstake.
|
| Interestingly, unstaking is not actually supported by the
| network yet so the staking only goes in one direction.
| The price and demand impact when that does go live will
| be interesting to watch.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| Basically yes but in fairness there is a bit of
| operational expenditure. You need to pay a bit for energy
| (there is still a computer that needs to run), internet
| costs and your HW may need to be renewed every 5 years or
| so (perhaps longer). Typical costs of a normal consumer
| grade computer plugged to the internet, almost
| insignificant but not strictly zero.
| jcbrand wrote:
| The vast majority of stakers won't use their own
| hardware, but will stake with exchanges like Kraken and
| Coinbase.
| konschubert wrote:
| All these are arguments in favour of PoS which I agree
| with.
| jcbrand wrote:
| They're arguments why PoS is centralizing.
| staringback wrote:
| How on earth have you come to the conclusion that not
| having operating expenses is centralizing?
| jcbrand wrote:
| Operating expenses force miners to spend at least some of
| their earned coins. Depreciation also means that you need
| to periodically recapitalize.
|
| With PoS, without significant operating expenses, you can
| simply use your earnings to perpetually increase your
| stake.
| konschubert wrote:
| There is no need to re-capitalise. It's all opex if you
| want account for it accordingly.
| derivagral wrote:
| Not OP, and not about opex specifically, but around PoS
| and centralization...
|
| Before we had ~3 groups (miners, holders, users) that all
| kind of needed each other. Now there's no more miners.
| Given that crypto loves zero-trust and all that, I think
| it'll be an interesting experiment to see how the
| randomness of staking allocations plays out; if
| randomness streaks towards major capital, it'll look like
| they're favoring themselves and their stakes will
| accumulate %-wise increase at a higher rate
| (centralization!). The other "random-streak" outcomes
| aren't as bad (imo) and there's some game theory around
| this topic that I'm only topically versed in. Complicated
| by the part that miners did have some of their own
| problematic incentives and externalities.
|
| In summary I view it as moving away from an unstable
| 3-body problem down to a more stable/centralized 2
| bodies, one of which has greater influence. Hopefully
| good stewards and all that, but instead of forced
| cooperation among the 3 we now mostly trust 1 group.
| AgentME wrote:
| There's a new block about every 13 seconds. Each validator
| will get its share of "wins" over time.
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| I wouldn't call it lottery. In a lottery, you have to buy a
| ticket.
| colinsane wrote:
| the majority of transactions in that block paid about 0.01 ETH
| tx fee ($20). 4 transactions were over 1 ETH. 1 single
| transaction paid a fee of 37 ETH:
| https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5ad934ee3bf2f8938d8518a3b978e81f17...
|
| i'm thinking it was a single person who just really wanted to
| be the first tx on the PoS chain. i'm not versed to decode
| transactions well -- i wouldn't be surprised if it was somebody
| making a "first PoS transaction" NFT or something.
| miracle2k wrote:
| Yes, it is this one:
| https://opensea.io/collection/thetransition
| [deleted]
| roschdal wrote:
| Bitcoin is using too much energy, and this energy is needed for
| more important things like heating and transportation.
| mckirk wrote:
| Well that's easy: a 2kW Bitcoin miner heats your house just as
| well as a 2kW electric furnace.
|
| (I'm kidding but I'm also not; I'm regularly amazed by the fact
| that the most complex and intricate computational machines have
| exactly the same 'output' as the most basic 'heat this piece of
| metal' contraptions, when looked at as a blackbox.)
| jefftk wrote:
| While resistive heating was state of the art for years, and
| you might as well do some computation with the electricity
| before turning into heat, we can now make systems that are
| far more efficient ("200%" and up) by moving heat instead of
| generating it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
| yread wrote:
| Have you heard of heatpumps?
| mckirk wrote:
| I definitely have, and I wouldn't use an electric furnace
| nowadays unless there was no alternative. That's what the
| 'I'm kidding' was meant for. Sadly, heat pumps can't mine
| Bitcoins on the side afaik, so I couldn't use those for the
| analogy :P
| russdill wrote:
| Why do I suddenly hear some familiar jazz?
| [deleted]
| MintDice wrote:
| [deleted]
| goethes_kind wrote:
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Now all we need to do is shutdown the gaming industry.
|
| It's so wasteful to be using electricity when we could all be
| playing chess or Yazee instead.
| sph wrote:
| Indeed. If energy is so important and the root of all our
| problems, we should stop generating and using energy
| altogether.
|
| I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto.
| We live on a technological world that consumes energy,
| everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced
| civilization is not reduce energy usage, but _make it cheaper,
| cleaner and more abundant_! Why does people complaining about
| "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion
| energy? So we can stop consuming it?
|
| It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up
| the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but
| using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is
| intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular
| agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games?
| Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without
| them and consume even less energy.
|
| Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of
| a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal
| ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved.
|
| We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy
| instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If
| governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil
| fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and
| solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense
| if you can get _cheap_ energy, otherwise it 's unprofitable.
| But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than
| "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-
| voted comment on a forum.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
| mrpopo wrote:
| > The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy
| usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant!
|
| Why? Do you think every additional watt of energy will make
| us happier? The countries using the most energy per capita
| are gulf countries like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. The
| population there is 10-20% residents, the rest are quasi-
| slaves living in awful conditions (hopefully you heard about
| what they did for the World Cup).
|
| > Do you know how we can measure the technological
| advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have
| at their disposal ready to use.
|
| Again, is the middle-eastern civilization more advanced? Most
| of them are still monarchies.
|
| We already live in an energy-abundant society. Making more
| energy will not solve the underlying problems of it.
| prvit wrote:
| > (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World
| Cup).
|
| What did they do? I mean, besides the ridiculous Guardian
| article claiming unrealistically low death rates among
| immigrant workers. (discussed on HN earlier at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117)
|
| > the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions
|
| How would you describe the _much worse_ lives of those
| people in their countries of origin?
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > How would you describe the much worse lives of those
| people in their countries of origin?
|
| I was born in one of those countries, and personally know
| people who have made the choice to work in these
| counties. Do understand that people are not choosing to
| be quasi slaves because their lives are better as quasi
| slaves. No, more often it's a choice to create better
| lives for their families, and sometimes rarely it's a
| choice by their parents to ship off one out of their
| seven children to generate income. This quasi slavery is
| only possible through the insane arbitrage generated by
| petrodollars, and because we only selectively choose to
| be morally outraged at human rights violation only when
| it's done by the villain of the week.
| uavals wrote:
| 1. Energy is limited.
|
| Sun's mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 *
| 9e16).
|
| Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year
| increasing energy output by 5%.
|
| How long will it take till we use-up whole sun?
|
| ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years
|
| How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12
| solar masses)
|
| ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799
|
| How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg)
|
| ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years
|
| Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not
| sustainable even on universe's scale. Eventually we will
| reach hard wall.
|
| 2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of
| resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent
| of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for
| humanity to do.
|
| 3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto
| heating raises energy prices for others.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I think you're reading the situation completely wrong here.
| Yes, we should make energy cheaper, cleaner and more
| abundant. I don't think anyone with any real stake in the
| game is rallying against that fact.
|
| The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value.
| It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people
| perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is
| that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same
| "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable
| purposes; things essential to our survival both on an
| individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a
| species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected
| biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in
| medicine and the like).
|
| Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or
| one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few
| if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage.
| Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy
| consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to _accelerate
| our technological progress_.
| otikik wrote:
| > I don't think anyone with any real stake in the game is
| rallying against that fact.
|
| Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy
| usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going
| up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated
| heat will become a problem on itself. But let's solve the
| more present matters first.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Although there are better reasons to reject crypto, energy
| usage for crypto has few benefits aside of
| speculation/gambling for material gain. In Europe, energy
| bills for most people have tripled so reducing energy demand
| is a priority right now. I think there are less harmful ways
| to gamble. You could try a casino perhaps or buy futures
| contracts on ornamental gourds.
| sph wrote:
| Just because it's not very useful today, it doesn't mean
| it's not useful ever.
|
| Reminds me of people that were sure the Internet wouldn't
| go anywhere in the 80s. Technologies don't have to
| necessarily be useful on day 1 or even 1000 to be
| eventually successful.
| temp_account_32 wrote:
| jollybean wrote:
| Gaming does something i.e. entertain.
|
| Crypto does nothing. Or you could argue, it 'entertains'. But
| in a way that is unnecessary (it's a distraction, not
| entertainment), and in a manner that creates unnecessary energy
| costs (PoW vs PoS).
| seydor wrote:
| people pay for nothing?
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Yes, although more concretely put, people pay for nothing
| of value. See [1] [2] for some more historical occurrences.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies
|
| Before you get all worked up about "crypto is better than
| tulips!", I'm primarily responding to your question by
| saying that _just because_ people are willing to pay
| (sometimes exorbitant amounts) for something doesn't imply
| it has that value.
| dreen wrote:
| Nah, it's just gambling but with a veneer of investing.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| You definitively live in the first world. As a person that
| lived in a third-world, dictator infested country for 3
| decades, I can tell you, OWNING your own money is LIFE
| CHANGING. I prefer not to have games, or netflix, or
| anything, but have financial certainty.
|
| For you guys money is a done deal. For a HUGE part of the
| world, something as basic as money (or even water) is not.
| Try to be a little bit more empathic.
| nix23 wrote:
| I live in a 3rd world country too (Switzerland) and i can
| tell you that the stability of our money (politics?) is 90%
| of our wealth, otherwise we would have literary nothing
| (with the exception of water (but who knows for how much
| longer)).
|
| EDIT:
|
| https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world.htm
|
| >>The term Third World was originally coined in times of
| the Cold War to distinguish those nations that are neither
| aligned with the West (NATO) nor with the East, the
| Communist bloc.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Sorry, I don't understand your comment. And I don't think
| Switzerland is a 3rd world country (6th country by GDP
| per capita).
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| They are making a joke.
|
| "Third world" was just a grouping of nations that didn't
| align themselves with the USA or USSR during the cold
| war.
|
| Over time labelling a country as "3rd world" become the
| de facto way of categorising it as a "developing
| country".
| jollybean wrote:
| Crypto is the 'least good' solution for people in regimes
| with crap currency.
|
| There are at least a dozen 'very solid' currencies that
| people anywhere should be able to transact in, notably the
| USD.
|
| All of which you 'own'.
|
| If there are helpful things they can do, 'digital'
| currencies, especially USD, (one that is not mess) would be
| imminently useful.
|
| If you thought the 'petro dollar' was a big thing wait
| until the 'digital dollar' and entire economies de facto
| switch to USD.
| nix23 wrote:
| In Zimbabwe it's illegal to use US-dollars, and some
| others maybe too.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| My friend, you keep showing your "ignorance" and lack of
| empathy. Or course that I'd prefer to use USD. But we CAN
| NOT! It's literally ilegal.
|
| Your comment is like telling someone poor "just go to
| work", or telling people dying of hunger: "you don't need
| to die of hunger, you can eat!".
| everfree wrote:
| Please don't try to tell me what's entertaining to me and
| what isn't.
| killerstorm wrote:
| It's unnecessary to you - a person living in a developed
| country with democracy and stable banks.
|
| It might work as a backup option to people who are less
| lucky. That's the majority of the world. Whether it's a good
| option depends on a situation.
|
| In any case, it's not for you to judge if it's necessary or
| not.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| e2-e4
| viraptor wrote:
| You're trying to compare mining farms running 24/7 with people
| using a single card for a probably an hour a day on average.
| Without actual data on the number of users, this is
| meaningless.
| nannal wrote:
| Bitcoin mining compares with PC gaming at 85TWh/a vs 75TWh/a
| viraptor wrote:
| You're not citing your source, but it's likely "Taming the
| energy use of gaming computers" which is a problem: it's
| from 2014, it's a rough estimate, assumes that you turn off
| your computer only for 8h sleep, includes all the other
| work done on a PC if it's at all used for gaming, is based
| on hardware before we got massive frequency scaling, double
| graphics (like optimus) and before everyone moved away from
| CRTs... and finally before a massive exodus to laptops.
| (their follow up report discusses moving away from CRTs as
| a way to limit power usage) It's really not a good source
| today, it was a disputable one at the time, and doesn't
| even match the question - it measures gaming computers
| usage, not gaming usage.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848104.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| I'm not taking the thread on a flamewar tangent. My comment
| did not contain any insults nor did I encourage anyone else
| to do so.
|
| I am pointing out with a sarcastic analogy that pre merge and
| post merge ethereum are not the same thing. Outwardly looking
| they are both ethereum but the post merge ethereum lacks the
| triangular incentive structure that pre merge ethereum had.
|
| I am also pointing out the hypocrisy whereby people will
| happy accelerate climate change for the sake of leisure but
| get upset when someone else accelerates climate change for
| the sake of utility.
|
| I am disappointed with your decision to detach this sub
| thread and any responses that may lead me to challenge my own
| perspective.
|
| I do however respect that it was done with the intention of
| an preventing unproductive dialogue.
| me_me_me wrote:
| And the we are going to ban entertainment all together, only
| then we can produce more wealth for shareholders :)
| optimiz3 wrote:
| Curious to see if this plays out anything like the insider lockup
| period expiring after an IPO.
|
| Anyone with ETH locked up in a 2.0 beacon validator has suffered
| brutal drawdowns from the peak.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This phase doesn't unlock validator funds
| lakomen wrote:
| It and all the other energy wasting planet destroying "coins"
| need to be forbidden.
| beefield wrote:
| Just wondering if there is a betting market somewhere that would
| show odds for e.g. such a bug in the PoS that Ethereum needs to
| roll back to PoW within the next 6 months?
| pedro_hab wrote:
| I think this is nice, it forces people that want to participate
| to have skin in the game.
|
| With proof of work there is incentive for people not invested in
| crypto to mine as much as possible and sell everything.
|
| If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in
| crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big
| enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should
| make a 51% attack on a network as proof it is a quantum computer.
|
| I know it is unlikely, I myself think is impossible. But the
| incentive is there.
|
| With proof of stake there is no incentive to do it, a 51% attack
| is idiotic since you have to buy so much.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in
| crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big
| enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should
| make a 51% attack on a network as proof it is a quantum
| computer.
|
| Thank you for this vision of a happier future.
| seydor wrote:
| Imagine if people voted or staked dollars to decide how many
| dollars the Fed or ECB should print. It looks like it had been
| suboptimal for most of history that s why the previous monetary
| systems successively failed. Maybe there is some kind of game-
| theoretic gradient that leads to monetary failure by default,
| which needs to be fixed by central banking . But there is no
| place in the world where people vote their central bankers,
| they are among the most opaque world leaders out there.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Only if your only goal is monetary gains. A group could still
| want to if they only wanted to trash a particular chain.
| platz wrote:
| > "Rightly or wrongly, she'd absorbed a very toxic environmental
| narrative," he said. "I mean, it's kind of hard to defend
| 'stickers for grownups' that emit, by some estimates, a megaton
| of [carbon dioxide] a week."
|
| What was the "toxic environmental narrative"?
| Quindecillion wrote:
| Great, now all that energy can be "wasted" rendering pixels with
| GPUs instead.
|
| This was always going to happen. Eth was never going to
| realistically compete with Bitcoin for energy. Now Bitcoin is the
| only PoW network remaining, as it should be.
|
| Looking forward to seeing Bitcoin play a pivotal role in
| renewable energy infrastructure build-out and capturing flared
| and vented methane to be one of the biggest carbon-negative
| industries on the planet.
|
| It arrived right when we needed it to tackle carbon emissions.
| shmde wrote:
| > Great, now all that energy can be "wasted" rendering pixels
| with GPUs instead.
|
| Just like it was supposed to.
| Quindecillion wrote:
| Point is the energy will still be spent and the carbon
| emitted if the grid is still primarily runs on fossil fuels.
|
| Energy use isn't the problem. Carbon emissions are. Green the
| grid, don't try to police people's energy use.
| survirtual wrote:
| People have had plenty of time to understand bitcoin. If
| they are so seeped in ignorance still, just let time do the
| convincing.
|
| We have dirty shipping barges, endless pounds of meat,
| useless use of cars, tvs for entertainment, computers for
| the same, private jets, hell planes in general, skyscrapers
| for jobs that don't matter, roads to nowhere, and so, so
| much more wasted energy -- but a sovereign monetary system
| that is free from corruption in its creation and in
| transfer, and THIS is the great evil energy user?
|
| How utterly daft people are to not see the plainness of
| this attack on freedom. They are like sheep to the
| slaughter.
|
| Time is a brutal teacher. Freedom lost is regained through
| suffering.
| omni wrote:
| A mining GPU is running 24/7, the GPU of the heaviest-usage
| gamer will be maybe a quarter of that, with the vast
| majority of actual gaming use cases being far below that.
| Nowhere near equivalent.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Energy production is flexible to a degree and it very much
| depends on energy usage. Up to 0.5% of the total energy
| usage of _the word_ just disappeared overnight, so it is
| safe to claim that a big percentage of that difference
| won't even be produced, decreasing carbon emission.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Looking forward to seeing Bitcoin play a pivotal role in
| renewable energy infrastructure build-out and capturing flared
| and vented methane to be one of the biggest carbon-negative
| industries on the planet._
|
| Crypto-talk is so similar to satire as to be indistinguishable.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It's like people bragging about lighting their farts in
| crowded elevators instead of not farting in crowded
| elevators.
| Quindecillion wrote:
| Let's talk about this in 10 years when it becomes plainly
| obvious that that is exactly what it's going to do.
|
| In the meantime you could actually do some research on it and
| discover that you might not have a clue what you're talking
| about. Or don't, it makes little difference to the outcome.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-03/methan.
| ..
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/23/lancium-
| raises-150-million-f...
|
| https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-mary-
| fo...
| dmitriid wrote:
| > https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-03/met
| han...
|
| "Bitcoin is solving the issue of brning gas flares by
| buying that gas and burning it ... thereby reducing
| emissions"
|
| > https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/23/lancium-
| raises-150-million-f...
|
| Lancium raises 150 million dollars to build windfarms 100%
| of whose output will be wasited on mining Bitcoin and not
| on, you know, actually producing electricity that people
| can use.
|
| > https://medium.com/@magusperivallon/a-financial-hail-
| mary-fo...
|
| "Bticoin will save the climate by replacing the financial
| stranglehold on our planet with a financial stranglehold
| that consumes ever increasing amounts of electiricty and
| gobbling up more and more resources (such as solar panels
| and windfarms that could be used elsewhere) to keep
| running". Also, "For a habitable future, we must stop
| financialization" says the article describing a system
| where profits are paramount.
|
| ----
|
| Crypto-talk is so similar to satire as to be
| indistinguishable.
| Quindecillion wrote:
| > "Bitcoin is solving the issue of brning gas flares by
| buying that gas and burning it ... thereby reducing
| emissions"
|
| You realise methane is a worse GHG than CO2, right? You
| realise flaring is incredibly inefficient with most of
| the methane still being released into the atmosphere,
| right? You realise that capturing it and burning it in a
| generator is better for GHG emissions, right?
|
| Right?
|
| > Lancium raises 150 million dollars to build windfarms
| 100% of whose output will be wasited on mining Bitcoin
| and not on, you know, actually producing electricity that
| people can use.
|
| 100% of output to Bitcoin? Where did you see that? Do
| they specifically state that? Because I couldn't see it
| in the article.
|
| Also, you just completely gloss over the benefit Bitcoin
| mining provides in load balancing and curtailment as a
| demand response (DR). You know, the main point of the
| article? You know what curtailment is, right? You realise
| the purpose of demand response, right? That's the real
| "wasted" energy. Bitcoin is an energy buyer of last
| resort so that the energy isn't wasted.
|
| Do you also realise that many renewable projects sit in
| waiting for months to be connected to the grid, right? In
| that time they could be mining Bitcoin to recoup any
| losses from just sitting there doing nothing. The more
| profitable renewables can be the faster they can scale up
| to replace fossil fuels. The only way this happens fast
| enough is through economic incentives.
|
| But seriously, I'm not sure why I bother explaining all
| this to people like you. You're not going to change your
| mind and your opinion on the matter is ultimately
| irrelevant. It won't affect the economic incentives for a
| faster transition to renewables. You'll just be proven
| wrong in a few decades, but figure out some logical
| backflips to think it's not so, to save your ego.
|
| Also, the fact that you keep referencing "crypto-talk"
| says a lot. You haven't yet figured out the difference
| between Bitcoin and the wider "crypto" industry, which is
| almost entirely a scam.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I assume it has been debated again and again, but since I don't
| know the answer I'm going to ask:
|
| We often complain people hold cryptocurrencies instead of using
| them as money. Isn't this change going to make this worse ?
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Ethereum isn't supposed to be money (though it can be), it's
| fuel you use for doing other things. Do people use less oil
| because it's deflationary and gets consumed when used? No,
| because it's useful now.
|
| The most likely end game for Ethereum is being a replacement
| for all backend financial systems. Instead of having to hire
| teams of people to verify things or integrate various legacy
| systems together, everyone can build on one neutral platform
| and pay a little ETH as the fee for using it.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Wait, so this cryptocurrency was never supposed to be... ...a
| currency?
|
| In this case, the crypto-not-currency community really needs
| to work on branding.
| the_duke wrote:
| Banks would never switch to a system that makes all
| transactions publicly traceable, and they shouldn't.
|
| The industry has investigated blockchains for many years,
| since distributed consensus for transactions is a problem
| they actually have. They might run their own private chains.
| But it won't be ETH.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| It won't be public and it won't be distributed - it would
| quickly revert to some form of centralized piece, hopefully
| one at each bank, but will probably end up with one huge
| central point. They will still call it blockchain to
| attract gen z to work there, but behind the scenes it will
| work just as badly as the current mess. It's in the
| bank's/banking industry's blood and regulations to
| centralize. Whatever gets thrown their way will get locked
| down and centralized. I can just imagine the huge audit
| systems that will spring up to audit the blockchain (where
| ideally you wouldn't need to audit it to begin with, just
| look at it cause all the same info is in front of all
| parties, unmodified). Nightmare fuel actually. Better just
| to start from scratch (new banks, new core banking
| software, different kinds of audits and regulations).
| lewi wrote:
| They never said anything about Banks.
|
| Conceptually, a service provider utilizing Ethereum could
| create or aggregate on-chain services and package them in a
| similar format to what a bank is today with very little
| overhead.
| asutekku wrote:
| Conceptually, yes. In reality, no major bank would ever
| do it.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| I heard exactly the same said about AWS in 2009, now
| almost every major bank uses it. Once something is shown
| to be more efficient those banks are going to have to
| adopt it or justify their inneficiency to their
| shareholders.
| [deleted]
| siganakis wrote:
| It is already happening. ANZ, one of Australia's top 4
| banks released a Stablecoin on Ethereum earlier this
| year.
|
| https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/anz-the-
| fir...
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Lots of companies released blockchains and coins. It's
| called FOMO, or "Metoo-ism". Interpreting this (or IBM's
| blockchain) as signs of a significant market shift is a
| triumph of hope over realism.
| kinakomochidayo wrote:
| There is something called zk rollups on Ethereum, and some
| use zero knowledge to make transactions private.
|
| Like Aztec Protocol, which is used by zk.money.
|
| It's also the same technology used by Tornado Cash, which
| was sanctioned recently.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| nappy wrote:
| The most likely "end game" is not replacing all backend
| financial systems.
| threeseed wrote:
| Curious how many banks you've worked for. I've worked for a
| couple.
|
| And they pride themselves on differentiating themselves in
| the market by offering specialised products and services.
|
| Not sure why a bank would deliberately want to turn
| themselves into the equivalent of a reseller.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Do those banks use AWS now? Did they fight it with many
| justifications of why bare metal is better and cheaper and
| more efficient before finally realising it's holding them
| back? Because that's what happened in every company I
| worked in and that same thing is going to happen to every
| company working in finance.
|
| In a capitalistic world efficiency comes before pride or
| your shareholders replace you.
| jl6 wrote:
| The only problem with this analogy is that "cloud" was
| able to quickly produce numerous examples of material
| cost savings. You're right insomuch as the banks were all
| over it as soon as the business case was proven. But
| there's nothing comparable in the crypto space.
|
| Who is using crypto to deliver mainstream financial
| products (banking, insurance, credit cards, loans,
| mortgages) at lower cost?
| nailer wrote:
| The merge won't affect gas fees, which makes Eth unsuitable for
| small purchases when the network is busy. Apparently Eth will
| do other work in future to fix that though.
| 0xrips wrote:
| not just work in the future, work is being done right now!
| https://www.eip4844.com/
| stiltzkin wrote:
| ETH as cryptocurrency mainnet still has the same high gas fee
| when it was PoW. Some layer 2 solutions will have the utility
| to use their token as cryptocurrency because low gas fees.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Stablecoins are mostly what people use for payments. ETH is
| what's staked on the beacon chain.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I never use stable coins for payment, and I don't know
| anybody who does despite being in crypto since btc was at $8.
| I do pay stuff in BTc and get paid in BTC once in a while and
| see people in my bubble do the same. We use stable coins to
| limit taxe exposure, mainly.
|
| It's true eth has never been a mean of exchange for any of us
| and more a platform for smart contract (my friends at
| kryll.io use it for that).
| Tenoke wrote:
| The majority who trade crypto use stablecoins for payment
| all the time. It's the default on most exchanges, and for a
| lot of the biggest pairs on DEXs.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| You are talking about trading, I am talking about
| anything but trading.
| Tenoke wrote:
| If you are talking about payments of non-crypto products,
| I was exploring the hiring for small jobs subs on reddit
| yesterday and the two main accepted means of payment I
| saw seemed to be PayPal and stablecoins.
| sidcool wrote:
| ELI5 anyone? What does this exactly mean?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Ethereum now uses 99.5% less electricity. That's all it means.
