Merge soon
ultrasound.moneyI have been skeptical for a long time that the transition to proof of stake would actually happen. It just seemed like