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| Don't forget about the Merge song "Pandas are not known for
| running" - a true classic.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCpj9tMIDIY
|
| Cheers
| pozdnyshev wrote:
| carvking wrote:
| You can't withdraw Ethereum.
| neprotivo wrote:
| It looks like the new Blockchain is quite centralized. 45% of
| blocks are mined by just two addresses:
| https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1570339602346684416...
| kranke155 wrote:
| Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very
| large numbers of users.
|
| Seems the most likely explanation.
|
| The idea that this isn't true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild
| fiction to me.
| giarc wrote:
| Wasn't a public blockchain supposed to solve this? I always
| see this speculation and I thought the blockchain was
| supposed to show the public who was doing what... instead I
| always see these comments about big holders and speculation
| who it is. Shouldn't exchange addresses be known?
| lvass wrote:
| They're known.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| Probably liquid staking providers, including exchanges that
| offer that service.
| jsmm wrote:
| You may be right that the majority is probably an exchange.
| But is there something in the protocol specification that
| prohibits such majority? Then it raises a question, can an
| actor such as a government (which may have unlimited
| resources) to hold large numbers of ether (> 51%) to add
| blocks to their advantage?
|
| Perhaps, it's my ignorance about this technology that makes
| me question and prevent me from adopting this technology.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Yes this is why they've added slashing. The human element
| can indeed decide in my understanding to slash the coins of
| those owners.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| There's a common misconception that once you have >51% you
| can do anything. This isn't true. There's plenty of
| mischief you might get away with (censoring, double
| spending), but you can't transfer other peoples money
| without their private key, and you can't change the rules
| of the protocol. You can probably tank the value of the
| currency by doing large enough double spends and causing
| problems, but in PoS importantly you're hurting yourself
| more than anyone else, while in PoW, you still have a bunch
| of useful hardware left over after the attack, and with
| hash power marketplaces you can attack a PoW chain while
| having more or less no investment in the chain itself.
| everfree wrote:
| You can't double-spend across epoch boundaries (~6
| minutes) without getting slashed and losing all your
| stake.
|
| Censoring is more plausible, though of course it still
| hurts you, as you described.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| I keep hearing "you can't do X without getting slashed".
| What happens if there is a network partition that lasts
| for longer than 6 minutes? Which two of the diverging
| blockchains get to slash the other one and take all their
| stake?
| everfree wrote:
| > What happens if there is a network partition that lasts
| for longer than 6 minutes?
|
| With less than 2/3 of the total stake active on a single
| partition, that partition stops finalizing transactions,
| meaning that the chain explicitly stops guaranteeing that
| it's canonical.
|
| Notably, slashing cannot result from a partition, only
| from malicious validator behavior.
|
| > Which two of the diverging blockchains get to slash the
| other one and take all their stake?
|
| For a partition, which is not a slashable offense, there
| is no slashing. The minority partition stakers suffer
| inactivity leak on the majority chain, meaning that they
| very slowly (at first) start losing their stake until the
| majority partition has 2/3 stake again. It's not a big
| penalty like slashing, unless the chain remains in a
| degenerate state for many hours or days.
|
| On the other hand, a slashing rules offender (attacker)
| gets slashed on _all_ chain forks. The conflicting signed
| block from one gets included on all others for a bounty.
| This means that every staker must vote for only _one_
| fork at a time, which means the network can eventually
| determine which fork is canonical because it was voted
| for the most.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| The short answers is yes, there are various safeguards and
| countermeasures in place, some on the protocol and some on
| the social/incentive layer. But it would take dozens of
| pages to explain all of these in detail, so if you are
| truly interested in this you can search for "proof of stake
| security" or "proof of stake centralization risk" and you
| will find a huge number of resources.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Mining pools do this.
| doomroot wrote:
| Not really the same. Mining pools simply point their
| capital at an api while those staking with exchanges
| literally give them their capital. With stratum V2 on the
| horizon (allows miners to construct their own blocks while
| in a pool) the similarities will be even less.
| DennisP wrote:
| But either way, it's a central entity ordering
| transactions and putting transactions in blocks.
|
| The real question is, how much capital do you need to be
| a block producer. For Ethereum that's 32 ETH; with 400K
| validators and 12-second blocks you'll produce one every
| 55 days on average.
|
| So on Bitcoin, the largest remaining PoW network, how
| much capital do you need to produce a block that often?
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Is your math right on that? That's a 15% annual return.
| DennisP wrote:
| Let's see....actually 14M ETH staked now so about 430K
| validators. Blocks are 12 seconds, so blocks per day is
| 24 * 60 * 5 = 7200. Taking 430,000/7200 gives 60 days.
|
| But they're saying returns are more like 6%. Where are
| you getting return per block? (Also I think some of the
| return comes from doing block attestations, on every
| block.)
| polezo wrote:
| Those are staking pools, which represent thousands of
| individual users, and the largest one (LIDO) also has has
| additional decentralization that is not well captured by
| looking at just reward address. The reward address is a
| contract that individual users will be able to tap into.
|
| Worth adding it's also not substantially less decentralized
| than PoW mining was, the status quo was 41% of hash power
| controlled by 2 pools. At least now it's using significantly
| less power and is largely more non-custodial.
| hoosieree wrote:
| I'm still flummoxed why people use blockchains for any kind of
| data or computation. Fundamentally isn't blockchain a tech
| stack built on a linked list with mandatory network calls in
| every operation? It seems purposefully inefficient. At least in
| theory it had a point (decentralized control). In practice,
| however...
| majinuub wrote:
| The only purpose of a blockchain is to decentralize the
| storage and validation of data. It only makes sense if the
| decentralization is worth the loss in efficiency. Using a
| blockchain just to store data and perform computations when
| you have no reason to decentralize will only result in a
| crappy, slow database.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Bitcoin doesn't even use linked lists (it's merkle trees).
| Similar with other coins.
| hoosieree wrote:
| I thought the transactions within a block are stored in a
| Merkle tree, but the blocks themselves are stored as a
| linked list. So if you wanted to find a particular
| transaction you'd still have to traverse all the blocks
| (O(length)) and then inspect each block (O(log(depth))). I
| have no idea what dominates in verifying a Bitcoin
| transaction, so maybe in practice the cost of finding a
| particular block is amortized because you're spending most
| of your time within a block.
|
| But from the original bitcoin paper[1] I got the impression
| that to verify any particular transaction you need to
| traverse the whole list of blocks.
|
| [1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
| pshc wrote:
| In practice you can look up a tx by its hash from the
| transaction index (implemented with a Merkle tree)
| pshc wrote:
| People won't use it for traditional number crunching.
|
| Way I see it, the idea is to get your data, code, and capital
| into the big global ball of state by consensus where it can
| coexist with other code. The point is being able to co-
| operate with others by writing arbitrary programmable
| incentive mechanisms.
|
| The tech isn't there yet though. It still needs higher
| throughput (sharding, layer 2s), better visibility into the
| mechanics, and probably some kind of privacy layer.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| First one is Lido and second one is Coinbase both of them are
| pools. Lido is more decentralized than Coinbase as the stake is
| spread across many different staking providers. In any case the
| situation is not ideal and a bigger uptake of solo staking and
| truly decentralized staking solutions like RocketPool would be
| beneficial.
|
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x388c818ca8b9251b393131c08a736...
|
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x4675c7e5baafbffbca748158becba...
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| wait, so why does Coinbase "own" a wallet with all its users
| ETH in it? Who really "owns" the coins held on Coinbase?
| snail_brain wrote:
| Coinbase
| aaronax wrote:
| Coinbase is the only entity that knows the private keys
| which could be used to move the funds in this wallet. So if
| "owns" means actual technical control of the coins,
| Coinbase owns them.
|
| Now, many people (pretty much all) follow the laws and
| contractual obligations of the region in which they live.
| Under the framework of that system, the funds at still
| belong to the customer that deposited them. Whether that
| means the customer "owns" them or is simply "owed" them by
| Coinbase is debatable...probably a pointless debate.
| vngzs wrote:
| > Under the framework of that system, the funds at still
| belong to the customer that deposited them.
|
| Careful. In the case of bankruptcy, you probably won't
| get your money back. Bloomberg Law[0]:
|
| > An exchange going bankrupt would likely have to face
| Chapter 11 debtors' rules on creditor recovery.
| Generally, secured creditors would be paid back first
| before others.
|
| > A crypto exchange is not likely to have investor
| protection measures in place for cryptocurrency, though
| it could carry insurance policies for certain covered
| incidents, such as cybersecurity incident. And unless
| user terms specified otherwise, an investor would likely
| be an unsecured creditor who may not be able to recover
| what they're owed.
|
| [0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/if-a-
| crypto-exc...
| [deleted]
| 1023bytes wrote:
| The top address belongs to Lido finance
|
| https://github.com/lidofinance/docs/blob/main/docs/deployed-...
|
| https://lido.fi/ethereum
| MrSqueezles wrote:
| This article was the first I read that describes the new
| system. It appears designed to benefit Etherium banks. The more
| you hold, the more you get.
|
| > Miners are replaced by validators - people who "stake" at
| least 32 ETH by sending them to an address on the Ethereum
| network where they cannot be bought or sold. These staked ETH
| tokens act like lottery tickets: The more ETH a validator
| stakes, the more likely one of its tickets will be drawn,
| granting it the ability to write a "block" of transactions to
| Ethereum's digital ledger.
| franky47 wrote:
| Quote from the article:
|
| > "I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back
| and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon
| from the atmosphere every week." -- Edgington
|
| There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into
| the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere.
|
| Both are critically necessary and complementary, but I don't see
| how Edgington thinks that switching off PoW suddenly makes
| Ethereum carbon-negative.
| Slartie wrote:
| Especially since the carbon emissions of Ethereum were a
| product of Ethereum's existence in the first place, hence an
| entirely self-made problem, produced by the very people
| developing and pushing the platform.
|
| It's a lot like someone being an active part of a group of
| gangsters taking hostages, then turning around and helping the
| police freeing them, only to then brag about how proud he/she
| is of having a role in freeing those poor innocent people.
| xtracto wrote:
| I love Ethereum and am a strong believer in Blockchain
| technology, but everytime I hear the "Ethereum PoS is a win
| for the environment" reminds me of the Simpons episode when
| Bart says something like: "I'm going to smoke and then quit
| smoking" to what Homer replies congratulating him because
| quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things to do...
| It is very misleading, and naive.
| hoosieree wrote:
| "We are ruining the environment more slowly."
|
| er, I mean...
|
| "We are saving the environment!"
| franky47 wrote:
| If the main observation curve doesn't go the way you want,
| check its derivative.
|
| "The wall is very close"
|
| "We're going too fast, shouldn't we brake?"
|
| "Oh at least, we're not accelerating, look, constant speed,
| everything is fine!"
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| He's not saying it is "carbon-negative" --- he's saying it is
| more efficient and avoids a megaton of carbon that would
| otherwise have been released.
| franky47 wrote:
| In this case "removing" is not the right term, but "avoid
| emitting". No carbon will be removed in any case, be it PoW
| or PoS.
| hwillis wrote:
| > There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon
| into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the
| atmosphere.
|
| The phrase "removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere
| every week" is globally syntactically ambiguous. It can be read
| as "removing [a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere] every
| week" or as "removing [a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere
| every week]". The second interpretation means removing a
| source. Both interpretations are roughly equally valid,
| although "eliminating" would sound better.
|
| "eliminating the emission of a ton of CO2 every week" is a
| similarly ambiguous phrase which can be interpreted as [the
| emission of a ton of CO2 every week] or [the emission of a ton
| of CO2], every week.
| franky47 wrote:
| Punctuation is key, as your second example emphasises.
|
| In this case, a better wording would have been: "removing the
| source of a megaton a week of carbon emissions".
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| The Ethereum's foundation next scam could be to sell carbon
| credits, promising not to switch back to PoW for the next 5
| years, genius.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Congrats to the devs. This is a historic moment for computing and
| distributed tech, and will pave the way for Ethereum's next
| updates: scalability, privacy, stronger censorship resistance,
| easier UX and account abstraction.
| politician wrote:
| I expect the major stakers to find themselves looking at OFAC
| sanctions in about 48 hours contingent on implementing strict
| AML/KYC procedures.
| yboris wrote:
| Why did the price drop? If the merge went successfully, I'd
| expect people to have more confidence in the future, and thus buy
| - driving the price up.
| Tepix wrote:
| Sell the news.
|
| Besides, BTC and ETH care tightly coupled. Perhaps some people
| sold BTC because they think it is now at a disadvantage
| compared to ETH and bizarrely it caused ETH to drop in price as
| well.
| miguelmota wrote:
| Yes, it did work. No missed slots and high participation rate.
| Exceeded expectations. Congrats to all the devs!
| joaquincabezas wrote:
| calling it "The Merge" (with capital letters) makes it sound like
| a blockbuster action movie. I'll say I prefer the book.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any
| legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not.
|
| I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I
| can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin
| and Ethereum's existence.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| "Make nerds rich" is a fairly legitimate use case.
| Kiro wrote:
| The use case is that it's fun and with PoS you don't need to
| feel guilty having fun at the expense of the environment.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Have a look into DeFi and what A16Z is investing in is a good
| start. When many of the biggest SV firms are investing billions
| and you still don't understand it, don't you get curious and
| dig deeper?
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| We know why they're investing billions. Same reason they
| invest billions into start-ups - their capital gives them
| preferential terms that let them cash out at the expense of
| other investors, whether it be at IPO, or ICO.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| I gave you a starting point, if you want to continue to
| dismiss a massive shift in society than that's on you.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The main use case for a block chain is to ensure that a ledger
| is valid and not tampered with.
|
| The reason we want public ledgers is to keep track of financial
| transactions securely.
|
| Why can't we just use a bank? At some level there needs to be
| security for the bank's database. Blockchains are generally
| considered the best way to do this. So when legacy financial
| databases are replaced in recent years blockchains are often
| considered.
|
| Public blockchains are even better because they ensure the
| validity of the overall system.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Blockchains are certainly not the best way to do that. All
| the hash try and error is completely useless and put there
| just to create "value".
| ilaksh wrote:
| What do you think is a better way?
| LtWorf wrote:
| digital signatures
| [deleted]
| solumos wrote:
| the easiest use case to grok (and one that's being used right
| now) is a near-instant global settlement layer
|
| e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without
| the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or
| waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear.
|
| Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for
| physical goods.
|
| e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2]
|
| [0] - https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-
| us/articles/682949304692...
|
| [1] - https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-
| bax...
|
| [2] - https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-
| win...
| hocuspocus wrote:
| [0] "A network fee of 2.5% (with a cap of $500) will be
| deducted from your investment amount for settlement, custody,
| and trading costs associated with your payment in USDC". Very
| cheap indeed.
|
| [1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything
| that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle
| problem. You _need_ trusted third parties in supply chains, a
| cryptographic signature would essentially achieve the same
| thing.
| solumos wrote:
| Fair critique -- AngelList is pretty aggressive with its
| fees. If you're willing to handle settlement + custody
| yourself, it's much cheaper.
|
| The oracle problem is very real (and solvable). Even
| ignoring the ability to transact within the same system
| where provenance is maintained, I tend to think that
| trusted third-parties moving their supply chain operations
| into a public ledger which is verifiable across time is
| more advantageous than point-in-time cryptographic
| signatures.
| kuschku wrote:
| But why? Rolling out SEPA ICT globally would have benefit far
| more people in far better ways.
|
| The ability to send money instantly from any regular bank
| account to any other regular bank account, without any fees,
| that's what we should aim for.
|
| Cryptocurrencies do this worse than the existing banking tech
| (e.g., the mentioned SEPA ICT).
| solumos wrote:
| > But why?
|
| Mostly US bureaucracy and central banks + states having
| their own agendas. At this point, world governments have
| had how many years to figure this out? It's no better than
| 2009 in the US.
|
| Much of the world doesn't have SEPA ICT. And much of the
| world probably doesn't want to support a euro-centric
| system (e.g. Serbia). Also, about ~1B people in the world
| are unbanked.
|
| Decoupling the geopolitical aspects from the settlement
| layer is a big advantage to crypto. USDC/Circle is free to
| censor whomever they'd like, but the Ethereum blockchain
| isn't going to halt at the whims of the SEC or any other
| regulator.
| syl_sau wrote:
| As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same
| thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding
| organizations and people through anonymous means as to
| circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or
| corporate authorities. This includes funding politically
| persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs
| or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's
| mostly what it's been used for so far (if we ignore speculation
| and various scams).
|
| I think it's hard to argue with this.
| herbst wrote:
| No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few
| companies that restrict things that go way further than the
| law.
|
| You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never
| thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer
| isn't international and banks may still complicate things,
| not even talking about how long these can take
| internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime
| services.
|
| There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer,
| Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad
| things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that
| visa doesn't want us to pay for.
|
| Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to
| say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you
| never happen to be in a position where you have to trust
| untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's
| nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of
| money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in
| Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and
| expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on
| money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread
| and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the
| money and avoid all of that.
|
| Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries
| with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and
| Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or
| USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even
| inside your own country.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| > Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I
| could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of
| wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged,
| broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could
| use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all
| of that.
|
| Or you could use Wise.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| As much as I'd like this to be the case, that's not a valid
| argument. If you're a random person who wants to fund a
| certain organization, you're going to have to buy the
| cryptocurrency somehow. For anything except tiny amounts this
| is going to require you to do KYC at some point. Every
| transaction on a blockchain is recorded forever and traceable
| back to you and the legal ID that you used during KYC. No
| one's going to mine Monero for five months just to fund a
| grassroots organization.
|
| The way covert funding of illegal or unpopular operations or
| bribes _actually_ works in the real world is different. It
| often involves stuff like gambling, getting a thousand pre-
| paid cards, having a bank that issues credit cards (eg
| Russian-owned MyWireCard which now dissolved issued huge,
| prepaid, free cards to EU politicians), or "ant work" such as
| hacking or grinding up game accounts and selling them for
| profit. That's the covert and difficult part - not having a
| blockchain. Before you could get paid for your OF leaks with
| Ethereum, you'd get paid with Amazon prepaid card codes. The
| tender being on a blockchain doesn't improve anything at all
| for those performing the payment or those receiving it.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| > mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots
| organization.
|
| Am I missing something here? This is the main use case for
| Monero. You can just buy it with your credit card or after
| buying bitcoins thru a KYC'd service. That's the point -
| once you got Monero, it is practically untraceable by the
| authorities or anyone else interested. No one can see who
| sent or received money without a view key. The same cannot
| be said for most other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH,
| since once you buy these from a KYC service, it's tied to
| your identity forever.
| nicbou wrote:
| Pseudonymous, not anonymous. It's only anonymous while you
| take steps to make it so, and only until you make a tiny
| mistake.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Monero is close to anonymous by default. You generate
| wallet, and send money there. While this first step can be
| tracked, you can just transfer the XMR from the first
| wallet to a new one. This time, no one can see your
| transactions or associate this address with you (unless
| you, for example, publish it next to your name).
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, that's the killer use case. It's also the use case
| that'll bring in _so much_ regulation.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Emphasis on _you_ can't find any uses
|
| and other people's use cases aren't legitimate _to you_
|
| We're past the point of playing with people's goal posts
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| You could just list some great use cases that are happening
| right now, that'd be a very compelling argument.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Typically you, the person replied to, or someone else is
| simply primed to debate the use cases, in a classic
| dropbox-style moment about how some other combination of
| technologies nobody wants _could_ do it, as opposed to
| diving into the technology itself and the opportunities
| presented by the platform
|
| For them its a quagmire because they cant find a reason to
| justify any time or mindshare on the technology, and are
| simply using any discussion to rationalize not doing that
|
| Its just past the point where they're relevant or the
| concept needs to be defended at all, its just not new or
| fragile enough anymore. Even politicians can debate nuanced
| aspects of 1 out of 100 use cases.
|
| And then there's the reality that speculation is a use
| case, so obvious yet somehow so unacceptable to technology
| savants, as if the entire financial services industry
| doesn't exist with its own niche technology to facilitate
| it
|
| And then it derails into a _relative_ utility argument,
| when someone points out the irony that nearly everyone here
| is working for a democracy destabilizing advertising
| conglomerate and getting paid in lottery tickets
| baby wrote:
| People have been using it for 10 years, yet it still doesn't
| have any usecase. It's like saying "I don't get tiktok"
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Using it for what.
|
| I see that 99% of use cases are "speculation to get rich on
| the basis of telling bigger fools to buy and HODL LOL".
|
| People have been using heroin for years, doesn't mean it's a
| good thing.
| miguelmota wrote:
| > I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain
|
| Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity
| in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized
| finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds.
| Endless possibilities.
| talhof8 wrote:
| When will those endless possibilities meet reality though?
| miguelmota wrote:
| It's a reality to the people of Latin America who use
| stablecoins on Ethereum to hedge against their own
| country's inflation.
| geysersam wrote:
| > allows for scarcity
|
| Sounds great...
| nly wrote:
| > anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds.
|
| You can only do __secured__ lending and borrowing, and only
| where the security is, itself, a highly liquid digital token.
|
| Person A lending USDC to person B, taking ETH for security,
| isn't doing much for the world at large except allowing B to
| defer his capital gains tax.
|
| Unsecured lending, backed only by the faith or expectations
| we have around future cash flows, is how the world creates
| opportunity for true investment and growth... and impossible
| in a trustless and anonymous system like crypto.
|
| Hardly limitless possibilities
| [deleted]
| kuschku wrote:
| Since when do we want scarcity? One of the largest advantages
| of the web was that it allows for a digital post-scarcity
| economy.
| [deleted]
| michaelwww wrote:
| These guys seem to think so:
|
| Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-jYgI0QVI
| michaelwww wrote:
| Sep 14, 2022 at 11:43 p.m. PDT
|
| Updated Sep 15, 2022 at 12:01 a.m. PDT
|
| The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-
| Biggest Blockchain
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/09/15/the-ethereum-merge-...
| konspence wrote:
| TylerE wrote:
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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 may be an incremental improvement over traditional
| global finance because there is a much greater ability to
| publicly scrutinize what goes on.
|
| But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift &
| democratization compare to traditional financial systems
| controlled by a a very small number of big players. Their
| influence still can override the mining process that's supposed
| to be the final word on transactions.
|
| Although I'll clarify a bit: I'm actually a _proponent_ of having
| a layer of human judgement that can fix a problem when things go
| off the rails. The issue is that in crypto this layer _is even
| less accessible_ to smaller players than in traditional finance.
| The DAO was able to throw its weight around and get a hard fork,
| but how many other groups with much less influence have suffered
| from similar problems and exploits without that same benefit?
|
| Yes, even in traditional finance there are some types of
| irreversible fraud. But for every day transactions, for using
| money as a daily part of transactions necessary to live your life
| and not just as a speculative investment, crypto falls far short.
|
| 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. If my wallet is pick pocketed or I simply lose it by
| accident I have a similar recourse to mitigate the fallout.
| Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though
| that's yet to be seen. But as a major change & liberation of
| people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems
| to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.
| krzyk wrote:
| Well, currently it looks like it will be more centralized,
| because before one could mine with just a single GPU, now one
| has to have a bunch of ETH to start.
| lettergram wrote:
| Prior to this merge at least theoretically you could have a
| consortium of people collaborate to combat centralization.
|
| Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It
| is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms.
|
| My young son the other day said "I'll get money from the store
| and buy what ever I want".
|
| I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work
| for the store, then they give you money to buy things.
|
| Then I thought about how banks or large lenders just give
| people money. They magically create a loan, which people have
| to pay back with interest. The bank assesses the risk they
| won't and profit they want and that's the interest rate. The
| FED works the same way, just handing out money. Those people
| don't work for their money. They just get free labor for
| controlling the money.
|
| Here it's like the store printing money at 5-8% a year or what
| ever just for having money in the bank. They can then spend 4%
| or what ever of that and still always guarantee growth in their
| money supply. It's the exact same.
|
| Theoretically, someone can make something the store finds
| valuable enough in the real world to trade their reserves.
| However, they'd have to find it more valuable than the static
| growth rate.
|
| The difference in POW is that anyone can enter the market. And
| large lenders won't have an advantage. Sure they could PAY for
| more processing power, but they have no advantage of printing
| money over the next guy.
| CodeShmode wrote:
| > Their influence still can override the mining process that's
| supposed to be the final word on transactions.
|
| Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would
| anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in
| their valuable asset?
| once_inc wrote:
| If all the large entities band together and frame the issue
| as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted,
| then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've
| seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in
| the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the
| majority wants to split".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep
| trading ETC.
| once_inc wrote:
| Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went
| with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a
| slow death.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It is about what people were willing to spend money to
| buy. Not the miners
| ineedasername wrote:
| "Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional
| finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful
| of massive players using their control to avoid the
| consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a
| hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail"
| dynamics in traditional finance.
|
| With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction
| layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will
| mean the very small number of organizations holding a
| majority of ethereum, _not the majority of __people__
| holding ethereum_.
|
| Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450
| walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225%
| of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not
| even taking into account whales that may control multiple
| of those largest wallets.
|
| So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it
| comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the
| 200,000,000 other holders?
|
| True democratization of crypto would have it be the
| latter, but that's not where I see things going.
|
| [1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Ethereum, like any financial instrument, has always been
| valued by willingness to pay. It is unavoidable that
| willingness to pay is impacted more by those with more
| wealth. You cannot sell an asset if nobody wants to buy
| it and people with money can buy things.
|
| If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were
| misled.
| ineedasername wrote:
| My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual
| level with banks is significantly higher than anything
| I'd have with crypto.
|
| All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that
| crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number
| of very large players in the field. It is _not_ the
| democratization of money & finance that proponents &
| crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a
| supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially
| similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative
| to the proposed revolution) features that might offer
| improvements on the traditional systems.
|
| And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that
| crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional
| financial systems into the hands of the people and all
| sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find
| such crypto evangelicals. _But no I have __never__ been
| misled by them_.
|
| It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise
| that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls
| massively short of promises made.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > My ability to address screwups or fraud on an
| individual level with banks is significantly higher than
| anything I'd have with crypto.
|
| Yes, nobody ever suggested that irreversible transactions
| would make it _easier_ to address fraud. You don 't have
| a central entity to appeal to.
|
| > All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that
| crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number
| of very large players in the field.
|
| No, it does not agree with that. But the value of
| ethereum is determined by willingness to pay. There are
| not a "very small number" of actors with willingness to
| pay for ethereum.
|
| Crypto is explicitly anti-democratic in that you cannot
| democratically (ie. by vote) decide to take away
| someone's asset.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I'm not talking about tampering, not in the sense of a 51%
| double spend or anything. I'm talking about off-chain real
| world human influence. I'm talking about things like The DAO,
| an organization that was such a huge player in ethereum at
| the time that when they suffered an exploit like so many
| others have over the years ethereum did a hard fork for just
| them to fix things.
|
| How many smaller players in the crypto scene have received
| that kind white glove treatment, going against the "code is
| law" principle, when they've lost huge sums of money? Code
| was law right up until The DAO massively screwed up and was
| deemed Too Big to Fail. No different than traditional
| financial institutions.
|
| As the mining resources of the various trustless Proof of $X
| models needed to makes crypto work are increasingly
| centralized into the hands of massive players in the field
| the principle of crypto democratizing control of money &
| finance is becoming an Emperor With [increasingly] No
| Clothes.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| once_inc wrote:
| 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. Having an economic
| incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it
| for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net
| carbon negative.
|
| Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at
| preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions.
| hwillis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity.
| That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per
| kB.
|
| Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work
| incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers,
| which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s
| to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the
| validators like that drives up costs massively.
|
| > Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent
| methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an
| economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead
| using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to
| become net carbon negative.
|
| No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with
| bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity
| as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing
| new sources of power to be exploited.
|
| Instead of being used for something useful, that
| electricity is being turned into waste heat.
| mrb wrote:
| << _Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in
| electricity._ >>
|
| A common misconception. Only a fraction (about 1% at the
| moment) of Bitcoin's electricity consumption is derived
| from transactions, because transaction fees account for
| only about 1% of miners revenues. The average transaction
| fee is about $1 at the moment, so a transaction "costs"
| only $1 in electricity because it provides $1 of extra
| revenue to miners who can subsequently spend it on opex
| (electricity).
| hwillis wrote:
| $60 (or, more currently, ~$83) is the block reward, at
| the current price, divided by the average number of
| transactions per block. It does not even include the
| added incentives from fees.
| samatman wrote:
| Yes, and the block reward can be claimed without any
| transactions in the block.
|
| On BTC this never happens, on other chains it's quite
| common, since no one uses them.
|
| That $60 in electricity 'per transaction' is simply not
| correct, the value of the block reward doesn't come from
| transactions. The transaction fee does.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I haven't computed it, but you need to take into account
| the energy it takes to mine a block and the number of
| transactions in that block.
|
| The transaction fee is irrelevant, as the fees being paid
| were mined in the past and already "paid for" with
| electicity.
|
| In the end, transactions drive the chain forward. You
| don't need (a lot of?) them to continue mining, but they
| are the only "useful" part of the blockchain.
|
| I have no idea if bitcoin operates at max capacity, but I
| think it does. If so, I think it's perfectly fair to
| attach mining energy use to transactions.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Let's add up the carbon footprint of the traditional
| financial ecosystem, in whole. I think once all the
| externalities are factored in (including things like
| minting and handling physical cash and coin), doing it
| all on a computer makes more sense even if POW is energy
| intensive.
|
| _Converting energy into economic value is the opposite
| of waste_. That is what mining does.
| hwillis wrote:
| > I think once all the externalities are factored in,
| doing it all on a computer makes more sense even if POW
| is energy intensive.
|
| No, it's not even close. Bitcoin currently uses as much
| electricity as 31 million US residents. _One transaction_
| uses more than two months of average residential usage.
|
| > (including things like minting and handling physical
| cash and coin)
|
| Why would you include that? Do you think people won't
| want to carry money? Do you think bitcoin makes cards,
| POS processors, and cash obsolete? Do physical wallets
| not take energy to make and run?
|
| Regardless, the amount of energy used to make and use
| physical money is very small:
|
| 1. coins are irrelevant; the most expensive coins are
| cents, which cost about a cent to make. The total amount
| of coins made is much smaller than the amount of paper
| dollars made, so the value of energy used is small
| compared to the total cash made.
|
| 2. The US spends 1 billion annually to mint currency.
| Bitcoin spends 6.5 billion USD on electricity directly.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Transactions do not have an energy cost unto themselves,
| blocks do. If the entire world were to stop sending
| Bitcoin transactions for one hour, it would make almost
| no difference in the power consumption of the world's
| miners. Roughly 7 to 10 empty blocks would be produced.
| The mining process provides network security all on its
| own, transactions or no transactions.
|
| >Why would you include that?
|
| Because I said "all externalities". Bitcoin competes with
| the traditional financial system, including all the
| people and infrastructure involved in cash handling. That
| includes not just minting, but distributing it,
| collecting it, counting it, securing it, and so forth.
| And that is a cost borne not just by the United States
| federal government, but every government with physical
| currency and every bank on the planet. The idea that
| doing all this with physical objects is less power
| consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous.
|
| If you want to make an honest apples to apples
| comparison, you include everything. Mining power usage is
| the single largest driver of bitcoin energy footprint
| granted, but it has a lot less other stuff attached.
| hwillis wrote:
| > The mining process provides network security all on its
| own, transactions or no transactions.
|
| The mining process provides a _fixed amount_ of network
| security. $125,000 per 15000 transactions. The fact that
| it would still cost that much money even with zero
| transactions is _not a feature_. It 's not a good thing.
|
| Each individual block is secured. You can't just add more
| and more transactions to each block without reducing
| security.
|
| > Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system,
| including all the people and infrastructure involved in
| cash handling.
|
| Right now bitcoin competes with practically nothing. How
| much pizza is bought with bitcoin vs cash? You're
| effectively assuming that all those other functions are
| either irrelevant or that bitcoin can somehow do them for
| zero cost. Neither is true.
|
| > And that is a cost borne not just by the United States
| federal government, but every government with physical
| currency and every bank on the planet.
|
| 60% of global federal reserves are in dollars. Dollars
| are the _world 's_ dominant currency. Compared to the
| massive disparity in energy use, it doesn't matter if
| even only 10% of global currency is in dollars. Dollars
| win.
|
| Plus, if you're trying to compare with the places where
| cash _really_ matters -where they can 't use VISA or cell
| phones to transfer money- then bitcoin is certainly at a
| huge disadvantage after you have to _buy computers for
| all those people_.
|
| > The idea that doing all this with physical objects is
| less power consuming than doing it with data is
| ridiculous.
|
| Again, you're not replacing coins with data. You're
| replacing coins with USB sticks.
|
| But you're right! It IS ridiculous, because it's
| completely insane how pathetically inefficient bitcoin
| is.
| roywiggins wrote:
| > The mining process provides network security all on its
| own, transactions or no transactions.
|
| It seems to me that if nobody transacted, nobody would be
| able to sell Bitcoin, mining rewards would be rendered
| worthless, and mining would stop.
|
| Sure, you can't point at any _given_ transaction and
| blame any _particular_ emissions on it, but surely it 's
| reasonable to amortize it and assign a fraction of the
| emissions during each block to each transaction,
| considering that Bitcoin has no value without them.
| Karunamon wrote:
| No, because there is no relation between transaction
| volume and block production times, and this is a protocol
| level constraint. The network aims to produce a constant
| number of blocks per hour, which happens no matter how
| many transactions are available to be included in that
| block.
|
| Here's an example: If, say, the maximum block size was
| doubled so they could hold twice as many transactions,
| this would cut your energy usage figure in half, but
| actual energy consumption by miners would barely change
| at all. Similarly, if the maximum block size was halved,
| your figure would double, but the energy consumed would
| not. If there were no such thing as a maximum block size,
| your value then scales linearly with the amount of
| transactions that can be crammed into 10-ish minutes of
| time.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I dunno, isn't that like saying "if planes were all half-
| empty, the carbon emissions of the plane would barely
| change, so you can't blame the carbon emissions on any of
| the passengers"? Yes, the "marginal carbon emissions" of
| a single transaction is ~0, much like the marginal carbon
| emission of taking an empty seat on an airplane is ~0,
| but by this logic nobody on the plane is responsible for
| any carbon emissions, which is obviously silly, so in
| lieu of any better accounting method, you just amortize
| the carbon emission of the plane across the passengers.
|
| If the block size was reduced to, say, one transaction,
| then the economic value of the Bitcoin network would
| surely drop, mining rewards would be worth less, miners
| would quit, and the electricity use would fall. It's the
| economic value of the transactions that end up rewarding
| miners; I can't see how people transacting on the chain
| aren't partly responsible for the miners' emissions.
|
| I can't think of any obviously better way to assign a
| number to that than just amortizing it across the number
| of transactions. It's a meaningful number that explains
| something about how much usefulness the network produces
| per unit of electricity. Doubling that by doubling the
| block size (or, halving it by halving the block size)
| would be a meaningful change!
| Karunamon wrote:
| > _But by this logic nobody on the plane is responsible
| for any carbon emissions_
|
| _That is strictly true_. This is why the concept of a
| personal carbon footprint (something dreamed up by a
| British Petroleum marketing team) is inherently inane.
|
| > _Doubling that by doubling the block size (or, halving
| it by halving the block size) would be a meaningful
| change!_
|
| How and why? It would change your metric, but it wouldn't
| make the network consume one single watt less or more
| power. Its efficiency is unchanged.
| roywiggins wrote:
| A machine that spits out one widget per watt is less
| efficient than a machine that spits out 10 widgets per
| watt. Even if there is exactly one widget machine in the
| world, it is always turned on and always draws the same
| amount of energy, one type of machine would produce more
| widgets than the other. That machine is more efficient.
| It is more useful for the same energy input. It's a
| totally reasonable metric to compare widget-producing
| machines by!
|
| If the bitcoin network is a transaction-producing
| machine, the more energy it takes to produce the same
| number of transactions, the less efficient it is. All
| else being equal, spending more money and energy for the
| same result is worse than spending less money and energy.
| lottin wrote:
| You're telling us that since mining costs don't vary with
| the number of transactions processed, they don't count.
| Production costs that don't depend on the level of output
| are called _fixed costs_. [1] They 're still costs.
| Pretending that a cost doesn't exist doesn't make it
| cease to exist.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_cost
| Karunamon wrote:
| And I'm telling you that the production cost is tied up
| in blocks, not transactions. This is not up for debate,
| it is intrinsic to how bitcoin works. If you send a
| transaction, the only power consumption involved in that
| act is involved in the transmission of the data and its
| broadcast to the network.
|
| The monstrous energy usage comes from trying to brute
| force a single hash. It is entirely decoupled from
| transaction volume.
| lottin wrote:
| You can't send a transaction without mining a block.
| Therefore all the costs that are incurred mining a block
| are costs that are incurred sending transactions.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Changing the maximum block size would change the "energy
| used by a transaction" since block production is a factor
| of fixed time, not transaction volume, so the comparison
| is absurd on its face.
| simiones wrote:
| And once that block size changes, the energy used per
| transaction will go down. It's really very simple, stop
| making it complicated. Blocks are there to hold
| transactions - that's their whole purpose. The fact that
| technically you can mine an empty block is an irrelevant
| detail of the protocol: bitcoin would not keep getting
| mined if there were no more transactions.
| progman32 wrote:
| But what is the current block size, and what's the plan
| for changing it?
| lottin wrote:
| It's not a comparison. The fact is that the costs of
| processing bitcoin transactions are predominantly fixed.
| This tells us that bitcoin doesn't have economies of
| scale. The average cost of a bitcoin transaction doesn't
| decrease as the number of transactions increases. This
| makes bitcoin uncompetitive in relation to pretty much
| any other transaction processing technology.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _production cost is tied up in blocks, not
| transactions_
|
| Fixed costs are amortized. The block's footprint is
| spread across transactions. Arguing otherwise is like
| someone taking the power bill of a bank to infer the cost
| per teller-window transaction, and the manager arguing
| that teller-window transactions don't burn energy,
| branches do. Yes, sure. But also irrelevant.
|
| And yes, if the branch tripled in size its energy use
| would reduce the per-teller energy footprint. (Assuming
| constant transaction volume.) But that's a hypothetical.
| Karunamon wrote:
| > _You can still amortize the cost of the block across
| its transactions_
|
| Sure, if you're more interested in talking points then
| useful metrics. Increasing or decreasing the block size
| limit would lower or increase the "cost of a transaction"
| (since blocks are generated on a schedule commensurate
| with difficulty, which is roughly a function of how many
| miners there are) without actually changing the amount of
| power consumed.
|
| What you're doing is basically correlating the world's
| average temperature versus the number of pirates and
| declaring that pirates are responsible for global
| warming. In reality, the two variables are unrelated and
| not even correlated.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the block size limit would lower or increase the "cost
| of a transaction"_
|
| Assuming constant transaction volume and other factors
| related to difficulty. You have a point. But it's far
| from a panacea for proof of work, and certainly not at
| the threshold to derail coming taxes and regulation.
| (Though one might find a way to structure the taxes such
| that they reward a productive increase in the block
| size.)
| expensive_news wrote:
| Are you really arguing that the number of blocks and the
| number of transactions in BitCoin are two variables that
| are "unrelated and not even correlated"?
|
| Of course they're related. It's trivial.
| hackerlight wrote:
| PoW crypto was using over 1.2 percent of the world's
| electricity. That's an insane waste irrespective of any
| kind of comparison to whatever other industries.
| majinuub wrote:
| > Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in
| electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay.
| It's $125 per kB.
|
| Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of
| electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be
| completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount
| of power. You're also missing the point of the power
| consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person
| to another, its used to secure the network from attacks
| and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of
| electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount
| of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar
| transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take
| into account the number of Lightning network transactions
| happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain
| transaction.
|
| > No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with
| bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same
| electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of
| electricity is causing new sources of power to be
| exploited.
|
| > Instead of being used for something useful, that
| electricity is being turned into waste heat.
|
| One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because
| something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean
| its useless to others. I, and many people around the
| world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the
| electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could
| profitably monetize flared methane, they would have
| already. They don't because trapping and transporting the
| methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard
| to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin
| IS useful in that respect.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and
| still use the amount of power.
|
| It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years.
|
| > You're also missing the point of the power consumption.
| Its not used to move capital from one person to another,
| its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve
| its integrity.
|
| I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to
| pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.
|
| > Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account
| the number of Lightning network transactions happening
| off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.
|
| They don't have to. All those techniques are equally
| applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million
| daily on electricity to do it.
|
| > Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably
| monetize flared methane, they would have already.
|
| Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity.
| Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines.
| Electricity companies are.
| ryder9 wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-
| energy-co...
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative
|
| Phrasing in this way suggests that Bitcoin is already net
| carbon negative or can plausibly become it. That is not
| true.
|
| > Using electricity isn't the problem.
|
| It is, as electricity is fungible and wasting it on bitcoin
| increases prices for everyone else and encourages greater
| degradation of shared resources.
| nightski wrote:
| I agree Bitcoin probably won't be carbon negative any
| time soon if ever. But electricity is definitely not
| fungible as production is not always in the same place as
| demand.
| simiones wrote:
| There are very few goods as fungible as electricity, even
| though it is not perfectly fungible.
| nightski wrote:
| If this were true we would not still be dependent on
| fossil fuels.
| lolinder wrote:
| OP didn't say there were no goods as fungible, they said
| few. Fossil fuels can be more fungible without them being
| wrong.
|
| Arguably, "fossil fuels" are _not_ as fungible as
| electricity anyway. I can take electricity from any
| outlet and, with the right adapter, use it to power any
| electric appliance. I cannot take gasoline intended for
| my car and use it in a grill, or in the furnace, or in a
| jet, no matter what equipment I buy.
| irusensei wrote:
| It's the other way around. You can transport barrels of
| oil overseas and use for trading but sending electricity
| requires infrastructure that may take some time to
| deploy. It's the same problem with gas pipelines.
| geertj wrote:
| If something is not 100% fungible, it can still be
| fungible to some extent. Given the size of our
| electricity grids and to a lesser extent the capacity to
| store energy, electricity is definitely fungible at some
| level. I don't have the numbers but I'd say this level is
| pretty high.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at
| preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions.
|
| This statement caused me to do some light research. I
| discovered that methane is 25 times as potent as carbon
| dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Which is why oil production without a gas connection
| tends to flare the methane. With the renewable transition
| we will in a not too distant future just leave the oil in
| the ground instead.
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/flaring-emissions
| hwillis wrote:
| https://climateer.substack.com/p/methane-lifetime
|
| > Methane emissions decay gradually, with an average
| lifetime of about 12 years ("perturbation lifetime",
| which is what matters for climate purposes).
|
| > This will increase by roughly 35% if methane
| concentrations double, or decrease roughly 25% if
| concentrations return to pre-industrial levels.
|
| Methane is actually 150x-ish worse than CO2, but it
| breaks down over time. Ameliorated over a long time it's
| 25-30x worse.
|
| Rough part is that breaking down methane depends on OH
| radicals in the air, of which there are a fixed amount.
| The more methane there is, the slower methane is broken
| down. If there were a sudden massive release of methane,
| it would stay at that 150x potency for a very long time.
| Fun!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > OH radicals in the air, of which there are a fixed
| amount
|
| To make the complexity really mind-blowing, no, the
| amount is not fixed. It varies, and temperature is one of
| the largest factors. But it's not a simple relation,
| because air currents are also very important, and
| temperature also changes those.
| Ntrails wrote:
| Messaging and information on actual greenhouse gas
| emissions and impact have long been god awful, often to
| the point of borderline misinformation. It's a source of
| tremendous frustration, in part because spending enormous
| political capital solving _the wrong problems_ is
| actively counter-productive
| derac wrote:
| Can you prove out the math on that one please?
| drtz wrote:
| Genuinely curious: how does burning methane to generate
| electricity make an organization carbon negative? Do you
| have a reference for this?
|
| I understand that methane is orders of magnitude more
| significant from a greenhouse effect point of view than
| CO2, but I don't see how it would be economically viable to
| burn methane "in stranded gas reserves" to generate
| electricity for Bitcoin mining but somehow it's not viable
| for other electrical consumption purposes.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The methane gas has already been burned for decades,
| adding bitcoin to the equation just made you look
|
| No other use case has been profitable for the gas by
| products so the sites pump it directly into the
| atmosphere
|
| Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not
| burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped
| for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy
| used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected
| from the grid, these are the best use cases of this.
| others are connected to the grid which gets the most
| debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin
| mining's absence and there was no political will to meet
| climate goals _ever_ )
|
| So the solution solves itself simply because it is an
| environmental solution that is profitable
| drtz wrote:
| I asked my question because I doubted the assertion being
| made without any math to back it up. It seems unlikely
| that
|
| 1) this could ever be a significant enough amount of
| Bitcoin mining energy to make Bitcoin "carbon neutral",
| and
|
| 2) if it ever did become a significant source of energy
| for Bitcoin, it would likely also be viable for other
| uses, eliminating the carbon offset argument
|
| I'm not doubting that you can put a cheap and inefficient
| boiler generator on top of a methane flare and label it
| "green energy."
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 1) North America has lots of this kind of energy.
| Gigawatts/hr being spewed into the atmosphere as an
| unprofitable waste byproduct as is.
|
| 2) Transporting this energy is a cost. Storing and then
| transporting the energy is a cost. And other kinds of
| computation on site requires much greater infrastructure,
| like internet and big box data centers, which these
| remote sites do not have. Bitcoin mining barely needs any
| internet bandwidth and doesn't need a low latency
| connection either. It creates an asset that can be easily
| sold to people willing to buy that asset at a price far
| greater than the costs to create it.
|
| Its important to understand that these are partnerships
| between two companies.
|
| The existing energy producer who is taking a risk on a
| dangerous operation, largely technophobic and takes far
| too long to understand how it benefits them. And a
| separate crypto mining company searching for cheap
| energy, driven purely by the market.
|
| The mining company sees the energy. The energy producer
| needs to reduce their waste byproducts.
|
| Its semantics and pure coincidence about whether "less
| hydrocarbons billowing directly into the atmosphere"
| meets your criteria for "carbon offset" or "green
| energy", its also what happens
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Interesting framing. I'd frame it as Bitcoin having a
| local unexpected environmental positive externality. (As
| opposed to negative, which it has most other places
| without an unplugged methane leak.)
| taolegal wrote:
| It's not negative or unexpected. Bitcoin naturally uses
| the cheapest energy it can find (arbitrage), which
| usually ends up being stranded energy. Something like a
| third of all electricity generated is wasted. So the idea
| that Bitcoin is unique compared to any other arbitrary &
| subjective use of energy is just anti-Bitcoin propaganda
| & green dis-information.
|
| Whereas it may be difficult for one reason or another to
| transmit energy from where it's most abundant (a desert,
| or other remote areas), it's not hard to co-locate miners
| in those places & incentivize further development &
| utilization of that energy resource.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Does the expression "perverse incentives" mean anything?
|
| This argument is like energy incentives in the world were
| mostly fine, except that some energy was stranded and
| could only be picked up by Bitcoin.
|
| For something that is supposed to "change the System" it
| for sure is often pitched like the System can _never_
| change. That missing (enforcement of) regulation makes it
| economically beneficial to just vent methane without even
| flaring, is not something to celebrate. It 's nice that
| the incentives lined up decently, this time. We should
| work on fixing the incentives so the methane can stay in
| the ground where it belongs. Don't dig that well.
|
| Say, you have access to cheap hydro power somewhere. The
| powerlines are not yet completed to export the
| electricity to where it could be more useful. Along comes
| a Bitcoin factory and sets up shop. Suddenly, the
| incentives are not in favour of ever completing that
| powerline, for benefits amortized over decades, when you
| can sell that sweet, sweet Bitcoin today.
|
| Of course, the owners of the Bitcoin factory would
| _never_ try to exert their influence and try to keep
| their cheap source of hydro power, or keep the methane
| flowing. /s
|
| I will make sure to bring popcorn for the future culture
| wars between ETH and BTC, now that their incentives are
| so divorced.
| taolegal wrote:
| > Of course, the owners of the Bitcoin factory would
| never try to exert their influence and try to keep their
| cheap source of hydro power, or keep the methane flowing.
| /s
|
| You see how you just substantiated my argument that
| Bitcoin naturally ends up favoring renewables, linking up
| the most efficient use of energy?
|
| It's not like there is (or should be) a limit on
| renewable energy production.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > For something that is supposed to "change the System"
| it for sure is often pitched like the System can never
| change. That missing (enforcement of) regulation makes it
| economically beneficial to just vent methane without even
| flaring, is not something to celebrate. It's nice that
| the incentives lined up decently, this time. We should
| work on fixing the incentives so the methane can stay in
| the ground where it belongs. Don't dig that well.
|
| Bitcoin was never billed to change _that_ system, and yet
| it is anyway.
|
| You're trying to let perfect get in the way of good,
| failing all modes of consensus until the world is
| uninhabitable, while this _just works_ and fulfills the
| goals of all political parties at the moment: reducing
| emissions _and_ being economical.
|
| Bitcoin mining on existing fracking sites is a stop-gap
| solution at best, right now nobody is making new wells
| with the perk of adding miners or renting space to mining
| firms. Right now, the fracking operations are just
| meeting their climate goals, the captured state regulator
| no longer needs to be in the awkward position to rubber
| stamp emissions exemptions, the governor no longer needs
| to run interference for the whole fracking industry. Its
| only a stop gap solution because if 10x more wells were
| made after a 90% drop in emissions, then we're at the
| same place we were, so if you begin seeing that then be
| vigilant about that. But thats really not a bitcoin
| issue, thats a fracking issue that you're putting on
| bitcoin because you've had zero influence your entire
| life on the oil and gas sector, the separate higher
| standard doesn't make sense though, as - for now - this
| stop-gap solution is here and working. "oh no but its
| bitcoin, that _other_ thing I spent so much of my energy
| hating " cope, my guy. this is working.
| lottin wrote:
| > Bitcoin naturally uses the cheapest energy it can find
|
| As opposed to everybody else, who naturally use the most
| expensive energy they can find.
| taolegal wrote:
| In order to argue that wicked corporations are wasting
| massive amounts energy for profit, yes this requires the
| idea of finding very cheap power, i.e. something like
| off-peak or excess.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| miners are driven purely by the market to find cheap
| energy sources
|
| its not altruism by any means and it doesn't matter
|
| this is what happens, frame it any way you prefer, it
| doesn't really matter as the constant is that North
| America is the best market for this
|
| all levels of government are noticing and investors are
| noticing and they all need the sustainability framing, I
| don't think I had made any framing in my reply
|
| Articles that talk about the "amount" of energy bitcoin
| mining uses are going to keep coming out, if you're more
| familiar with that framing, the _source_ of energy has
| been _more important_ than the amount for a very long
| time, to convey environmental impact, and this is just
| one example
| reggedtorespond wrote:
| I looked into your statement about bitcoin mining
| preventing methane emissions and it doesn't add up to me.
| Oil drillers already flare the methane, which turns it into
| carbon dioxide. The solution these bitcoin miners are
| implementing is to burn the methane in a controlled manner
| so they can harness the energy produced for electricity to
| mine bitcoin. The same chemical reaction occurs, converting
| methane into carbon dioxide. The companies internal
| research claims this reduces carbon dioxide equivalent
| units, but I'm pretty skeptical. Of course, they would want
| their research to show they are doing something good. Sure,
| I guess it is more useful to harness the energy than to
| just burn it fruitlessly, but I don't see how it reduces
| emissions. Is there something I'm missing as to why this
| would make sense?
| majinuub wrote:
| If you release the CO2 into the atmosphere, it doesn't
| really reduce emissions. However, because miners can
| harness the energy in a profitable way, they could afford
| to sequester or scrub the CO2. That would make oil and
| gas companies look a little greener, which is even more
| of an incentive. I believe some miners are doing this
| already.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| I don't think anyone, anywhere is profitably doing carbon
| sequestration (and i'm not aware of any practical
| 'scrubbing' scheme).
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| They may or may not be able to afford to sequester the
| carbon. Even if they do that (and I have never heard
| before that they do), in the long run would surely be
| out-competed by other miners who don't bother.
| elevaet wrote:
| 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.
| giaour wrote:
| Not sure if "goat load" was a typo, but I love it. Although
| you can put significantly less on a goat than you could on a
| boat.
| mrits wrote:
| It really depends on the boat and the goat.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But if you're trying to go up a mountain it can't be bleat.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Baaaad
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It was a typo but I loved it so much that I left it in and
| instantly adopted it into my lexicon.
| seydor wrote:
| How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control
| ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some
| physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they
| need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case
| has the same level of trust as the first.
|
| I think this begins the search for another trustless
| transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Chia solves this pretty well with a one time POW then POS in
| the form of presolved hashes.
| mratsim wrote:
| Chia plotting managed to get banned from all cloud
| providers in a month.
|
| It's also wasting by actively destroying storage disks.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >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.
| bitcurious wrote:
| >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.
|
| In the prior state, the folks with control were the ones
| willing to invest in it. In the after state, the folks with
| control are the ones willing to invest, OR the ones willing to
| get others to invest - i.e. coinbase.
| c0mptonFP wrote:
| Your concerns are valid. And you're free to commit to projects
| that align with your values.
|
| To me, the immutability of _an actual blockchain_ is non-
| negotiable. I 've given up on Ethereum after the DAO fork out
| of principle.
|
| But that's the beauty. Unlike our current financial system,
| you're not bound to use Ethereum. You have sovereignty and can
| make your own choices (and drive change).
|
| -- (I only discuss part of your comment, don't have time for
| the rest)
|
| Just FYI, the biggest problem for crypto fraud is phishing, not
| theft. A thief can't get your private keys from a hardware
| wallet. And there are many, many, MANY strategies you can use
| against phishing.
| api wrote:
| At the very least it makes something that is the world's
| problem -- massive energy waste due to PoW -- into an economic
| problem that is self-contained to the Ethereum block chain.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > liberation of people from massively powerful banks and
| governments
|
| The difference between business and governments is that in
| business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every
| adult has a vote.
|
| "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working
| democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is
| (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people
| should be liberated from government, people should be the
| government.
|
| Therefore I think the best situation is where government
| controls the money, and we the people control the government.
| ibeckermayer wrote:
| > "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working
| democracy
|
| If 51% democratically voted to enslave the other 49%, that
| would be a working democracy but far from "liberation of
| people".
| fcantournet wrote:
| No it wouldn't. There is no definition of democracy where
| 51% of the people enslaving the 49% would constitute a
| democracy. Except the one you just imagined for the
| purposes of "winning" an argument on the internet.
|
| This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk
| about minority rights, and free media, and non-
| discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
| colinsane wrote:
| replace "enslave" with gradually weaker words until you
| find the statement you, personally, agree with.
|
| 51% decide that 49% shouldn't be allowed to drink
| alcohol. that's a comparatively minor example of "tyranny
| of the majority" (which happened within living memory).
| now explore all battles you've been on the losing side
| of. abortion access? funding of overseas wars? legality
| of drugs?
|
| i find it incomprehensible that if you look at things
| honestly you won't find at least some instance when
| you've felt repressed by the democratic rule of the
| majority. "enslavement" is simply that repression
| exaggerated for the purpose of _making you see it_.
|
| > This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk
| about minority rights, and free media, and non-
| discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.
|
| no, these are the core tenets of egalitarianism.
| democracy is merely one process by which we may
| _approximate_ egalitarian ends. if you care about
| egalitarian ideals (or above, "liberation of the
| people"), you should be open to other processes which
| achieve them -- not just the one you were raised to know.
| ibeckermayer wrote:
| You should look up the definition of "democracy" in a
| dictionary before accusing others of making up a
| definition.
|
| Im not just trying to "win an argument", like you accuse
| me of, I'm pointing out an inaccuracy of your statement.
| Through your childish outburst I can see that you're
| defining democracy to include other aspects of what you
| deem to be "good governance" -- fine, but that's
| confusing given the well known definition which doesn't
| necessarily include those things.
| oblio wrote:
| To add to your comment, we want a *powerful* and accountable
| government.
|
| Weak governments make for failed states, because corporations
| and other interest groups such as gangs, warlords, control
| things instead.
| notch656a wrote:
| I want a weak government. I'd rather have warlords compete
| for my allegiance than be subject to one all powerful
| warlord who has no powerful enemies to worry about. A
| capitalism of polycentric governance, if you will.
| vkou wrote:
| Warlords typically 'compete' for your allegiance by
| conscripting you to fight for them, and killing you and
| your family when you refuse.
|
| Or, if you and nobody in your family is of 'military
| age', they 'compete' for it, by rolling into your town,
| and stealing half of what you own. The 'competing'
| warlord that rolls in next week will, of course, steal
| the other half. If you're lucky, they won't make an
| example out of your town for 'supporting' the first
| warlord.
|
| I'll take a strong, stable government over that horror-
| show any day of the week, but if you'd like to give it a
| try, much of Mexico has quite a bit of that sort of thing
| going on right now. Anyone who moves to the right parts
| of it can enjoy life amid 'competing' cartels.
| notch656a wrote:
| Meh I fought alongside the YPG in Syria, under a rather
| weak government. They let me come in or leave as I
| pleased. They didn't steal from me. We fought against the
| other 'warlord' ISIS and all in all it was nice having a
| pretty diverse pick of militias to choose from.
|
| All in all it was definitely a more freeing environment
| than a lot of life in the US.
|
| ------------
|
| >Why do you live in the US, then? That should make you
| think a bit harder about failed states.
|
| If the government wants to leave the territory I'm in,
| I'm all good with that. I've never demanded the
| government stay here.
| oblio wrote:
| This is such an edgy teen attitude type of comment.
|
| Why do you live in the US, then? That should make you
| think a bit harder about failed states.
| notch656a wrote:
| >Why do you live in the US, then?
|
| Why does anyone live somewhere under a government they're
| not happy with? Why do women live in states with abortion
| laws they disagree with, is it because they're edgy
| teens? Why don't you personally live somewhere else that
| is closer to your goals of governance, surely US is not
| the most ideal for what you seek?
|
| I don't really think you want to go down the road that
| presumes someone isn't thinking hard enough if they don't
| run away from where they're currently living. Personally
| when I did leave the US I did it to help the Kurds, not
| to abandon my own family, and without the permission of
| the mother of my child to expatriate it isn't exactly
| proof I'm not thinking 'harder' because I live here right
| now. Regardless of how fucked up the US government is I
| have certain obligations to my family who happen to be
| here more for logistical reasons than political reasons.
|
| If it were just about me, or if I had permission from the
| mother to expatriate our child, sure I'd likely not be
| where I am right now.
| acdha wrote:
| > And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional
| global finance because there is a much greater ability to
| publicly scrutinize what goes on.
|
| The flip side is that it's creating new opportunities for
| massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People
| who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions
| like using shell companies but normal people won't think to do
| that or realize that they're making that level of trust by
| using a wallet, exchange, etc.
|
| There are some obvious big problems ("do voters know you paid
| for this porn site 15 years ago?") but also more personal ones:
| imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data
| mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk
| but I'd hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being
| effective and perfectly operated.
| chaseadam17 wrote:
| You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with "human
| judgement" on top.
| acdha wrote:
| Why bother paying more for a slow database if you're not
| going to rely on the one feature which can't be done faster,
| cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?
| serverholic wrote:
| Because it gives people options and increases competition
| in the financial system.
|
| It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the
| ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.
| acdha wrote:
| Everything gives people options: the question of whether
| those options actually increase competition comes down to
| what a particular option does better than the
| alternatives. For example, if I'm not in the business of
| selling blockchain services I don't care about Visa's
| backend infrastructure. I care about things like how much
| overhead I'm paying on each transaction, how hard it is
| for my customers to use, how quickly transactions go
| through (especially in retail settings - I don't want
| someone blocking the line while they wait for a miner to
| approve a block), and the cost / risk of fraud.
|
| Currently, it's by far easier for everyone to use Visa:
| most people have access to that system, services are
| widely available for businesses of all sizes, etc. The
| primary drawbacks are transaction costs and businesses
| being on the hook for most fraudulent transactions.
|
| Switching to Ethereum would make things slower, but that
| could improve. Since it's not tied to a hard currency,
| however, there's a much bigger problem cost management: I
| know exactly how much a Visa transaction will cost but
| gas fees are unpredictable and volatile, and the exchange
| rates for ETH vary both independently and more than most
| currencies. Similarly, there's a real appeal to not
| automatically being on the hook for a disputed
| transaction but that's significantly undercut if you have
| to worry about being one mistake away from irrecoverably
| losing everything in your account and so far customers
| have not been jumping to take on more personal risk
| either.
|
| The big question here is also what competitive businesses
| do in response: for example, if at some point in the
| future Ethereum actually became cost-competitive what
| happens when Visa simply lowers their transaction fees
| until that's no longer the case again? They have a lot of
| margin to do that and the merchants don't need to change
| anything about how they do business. Similarly, Ethereum
| is nowhere near the speed of a traditional credit card
| transaction but even if it hit that speed it'd be playing
| catch-up with Apple/Google Pay - businesses care a lot
| about things like that since it's often highly visible to
| customers and can affect things like retail lines, so the
| question is whether that can be improved faster than
| companies like Apple/Google, Stripe, Square, etc. can
| improve their services.
| serverholic wrote:
| I think most of those problems are being worked on and
| have a very real chance of being solved.
|
| Right now, on layer 2, you can transact for a $0.01 fee
| no matter the size of the transaction. I'm not a Visa
| expert but from what I understand they take a percentage
| of the transaction. Visa could lower their fees but I see
| that as a win-win. They faced competition and either way
| consumers win.
|
| Granted if Eth exploded in popularity the fees would go
| up potentially 10x. However there are upgrades on the way
| to lower fees even further. Namely danksharding (excuse
| the silly name).
|
| Things like UX, and fraudulent transactions are much
| harder. However UX can get better and there are actually
| things we can do about fraudulent transactions. A Visa
| competitor could build their own smart wallet where the
| financial institution has keys to the wallet as well as
| users. This would allow them to administer the wallet for
| the user similarly to current bank accounts.
|
| A competitors could also create their own layer 2 which
| would only confirm transactions on the main ethereum
| network after X amount of time. This would allow the
| company to revert fraudulent transactions within that
| time window.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _on layer 2, you can transact for a $0.01 fee no matter
| the size of the transaction. I'm not a Visa expert but
| from what I understand they take a percentage of the
| transaction. Visa could lower their fees but I see that
| as a win-win_
|
| The competition is P2P interbank transfers, which are
| being rolled out to be free in the U.S. (And are free in
| Europe.) Credit card transactions come with additional
| perks for the consumer, like anti-fraud and rewards,
| which bias the coin. Someone not caring for those
| protections can, again, use interbank transfer.
| acdha wrote:
| Sure, anything is potentially possible but notice how
| often you had to describe things in uncertain future
| terms. If you are running a business, that sounds like
| "call me back when you can do this" -- and in particular,
| consider that while Ethereum-based companies are spending
| large amounts of effort working around the architectural
| drawbacks of using a blockchain, everyone else is working
| on user-visible features.
| serverholic wrote:
| Sure, by all means wait until these features are ready.
|
| They're not as uncertain as I made it sound though. Smart
| wallets already exist and layer 2's exist where users can
| submit proof of fraud. Danksharding isn't going to take 8
| years like proof of stake.
|
| The biggest issue I see is building trust, which takes a
| lot of time. A smart wallet is great but it's going to
| take years before the community trusts the builder of the
| wallet.
|
| With that said, I do think crypto has a chance of
| offering things that the current financial institutions
| will find very difficult to compete with. I'd love to see
| Visa reduce their fees to a flat $0.01 per transaction
| but that that would massively reduce their profits.
|
| Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the door
| to more competition in other areas. For example, a fairer
| and more transparent alternative to credit scores.
| Current credit score providers rely on the fact that
| their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent
| credit score would be very difficult.
|
| The reason I'm so interested in crypto is the possibility
| of taking away power from these large institutions.
| acdha wrote:
| > With that said, I do think crypto has a chance of
| offering things that the current financial institutions
| will find very difficult to compete with. I'd love to see
| Visa reduce their fees to a flat $0.01 per transaction
| but that that would massively reduce their profits.
|
| That's 60 times lower than Ethereum's transaction fee.
| Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking
| on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's
| basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.
|
| > Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the
| door to more competition in other areas. For example, a
| fairer and more transparent alternative to credit scores.
| Current credit score providers rely on the fact that
| their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent
| credit score would be very difficult.
|
| There are two problems here. The most obvious is that
| it's at cross-purposes with privacy but the more subtle
| one is that as people build layers on top of the Ethereum
| network to compensate for design deficiencies, that
| transparency evaporates and you're left with the same
| need for individual companies to share data with each
| other and near-certainty that in the absence of
| regulation they will do so even when it's not in their
| customers' best interest.
| serverholic wrote:
| I think it's important to understand that L2 is
| considered the future of Ethereum. So when we are talking
| about fees it's important to use the numbers that people
| will actually be paying in the future. Right now those
| are hovering around $0.10 and it's expected that
| danksharding will reduce those by a couple orders of
| magnitude in the near/mid term future.
|
| IMO L2's are fundamentally better than Venmo and Square
| Cash. Firstly, they are much more transparent to the
| user. Switching to a different L2 is usually as simple as
| selecting an option from a dropdown in your wallet app.
| There are also protocols for allowing users to buy crypto
| straight on L2 without paying L1 fees and transferring
| from one L2 to another (for a small fee). Additionally,
| if an L2 goes down there are escape hatches that allow
| users to pull money out onto L1. The same cannot be said
| for Venmo or Square. This transparency also means users
| are less tied to a single provider. If I want to accept
| money on Venmo I have to sign up for a whole new app, vs
| selecting an L2 from a dropdown like I mentioned before.
|
| Regarding credit scores and privacy, there is strong
| reason to believe that zero-knowledge proofs will be very
| useful here. These are much more cutting edge but zk-
| proofs allow people to prove things about themselves
| without giving away their private info. This could allow
| a privacy-respecting credit score where users can prove
| certain things about their financial history without
| giving everything away.
|
| I will admit privacy is still very much a concern. The
| recent controversy over Tornado Cash proves that
| governments are not comfortable with total privacy.
| However, I will say that this isn't the first time the
| government has tried to stop cryptography. Originally,
| there were legal battles over public-key encryption when
| it was first invented but now we use it every day.
| km3r wrote:
| > Additionally, if an L2 goes down there are escape
| hatches that allow users to pull money out onto L1. The
| same cannot be said for Venmo or Square
|
| Aren't venmo and cashapp FDIC insured?
| serverholic wrote:
| They are but I'm saying that if their servers go down it
| might be some time before you get your money back.
|
| You can use an L2 escape hatch at any time. The L2
| doesn't need to be online or functioning.
| peyton wrote:
| It's pretty clear to anyone under 40 working in finance
| that there's room for improvement.
| acdha wrote:
| Also those over 40, but that still doesn't mean
| everything advertised as the solution is actually the
| right answer. This is especially true when the sales
| pitch is "buy now, you'll make a killing!" but all of the
| real problems get a response along the lines of "we're
| working on that but it was harder than we thought".
| Salgat wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| 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.
| eric_cc wrote:
| It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on
| and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very
| similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a
| briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and
| settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin.
|
| If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD
| (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you'd
| really need to compare the "tokenomics" of the currencies. With
| bitcoin, you have complete predictability in terms of when new
| bitcoins are created (inflation). With USD it's purely up to
| the government.
| seibelj wrote:
| At least the goal posts have moved to needing a thousand words
| to criticize Ethereum over "energy waste bad!" Nothing ever
| satisfies the nocoiners
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| burner000 wrote:
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I think money satisfies nocoiners already.
| dang wrote:
| 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
| notch656a wrote:
| ineedasername wrote:
| This has never been an issue that can be discussed in such an
| abbreviated form. So you're criticizing earlier simplistic
| dismissals of crypto because of their over simplifications.
| Yet now you're also trying to dismiss a more detailed bit of
| thinking on crypto when it tries to correct the exact faults
| you found in those simplistic criticism _precisely because it
| is more detailed_. You can 't have it both ways.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The transition on this site has been seamless, hasn't it? I
| have to say, I actually do think less of people for it.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think it's hilarious that you call this moving the
| goalposts. As if the critiques about country-sized energy
| waste were the only issue raised until this moment. When that
| was actually a later-stage critique as "mining" grew and
| grew.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you're gonna make wild prophecies about how crypto is
| going to completely democratize control of the money supply -
| and crypto boosters _love_ to rant about stuff like that -
| then yeah, people are going to keep on finding fault with it
| until someone comes up with a new replacement for "proof of
| turning a fuckton of energy into waste heat" that isn't
| "proof of having a fuckton of money invested in the coin".
|
| The number two crypto left Proof of Waste and that's good,
| yay! But the whole scene is still in the shadow of Bitcoin's
| Proof of Waste, and until that does the same, or shrinks to
| an irreverent shitcoin, people are gonna hate on _all_ crypto
| for its energy usage.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > 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
| time they even had the card - they had stolen it that night and
| tried to use it at a local gas station. A fraud alert woke me
| up.
| zeroclip wrote:
| This is not a shining example of the security of credit
| cards, but an example of how insecure they are. We regularly
| carry passwords into our bank accounts in our pockets, and
| punch them into random ATM machines on the street in a
| foreign country, say them over the phone, or type them in
| while using the coffee shop WiFi. It is no wonder our cards
| are frequently compromised and the total cost of card fraud
| is many dozens of billions of dollars per year.
|
| Usually, the credit card company is the one absorbing the
| cost of this fraud - the food or physical goods that the
| fraudster purchased doesn't just magically leave their
| possession.
|
| It is entirely possible to build a company that holds custody
| of your crypto, extracts rent on transactions or borrows with
| your deposits, and uses their profits to give you some
| financial protection up to a certain limit. Most likely
| within 10+ years your local bank will have some account that
| will custodially hold some limited amount of funds in crypto
| that are FDIC insured. But not everybody in the world wants
| this system, and not everybody wants _all of their assets_ to
| be held in this way.
| jasonshaev wrote:
| Perhaps, but it IS a good example of a system that protects
| the end user from monetary loss in the event of fraud due
| to leaked credentials (in this case the card number + CVV +
| exp date). In my opinion, any system that seeks to replace
| credit cards needs to have a similar ability to recover
| user funds in the case of inevitable security leaks, which
| is something many crypto systems struggle with.
| colordrops wrote:
| 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.
| progman32 wrote:
| Okay, then they leak their private key.
| c0mptonFP wrote:
| Good luck getting a private key out of a HSM.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| My view is that crypto's goals (e.g. decentralized,
| deflationary, no transaction reversals) are non-goals, but even
| if those non-goals were goals, both PoW and PoS fail to
| effectively solve them, especially the decentralized part. PoS
| sucks more than PoW on this axis: PoS encourages centralization
| _within_ the system (those with more ETH control the chain),
| and PoW encourages centralization _outside_ the system (those
| who command more assets to buy GPUs and energy controls the
| system), so it 's really silly and funny and pathetic both fail
| at the same thing, with PoS moving the needle in the wrong
| direction, but also, it was a non-goal to begin with so who
| cares I'll just go with the one that doesn't set the planet on
| fire please.
| [deleted]
| colordrops wrote:
| You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with
| the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions
| can't be controls be reversed, indicating that you want a human
| layer of control that is currently missing. This is a
| conflating of layers and evidence of a fundamental
| misunderstanding of of how it works.
|
| The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted
| to the top of HN that make me wonder if I'm on a ship of fools
| that is no longer the center of gravity of interesting and
| creative tech thought.
|
| Crypto has been around for over a decade and isn't going away,
| and it's an complex technology that has massive depth and a lot
| of interest. These sorts of negative superficial comments that
| get repeated ad infinitum are tiring and provide no value.
|
| If you prefer credit cards then use them. No one is taking that
| away from you. That isn't the main use case that Ethereum is
| going after.
| ineedasername wrote:
| >You are saying two contradictory things. First that those
| with the most money control Ethereum, and then that
| transactions can't be controls be reversed
|
| No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with
| the most money, and history has show as that _transactions
| __can__ be reversed_ when those large players throw their
| weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way.
|
| I'm also saying that _I don 't mind_ there being a human
| layer of judgment, but also that it goes very much against
| the trustless ethos of crypto. And also that the currently
| layer of human judgement is vastly less accessible to the
| average crypto hold than it is in traditional banking &
| finance.
| colordrops wrote:
| The reversal was not great, but also just a one time thing
| that still required the concensus of many entities and
| widespread code change and deployment distributed across
| countless nodes. If it was a bad call then it wouldn't have
| been adopted or would have forked the network in a more
| serious fashion than ETC. If reversals a regular occurance,
| then ETH would not be trusted and it would lose traction.
| It's like comparing an asteroid strike with a car accident.
| The DAO reversal is a single event and says almost nothing
| about the general reversibility of individual small
| transactions. Future reversals are very unlikely now and
| would have to be some huge event and gather concensus like
| any other change to the protocol.
|
| A singular huge change is just not comparable to credit
| card chargebacks that can be executed by anyone. Not
| comparable at all. Chargebacks are part of the CC protocol.
| Eth has no such mechanism.
| pbronez wrote:
| I think the argument is:
|
| (1) in both traditional finance and crypto, a relatively
| small group of big players control the rules of the game
|
| (2) in traditional finance, there are established ways for
| small players (Eg consumers) to appeal to big players (eg
| retail bank) to make exceptions and provide redress
|
| (3) in crypto, there are not yet established pathways for
| small players to petition big players for redress in this
| way.
| biztos wrote:
| In the interest of levity, and at the risk of downvotery, I ask:
|
| > So... it's done?
|
| And the blockchain answereth:
|
| > It's done.
|
| :-)
|
| https://youtu.be/1_TuEO6Mttw
| biztos wrote:
| I'm OK with being downvoted for irrelevance but in case anyone
| doesn't get the reference:
|
| A great deal was made of the change to Proof Of Stake, enough
| that it sort of became an end to itself, and the conversations
| about how exactly it would be safe or even a smart thing to do
| -- national energy output of country X notwithstanding -- got
| very hand-wavy.
|
| And yet it came to pass.
|
| The sci-fi reference linked here is about that, precisely. A
| big decision is made, the affected parties _think_ they know
| all the implications, and yet -- well, see the movie.
| irae wrote:
| Let's congratulate ETH from consuming 99.9 less energy, thus
| having 99.9% less value. IMO they essentially transformed
| something revolutionary, which is value secured by the masses.
| Anyone could mine and help ETH be secure. Now the rich (steakers)
| control the system. Which is essentially what happens with the
| current economy dominated by the rich. They are simply trying to
| change the "who". Alienating the miners was precisely the move to
| show in ETH the rich rule, the poor suffer. Same old capitalism
| as usual.
| 0xfoobar wrote:
| For those interested in understanding the tech rather than the
| typical bashing things as beneath them, I wrote up a detailed
| technical explainer of how Ethereum PoS works:
| https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/ethereum-proof-of-stake
| syzygyhack wrote:
| Ty for your service foo.
| lucozade wrote:
| I have a question if I may.
|
| What mechanism is deciding who pays inactivity leaks?
|
| It says that if a minority stop attesting then they will leak
| until eventually the attestors get to a supermajority. That
| makes sense.
|
| It also says that, if a dishonest minority start a soft fork,
| the fact that they stop attesting on the honest fork means that
| they eventually leak out until the honest fork gets a
| supermajority.
|
| That implies that, unless some mechanism has decided which is
| the honest fork, then all attestors will leak assuming that
| they aren't trying to attest to both blocks (which is illegal).
| But if all attestors are leaking then that supermajority won't
| occur will it?
|
| So something must be deciding which is honest. But it can't be
| using number of attestors/deniers because of USAF ie where the
| honest fork is the less attested one.
|
| So how does that work? How is honesty determined given that
| both forks are legal wrt rules and failed attestation is
| penalised but cannot be shown to be malicious (according to the
| doc).
|
| Also, as an aside, how are leaks actually transacted? They
| can't be using the main transaction or none of the above would
| work. Is there some sort of shadow transaction system for
| staked ETH? If so, what mechanism decides the validity of the
| leak transactions?
|
| Very interesting mechanism. Clearly a lot of thought has been
| put into it.
| lucozade wrote:
| In case anyone's interested, from what i can tell from
| reading other writeups, there is no "honest fork" check. Each
| fork will independently deal with inactivity until they're
| able to finalise.
|
| If that's the case, the article is correct in saying that a
| minority honest fork will finalise as would an honest
| supermajority fork. What it didn't mention is that the
| respective dishonest forks would too. If I've understood
| correctly.
|
| Not really sure I get why this is a good thing.
| bambax wrote:
| Isn't it a little unfortunate that the acronym for Proof of
| Stake would be PoS? Couldn't they think of something else?
| kortex wrote:
| I'm sure you can find a naughty word or phrase, or some other
| semantic collision, out of almost any 3-letter combination,
| in some language somewhere. Sure it's one of the more well
| known ones in a very common lingua franca, but we humans are
| smart and can context switch.
|
| Edit: Actually not sure if you are talking about Point of
| Sale, Place of Service, Piece of $#!7, or something else.
| Case in point: context matters.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| You mean people might confuse it with Point of Sale? /s
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| I don't think that's an obtuse comment. I understood the
| article to be talking about Point of Sale the entire time
| because I live off the blockchain hype.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Hopefully the new algorithm is not a Piece of Shit.
| capableweb wrote:
| Don't be obtuse. They clearly imply people might think it
| means Point of Service.
| fladrif wrote:
| Having read your article, I still don't understand one part.
| The claim that the honest validators in the face of a malicious
| superminority can eventually leak them out, but a malicious
| supermajority cannot do the same to an honest superminority. I
| figure there would need to be some other mechanism that would
| tip the balance in favor of the honest validators, otherwise it
| seems like majority should always win.
| dannyw wrote:
| If you run a node, you're also checking that every block
| follows the rules.
|
| A malicious supermajority cannot break the rules your client
| enforces, because your client will reject it.
|
| Think of it as everyone running ethereum has a bunch of
| asserts() each block or communication it receives.
| fladrif wrote:
| What are these rules? Say for instance 51% of validators
| decide to include a malicious transaction inside of a
| block, what rules would that be breaking?
| capableweb wrote:
| Depends on what way the transaction is "malicious". If
| malicious means transferring funds that don't exists,
| it'll be noticed. If malicious means transfer funds out
| of an address it doesn't hold the key for, it'll be
| noticed, and so on.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > If malicious means transferring funds that don't
| exists, it'll be noticed.
|
| who cares?
|
| As far as I can tell, a majority that wants to block a
| vote can do so freely and the only resolution is a fork
| where people just assume that the honest fork will win
| out.
|
| I also think it's not a majority but actually just a
| little more than a third to block a vote for eth
| fladrif wrote:
| And in the case that the malicious supermajority isn't
| breaking the rules? In the stated instance where they're
| omitting certain transactions, what rule would they be
| breaking?
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Most people aren't bashing the tech, but bashing the excessive
| hype, fraudulent scams and money chasing.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's like... I can be fascinated by the creativity that goes
| into designing and making credit card skimmers that blend
| invisibly into an ATM, that doesn't mean I like the theft...
|
| Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843961
| SilasX wrote:
| Guess you can update this part now!
|
| >3. PoS (Ethereum, soon(tm))
| 0xfoobar wrote:
| Indeed! :)
| bsaul wrote:
| I find the complexity of that algorithm both impressive ( since
| they seem to have made it work), but also quite worrying. I'm
| really not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs, not
| in the implementation but rather in the protocol.
|
| I know a lot of very smart people are working on this, but i'd
| rather have something conceptually simpler to work as the base
| layer for a whole new economy.
| ur-whale wrote:
| >ly not sure how such a beast can't be filled with bugs
|
| The one nice thing about crypto is that if there are bugs,
| the incentive to exploit them is large, they _will_ get found
| quickly.
|
| How the problem is dealt with after the fact (e.g. ETH
| Classic hard fork) i.e. the governance model is the real
| interesting part.
| seydor wrote:
| The incentive is to discover them but exploit them _after_
| the switch to the new chain
| ur-whale wrote:
| > The incentive is to discover them but exploit them
| after the switch to the new chain
|
| You're always at the mercy of a hard fork that "fixes"
| the bug after the exploit.
|
| This is what the Ethereum classic fork was about.
| seydor wrote:
| What if you get half the validators to conspire to
| benefit from the scam
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Making PoS scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes with
| commodity hardware is not simple though. Few projects managed
| so far, and Ethereum wasn't designed for it from the outset,
| so it's even more difficult.
| preseinger wrote:
| But of course no system can scale to O(100k) nodes and
| retain reasonable availability and consistency properties.
| valzam wrote:
| Of course they aren't really scaling to hundreds of
| thousands of nodes. At any given time only 120 nodes are
| involved in consensus.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies impose some complex constraints on
| themselves that require complex solutions.
|
| Conceptually banks and exchanges solved the consensus problem
| decades ago and they did it with a highly secured simple
| database and lots of crosschecks.
|
| But if you trust nobody (except some developers somehwere)
| then things get tricky
| chompychop wrote:
| Could you go into more detail or provide references on
| where I could read up more on how banks do this? I've
| always wondered why we hear a lot about crypto exchanges
| getting hacked, but seldom about banks. What is it that
| banks are doing right (or crypto exchanges doing wrong) in
| terms of security?
| vivegi wrote:
| Banking systems do not require consensus. So, it is a
| single party that has to make a trust decision with a
| counterparty that it partially trusts, but may
| potentially be a fraudulent party masquerading as a
| trusted party.
|
| Crypto requires consensus amongs millions of untrusted
| and possibly malicious parties i.e., no trust, all
| cryptography.
|
| Both require cryptography to work (eg: online banking
| transaction vis-a-vis crypto currency transfer). But the
| former is well-known (Public Key Encryption and Symmetric
| Encryption) client and server with established trust
| relationships that can be cryptographically verified
| whereas the latter is a distributed system with untrusted
| nodes and has different dynamics.
|
| The other issue is about correctness. If there is an
| error (system or human) in the banking system, there are
| compensatory transactions/procedures possible. Crypto has
| not evolved yet to accommodate these real world issues.
| It is also not proven that the crypto protocols are 100%
| correct. Therein lies the rub. The banking system is also
| not 100% correct, but has procedures to address the
| failures (complaint system, appeals, courts etc.,) but
| with crypto, there is no way to address the failure cases
| (hacks, lost wallets, corrupted drives, 51% attacks
| etc.,)
| forkerenok wrote:
| First things that come to mind reading GP are the
| existing interbank payment clearing networks: Fedwire,
| CHIPS, SWIFT, etc.
|
| And, on the contrary, SWIFT was hacked not so long ago: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%932016_SWIFT_bank
| in...
| xoralkindi wrote:
| This is all about ledgers, traditional banks have a
| centralized ledger that only they can edit. Blockchains
| the ledger is decentralized, anyone can edit the ledger
| (based on specific rules) this provides allot of avenues
| of attack.
| bsaul wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're half joking, but banks authentify
| every single tenant in the transaction (from account
| owners, to institutions) in the most rigid way. Fraud
| usually happens at the edge (credit card), but everything
| "inside" the system is a legally registered entity. It is
| completely integrated with the legal system.
| selestify wrote:
| > everything "inside" the system is a legally registered
| entity. It is completely integrated with the legal
| system.
|
| Well then, that's not at all solving the same consensus
| problem that crypto solves.
| bsaul wrote:
| Oh ok, yes from that point of view they're solving
| entirely different problems, for sure.
| Vespasian wrote:
| They do solve the consensus problem but don't have the
| same constraints crypto does.
|
| The consensus (of who owns what and how did that happen)
| is whatever the banking says it is at the moment. This
| works because society places a lot of trust in the actors
| and the checks and regulations surrounding them (e.g.
| liability regimes) as well as the ways to rectify
| mistakes (through the legal system).
|
| Crypto adds the additional requirement that every
| participant of the system (even end users) can
| independently come up with the same state without a
| single entity being the arbitrator of truth. The tradeoff
| is added technical complexity and inefficiency (storage
| and computation)
| 0xfoobar wrote:
| Agreed that conceptual simplicity is always best, and the
| current Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST doesn't have provable
| guarantees yet (though seems to be working in practice). I'm
| excited to see slight modifications to the
| consensus/forkchoice algo that do have provable guarantees,
| like [Goldfish](https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/09/goldfish)
| from Paradigm Research.
| m12k wrote:
| I'm a crypto skeptic, but I have to admit, one of the cool
| things about crypto-currencies is that they come with their
| own built-in bug bounty. If there's a bug, it will most
| certainly be found.
| bsaul wrote:
| I'm not sure a criminal mind would advertize having found a
| bug in the algorithm. Instead it would probably try to
| capitalize on that bug for as long as possible while
| remaining quiet about it (assuming it's possible, of
| course).
| mirekrusin wrote:
| There is large areas in cryptography where if you don't do it
| right the whole thing won't work at all - in that sense there
| are large parts that are self verifying which collapses
| complexity. I'm not saying it's all easy, just that experts
| can navigate through complexity because they know what to
| ignore by abstracting it and thinking about properties it
| holds, not keeping in mind all the guts underneath. Maybe
| good example is that you can use sha256 effectively in your
| code without knowing or focusing on how it works internally.
| You're interfacing with it through relatively easy properties
| it has.
| bsaul wrote:
| Except cryptography usually rely on mathematical proofs.
| I'm not aware of such possibility for distributed systems.
| I know Lamport did work on that subject, but i'm not sure
| if you can equate a TLA+ proof on some properties to a
| mathematical proof about the structure of numbers, nor do i
| know if ethereum even has a TLA+ proof or equivalent of
| anything regarding the PoS protocol (i honestly don't know,
| so i may be completely wrong).
| plopilop wrote:
| There has been some work on the topic, for instance
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765.pdf
|
| But the main issue in provable security is that you're
| trying to prove real world things with math, and so far
| we're quite bad at it. The more mathematical the thing
| you want to prove is, the better.
| bitL wrote:
| I wouldn't rely on experts being able to navigate through
| complexity as it happens quite a bit that a major bug in a
| protocol obliterating it completely is found 15 years after
| its inception...
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| There are even larger areas in cryptography where if you
| don't do it right the whole thing will work, and after a
| few months someone will make $1B by crashing your currency
| into oblivion.
|
| Edit: if you want to see how that can happen, I like to
| take apart weak cryptocurrencies and show what's wrong with
| them. Someone paid me to do a public review of a thing
| called Stratis a while back, and I went to town. Here's a
| highlight.
| https://twitter.com/PLT_cheater/status/1235036182284820481
|
| I still accept commissions doing code review. It's just
| _too much_ fun.
| [deleted]
| xoralkindi wrote:
| Good cryptography should be auditable, that means it should
| be simple. It should not rely on experts knowing their way
| through the complexity but should rely on mathematical
| guarantees.
|
| Yes the cryptography primitives should act like black
| boxes, no need to peak inside but when a number of these
| black boxes are used together to form a high level protocol
| allot of subtle things can go wrong for example see the
| history of SSL/TLS https://www.feistyduck.com/ssl-tls-and-
| pki-history/
| atomlib wrote:
| What's Substack? Is that new Medium?
| speedylight wrote:
| That's how I always thought about it yeah.
| NavinF wrote:
| Yeah it's like Medium except it has less fluff/self-
| promotion.
| toastal wrote:
| It'll be okay like Medium used to be until it isn't and the
| funders turn it into Medium while seeking that return on
| investment. You're still better off owning your own blog in
| the long run.
| lloppal wrote:
| It's like Medium but wants you to pay for newsletters.
| polisteps wrote:
| Which is fairer imo than paying for the whole site. I
| prefer creator control on which content is paid and which
| content is not.
| macawfish wrote:
| The Ethereum people were very clever to call this extreme fork a
| merge :)
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I look forward to their rebase :D
| olalonde wrote:
| A good moment of humility I hope for all those HN experts who
| implied Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake would never
| happen.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| I'm just glad I renamed the word for staking in Tezos from
| "forging" to "baking". There's now about a million companies
| with names referring to baking in some way. I don't think there
| would be a lot of financial companies that have forging in the
| name. It might well have been a detractor for Ethereum PoS as
| well.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I feel like you have an overly emotional attachment to this,
| given your need to make this comment. People say things that
| turn out to be wrong all the time, but you seem to have become
| resentful that they disbelieved this would happen.
|
| Odd way to approach a technology.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| I'd interpret your response as being more emotional than the
| parent's comment.
| [deleted]
| olalonde wrote:
| I was sarcastic about the "expert" part. Those commenters
| were not merely wrong, they were spreading misinformation. To
| actual experts, Ethereum's move to PoS has been a certainty
| for many years now.
| [deleted]
| timeon wrote:
| Is Ethereum Classic going to be relevant?
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| There will be more recent PoW fork. But probably ETC will see
| new miners flocking.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Just the sound of goal posts moving.
|
| But these posts are more easily ignored now.
| chris123 wrote:
| The fatal flaws of PoS, centralization, censorship, benefit the
| few of the expense of the many will become apparent.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| This thread is HN jumping the shark for me.
|
| The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60
| billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the
| scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge
| number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open
| source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and
| entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore.
| wyager wrote:
| > Permanent power savings the scale of a country.
|
| Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
| RunSet wrote:
| > The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a
| $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power
| savings the scale of a country.
|
| Indeed. If someone claimed that Ethereum is a scam and Vitalik
| Buterin is a scammer I would need them to substantiate that
| claim.
|
| https://teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/comments/x0i8ts/just_traded_all...
| krferriter wrote:
| Unfortunately all the NFT scams (most of which were run on
| top of ethereum) and smaller coins/networks created and
| promoted solely for pump-and-dump schemes (not ethereum) got
| conflated in some people's heads with everything else in the
| cryptocurrency space and now they think it is all just a scam
| that doesn't do anything besides trick people into losing
| money.
| vsareto wrote:
| If you want a majority of people using your thing,
| perception is important.
|
| - Governments were pretty late to the party with
| regulations/law enforcement because they understandably
| didn't know if it was serious. This meant your average
| person who lost in a scam probably had no justice.
|
| - The volume of scams made it seem that all of this was
| normal - best case was you did some research that found out
| before you put money in. This is partly because of
| governments but also there's no central authority from the
| crypto side to say what is safe and what isn't. "Buyer
| beware" with an every day currency/payment system doesn't
| really do you any favors in terms of adoption.
|
| - People lost substantial real money to complicated
| technical issues on top of the scams
|
| - All of this meant you had to do your research to
| fundamentally use the thing safely, which turned it more
| into an investing chore than payment convenience.
|
| So it's actually pretty reasonable if someone has this
| impression
| resters wrote:
| HN has been oddly prejudiced against crypto. Sure there is a
| ton of hype, but there are some extremely interesting ideas and
| some incredible innovation taking place.
|
| This is what happens when startups become cool and the people
| who would have otherwise gotten an MBA and tried to find work
| at a major bank are now the ones on HN.
| svnt wrote:
| The audience here probably holds a disproportionate amount of
| newly less-profitable GPUs.
|
| PoS has been the clear future for better than five years and
| huge credit to the ETH team for making this happen.
| ruune wrote:
| People here are largely anti crypto, not anti Proof of stake
| overtonwhy wrote:
| Over a Russian cryptocoin? Weird spot to draw the line.
| Ethereum Classic is still running with billions of USD in
| market cap after the last fork that happened years ago. Why
| does anyone think this fork is anything except another way for
| the controllers to cash out before their scam bubble pops?
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| To be fair, the article talks about none of that and focuses on
| the high-level traders perspective. I'd bet that a write up of
| the process of the merge would be a huge hit on HN.
| aliqot wrote:
| I want to have the same faith as you, but I've been here
| since y2, and it has seldom been positive. I get it, I'm in
| the same field of research and can't stand what traders have
| done to the industry.
|
| 0. In the beginning we had no legitimacy, so we courted
| regulators and current financial types in as a means of
| legitimacy by proxy.
|
| 1. Those financial types and regulators who had open minds
| joined, shenanigans ensued, and we saw a replaying of all the
| dirty tricks that were outlawed in traditional markets like
| front-running.
|
| 2. Then fast forward to where we are now; industry types who
| came in early are making a killing and funding legislation
| like New York's BitLicense, which pushes toward
| centralization by outlawing participation for 'unaccreddited'
| types like the nerds who built this whole shindig.
|
| For folks like me who just want to build distributed systems
| and tackle issues like consensus, it's hard to be taken
| seriously, because we're all just trying to do our work but
| we're trapped in this casino where there's starting to be
| more pinky rings than poker chips and it's only getting
| worse.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and
| entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore.
|
| There has to be a goal insight, otherwise it's just technical
| virtuosism for the sake of nothing. Nobody likes technical
| virtuosism for the sake of nothing otherwise guitar players who
| can play at 2000 bpm would dominate the billboard.
|
| Blockchain is not a young technology it was conceived in 1996,
| almost 30 years later the usecase it's still obscure, except
| the only usecase has been to create a casino in disguise.
|
| Making regular daily tasks less painful is a goal which if it
| was ever there has been abandoned post the first BTC run from
| 1$ to 127$
| ews wrote:
| Hacker News has a serious mob mentality with regards to crypto.
| Some loud voices decides it was a "scam" years ago and would
| not get out of their high horse despite the evidence, and
| despite incredible technical feats like the merge. It was never
| the place to have an intelligent conversation about pros/cons
| and it will never be.
| seydor wrote:
| But this is the opposite of hacking. Feels like turning ETH to
| a political system. Soon you ll have the "republican party of
| ETH" forming. Those are natural self-organized outcomes when
| groups of humans are trusted with power.
| svnt wrote:
| It's moved the participation mainstream for sure. No longer
| do people need to hoard electronics and build asics.
|
| The power dynamics were always there, though, just obscured
| by additional requirements of some level of technical
| competence.
| seydor wrote:
| and some actual physical friction which prevents some kinds
| of very quick reaction to current events
| ryyr wrote:
| ethereum is a political system, it exists to recreate the
| present arrangement with dlt and the extra niceties that it
| gives those in power. excuse the paranoia. anyway, definitely
| an achievement in my book
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Hacker News is an amazing place filled with visionaries and
| world-class thinkers.
|
| Until you bring up crypto.
| bertman wrote:
| Well, the whole crypto/fin tech space is such a rotten cesspool
| of scammers and blowhards that it's becoming very difficult to
| take anything they do and say seriously.
| viscanti wrote:
| The ETH core team who pulled off a very ambitious migration
| to POS might be different than the run of the mill scammers
| who are involved with crypto. Seems weird to group them all
| together when they appear to be very different.
| [deleted]
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The coreteam actively support building a platform which is
| to 90% or somused by scammers. They might be technically
| curious and not be scammers themselves, but this is a bit
| like Wernher von Braun's Statement that he is just building
| the rockets for the Nazis and makes them manoverable, what
| payload is loaded and where they are aimed at is "not my
| [his] department"
| kranke155 wrote:
| 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 where innovation is a new JavaScript
| framework.
|
| Not saying anything bad about that, but people here don't seem
| to have innovation in mind. I mean r/Ethereum on Reddit is
| better than HN to discuss these topics. It's just wrong. HN has
| become counter futurism.
| paldepind2 wrote:
| You complain that HN is a hive mind and suggest that
| r/Ethereum is a better place?
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| Laughable to suggest that everyone is wrong (except you of
| course) and that not worshipping crypto makes you an "average
| developer"
| mratsim wrote:
| > a forum for your average developer
|
| The average developer doesn't use Rust
| simonw wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > It's the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the next
| decade or two and HN doesn't get it at all.
|
| It HAS been the biggest wealth producing opportunity of the
| LAST decade , along with Bitcoin.
|
| They are now both priced for world changing paradigm shift
| and perfect execution doing so. Which means that there is no
| wealth producing opportunity at all considering that you need
| everything to pan out great just to mantain the current
| valuation.
|
| Also everything is an S-curve and once you arrive to 750bn
| (or whatever they crypto-marketcap is) there is physically
| nowhere to go to from there.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| So we now have a technical marvel used for financial
| speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging
| regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I
| supposed to be impressed by this?
|
| It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor
| divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own
| sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not
| necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.
| jasonsync wrote:
| But doesn't a lot "good tech" have nefarious roots?
|
| The internet got its start as a government weapon in the Cold
| War?
| Psyladine wrote:
| Any tool is a weapon proportional to its power & utility.
| Beyond that, there's nothing nefarious inherent in
| weaponry, the DARPA initiatives that birthed the internet
| were based in defense, against nuclear annihilation. Seems
| like a win-win, politics non-withstanding.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Do you use the shadowy currency popular with criminals known
| as the US dollar?
|
| USD is by far the most popular currency used for crime. It
| has stable price, accepted everywhere, and lacks a public
| ledger.
| liuliu wrote:
| > dodging regulators ...
|
| With The Merge, that no longer the case, and this is good for
| Ethereum and for cryptocurrency community.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Oy, friend, you ever heard of a prototype? Or burgeoning
| technology? Do you remember the history of the internal
| combustion engine?
| spyspy wrote:
| Basically proving their point. We should have been more
| critical of the ICE too before we built our whole society
| around it and let it contribute to destroying our
| environments.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The engine wasn't the problem, the lack of industry
| regulation in areas like gas and oil was the problem.
| Don't blame the tool.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Don't blame the tool.
|
| Blame both.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| I'm really impressed by how virtuous you are.
| DangMeatSlurper wrote:
| tirpen wrote:
| Virtues are generally more impressive than a cynical
| mockery of virtues at least.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor seems much
| more akin to the HN culture than whorshipping the regulators
| to me
| jliptzin wrote:
| Cash is still best for illicit activities
| m12k wrote:
| Money laundering cash at scale is much, much, much harder
| than money laundering crypto.
| pasiaj wrote:
| I seriously doubt that. Please elaborate why you think
| this is the case.
| mratsim wrote:
| America's underground economy is estimated at 2.5
| trillions, 10-12% of GDP:
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032916/how-
| big...
|
| The total market cap of ALL crypto is about 1 trillion
| today. So money laundering at a thousands of billions
| scale cannot use crypto.
| silon42 wrote:
| and for privacy
| shemnon42 wrote:
| Yes, we should focus on surveillance capitalism instead.
| Perfectly legal.
|
| If you want to talk about actively making the world worse
| look at most web2 "algorithms" and how the push to the
| extremes is tolerated by "but numbers go up."
| mratsim wrote:
| > used for financial speculation, conducting illicit
| transactions, and dodging regulators...
|
| https://decrypt.co/66411/cia-bitcoin-surveillance
|
| > Michael Morell, who was previously the CIA's acting
| director, said in 'An Analysis of Bitcoin's Use in Illicit
| Finance' that "blockchain technology is a powerful but
| underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify
| illicit activity and bring criminals to justice."
|
| > Tracking illicit Bitcoin transactions is therefore easier
| than tracing illegal funds moved across borders using
| "traditional banking transactions" and "far easier" than
| trying to follow cash, according to the report.
|
| > One source in the report was quoted saying that "if all
| criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit
| financial activity."
|
| TL;DR cash is a better tool for crime according to an ex CIA
| director
| tcgv wrote:
| > So we now have a technical marvel used for financial
| speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging
| regulators
|
| You're right, it's an impressive piece technology that's been
| growing through questionable use cases. But that's not the
| fault of the underlying technology, but of the actors
| involved.
|
| As long as blockchains are treated as a second class citizen,
| governments choose to ostracize it, financial oligopolies
| lobby against it, things won't change.
|
| But imagine what could be accomplished if governments decided
| to embrace and properly regulate it, and what it could
| empower in our society in terms of a more open and acessible
| socio-economic environment.
|
| Let's not blame the technology.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| "Properly regulate" a thing whose only purpose is to bypass
| regulation. Seems legit...
| DangMeatSlurper wrote:
| solardev wrote:
| > Let's not blame the technology
|
| That sounds like something people say to defend guns,
| nukes, and crypto. Why wouldn't you blame a technology
| whose primary use is malignant?
|
| It's not like the crypto hellscape we have now was an
| accident of its evolution. It was the inevitable and
| predictable outcome of a decentralized and poorly regulated
| system built atop complex code that the average person has
| little chance of properly evaluating.
|
| From all appearances, this is exactly how they were
| designed and exactly the point, to extract money from fools
| and funnel it to a select few crypto bankers. That's not a
| good thing.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Friend, blockchains were designed to circumvent centralized
| regulation. Fraud is still illegal whether or not you use a
| funny internet cryptography tool, we don't need to be
| regulating our tools.
| rco8786 wrote:
| It was an amazing feat to do. But the question of "so what?"
| remains unanswered.
| dylkil wrote:
| the servile class learned how to program
| ouid wrote:
| i have as much of a problem with wealth inequality as you do,
| but wealthy people have as much of an advantage playing the
| crypto game as they do the regular game, because its just a
| market.
| periphrasis wrote:
| Imagine thinking securities fraud is the profession of the
| superior man: instead, he is merely a slave to his desires,
| namely greed, debasing himself in order to vainly feed the
| insatiable beast inside. Truly pitiable and truly servile.
| smoldesu wrote:
| This is still a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. We
| just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for work
| rendered.
| wkrsz wrote:
| One can be critical about cryptocurrencies as currencies,
| investment or speculative assets _and_ be curious by how the
| merge was performed.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| drawnwren wrote:
| I mean, 1 --- HN is largely populated by big tech coders who
| decided selling out the entire world population for a mid
| $100ks salary from the surveillance state sounds like a good
| deal.
|
| But 2, there are liquid markets for crypto. So, while you
| might feel good typing out how you value crypto --- it simply
| doesn't matter. Put your money where your mouth is. Short it.
| [deleted]
| motoxpro wrote:
| > We just don't accept Monopoly Money as compensation for
| work rendered.
|
| Every person that took equity in a startup that then went out
| of business would love to talk with you. Believing bitcoin
| will be valuable for some people isn't really any different
| than believing pets.com will be successful or that tesla will
| actually be able to make electric cars and taking equity
| instead of cash for compensation.
| smoldesu wrote:
| You're right, I sometimes forget that the crowd here is
| motivated more by opportunism than real technical
| innovation.
|
| All the more, we shouldn't cede financial power to Joe
| Shmoe and his pre-mined L2 chain.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| This is not the same thing. Shares of a company have an
| actual value: a part of the company's capital (computers,
| building, etc). At least there is some ground based on
| real-world something. Of course the company can go bankrupt
| and owe more money than its capital can cover, but that's
| still not the same has crypto assets, whose values are
| _purely_ speculative.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| These remote startups building social media sites and
| SaaS products with Javascript surely own lots of
| buildings and computers and run their own datacenters!
| Psyladine wrote:
| In the sense that there isn't any difference in spending
| your annual salary on lottery tickets instead of food.
| Before you balk, I point you at the handful of winners who
| raked in billions, a ROI most of these "food eaters" could
| only dream of.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| I accepted that Monopoly money ten years ago for work
| rendered. Glad I did.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Hey, if you don't mind your per-diem being less liquid than
| your stock options, go for it. Thinking pragmatically about
| the future of cryptocurrency though, I'd reckon it's safer
| to bet on the US dollar than Bitcoin bouncing back.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| I sold a couple of Bitcoins years ago at 200$ because I
| thought it wouldn't bounce back. Guess I keep what's left
| until Bitcoin hits a million.
| fourstar wrote:
| >we
|
| Speak for yourself, noob.
| sbf501 wrote:
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment
| section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't
| real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up
| cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.
| usehackernews wrote:
| This isn't crypto "hype." It's not going to impact the price
| of Ethereum. At least it's not hype in my opinion. It's just
| an impressive engineering feat.
|
| Given crypto isn't going to die tomorrow, it's good to see
| Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof
| of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum,
| reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is
| admirable.
| lottin wrote:
| Not wasting electricity is absolutely good news for the
| environment. At the same time, they were _wasting_
| electricity before... so I don 't know about admirable,
| they've stopped doing something they shouldn't have been
| doing in the first place.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I'm curious, what are your thoughts on these neural net
| AI art generation tools like DallE and GPT? You seem to
| have strong opinions on what "legitimate" uses of
| electricity are, and they given that an entire economic
| ecosystem is apparently not legitimate, is making art?
| How about playing video games?
| root_axis wrote:
| If it required the energy resources of a small country to
| produce 20 images per day, it would be considered
| completely absurd by most everyone.
| lottin wrote:
| It depends... can the same outcome be achieved by using
| 99.5% less electricity? If it can, then it means 99.5% of
| the electricity consumed by this activity is being
| wasted, and that is a fact. Otherwise, it becomes a
| matter of opinion. Do I think casinos are a waste of
| space and energy? Sure, but this is just an opinion based
| on my personal preferences. I understand people have
| different preferences.
| root_axis wrote:
| It's hype - whether or not its also an example of
| impressive engineering is beside the point. Nobody is
| suggesting eth devs are bad programmers.
| majinuub wrote:
| This article can give you some insight as to why HN reacts the
| way it does: https://www.citadel21.com/why-the-yuppie-elite-
| dismiss-bitco...
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I just want to check in and make sure you understand that the
| fundamental principle of how a Con Game works is that the
| mark thinks they know something that no one else knows.
| jarboot wrote:
| HN is also a forum launched in 2007 and likely skews older and
| more financially conservative
| the_gastropod wrote:
| > Permanent power savings the scale of a country
|
| I don't know if _you_ ever argued against that massive energy
| footprint as "FUD". But I do find it pretty hilarious to see a
| crypto proponent _now_ use that as a positive. "We're not
| wasting country-sized amounts of electricity anymore!"
|
| FWIW, I don't think most crypto-critics (yours truly included)
| argue that it's not technically interesting. We argue that it's
| tech in search of a (mostly) non-existent problem, that has a
| whole host of very negative externalities.
| brightball wrote:
| Ethereum has always seemed like the only real effort towards
| accomplishing the goals that were set out for the Bitcoin
| ecosystem.
|
| Everything else...literally everything else in the space
| appears to be pump and dump, get rich quick scams: ICOs, NFTs,
| new coins appearing constantly, etc.
|
| Kudos to Ethereum for pulling off the merge. There's a lot of
| people heavily invested in mining that this move threatens and
| they're going to scream about it. IMO Eth2 is the future core
| of everything in the web3 space.
| nateunch wrote:
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Congratulations miners, validators, and hosted validator
| services!
|
| Big win for sustainability and industry!
| once_inc wrote:
| A recent study by an American governmental organisation (I
| don't remember which) recently showed that Bitcoin can be used
| to reduce methane emissions. This in turn would make Bitcoin
| mining and Proof-of-work net carbon negative (significantly so
| if my memory of the graph accompanying the news isn't letting
| me down).
|
| edit: also, this is a new frontier that combines the best of
| both worlds for energy suppliers, bitcoin miners, governments
| and the environment.
| salmonlogs wrote:
| Let's be clear: Bitcoin is NOT reducing methane emissions or
| carbon emissions. Crypto mining cannot reduce anything. This
| is just a straw man.
|
| The study you reference discussed burning waste methane to
| turn into electricity, rather than gas flaring.
|
| That electricity could be used for anything. Water
| desalination, stored for grid balancing, powering
| agricultural needs or offsetting the electrical needs of the
| gas facilities.
| vntok wrote:
| > That electricity could be used for anything. Water
| desalination, stored for grid balancing, powering
| agricultural needs or offsetting the electrical needs of
| the gas facilities.
|
| No it precisely could not, because there's no transport
| infrastructure, storage or grid balancer there.
|
| That's why they were flaring in the first place.
| once_inc wrote:
| sigh, one of these days, I'm going to be able to downvote
| despite being heavily suppressed for having a fact-based
| opinion about Bitcoin, which is the result of literally
| years of study. Until then, you have my upvote.
| baby wrote:
| Let's talk about modern technologies pls
| once_inc wrote:
| These are modern technologies. The infrastructure to use
| the methane isn't there, so it needs to be monetized
| locally. Bitcoin mining is one of the very few options
| available to do this at scale.
| baby wrote:
| Bitcoin is by no mean a modern technology at this point.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Are there resources that tell you how to do moderately complex
| things in ethereum/crypto properly/safely?
|
| I've dug in every once in a while, but the people doing things in
| crypto seem to have crypto "stacks", and those stacks aren't
| transparently obvious. I haven't been able to find the useful
| entry point into these things.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > how to do moderately complex things in ethereum/crypto
| properly/safely?
|
| As far as I know it is not achievable.
|
| Even doing it in normal banking system is quite tricky with
| BTC/ETH it is basically hopeless.
| c01n wrote:
| Congratz Ethereum, sorry for doubting you. Now let bug bounties
| begins (:
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I think this is great news because it reduces wasted energy. The
| sooner cryptocurrency stops boiling the ocean, the sooner the
| rest of us can ignore it.
|
| I have no problem with weird nerds having their own hobbies (I
| have a model train set!) as long as they are not actively hurting
| anyone.
|
| Now do the same for bitcoin.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| You do realize that the entire cryptocurrency space (all coins,
| regardless of their names) are using less electricity than the
| total of electronics that are in standby in US only. So, if you
| want to have an impact, better to reorient your efforts to have
| the industry do away with standby idea. That was a good idea 5
| decades ago in 70's, when electronics were expensive and they
| lasted a decade. But nowadays, with planned obsolesce, it makes
| no sense to have standby technology implemented to make the
| electronics last longer because they fail after one year anyway
| due to other factors rather than transient response on startup
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_response &
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_state)
|
| So, boiling the ocean is not done by this anyway, my point.
| akx wrote:
| Don't suppose you have any data to show to back that
| electricity claim?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| There was an article that said bitcoin blockchain uses as
| much energy as entire country of Argentina, which made
| rounds here in HN
| (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952). In that
| graph there you also get US consumption too. And China's as
| well. Now compare them and tell me again the oceans are
| boiling because of bitcoin.
| jcranmer wrote:
| You haven't provided the requested data. What's the
| energy consumption of "the total of electronics that are
| in standby in the US only"?
|
| Actually, let math out an estimate of what your claim
| amounts to. Bitcoin uses ~125TWh/yr of electricity. The
| US has ~125 million households. That means Bitcoin uses
| about 1MWh/yr per US household, or on average, about 114W
| per US household. If I assume that's 5V DC circuits
| that's about 22A.
|
| Therefore, your claim that Bitcoin uses more electricity
| than standby circuits in the US implies that standby
| circuits are consuming more electricity than the maximum
| capacity of one of the circuits in a typical circuit
| breaker box. That doesn't pass the smell test.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Pure whataboutism.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Yours? Yes, I agree. "bitcoin is boiling oceans" is
| laughable at best.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Hyperbole is not whataboutism.
|
| Doing a bad thing for a dumb reason does not become
| better if others are also doing other bad things for
| other dumb reasons.
| noipv4 wrote:
| you can obtain the poap if you attended the party like so:
| https://youtu.be/Nx-jYgI0QVI?t=10993
| ftulp wrote:
| Ethereum is anti-cryptocurrency. It is a bribe to get
| unprincipled people to betray Bitcoin, and the best interests of
| humanity.
| lambdadmitry wrote:
| What boggles my mind is that _there is no withdrawal from
| staking_ and almost no one talks about it. That is, staking right
| now is a one way street with a promise to be able to withdraw
| some time in the future and returning only about 4% gross
| annually, which is laughably low for something that risky. It 's
| well hidden in Ethereum press releases, the only mention I can
| quickly find is the FAQ entry titled 'Misconception: "The Merge
| enabled staking withdrawals."' here [1].
|
| It's not just about transparency either. The whole system's
| security rests on game theory. Not being able to withdraw must
| affect incentives, which means the introduction of withdrawals
| will change the system in ways that were not tested yet.
|
| [1]: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
| Darkstryder wrote:
| Withdrawals haven't been enabled _yet_. Per your own link it
| will be enabled in an upcoming upgrade.
|
| Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never
| happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade,
| and this one did happen in the end.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| > Withdrawals haven't been enabled _yet_. Per your own link
| it will be enabled in an upcoming upgrade.
|
| lambdadmitry is aware of that, they wrote "that is, staking
| _right now_ is a one way street _with a promise to be able to
| withdraw some time in the future_ ".
|
| >Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never
| happen. But you could argue the same about the merge upgrade,
| and this one did happen in the end.
|
| They weren't saying that it definitely won't happen, their
| main point was "[the return] is laughably low for something
| that risky". Yes, you might be able to withdraw in the
| future, but it's not guaranteed and right now you can't, so
| there should be more attention paid to the risk as it stands.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > Of course you can argue this upcoming upgrade will never
| happen.
|
| If software development has taught me anything, it's to never
| depend on the anticipated future kindness of software
| projects I don't control.
| lambdadmitry wrote:
| I'm saying that right now staking is an activity with a
| serious risk of losing all of the staked money, an undefined
| period of the money being inaccessible, and just 4% gross
| reward for that, which is so poor I can only imagine very
| _specific_ people engaging in it. It doesn 't make sense
| financially, so the people doing that are either foolish,
| enthusiasts, or looking for other ways to profit such as
| regulatory capture, which should not inspire confidence.
|
| What's more, it's expected to change, changing the rules of a
| system relying on incentives to stay sound. In that sense
| it's not even releasing an alpha version, it's releasing a
| different product and promising to launch the announced one
| some time later.
| Darkstryder wrote:
| It does make sense if you accept two hypotheses:
|
| 1/ cryptocurrencies are here to stay, like it or not
|
| 2/ The environmental harm done by PoW is a much greater
| risk to oneself than losing some money on staking.
|
| Then staking becomes a << vote with your wallet >>
| situation to nudge the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem
| towards non-polluting algorithms.
|
| If you prove switching to PoS can be done at Ethereum's
| scale, the case to ban PoW altogether becomes much
| stronger.
| lambdadmitry wrote:
| It still doesn't, unless you mean as a cause for
| activists. Stocks are here to stay too, and SP500
| returned about 12% since mid-20th century while being
| much lower risk and having no withdrawal restrictions.
| Why settling down for 4% when you can have multitudes of
| that with lower risk? There is no financial sense to do
| that, and "voting with your wallet" against your
| financial interests is by definition activism.
|
| What you're saying is effectively "staking is a donation
| to Ethereum future", which I don't mind as long as it is
| explicit. In Ethereum's communications, it's anything
| but.
| Darkstryder wrote:
| I think our disagreement is that I vehemently consider
| global warming to be against my long-term financial
| interest, making it perfectly rational to invest in
| anything that has a serious shot at limiting it, while
| you consider this to be << activism >>.
| bhaak wrote:
| > It's well hidden in Ethereum press releases, the only mention
| I can quickly find is the FAQ entry titled 'Misconception: "The
| Merge enabled staking withdrawals."' here [1].
|
| You shouldn't make financial decision based on press releases.
| It was a well known fact that the withdrawal of staked ETH
| would not be enabled with the POS hard fork. Every staking
| tutorial does point that out.
|
| The Beacon Chain has been started in December 2020. That means
| people have been staking for almost 2 years now, knowing that
| they won't be able to withdraw any of their staked ETH for
| years.
|
| You can say what you want that is quite the commitment.
|
| > That is, staking right now is a one way street with a promise
| to be able to withdraw some time in the future and returning
| only about 4% gross annually, which is laughably low for
| something that risky.
|
| You are aware that the POS rewards are calculated taking the
| amount of staked ETH into account? The more ETH is staked the
| smaller rewards are? That means that people are totally fine
| with staking for that kind of return.
| phartenfeller wrote:
| I appreciate it wasting less precious energy. But this change
| also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are
| fading away right?
|
| The wealthy actors are the ones dictating the transaction now and
| they also on top get paid for being rich. This does not sound
| like a "better financial system" for me. Also, don't forget the
| DAO Fork[0] where with the "ungovernable Blockhain" it was
| decided a transaction was not ok and it was removed?!
|
| [0] https://ethereum.org/en/history/#dao-fork
| seanhunter wrote:
| Ungovernable doesn't mean that the people involved can't decide
| what to do. "Ungovernable " meeans an external party can't
| force them to do something they don't want.
|
| The dao fork proves this because some people decided not to
| roll back and forked the chain instead. The ecosystem decided
| which fork was the main fork but they both live on.
| staringback wrote:
| The Dao hard fork was not a roll back. The original hack
| transactions still exist on chain and are executed by every
| node which syncs from genesis.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Over 90% of NFTs flow through one provider, Pinata. OpenSea,
| GME, and many other exchanges are all powered by Pinata,
| without which you would have a terrible experience buying and
| trading NFTs. Of which, NFTs are primarily traded on two
| platforms.
|
| It's already centralized, all of it, from the blockchain to the
| "dapps" built on top of them.
| Yizahi wrote:
| And it will be the same group of people until the thermal death
| of the universe, because there are literally no mechanisms to
| separate those wallets from the tokens. The ultimate feudalism.
| konschubert wrote:
| Just like with Bitcoin.
| kevinak wrote:
| No.
| kortex wrote:
| Every networked system (eth, btc, usd, the internet itself,
| trade, an economy) has aspects of centralization and
| decentralization. USD is decentralized in that if enough people
| stopped attesting to its value or accepting it for trade, the
| whole thing folds. That doesn't happen precisely because so
| many people believe in its value. But many aspects of USD and
| the banking system are opaque: how it is minted, what players
| are trusted, how much fractional reserve is allowed, etc.
|
| The big difference is how easy it is to step into the game. I'd
| probably need millions of dollars, oodles of lawyer-hours, a
| bunch of employees, and a mountain of paperwork, to start a
| bank and participate in the banking system as a peer. I just
| need 32Eth (roughly $50kUSD) and some computers to participate
| as a validator.
|
| The hard fork only "worked" cause enough people went with it.
| If enough people said "f it, no fork", then the fork still
| happens, but loses the social capital and thus the old chain
| "wins".
|
| The internet struggles with ipv6 because not enough nodes
| support it. Politics breaks down when parties can't reach
| agreement. I don't know of any system which is truly tolerant
| to byzantine / 51% attacks.
| bhawks wrote:
| Transition to proof of stake consensus doesn't make a byzantine
| fault tolerant system anymore or less accessible to the
| everyman, it simply replaces depending on electricity to
| depending on investing directly into the protocol.
|
| One may see the 'wealthy' as getting more 'say' but in reality
| they could (and did) just buy hardware that produces higher
| hashrates.
|
| This performative ceremony is gone now to the benefit of all
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power
| to the people" are fading away right?_
|
| Don't look now but "decentralization" and "power to the people"
| are already gone in the crypto market.
|
| Blockchain is a novel accounting system. But has any
| organization * _ever_ * derived any real power from an
| accounting system? Are Google and Apple and Amazon market
| leaders because of a novel accounting system? I don't think so.
|
| In a capitalist system, real power is derived from marketplace
| control. Accounting is just a way of keeping score.
|
| Likewise, in the crypto market, Binance has now consolidated
| it's power position as marketplace leader and has effectively
| become the "central bank" of crypto with the power to mint it's
| own currency (Tether and BUSD) and use it to manipulate the
| marketplace at will. In a brazen demonstration of their power,
| they plan to crush other stable coins by simply replacing them
| with their own.
|
| https://fortune.com/2022/09/06/binance-moves-against-rival-s...
|
| What are "the people" going to do about this? What does
| blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing.
|
| Power to the Binance! They are now driving the crypto bus and
| everyone else is just along for the ride.
| binibus wrote:
| > What are "the people" going to do about this? What does
| blockchain have to do with this? Not a damn thing.
|
| You have Coinbase, Kucoin, Gateio, Crypto.com, Kraken,
| Bitfinex, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap, ...
|
| Competition is also a form of decentralization.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes. Just like Amazon has lots of competition in ecommerce.
|
| Whoever controls the majority of the trading volume sets
| the "market" price. The "competition" has little choice but
| to follow along.
| qznc wrote:
| I wonder what the ETH miners are doing now. Did they switch to
| other coins?
|
| I doubt that they actually switch off their stuff. That makes
| no sense economically.
| Stagnant wrote:
| To give you an idea how big of an impact this is to miners,
| my 5700 XT went from making $1.2 / hour (mining Ethereum) to
| $0.15 / hour (mining Ethereum Classic) Eth classic seems to
| be currently the most profitable coin to mine and it is
| barely worth the electricity cost.
|
| The people with actual mining rigs with multiple GPU's will
| either sell their stuff or start renting them for services
| like vast.ai. I assume most will end up selling because of
| the cost of getting a server-grade Motherboard/CPU + lots of
| RAM isn't exactly cheap and the effort required to set
| everything up is much higher.
| qznc wrote:
| That means a lot of second hand GPU hardware could show up
| in the next weeks. Good for all the people who want to play
| with AI images.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I saw an article yesterday saying that Ethermine (the largest
| mining pool) is indeed shutting down. I was surprised too! It
| seems like they're switching their business model to a
| staking pool.
| kalleboo wrote:
| It looks like a third of the hash rate moved to ETC (Ethereum
| Classic) https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Yes. With proof-of-stake, the sources of truth are those few
| players who have amassed very large amounts of money.
|
| The developers behind ethereum have effectively rediscovered
| what banks are.
| ews wrote:
| PoS is way more decentralized than PoW, as there are many more
| home stakers than 'home PoW miners'. Some numbers here
| https://ethsunshine.com/
| funklute wrote:
| > But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power
| to the people" are fading away right?
|
| But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and
| PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in
| turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's
| voting power is independent.
|
| If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of
| estimating independent voting power, that is not tied to
| resources.
| max51 wrote:
| With proof of work, you have to spend your pile of money if
| you want to influence a vote. Whatever the cost of a 51%
| "attack" would be, the attacker has to actually spend that
| money to do it.
|
| With proof of stake, having that money is enough to vote and
| you don't need to spend or waste it. In fact, you get paid
| for having that money sitting in the account.
| hot_gril wrote:
| The catch is that people will notice 51% attacks. If you
| have enough voting money and fudge transactions, all that
| money becomes worthless pretty quickly. The more realistic
| issue is that the big voter gets to decide the direction of
| the protocol, but again sufficiently screwing things up
| only leads to their own demise.
|
| It was worse with PoW in theory. Just because you have tons
| of mining equipment doesn't mean you have a stake in the
| future of the cryptocurrency.
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| Like with ballots tied to people's real identity in some kind
| of "polling station"?
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| If you're willing to admit a central authority to
| authenticate who can and cannot vote, cryptocurrency
| becomes easy.
|
| Really bitcoin is fundamentally trying to solve the problem
| that its impossible to tell who is a "real" person on the
| internet. If you dont have that problem everything is
| trivial.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| So what you're saying is, bitcoin was always useless in
| sufficiently advanced society, like mine, where I
| routinely verify my identity online through my bank?
| funklute wrote:
| Interestingly, the original bitcoin white-paper had a
| motivating example that basically amounted to side-
| stepping banks, because banks do not provide fully non-
| reversible transactions. In essence, bitcoin was a
| technological solution to a problem which would have been
| solved more elegantly by changing financial laws, and
| requiring banks to offer non-reversible transactions.
| (the problem with that is obviously that it could be used
| for fraud, but then you get into the whole debate about
| freedom vs protection)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > In essence, bitcoin was a technological solution to a
| problem which would have been solved more elegantly by
| changing financial laws, and requiring banks to offer
| non-reversible transactions.
|
| Ahh, this may explain why I don't see how cryptocurrency
| is a good thing. I consider the fact that banks do not
| allow fully non-reversible transactions as a very
| strongly desirable feature, not a bug to be done away
| with.
| funklute wrote:
| And I think this is a very valid viewpoint. Clearly, many
| people think the same, otherwise we'd already have non-
| reversible transactions in the conventional banking
| system.
| bawolff wrote:
| I mean, yes. If you read the bitcoin paper it very
| clearly talks about what problems it is trying to solve,
| so this shouldn't come as a surprise.
|
| Whether or not it is useless really depends how much you
| value independence from a central authority (i was
| originally going to say anonoyminity, but if you only
| care about anonoyminity, digicash is a much better
| solution than bitcoin)
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| Indeed, for more nuance here's a full explanation of the
| problem being dealt with by various Proof of Whatever
| algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
|
| They always rely on scarcity of something: scarcity of
| processing power, scarcity of being on the ledger of the
| blockchain and owning an amount of currency, scarcity of
| hard disk space, etc.
| twodave wrote:
| Not personally into crypto much, but wouldn't proof-of-
| identity for those who want to vote be enough? Those who
| simply want to use the system (to send/receive) need not
| disclose themselves, but those participating in the ledger
| ought to have to unmask themselves so that when something
| goes horribly wrong there's a person to point
| at/sue/whathaveyou...
| irae wrote:
| Miners need not only to spend money on hardware, but also the
| upkeep of earning money by mining is expensive (electricity,
| or the cost of electricity generation).
|
| Thus, Proof of Stake let the rich grow their richness for
| doing nothing. In Proof of Work they need to continue working
| to make their money grow. Not to mention that they removed
| the miners from the equation, proving that in ETH system the
| poor and the people don't have power at all, whereas in BTC
| no one ever had any such power.
| Tepix wrote:
| Which is what the Worldcoin project tries to do with their
| retina scans. The idea isn't bad in principle.
|
| On the other hand they want the same amount of their virtual
| currency for themselves as _2 billion people_.
| saurik wrote:
| There isn't any cryptographic basis to human retinas,
| though, to prove a scam is "real"; so, at the end of the
| day, this is just a centralized actor in the form of a
| hardware manufacturer that can forge as many retina scans
| as they want, with the only limit preventing any of us from
| doing the same being whatever DRM they can try to pile on
| their device.
| capableweb wrote:
| On that note, is there anything we could use as a
| cryptographic basis? I'm guessing DNA would qualify. We
| could make everyone's addresses be derived from a
| content-address of our DNA.
| marcinzm wrote:
| You can I believe forge DNA from scratch with enough
| effort or just pick some up that we perpetually shed
| everywhere.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Handing over a copy of my biometrics to a VC-funded-and-ran
| private company is about the last thing I'd want to do in
| my life, just below taking said eyeballs out.
| sbt wrote:
| > If you want to give "power to the people", you need some
| way of estimating independent voting power, that is not tied
| to resources.
|
| You mean like a democracy?
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Hard to implement a democracy without any authority to
| prove that I'm 1 person with 1 vote and not 100 people with
| 100 votes.
| notch656a wrote:
| IDK democracy is the best way to ensure prosperity and
| wealth. It's basically the idea that the 51% can rob the
| 49%. Preservation of wealth arguably can be better
| preserved if taking from the 49% results in their violent
| frustration of those efforts, and enabling that may require
| some constitutional republic, benevolent
| dictatorship/monarchy, or ancap kind of situation.
| undersuit wrote:
| I'd always rather the greater than 50% coalition have
| control than the less than 50% coalition. Just look at it
| from a numbers standpoint. If the vote is to "kill the
| other team" giving which group power does the least harm?
| The Majority.
|
| And just because that vote can happen isn't a mark
| against the system. The three other forms of government
| you mentioned are all equally capable of that atrocity.
| notch656a wrote:
| 51% killing the 49% in iteration is 1% killing the 99%.
|
| >The three other forms of government you mentioned are
| all equally capable of that atrocity.
|
| If you ignore the psychological disadvantage of the
| killers having a monopoly on 'legitimate' violence. For
| instance, in some anarchistic type scenario there is at
| least the upper hand that everyone understands the
| aggression of others is not granted some philisophical
| legitimacy over their own, and people frustrating these
| efforts will know their defensive efforts are not
| philisophically disadvantaged. Moral is an important
| component of self defense. It is easier to push many
| people in the cattle car if they think a legitimate
| 'authority' of the government has spoken.
| undersuit wrote:
| I like that your anarchy has government, the Ancaps on
| Reddit would like you.
| notch656a wrote:
| >your anarchy has government
|
| What are you referring to exactly?
|
| Earlier I mentioned 'constitutional republic, benevolent
| dictatorship/monarchy, or ancap kind of situation.' Yes
| some of those include government.
| undersuit wrote:
| >For instance, in some anarchistic type scenario
| notch656a wrote:
| I don't see anything 'has government' related in your
| quote there so now I know you're just full of shit.
| funklute wrote:
| Except that with blockchain solutions, you generally try to
| preserve anonymity. (as also elaborated on in other
| comments in this thread)
| hwillis wrote:
| You also (almost always) try to preserve anonymity in a
| democracy. When was the last time you voted in person
| outside a booth?
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's not very anonymous in the US. You're required by law
| to identify yourself if possible*. Your party
| affiliation, registered mailing address, and registered
| phone number are all publicly visible. Someone knows your
| votes too, and they try to keep it secret, but I have
| little faith in that.
|
| * In all 50 states AFAIK you can register with no ID and
| no home address, but it's illegal to lie.
| funklute wrote:
| > You also (almost always) try to preserve anonymity in a
| democracy.
|
| You most definitely do not. When you turn up to vote, you
| get asked for id.
|
| EDIT: your actual vote is anonymous, yes. But your
| participation in the voting is not anonymous. Blockchain
| allows for anonymous participation, so to say.
| hwillis wrote:
| > Blockchain allows for anonymous participation, so to
| say.
|
| No, _different agents are voting_. Democracy could be
| totally anonymous, in principle- get a secret key,
| generate a valid public one-time key, and your vote is
| verifiably valid but nobody has any idea who voted, much
| less who they voted for. If everyone is registered, you
| don 't even have any useful information about who _could_
| have voted. Even in reality, your identity is discarded
| as soon as possible.
|
| Blockchains are inherently public. Validators are NOT
| anonymously participating- they may be owned anonymously,
| but the owner isn't the one with the actual right to
| vote.
|
| It's not just a semantic difference. In a real election,
| your ballot comes in a voter envelope. The ballot is
| anonymous inside the envelope, and the envelope is opened
| blind, but kept until the election is over. If they get
| two envelopes from the same person, they know it was a
| fraudulent vote. Once those envelopes are thrown out,
| there is nothing tying you to an election at all.
|
| On the blockchain you effectively never throw out the
| voter envelope. Your vote -and what you voted for- can
| both be tied back to you via ownership of the voting
| agent. There is zero inherent protection of that
| relationship. All protection is done externally and the
| system does not do anything more than making sure it's
| not _actively impossible_ to conceal your identity.
| funklute wrote:
| > Blockchains are inherently public
|
| The vote is public, yes, but the participation is
| anonymous. I can easily set up two different miners, both
| controlled by me, but with different addresses. There is
| not generally an easy way of looking up agent ownership.
|
| And while participation could in theory be anonymous for
| democracies, as you've described, I'm not aware of any
| country that actually does that?
| pGuitar wrote:
| openfuture wrote:
| Yeah exact. Proof of trust, web of trust,... datalisp.is
| Geee wrote:
| Not so fast. In both networks, the ultimate control is held
| by those who run end-user nodes. These people create demand
| for the asset, and creating demand is ultimately the way to
| control the asset.
|
| An end-user node is like a device, which verifies that bank
| notes are genuine or that gold coins are pure. If everyone
| can independently reject bad money and accept good money, the
| good money will have more demand and therefore be more
| valuable.
|
| Even if someone is very rich or has resources to mine blocks,
| they can't dictate demand for other entities. They must abide
| by the rules which are enforced by end-user nodes.
|
| If there are entities which have power to dictate demand, and
| the network can't defend itself under pressure, means that
| the network is not properly decentralized.
|
| Also, the decision between "good money" and "bad money"
| should probably be a game theoretic focal point, rather than
| something set by a foundation and large staking entities.
| funklute wrote:
| > These people create demand for the asset
|
| I don't think I really understood what you meant by this...
| Nor did I really follow your overall point here, if I'm to
| be honest...
|
| > means that the network is not properly decentralized
|
| ummmm..... this just sounds like a convenient excuse in
| case of failure.
|
| - "Somebody did a 51% attack!" - "Oh, well it's not the
| system's fault, it just means that the implementation was
| bad"
|
| Actually 51% attacks are a theoretical feature of these
| systems, before you even get to the implementation details.
| kobalsky wrote:
| in a proof of stake system doing a 51% attack is
| suicidal, it's kind of the whole point
| zonotope wrote:
| > An end-user node is like a device, which verifies that
| bank notes are genuine or that gold coins are pure. If
| everyone can independently reject bad money and accept good
| money, the good money will have more demand and therefore
| be more valuable.
|
| The key word there "independently". Proof of resources is
| one way to tell if an individual node is actually
| independent.
|
| Proof of resources gives an individual who has more
| invested in the network more weight in deciding which "bank
| nodes are genuine". Those individual's votes in theory
| deserve more weight because proof of resources assumes
| those individuals are harder to influence (or bribe) and
| have a stronger incentive to keep the network functioning
| because they have more at stake. These systems are trying
| to ensure that the nodes that have the power to accept or
| reject "money" only accept "good money" and always reject
| "bad money", and they're using demonstration of resources
| as a proxy of trustworthiness and independence.
|
| Whether someone ties a bunch of money into specialized ASIC
| chip that's really only good for mining bitcoin, or they
| tie a bunch of money into staking eth is an implementation
| detail.
| salmonlogs wrote:
| Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority
| control over the network.
|
| "64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities"
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...
| iSnow wrote:
| It should also be said that the biggest entities are staking
| pools/providers. If one of those act up, people can unstake
| and leave. It's really not that different from mining pools
| in PoW.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| 1. There is no mechanism to unstake yet.
|
| 2. Having a centralized staking pool means that there could
| be governmental sanctions a la tornado cash coming on such
| "validators" for facilitating North Korean payments and
| such. Once again, not a good look.
| teknopaul wrote:
| There is a mechanism to unstake it's controlled to 6
| leavers per epoc, reducing if that's an issue: it has
| been thought out. It's not live yet which is slightly
| different.
| staringback wrote:
| If a staking pool refuses to accept a block with a
| tornado cash transaction as valid, they will be penalized
| and forcefully removed from the network.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| >If one of those act up, people can unstake and leave. It's
| really not that different from mining pools in PoW.
|
| Can they? I know that Coinbase already blocks users from
| unstaking. What's stopping the other brokers from taking
| the same approach?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think it's worth mentioning that a pool large enough to
| do malicious things on the chain and get away with it is
| strongly disincentivized from doing so.
|
| It would take billions of dollars worth of ETH to do such a
| thing, and then doing it would destroy confidence in the
| coin and absolute tank the price, costing the evil pool
| hundreds of millions.
| akrymski wrote:
| > doing it would destroy confidence in the coin and
| absolute tank the price
|
| People seem to say that but there's no evidence of this
| in fact. A price will only tank if lots of other holders
| rush to sell _before_ the thief sells his stolen
| billions.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think it's a matter of how quickly the thief could make
| their profits before people notice.
|
| Of course, keep in mind that for such an attack to work,
| you need 51% of the total ETH being staked. Again, that's
| billions of dollars right now. If you stole some coins
| via double-spend, you couldn't pull the money into usable
| fiat very quickly. Even dumping a bunch of coins is going
| to crash the price.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| That's like saying "100% of USA controlled by one entity" -
| except that in the US people are stuck with one president for
| four years no matter what, and when staking users can go
| stake with someone else at any time at all.
| altacc wrote:
| The difference is that between centralised banking and
| cryptocurrency, only one of them is claiming to be
| decentralised and it isn't the bank.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| No doubt about that, people are in the dark about
| effective centralization of PoW and PoS, but PoS makes it
| easier to move to a new representative. In PoW, if you
| wanted to be a part of those centralized services with
| any return at all, you often had to get a spot on a
| mining farm, which meant you were locked into that place;
| even if you left, someone else just took your place, so
| effectively, it was the computational power that was
| locked in with that specific centralized mining
| operation. With PoS, there is no such lock-in, and
| changing the staking destination is a quick affair.
| kadalashvili wrote:
| Mining requires capital too
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Wow!
|
| Bitcoin, your turn!
| [deleted]
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Congrats to the devs. This is a historic moment for computing and
| distributed tech, and will pave the way for Ethereum's next
| updates: scalability, privacy, stronger censorship resistance,
| easier UX and account abstraction.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| > This is a historic moment for computing
|
| A) Really? B) Bit early to be proclaiming historic events. On
| account of, well, history is very much post-tense.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Yes, of course this is my opinion. The transition has been
| years in the making and the amount of research and
| contributions to computing, distributed systems, and
| cryptography that this transition has created has been
| immense.
| xyst wrote:
| huge for the platform and the environment, especially after years
| of "the merge is coming soon". Very bullish outlook
| gwd wrote:
| So there's an article with information about how to run a
| validator from home [1]. But my question is, what the typical ROI
| for this sort of thing? Not just from your stake of 32 ETH, but
| from the hardware depreciation, electricity costs, etc?
|
| I like the idea of a non-PoW blockchain, and I don't mind taking
| some risks, but before I invest $60k in becoming a validator, I'd
| like to know what the potential payback might be.
|
| [1] https://ethereum.org/en/staking/solo/
| 0x64 wrote:
| APY depends on the current validator count, decreasing as more
| validators come online. Currently, the base APY is around 4 %.
|
| On top of that, you have to factor in luck: block proposals are
| randomly assigned to validators, and they include a random
| amount of tips depending on network activity. You could propose
| a block that nets you 0.01 ETH in tips, or a block with 50 ETH
| in tips.
|
| On average, I believe the post-Merge APY has been estimated to
| be [?]6 % (non-cumulative).
|
| Hardware can be anything. Even a RasPi 4 with 8 GB of memory
| can be made to work. Any old x64 machine with two or more cores
| works. 16 GB of memory is recommended, as is a 2 TB SSD to
| minimize down-time. Storage requirements are likely to go down
| in the medium-term, as e.g. state expiry get implemented.
|
| I'd recommend an Intel NUC. They use laptop CPUs, so
| electricity consumption is around 5-20 watts. For networking,
| you'll need around 5 Mb/s up and down after the initial sync.
| zeroclip wrote:
| In addition to the APY described by sibling comment, validators
| can also run MEV-Boost to increase their APY:
|
| > You should run mev-boost to earn a fair share of the MEV
| extracted in the blocks you propose. Connecting your consensus
| client to mev-boost allows you to get full blocks from a
| network of block builders optimized for MEV extraction. This
| can increase validator rewards by 75.3%, or give an APR of
| 12.86% rather than a non-MEV APR of 7.35% from staking eth.
|
| https://boost.flashbots.net/
| somerandomguy33 wrote:
| So, nobody is going to mention Pulsechain?
|
| It's supposed to do what the Ethereum merge won't: Fix the fees.
|
| It also comes with one of the biggest airdrops for Ethereum
| holders.
|
| Look into it.
|
| Cheers!
| Yuioup wrote:
| The thing I've noticed about comments in a lot of HN threads
| about Crypto is that each comment posted is long, like really
| long and I'm none the wiser.
|
| That raises alarm bells with me.
| [deleted]
| giamma wrote:
| This article is biased:
|
| "That innovation was the essential ingredient behind
| decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs"
|
| as if defi was already globally in use! And later:
|
| "Rightly or wrongly, she'd absorbed a very toxic environmental
| narrative,"
|
| I am actually very glad that new generations have a much better
| understanding of environmental risks and I find very difficult to
| sympathize for a ecosystem that is such energy greedy.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I gotta say, I've been really cynical about this and honestly
| thought Ethereum would keep putting off the move to PoS forever.
| I'm very very happy to be wrong.
|
| I still don't see the value in cryptocurrency as a project, but
| now that it's not rolling back years of renewable energy
| development, I'm down to have some much more interesting
| conversations about Ethereum, and I may even be willing to buy
| some and try it out.
| adh636 wrote:
| PoW incentivizes renewable energy development. It's certainly
| not rolling it back.
|
| It used to also incentivize GPU production, but as of today
| that has been diminished as well. Instead it is only current
| asset holders who reap the rewards.
|
| EDIT: Edited to include at least one source on the connections
| between PoW and renewable energy. This just scratches the
| surface though. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/bcei-white-
| paper
| squarefoot wrote:
| POW incentivizes wasting energy for a practice that turns it
| into money without the in between steps of creating
| businesses and jobs (read: progress), and that alone is a
| huge minus point. That energy is then wasted for more POW
| currencies, which implies that those who make the most money
| out of it can dictate energy prices. The only way to bring
| back down energy prices isn't to create more, as it would
| quickly be allocated by highest bidders for more POW mining
| in an endless circle, but to reduce that toxic demand, and
| eliminating POW mining would represent a good start.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| People had an option against the "you must believe me it
| has value" money and now it goes down the drain because a
| bunch of idiots are crying about "excessive" energy usage.
| It was the perfect energy backed money (like there was a
| gold backed money back then...).
| hagbarth wrote:
| As it was before.
| vestrigi wrote:
| PoW incentivizes renewable energy development for useless
| mining, but not for anything more than that I guess. At least
| the renewables can now be used to power other more necessary
| demands, if the owners don't move on to mine other coins that
| are compatible with their rigs.
| bhaak wrote:
| Sure, that's why we had crappy GPU before crypto currencies.
|
| Gamers had to put off buying new GPU because they were
| misused for POW. Ask them about the "incentivized GPU
| production".
| Ragnarork wrote:
| If anything, it incentivized the production of GPU
| artificially limited for the exact work needed for PoW.
| Good job!
| Doxin wrote:
| > PoW incentivizes renewable energy development.
|
| PoW incentivizes energy development. And then proceeds to use
| it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip optimizer, except the
| fitness function is how much power it can waste.
|
| > It used to also incentivize GPU production
|
| And then proceeds to use it all up on PoW. It's a paperclip
| optimizer, except the fitness function is how much e-waste it
| can produce.
|
| It's for these reasons I'm not super convinced in the proof-
| of-storage type proposals. All it'd do is change what was
| being wasted. proof-of-stake seems to be the one proposal
| that avoids ridiculous amounts of waste. The only downside of
| course being that it essentially hard-codes the "1% of people
| make 99% of the money" principle.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| All the other people are free to buy the cheaper/more
| efficient solar panels for their own purposes. Why do you
| care that somebody uses them for Bitcoin? Do you also care
| that I shower with hot water a lot?
| Jnr wrote:
| Same as people were free to buy graphics cards for gaming
| in the last couple of years?
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| Are you suggesting the high-end semiconductor shortage
| was caused by crypto? I don't think so. When you have
| Apple buying out the entire 5nm TSMC capacity for a
| year/more - in direct competition with NVidia, it's a
| hard proposition to make. And it's not like the GPU
| vendors were unhappy about the high prices and/or tried
| hard to get more production capacity.
|
| BTW you don't mine Bitcoin with GPUs, that's impossible
| for at least 5+ years now. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs
| that are using older production nodes (+-30nm and the
| like).
| gruturo wrote:
| The semiconductor shortage? No. The GPU shortage, and the
| insane prices also due to scalpers abusing the shortage?
|
| 100%. yes.
|
| Shall we pretend you replied in good faith to a post
| asking "Same as people were free to buy graphics cards
| for gaming in the last couple of years?", genuinely
| misunderstood the question, genuinely missing the
| "graphics card" and thought only of the general
| semiconductor shortage in your answer?
|
| 100% no. I call your bullshit.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| Well my point is, you make GPUs in the same factory where
| you make CPUs and networking chips. So first have a look
| at what happened there - e.g. a massive new client has
| appeared and booked out the entire capacity that usually
| Nvidia and AMD were getting. Are you saying this 100%
| surely had zero impact?
|
| And again, I was talking about Bitcoin, and you don't
| mine it with GPUs, and ASICs don't compete with GPU
| production capacity. So who replies in bad faith? I'm
| happy to believe the other commenter genuinely missed me
| talking about Bitcoin, so I mentioned it again. Then you
| come here with your attack...
| gruturo wrote:
| Fair point about Apple buying out the output of TSMC's
| 5nm line - but Nvidia used Samsung's 8nm process. One
| could argue some orders were displaced due to TSMC being
| booked out, thus crowding Samsung's capacity as a cascade
| effect, driving prices up, or that Nvidia would have used
| a different process or booked capacity on both factories
| if it was possible.... but on the other hand Apple likely
| financed the entire 5nm line (it's pretty much in line
| with their operational model and they did it in the past
| - although I'm writing with no evidence it took place in
| this specific occasion), so an argument could be made
| that such 5nm line wouldn't have even existed for a
| further year or 2 hadn't Apple basically paid for it.
|
| I don't know precisely what's the net impact of all of
| the above, but I have reasonable suspicion it it pales
| compared to the miner-induced shortage (which enabled
| scalping - it would have hardly made sense otherwise).
|
| And while I agree bitcoin hasn't used GPU mining in ages,
| you were replying to a graphics card related question,
| and the entire thread is about Ethereum PoW (GPU mined)
| being sunset with this merge.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| I first replied with the hot water comment, the reply to
| the GPU question wasn't my first comment here.
| gruturo wrote:
| Fair point too, and I had missed that, sorry.
| Jnr wrote:
| I personally know people who were successfully mining
| crypto using GPUs in the last couple of years. If it was
| Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge, I don't know and it doesn't
| matter to me. As soon as the crypto prices came down this
| year, they sold their GPU collection. So saying that
| miners used only ASICs is not true.
|
| Yes, there was a semiconductor shortage, but miners made
| the situation worse for others because they each used
| tens of GPUs instead of just one as a normal person would
| for gaming or graphics work.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| My friends who have an AI company bought out these miners
| by the dozen and are running it for training - and yes
| they got it by offering more money than gamers and buying
| the whole lot, so gamers got the short stick again.
|
| Why is that not bad? I don't see where the value for
| society got so much better, if that's the measure you're
| using - I'd rather have someone run the Ethereum
| blockchain than generate catgirl porn pictures. But even
| that is IMHO more useful than a bunch of guys gaming, at
| least more people get to feel the effect of a GPU than if
| it was owned by a gamer and only ever used for his eye
| candy. Games also could simply use the available
| resources better and then the gamers wouldn't need such
| absurdly overpowered hardware.
|
| Overall, I think we shouldn't be measuring usage of GPUs,
| solar panels or any other products like this and
| definitely shouldn't be saying who has a right to have it
| and who doesn't, or for what prices - that gets us into
| nasty situations with only nasty answers.
|
| This is a product like any other, gamers don't have any
| right to get cheap GPUs. Somebody else offered more money
| for it and the vendor didn't take the low-end market -
| that's just how it is.
| wisty wrote:
| I'm happy if you want to pay to shower with hot water.
| I'm not going to pay you to shower with hot water.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| I'm not paying for it, I have my own solar arrays. And
| after I am finished I'll redirect the unused energy to
| BTC mining again - the grid pays less than half of what I
| get from mining. Nobody's business.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Well, if they are being bought for PoW mining there is a
| good chance that they would then become more expensive
| for other uses. It is not like we have solar panels just
| laying around and nobody tough of using them before PoW
| came along.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. To me it seems much more
| like the increased demand has generated a lot of
| competition and that got prices way down from the levels
| just 5-10 years ago.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And that is exactly why we should base plans and
| decisions on the actual facts we are sure about and can
| measure and verify and provide citations to prove, not
| just our feelings about how things seem and how we wish
| the ideal world worked in our childish libertarian
| fantasies and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| So where's your data? I bought a pretty large solar array
| by adding a panel or two over the years. It's so big now
| that I have more than enough energy to sell/mine BTC even
| in winter - and that's for a large old EU-style village
| house and I like to shower in hot water a lot and keep 24
| degrees (admittedly, I use a little coal the week/two
| it's -20 outside), and I don't even have new windows -
| still these 100 year old wooden ones - nor modern
| insulation (my ceiling is insulated with >50 year old
| straw, lol).
|
| Today it's possible to buy a shipping container full of
| incredibly efficient solar panels for just around 8k EUR
| and have it delivered the same month. If that's not cheap
| and available I don't know what is - and it definitely
| wasn't this good 5 years ago, not even playing the same
| game.
|
| 5 years ago I had to talk to a sales rep who wanted to
| visit me and do special deals (and tried to bag the
| difference from grid costs through their shit leasing),
| now I just order on an eshop, pay with card and it's done
| in 15 minutes. My last shipment last year arrived within
| a week after ordering, now it's worse because of the
| Russian war - but that applies to everything related to
| energy, and there are new companies trying to cater to
| this new market already, it just takes some time to ramp
| up.
|
| Each year the availability, efficiency and price of solar
| panels improved for me. You're claiming it got worse
| because of crypto - based on what? To me, your snark
| seems just like a childish socialist fantasy and anti-
| money/market scheme, and the reality starkly disagrees.
| konschubert wrote:
| "Money makes money" was equally true for PoW as well. You
| need money to set up a mining operation.
| cburgdorf wrote:
| Even more so because realistically you need to set it up
| somewhere where electricity is cheap which which is a
| centralizing force in itself. Also you need to have a
| really efficient mining rig for it to be profitable. With
| Ethereum PoS you can easily home stake on a Raspberry Pi
| which means it is much easier for regular people to
| participate.
| barnbuilder wrote:
| There is no reason PoW-incentivized energy development
| would have to be only used for PoW.
|
| PoW means there can now be a buyer of last resort no matter
| when and where you are generating power. Newly developed
| renewable based electricity can be sold at "x" price when
| there is residential or commercial demand, and at "y" price
| (y < x) to a PoW miner otherwise.
|
| In this scenario there may not have been enough demand at
| price "x" to finance the renewable development, but the PoW
| buyer of last resort makes it feasible.
| danw1979 wrote:
| The free market hasn't been operating and never will
| operate with the restrained controls on energy usage that
| you outline though.
|
| Besides, there's so many more useful things to do with
| that cheap renewable energy at times of low demand -
| synfuels, desalination, etc - that we should definitely
| see what else the free market can come up with given
| negative energy prices, rather than propping prices up by
| running pointless hash-computers for some speculative
| investment scam.
| barnbuilder wrote:
| It's one thing to have excess power, and another to have
| excess power in the time and place that you want to do
| these things. For example excess solar energy in the
| middle of the country is never going to be able to be
| deployed to desalinate water in the ocean because you
| will lose it all in transmission and storage (or you will
| spend more than you would just generating new power near
| the desalinization plant).
|
| This is what makes bitcoin mining so unique as a way to
| make use of excess energy. First of all, securing a
| censorship-resistant digital monetary system is not
| pointless nor a scam. Second of all, energy from anyplace
| on earth, at any time, can be deployed for this purpose
| -- all you need is a mining machine and an internet
| connection.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| In fact, it is precisely the reverse of that: it's not a
| buyer of last resort, it's an energy price FLOOR. Any
| energy that you could sell to a customer, must be sold
| above "y". And so it is with computer hardware - any top
| or near top wafer capacity item you may want to buy must
| be above "Y" (what a crypto miner would pay for it). And
| this is why we saw massive price hikes for consumer
| computer tech in the last two years.
|
| And is this way - a price floor - and not the way you
| describe it, because of the economic incentives of
| miners. They have already paid for these captial
| intensive mining rigs, and to best turn a profit they
| must be running at all times. The marginal cost of mining
| is important, but given the capital costs (incl
| depreciation of hardware!) you cannot ignore it.
|
| Basically, your explaination is a failure of first order
| thinking. To a first order approximation, only the
| marignal cost of mining matters and thus the scenario you
| describe is true. However, you must include the second
| and nth order effects of capex to truly match reality.
| barnbuilder wrote:
| The miners don't need to be running at all times. If the
| cost of power exceeds mining returns then they definitely
| should not be running -- they'd be losing money AND
| wearing out their equipment. There is a middle ground
| where mining returns exceed power costs but don't fully
| cover capital expenditures, but the miner doesn't have to
| operate during that time if they think they are better
| off making no revenue but avoiding the wear on their
| machines. The question is whether you think you will have
| a period of cheap power in the near future, and in this
| case miners can benefit from the cyclical and predictable
| nature of power demand in answering that for themselves.
|
| One can easily imagine a scenario where miners run
| overnight when power is cheap, turn their machines off
| during the day when power is in high demand and expensive
| (and you'd either lose money by having them on, or you
| would make less than you would by conserving your
| hardware and optimizing its usage), and earn a profit
| overall (while leaving the power producer better off too
| by letting them sell power that would otherwise be
| wasted).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Just like burning down houses incentivizes fire station
| development.
| bitL wrote:
| If you can buy a bunch of 3090s for mining, you likely
| can buy a 2000Wh power station with solar panels to feed
| them and pay $0 variable costs.
| viraptor wrote:
| You already occasionally have to wait for solar panel
| deliveries. (depending on your location) By buying them
| for mining you effectively make others wait and not use
| them for moving off fosil fuels. Additionally, both solar
| panels and batteries still rely on mining actual limited
| materials, so every one used for crypto effectively means
| one less for useful purposes in a long run.
| gambiting wrote:
| I don't really follow - 3090s are below PS1000 each, you
| hit 2000W power consumption with just 4 of them, so
| PS4000 on GPUs. 2000W panels + battery is going to be at
| least PS15-20k at current prices. Not sure why affording
| one would mean being able to afford the other.
| bitL wrote:
| 2000Wh power station can be had for <$2k and 2000W solar
| panels for ~$2k. 3090s don't really consume 500W, more
| like 350W and that assumes regular voltages; in reality
| for mining it's much lower. 3080Ti would be even cheaper
| for about the same throughput.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeah but you have the rest of the system to account for.
| And you need more than just what the system uses to
| charge the battery storage for overnight use - probably
| 4000W of panels if not 6kW. The batteries are the most
| expensive part of this(unless you only want to run the
| system for few hours during the day, but then what's the
| point?). You mentioned a 2000Wh power station, but I'm
| not sure how that helps? That will only store enough
| energy for an hour of running at most. So yeah, you're
| looking at about PS15k for the whole power system alone.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > The only downside of course being that it essentially
| hard-codes the "1% of people make 99% of the money"
| principle.
|
| This is only true if the only or best way to make money is
| through staking. This is unlikely to be the case - the
| ability to deposit your cash in a savings account or park
| it in government bonds doesn't stop people from investing
| in stocks. What it does instead is put a floor on
| acceptable rates of return from more risky options.
| AgentME wrote:
| >The only downside of course being that it essentially
| hard-codes the "1% of people make 99% of the money"
| principle.
|
| Anyone can stake, and the more people that stake, the
| smaller the reward, so the result should end up being that
| more people join in until the expected reward is lowered to
| that of other widely-available investment opportunities.
| friendzis wrote:
| > the more people that stake, the smaller the reward
|
| In PoW reward is proportional to normalized "work".
| Reward is proportional to normalized amount staked. This
| very directly leads to wealth concentration.
| AgentME wrote:
| In PoW, the "work" is just how much money the miner
| spends on mining hardware and electricity. Both PoW and
| PoS are cases where people with money invest that money
| and get a proportional reward. PoS just cuts out the
| hardware and electricity waste.
| Doxin wrote:
| It creates a system where money makes money. It's hardly
| surprising if that leads to the richest people making the
| most money. The result won't be more people joining in
| until the expected reward is low enough, The result will
| be that a few rich people will join in with enough ETH to
| push the reward down. There's probably be a bunch of
| small-time investors doing it too, but again, more ETH in
| is more ETH out.
| viraptor wrote:
| > It creates a system where money makes money.
|
| It _preserves_ a system where money makes money. You need
| money to buy mining hardware and energy. If you had
| enough money you could start mining. Now if you have
| enough money, you can stake.
| AgentME wrote:
| If the reward is pushed down to be equal to the same
| reward that's available to anyone through widely
| available investment opportunities, then it doesn't seem
| like it's any more of an issue than how any other
| investment works.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| They've just re-invented interest.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| To me in the current age also appears crazy to think that
| we need incentives for energy development, as without
| crypto PoW we have enough energy
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Stockpiling food and lighting it on fire for warmth would
| incentivize more food production also, but if there are ways
| to generate warmth without wasteful steps, I think we can all
| agree they're unarguably better
| roenxi wrote:
| It isn't really over yet. This must have had a fairly radical
| impact on the incentives of the people who are involved in
| running the network since random outsiders can't muscle in any
| more. We don't know what that does the economics of the project
| from just the first couple of hours. I'm going to be checking
| back in on Ethereum after 1 and 12 months to see what really
| happened here.
| lambdadmitry wrote:
| What's more, it's still impossible to withdraw from staking.
| Which means there will be another massive change of
| incentives some time later.
| bitL wrote:
| Monero is the only cryptocurrency that is fulfilling its
| original promise (basically digital cash, untraceable) and that
| is being banned left and right by exchanges these days. ETH is
| more of the old power balance with slightly new players without
| all the previous regulations (i.e. scams everywhere).
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| > the only cryptocurrency that is fulfilling its original
| promise
|
| What was the original promise again? I don't see original
| Bitcoin whitepaper mentioning traceability or untraceability.
| There is a chapter about privacy features and no sane person
| would see a promise of untraceability in that chapter.
|
| It seems that shills and spin doctors pumping their own
| crypto coins twist the history to their needs.
| bitL wrote:
| It's not how it was spelled out in the Bitcoin whitepaper,
| but how it was sold to the public - privacy was among the
| biggest draws initially if you remember.
| darkwater wrote:
| > (basically digital cash, untraceable)
|
| and programmatically "generable" is a recipe for disaster
| (i.e. most of the exploited machines nowadays run a monero
| miner, when they once ran a spambot)
| Proven wrote:
| irae wrote:
| It is really a canandrum IMO. Being untreceable like cash has
| advantages, for sure. But humans will always need to interact
| with each other, and some interactions rely on certain levels
| of trust.
|
| A small part of the reasons our society is safer, in
| comparison with a hundred years ago, is that wealth is held
| by large institutions and cannot be stolen (as oposed to
| storing gold and jewlery at home). Thus making personal
| violent crimes slightly less lucrative.
|
| Trust in banks and government arguably yeilded some benefits
| as a tradeoff for privacy. Monero might be too far for many
| people. In some ways the value not migrating from Bitcoin to
| Monero proves it to some extent. The institutions refusing to
| make the transition proves distrust in their system, also to
| some extent.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Will this reduce video card prices?
| irae wrote:
| Unlikelly. Miners are still mining other crypto. Some believe
| ETH is worth nothing now that it is not PoW anymore, so they
| are choosing other crypto to mine.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I wouldn't wxpect people to atop mining. But will as many
| people purchase cards specifically to mine?
| Cryptonic wrote:
| Potentially after the chip and supply chain crisis
| nine_k wrote:
| The switch to proof of stake is not exactly abrupt, it
| was,discussed and planned well in advance. I bet the video
| card makers must have been preparing.
| pdpi wrote:
| They're already dropping plenty. Ars Technica reported[0] a
| few weeks ago that nVidia is currently struggling with a
| stock surplus, rather than deficit, and Amazon UK has several
| RTX3070 SKUs shipping at MSRP or thereabouts.
|
| 0. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/nvidias-excess-
| inven...
| dudebrooo wrote:
| desindol wrote:
| It sounds always like a grandeur delusion doesn't it?
| tucnak wrote:
| quantified wrote:
| > Edgington, who began his career researching climate science
| before eventually landing in crypto, understood where his
| daughter was coming from. "Rightly or wrongly, she'd absorbed a
| very toxic environmental narrative," he said. "I mean, it's kind
| of hard to defend 'stickers for grownups' that emit, by some
| estimates, a megaton of [carbon dioxide] a week."
| latchkey wrote:
| On a personal note, Ben is a really really nice and smart guy.
| I have a huge amount of respect for him.
| quantified wrote:
| We're all complex, multidimensional people. He's probably a
| really good parent.
|
| But "toxic environmental narrative"?
| proto-n wrote:
| I think someone can be toxic and at the same time be right
| about what they say
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| It worked.
|
| And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%:
|
| https://twitter.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1570305323629527046
|
| I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million miners
| cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.
| scambier wrote:
| Wait, the Ethereum blockchain alone was consuming 0.5% of the
| world's total energy?
| sph wrote:
| Wait until you hear how much of the world's total energy is
| wasted on ads (manufacturing, transmission, power usage) or
| spam email.
| kaba0 wrote:
| While I hate ads with a burning passion, they do affect
| multiple orders of more people than cryptos ever did, even
| if that effect is far from positive (but not blanket
| negative either).
| scambier wrote:
| - "X is extremely wasteful"
|
| - "Wait until you hear how much Y is more wasteful"
|
| Ok?
| dmitriid wrote:
| That's a good company for cryptocurrencies to be in, don't
| you think? Just as wasteful and useless.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| usual comparison was that the energy consumption is
| comparable to nations like the Netherlands or Finland, so
| seems about right.
| ollifi wrote:
| There is lot of talk and debate about building wind,
| nuclear doing the green transition etc. in Finland. I guess
| like in every country. Somehow it makes me sad that group
| of open source developers could do more today than we ever
| can to help the planet no matter how much we scale back.
|
| Although they built the hell machine in the first place, so
| maybe better if they would not have ever done anything.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well, in that perspective 'green production' seems like
| the right thing to be talking about (vs. cutting usage,
| say) - if you over-produce you can always export, selling
| 'green' energy to a country that might otherwise have
| been buying 'brown'.
| mailbag wrote:
| 0.5% of the world's electricity.
| mrpopo wrote:
| Total electricity*. Which is still huge, I am not sure people
| realize that there are no more low-hanging fruits in the form
| of a technical feat that a small group of people can
| accomplish like this, without impacting people's lives.
| shafyy wrote:
| It's weird to celebrate the electricity savings of Ethereum
| like this. It's good that it's less energy-intensive now,
| but it was that energy-intensive before _because_ of
| Ethereum in the first place.
| miguelmota wrote:
| For something that millions of people across the world
| rely on, with million+ transactions daily, it's
| definitely worth celebrating. It's using a magnitude less
| energy now than YouTube or Netflix [1] If YouTube had a
| similar decrease in energy, Hacker News would be all over
| it.
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/#proof-of-
| stake-e...
| shafyy wrote:
| Sure, let's compare the utility of Ethereum to YouTube or
| Netflix. You must be kidding.
| yebyen wrote:
| You underestimate the utility of a global financial
| system which can be participated in by anyone.
|
| This makes many tools and processes (leveraged financial
| instruments and automated market makers) available
| without an intermediate third party that most humans
| would never know existed, let alone how to use.
|
| They are still in their infancy, the investment in
| knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite
| substantial. How many years before a regular person can
| ditch the bank for their own personal hedge DAO?
|
| I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you
| think that internet TV is more important than leveling
| the financial playing field.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > How many years before a regular person can ditch the
| bank for their own personal hedge DAO?
|
| That will never happen, since these things, by design,
| offer none of the guarantees that banks do.
| yebyen wrote:
| I absolutely love overdraft fees. I've never used a bank
| that didn't have some ridiculous scheme of their own
| which you had to internalize or pay a monthly fee. Banks
| offer some guarantees, but they're not really helping
| most people.
|
| Neither is Ethereum, maybe you'll say, but I didn't come
| here to argue about that. This is a day to celebrate
| because the #1 top complaint of all crypto detractors has
| been addressed by Crypto's second largest collective. Now
| that is finished we can move onto #2 top complaint,
| whatever that will be.
|
| I certainly do not imagine, foresee, or desire to live in
| a world in which people must protect their private keys
| or forfeit their house to a hacker. But can you really
| say we aren't headed there now? Is the alternative
| better, (that you have to trust the bank's security? Are
| you in the US? Oh god, I have some bad news...)
|
| Acting like scams began in 2008 when Bitcoin was first
| invented is the ultimate scam. I grew up in NY, we've all
| been getting scammed our entire lives, by the government
| too.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > You underestimate the utility of a global financial
| system which can be participated in by anyone.
|
| Ah yes. By anyone. Especially those who got in early
| before the prices skyrocketed and can now enjoy the
| global financial system of... currency manipulation and
| hoarding.
|
| > I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you
| think that internet TV is more important than leveling
| the financial playing field.
|
| You must be kidding when you call scams, currency
| manipulation, hoarding and zero customer protections a
| "level playing field for a global financial system".
|
| > They are still in their infancy, the investment in
| knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite
| substantial.
|
| The only investment in knowledge there was (and there was
| very little of that) is discovering why existing systems
| are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them.
| yebyen wrote:
| > discovering why existing systems are the way they are
| and keeping busy reinventing them
|
| You may have had access to those existing systems (the
| global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us
| did not. Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it
| against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two
| years ago.
|
| I was a 12 year old investor and E-trade told Grandma and
| Auntie that they would have to sell their Red-Hat stock,
| back in 2003 or 4, because it had gone down so much in
| value that it was no longer worth the monthly trade
| commission to maintain the position open. We bought some
| stock after IPO, and had bad timing by a few months. If
| they had known then what we know now, well...
|
| I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-
| inventing the global financial system on the internet,
| believe you me. That was a good investment, bad system
| and bad timing.
|
| Do you have any idea how exploitative the global
| financial system is for people who are not "in the know"?
| It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > You may have had access to those existing systems (the
| global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us
| did not.
|
| Many you... who?
|
| > Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against
| itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years
| ago.
|
| That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either
| "financial education" (because it's something you could
| always do in "traditional finance"), or "let the suckers
| come, the more the better" (most of crypto).
|
| > I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-
| inventing the global financial system on the internet,
| believe you me.
|
| Oh, I do believe you. Crypto maximalists never talk about
| it. They only speak vague trivialities and then
| disappear.
|
| > Do you have any idea how exploitative the global
| financial system is for people who are not "in the know"?
|
| Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.
|
| > It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
|
| Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.
| yebyen wrote:
| > That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either
| "financial education" (because it's something you could
| always do in "traditional finance")
|
| OK. Now we are really splitting hairs, because
| "education" actually doesn't count as "leveling the
| playing field." I'm totally done here, you just played
| yourself.
|
| You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional
| exploitative financial system, and I'll continue my
| education here in the exploitative crypto-financial
| system. And we shall never talk again. That would be a
| positive outcome, right?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > OK. Now we are really splitting hairs
|
| We're not. I'v directly responding to what you write, and
| not to hat you _think_ you write.
|
| You started with "leveling the playing field" and
| continued with "Being able to take a risky asset, and
| hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was
| aware of two years ago".
|
| > You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional
| exploitative financial system
|
| Ah yes, you continue to use the words you don't fully
| understand, but since they are emotionally charged, this
| makes them the right arguments in your mind.
|
| > And we shall never talk again.
|
| As I already said, "Crypto maximalists ... only speak
| vague trivialities and then disappear."
| yebyen wrote:
| If you antagonize someone in a discussion, they're going
| to disappear. I don't need a degree in crypto-finance to
| tell you that. I'm not here for any of this.
|
| If you want to engage me in a proper discussion, you can
| look me up. I've been on the internet using this name
| since I was 12 years old (and yes educating people, and
| also getting educated myself.) I'm not going anywhere.
|
| Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible
| those traditional financial instruments are for normies?
| I'm interested in that information, can you provide
| links?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You haven't disappeared as you promised, you keep
| replying. Please keep your promises when you make good
| ones with positive outcomes like disappearing. It makes
| you seem insincere when you keep promising to disappear,
| but don't. There's a huge difference between disappearing
| because somebody actually antagonized you, and
| disappearing because you couldn't prove your point and
| decided to act antagonized because people wouldn't
| believe your wild claims without proof.
| yebyen wrote:
| I haven't made any claims. I said I learned something,
| and your buddy disappeared without explaining how to do
| the same thing I said I learned how to do as he said was
| "something you could always do," while shouting insults
| at me on his way like I'm somehow the one responsible for
| the Crypto-calypse. I'm not, and you people need to get
| over yourselves.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > If you want to engage me in a proper discussion
|
| I did try to engage in the discussion. "I'd not be here
| wasting my time talking", "You go ahead and educate
| yourself", "we shall never talk again." are hardly a
| proper response.
|
| > Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible
| those traditional financial instruments are for normies?
|
| Define "normies" first. Or better still, drop this
| condescending pejorative.
|
| > I'm interested in that information, can you provide
| links?
|
| I have no links, as it's a service often provided
| directly by your bank. Right now I have some money
| invested in risky assets that in the past two months sank
| 10% due to the way the world is right now.
|
| There are multiple lists of "best books about
| investment", so you could start there. You know why? The
| absolute vast majority of "innovation" and "knowledge" in
| crypto space falls roughly into:
|
| - scams
|
| - currency speculation which is indistinguishable from
| Forex trading except that it's running on "smart
| contracts". Forex trading was huge in some countries
| (Moldova and Turkey among those I know about) in early-
| to-mid 2000s. I had friends at university heavily
| invested in it. It probably still is quite popular (and
| it's very popular in "defi" which is rarely anything but
| currency speculation and unsecured loans).
|
| - asset hoarding + speculation. "Buy cheap, hype, hope
| for the price to go up, sell". Indistinguishable from
| anything traditional (from stocks to bonds to Ponzi
| schemes): you buy an asset, wait for the price to go up,
| sell.
|
| What crypto is busy discovering is why "traditional
| finance" has all these things in place: KYOC, fraud
| protection and prevention, reversibility of transactions,
| deposit insurance, functional courts and laws etc. And is
| just as busy re-inventing all those, poorly.
| yebyen wrote:
| > I did try to engage in the discussion.
|
| Go back and read it. I'll give you the benefit of the
| doubt now, but you did not. You threw barbs and used the
| word "scam" as often as you could, and told me I'd be
| likely disappearing in a few minutes. Then someone showed
| up to comment on how disappointed they are I didn't
| really disappear like I promised. Can't win for losing.
| This is exactly like every crypto discussion on the
| internet today, it's very frustrating. I hope you know
| how difficult it is for me to be this patient. (It
| actually reminds me a whole lot of doing Ruby evangelism
| in almost the same circles...)
|
| > how easily accessible those traditional financial
| instruments are
|
| > I have some money invested in risky assets that in the
| past two months sank 10% due to the way the world is
| right now
|
| I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures. If you
| had seen this coming, you could have done some short-
| selling to hedge your risks. Price goes up, you deliver
| and sell for a profit. Price goes down, you still have
| your asset and can cash out for a profit. Is that a
| service offered by your bank? Not mine...
|
| But maybe your bank offers it ...maybe only to
| qualified/accredited investors? How do I get that?
|
| Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not
| accessible, no matter how many books you read. Go out and
| get a million dollars today, through some act of God, and
| you still won't be a qualified investor next week or next
| year. Or you can wait for SEC approval, and then you can
| go get them through your broker I guess.
|
| Some people read books, others are not well-served by
| book learning. I looked for a book that could explain it
| to me, but ultimately I only learned by getting hosed
| using these instruments flatly incorrectly until I
| figured out what I was doing wrong, by using them, and
| observing the outcomes, then also asking for help. Lovely
| people answering questions to help others learn. (It was
| the friends we made along the way!)
|
| Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes,
| I'm sure there is. Does it protect people how it was
| really intended, or does it actually mean it _just
| remains inaccessible_ to most people? This is how crypto
| levels the playing field.
|
| Does that mean you cannot cut yourself when working with
| the sharp object? No, it definitely is not safe to go
| alone here. There are a million and one ways to lose all
| your money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible
| before. And soon a new technology will come, and everyone
| who understands the current landscape will know
| immediately what to do with it, (and everyone who has had
| their head in the sand will wait for the SEC for
| guidance, and eventually begrudgingly accept the
| improvement, maybe, once all the life has been sucked out
| of it by bureaucrats.)
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Go back and read it.
|
| I did re-read it. That's how I could quote your words.
|
| > You threw barbs and used the word "scam" as often as
| you could
|
| Because that's what the absolute vast majority of crypto
| is.
|
| > This is exactly like every crypto discussion on the
| internet today, it's very frustrating.
|
| Yes. Every crypto discussion on goes like this:
|
| - Crypto claims are refuted or questioned
|
| - Crypto maximalist spouts some grandiose bullshit
|
| - Crypto maximalist gets called out
|
| - Crypto maximalist disappears
|
| I've yet to see you actually address anything I said in
| my very first comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850112
|
| > I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures.
|
| It's a nonsensical term (like many other nonsensical
| terms) that only exists in the crypto space. And only
| works in the highly volatile market like crypto. This is
| short-to-medium term currency speculation, and I'm sure
| there are plenty of services that allow you to do that in
| "traditional finance". As I'm not interested in currency
| speculation, I couldn't tell you what they are.
|
| > Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not
| accessible
|
| You've selected a single service revolving around
| currency speculation and you call "traditional finance"
| inaccessible because of that. That... is not what
| accessibility to financial services means. Or what
| "levelling the playing field" is.
|
| > Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes,
| I'm sure there is.
|
| You're sure, but at the same time you are completely
| uninterested to learn why it is that way, and you dismiss
| anyone telling you why it is the way it is because, let
| me quote, "it's an awful exploitative global financial
| system".
|
| > There are a million and one ways to lose all your
| money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible
| before.
|
| Indeed. And that makes this "accessible and a level
| playing field" unlike traditional finance which offers
| fraud protection, deposit insurance, etc. etc.
|
| > And soon a new technology will come, and everyone who
| understands the current landscape will know immediately
| what to do with it
|
| So, the "accessible system" will be accessible to those
| who understand current landscape, who have already lost
| money a million ways and cut themselves on sharp corners.
|
| That is neither accessible nor a level playing field.
|
| If you claim that it is "global financial system which
| can be participated in by anyone", where are the
| protections for those who "did not have access to
| existing systems" (I keep quoting you).
|
| I'm a programmer, I earn quite a lot. And I still cannot
| afford to just go ahead and "lose my money in a million
| ways" and "cut myself when working with a sharp object".
| Where's your accessibility, huh?
|
| > and everyone who has had their head in the sand will
| wait for the SEC for guidance
|
| Ah yes. Instead we can just not wait and lose the money a
| million and one ways for the sake of.... something.
|
| There's a reason for SEC guidances, but, again, you're
| entirely unwilling to learn why they exist. Perhaps, you
| will learn it the hard way.
| yebyen wrote:
| You're not responding, you're just condescending, and
| you've only quoted from the parts you cherry-picked as
| you could easily be responsive to them.
|
| What is a qualified investor? And why do you have to be
| one if you want legal access to unregistered securities?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > You're not responding, you're just condescending
|
| Says the person with such gems as "go educate yourself",
| "normies" etc.
|
| > you've only quoted from the parts you cherry-picked as
| you could easily be responsive to them.
|
| Says the person who ignores everything written in every
| single response and then pretends he's being offended
|
| ---
|
| There's a reason you repeated several times you're a big
| time investor from age 12. That is most likely
| representative of your actual age.
|
| At this point I've lost all interest in trying to have a
| conversation with you. Adieu.
| yebyen wrote:
| > "normies"
|
| The context was "us normies"
|
| I literally just came here today to tell everyone that I
| learned something, and you ruined it. You raised the bar,
| it's no longer enough that I learned something, I have to
| make it accessible for everyone else too, or I am a bad
| person. Thanks.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > For something that millions of people across the world
| rely on
|
| People keep claiming that _millions_ of people _rely_ on
| it is such a bullshit claim
|
| > with million+ transactions daily
|
| Which is a paltry 11 transactions per second. I think a
| Raspberry Pi is now capable of the same amazing feat.
|
| > It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or
| Netflix
|
| And doing orders of magnitudes less while consuming
| insane amounts of energy.
|
| Had Ethereum tried to move around as much video as
| Youtube and Netflix are doing, heat death of the universe
| would happen the next day after the attempt.
| dannyw wrote:
| Can your Raspberry Pi synchronize with other Pis in a
| permissionless way, and agree on a shared state despite
| malicious actors?
| mort96 wrote:
| Can nodes in Etherium? Or is there a central governing
| body there which has the power to revert legitimate
| transactions, just like in traditional systems?
|
| https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-
| reversed-a-50-...
|
| Oh.
|
| But hey, at least it's an unregulated, informal, ad-hoc
| process in Etherium with no justice system or oversight
| to enforce the rights of the little guy.
| ETH_start wrote:
| The DAO hard fork was an exceptional event that occurred
| in 2015, under very unique circumstances inherent to the
| world's first smart contract platform experiencing the
| world's first major smart contract hack, and has not been
| repeated since.
|
| Ethereum at this point - with seven years of autonomous
| operation and no repeats of DAO-like hard forks - has
| proven to be an immutable and credibly neutral settlement
| layer.
| ikt wrote:
| You do know you just compared ethereum when it was in its
| bootstrapping phase to now when it has millions of users
| and projects right?
|
| and you do know a group of people tried to have the same
| thing done again a few years ago and it failed right?
| dmitriid wrote:
| You're pretending that _tech_ is more important than the
| _uses_ of that tech or the _outcomes_. Which is doubly
| ironic because the comment above compared Ethereum to
| Youtube and Netflix.
|
| The 99.999999999% of use cases for Ethereum (or for
| Blockchains in general) can be easily handled if not by a
| single Raspberry Pi, but at least by a modern laptop.
| Because those use cases are currency speculation, buying
| useless shit, and asset hoarding.
|
| The remaining arguably useful usecases are an exchange of
| IOUs.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| This is how all tech works - trains, cars, power
| stations. We build things that are initially inefficient.
| We eventually transition to energy efficient tech. We
| celebrate. It's rare the transition can reduce 99.95% of
| energy footprint the size of a country within a minute of
| activating the new tech.
| scambier wrote:
| Trains, cars and power stations serve a purpose. The
| blockchain only creates waste with nothing in return.
| Yeah it does pollute less now, but it's still too much.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The difference is that PoW is not "inefficient". Rather,
| it is intrinsically wasteful by its very nature.
|
| Take an inefficient car for instance. There are
| diminishing returns in its utility after a certain point
| of energy use. On the other hand, there are no
| diminishing returns in PoW. The more energy you use, the
| more money you make.
| deadfish wrote:
| An electric heater runs current through a wire .. the
| waste product of doing so is heat. The more you 'waste'
| the more heat produced.
|
| I guess the more efficient version of the same thing
| would be the move to using heat pumps.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Electric heaters are the classic exception in energy
| efficiency calculations. The heat produced is only wasted
| in that it will eventually dissipate. But heat is exactly
| what you wanted when you turned the heater on, and so
| heaters are often described as 100% efficient. I guess
| with heat pumps this logic makes less sense. It is more
| efficient to move heat around than to generate it.
|
| Not quite sure how this relates to Proof of Work. People
| don't generally run mining rigs because they want to
| generate heat. The heat is almost always waste.
|
| I've always wondered if the economics of using CPUs in
| heaters to do something useful _and_ generate heat would
| ever work out.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Sure? It was both an inefficient and wasteful mechanism
| to secure consensus. This is why developers have been
| actively researching and developing how to switch Eth to
| PoS for years.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Let me introduce you to carbon credits.
| j_mo wrote:
| Yeah, this quote from the article made me groan out loud:
|
| > I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon
| from the atmosphere every week
|
| You're not removing it, you helped create the thing that
| was putting it there in the first place, and fixed your
| mistake! It's still there, it's just not getting worse
| now.
| alkonaut wrote:
| While it's a good step, I'll only join in the applause when
| someone reduces energy use by a 0.5% they didn't create
| themselves.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Completely indefensible in a world beset with global warming
| and energy shortages
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I wonder if there is some very surprised power plant
| technicians out there right now scratching their heads
| because they didn't get the memo.
| [deleted]
| Gigachad wrote:
| I wonder if this gets accounted for somehow, where power prices
| drop slightly causing bitcoin miners to pick up the savings.
|
| I'm gonna assume there won't be some huge shutdown of power
| plants so this power is still being produced.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if a million
| miners cried out all at once and then were suddenly silenced.
|
| You might want to adjust your force sensitivity. The merge
| doesn't simply GPU mining will stop, simply that the PoS chain
| is now merged with the PoW chain. You'll still be able to PoW
| mine with your GPU until they remove PoW fully, which is due to
| happen sometime around Q3 2022.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| We are already very close to Q3 2022. Unless you meant
| another year.
| soco wrote:
| Isn't September even Q4?
| wumms wrote:
| Q1: January, February, March
|
| Q2: April, May, June
|
| Q3: July, August, September
|
| Q4: October, November, December
|
| Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_year
| robjan wrote:
| Depends on which country you are in. Many countries
| financial years run April to April.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| More precisely, it depends whether Q3 2022 meant calendar
| 2022 or financial 2022 (and if the second, which
| financial 2022). But for an international project, I
| suspect the right reading is Q3 of calendar 2022.
| kristofferR wrote:
| It depends on which type of Q, I think.
|
| Some companies, like Costco, are in their Q1 period right
| now.
| bsamuels wrote:
| what you're referring to is an earlier way the merge was
| designed. there is no PoW mining anymore.
| capableweb wrote:
| If that's the case, I stand correctly. Seems my
| understanding of the merge was an outdated one then. Thanks
| for the correction.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| No, PoW on Ethereum mainnet is forever done after The Merge.
| The chain is now fully PoS.
| everfree wrote:
| To be clear, it's not possible to PoW mine with your GPU
| anymore. That's what today's update changed.
| maxioatic wrote:
| During the livestream of the Merge someone said 0.2%, while
| Bitcoin was at 0.5%. Regardless, still an amazingly high
| percentage to just "turn off".
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| Well, I laid out my numbers and calculation.
|
| If there is a more accurate way of calculating it that
| results in 0.2%, I would love to hear about it.
| mratsim wrote:
| https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
|
| - Youtube 244 TWh/year
|
| - Gold mining 240 TWh/year
|
| - Bitcoin 200 TWh/year
|
| - Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year
|
| - Netflix 94 TWh / year
|
| - Gaming 34 TWh / year
|
| - Paypal 0.26 TWh / year
|
| - Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
| alexmingoia wrote:
| We'll still use that 0.5% for something else, right? It's not
| as if power generation (and emissions) will be reduced.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Some power generation is done by demand, e.g. coal plants are
| fired when there is demand or turned off when there is low
| demand. Same with e.g. pumped hydro and other sources.
| capableweb wrote:
| Energy generation changes depending on energy usage. The
| grids around the world are highly flexible (in relative
| terms) so when energy usage goes down, less energy is
| produced and vice-versa.
| Jolter wrote:
| No, what happens is that the price per kWh drops.
|
| The only way production drops is if that takes the price
| below the point of profitability.
| [deleted]
| daemin wrote:
| Electricity production at any point in time must match
| electricity consumption, that's literally how the
| electricity grid works.
|
| Price is them somewhat affected by this and many other
| factors.
| Jolter wrote:
| Alright, I concede I didn't think that comment through.
|
| I was only considering a national grid, at peak
| consumption hours, where excess power is exported and
| hence "disappears from view", but of course taking a
| global view the electricity is just consumed somewhere
| else.
|
| Still, with the current energy crisis, with prices at
| all-time highs across at least Europe, I don't know if
| there is anywhere where power production is not running
| at close to 100% capacity at peak hours. Right now it is
| extremely profitable to be a power producer in Europe,
| and you can sell every kWh you produce thanks to the
| countries being interconnected.
|
| The regulation capacity you're talking about is on the
| margin. Certain plants (like most hydro power plants)
| will adjust their production to keep the frequency
| stable, but there is certainly no excess production
| capacity right now.
| viraptor wrote:
| > where power production is not running at close to 100%
| capacity at peak hours
|
| That's not how it works really. The peak can change - it
| may literally be influenced by the break time in TV shows
| and people putting the kettle on at the same time. In the
| other direction, we may lose capacity due to repairs and
| unplanned outages. If we ever get close to 100% of
| production capacity for more than a moment, that's a
| massive planning issue. Instead we do rolling blackouts.
| Shorel wrote:
| And a million gamers are still waiting for reasonable GPU
| prices.
|
| Nvidia really milked that cash cow.
| mratsim wrote:
| On the topics of gaming, the energy consumption isn't pretty
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
|
| - Youtube 244 TWh/year
|
| - Gold mining 240 TWh/year
|
| - Bitcoin 200 TWh/year
|
| - Ethereum PoW 112 TWh / year
|
| - Netflix 94 TWh / year
|
| - Gaming 34 TWh / year
|
| - Paypal 0.26 TWh / year
|
| - Ethereum PoS 0.01 TWh / year
| me_me_me wrote:
| I have a massive full tower case, it is housing my 3rd rig
| currently.
|
| The first one was standard pc and the motherboard with gpu
| looked tiny in it,
|
| I got 3070 recently and it barely fits (with hdd cage still
| in place), it looks ridiculously big. The card is so big it
| comes with a special bracket to be mounted below to support
| its weight.
|
| Those cards are not going down in price any more than they
| already are.
|
| Also worth mentioning $1,000 in 2000 is equivalent in
| purchasing power to about $1,719.92 today, it feels like
| those cards are getting expensive but part of it is cost of
| inflation.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> And it reduces the world's energy bill by 0.5%_
|
| I live in Europe and the measures my county is taking to combat
| energy shortage are pretty wild like limiting the heating of
| apartments, indoor swimming pools, reducing street lighting,
| but nowhere was is stated "banning crypto mining".
|
| Pretty insane how we're just tolerating this massive energy
| waste just so some people and organizations can have something
| to speculate on for money.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Places with issues at that level aren't really where much
| mining is happening.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Sure, buit the energy crisis is a global issue. And you
| can't solve global issues using local solutions.
| pvigilo wrote:
| No it's not, there's a lot of stranded energy in the
| world. We are just missing it where we need it the most.
| That's why your country is doing "local solutions"
| ikt wrote:
| I mean it's technically both, Australia sure isn't
| waiting for the world to rely less on coal and gas, it's
| pumping 10's of billions into renewables, something some
| of us argue should have been done years ago.
| smcl wrote:
| There are _definitely_ cases where The Market doesn 't
| magically fix things and regulation needs to be introduced to
| prevent bad behaviour (or encourage a societally beneficial
| behaviour).
|
| However in this case with the high cost of electricity in
| Europe right now, isn't crypto-mining similar to lighting
| money on fire? I can't imagine it's profitable in many
| European countries, if any.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > However in this case with the high cost of electricity in
| Europe right now, isn't crypto-mining similar to lighting
| money on fire?
|
| Miners sometimes sign long-ish-term contracts for energy.
| smcl wrote:
| Ahhhhh I see
| kaba0 wrote:
| You honestly say it with a straight face that 0.5% of the total
| electricity used by the word is not an unfathomably large
| number that was wasted for years with no good reason?!
| ideamotor wrote:
| So, it's no longer "rent seeking" behavior, now it's a digital
| collectable that enables rent collection.
| jsvaughan wrote:
| Does anyone know whether we will see an immediate jump in
| transactions per second due to this?
| asenna wrote:
| We will not. The throughput of the system does not get affected
| right now and so does the gas fee, it does not change.
| qualifiedai wrote:
| wow! It did work, the merge is confirmed, no transactions
| dropped! Congratulations to all the devs!!!
| dereg wrote:
| I'm really curious what the GPU miners are going to be doing with
| their cards. Today may be as big a moment for gamers as it is for
| ETH devs.
| latchkey wrote:
| I have a very very large GPU farm. We switched to ETC, for now.
| Why? Because it is the easiest one that doesn't require
| retuning everything. GPUs are like snowflakes and each one of
| my cards are tuned for hash/power/stability, individually. It
| is an insane amount of work to do this because the failure mode
| is that the card (and machine) crashes.
| can16358p wrote:
| But, do you believe ETC has future? I think the current
| increase in ETC GPU mining is due to people trying to squeeze
| the last bits of money return of their farming investment
| until they could sell/repurpose (I mean non-crypto) their
| rigs.
|
| I honestly don't believe ETC has any practical future value,
| and any increase in valuation these days will result in a
| bigger crash of ETC value in a few days/weeks as people get
| out of the GPU mining ecosystem.
| latchkey wrote:
| ETH transitioning to PoS is a poison pill for all of the
| gpu mineable shitcoins out there.
|
| Any gpu mineable coin will trend towards zero because they
| cannot support the irrational speculation any longer...
| unless they come up with some better use cases for
| usability.
|
| There are enough home miners that either have free power
| and/or low capital opex requirements, such that any money
| earned is good money, even just a few dollars. This
| constant sell pressure on the market will always push
| things down.
| avnigo wrote:
| Check out the hashrate for Ethereum Classic [0], it doubled
| overnight. Would be interesting to see if it's sustained.
|
| [0]: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/ethereum-classic/hashrate-
| ch...
| MrPatan wrote:
| How much do they get for transactions on ETC? Is it more than
| 0?
| 8K832d7tNmiQ wrote:
| Now tripled as of this writing.
| zionic wrote:
| 3x hash rate @ same $USD value == 1/3rd the rewards per hash
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Time for AI!
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Switch to a different currency that is still proof of work? I
| mean if you've got all the gear and just need to change was
| software is running and you get back to making money, wouldn't
| you?
| Tenoke wrote:
| Nothing else was as profitable (and ETH profitability had
| already dropped), and depending on your costs switching won't
| be worth it for many. Even for those who is the other
| mineable currencies are much smaller and will likely be
| oversaturated with just a fraction of the hashpower which was
| going into ETH.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| The issue comes how can they make it profitable and
| realistically that is probably going to be a problem they
| solve rather quickly.
| ParksNet wrote:
| Overall daily profitability on a 3060 Ti is down from $1.56
| pre-merge to $0.36 as of writing:
|
| https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...
|
| Seems logical to just sell the GPU for $300 on the used market
| and get 833x its daily mining profitability.
| archerx wrote:
| Mine other coins.
| [deleted]
| awestroke wrote:
| Which ones? BTC is only mined on ASICs, other top coins are
| POS.
| PanosJee wrote:
| Even if they did nobody buys anything rn
| bhaak wrote:
| Ethereum had about 80-90% of the whole hashrate of GPU
| mineable coins. The next biggest one was ETC with about 5% of
| the hashrate of Ethereum.
|
| They can't go all to other coins. It won't be profitable.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| They've been divesting heavily over the past few months. Prices
| cratered and high end cards have been going under MSRP for
| weeks.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Selling them?
| seydor wrote:
| Does Eth have an advantage now vs. even more trusted actors like
| Binance? Binance has a history of relative reliability and is
| better understood by people. The unknown crowd of ETH stakers is
| .. unknown, but it demands our trust. Why should we trust it?
| nateunch wrote:
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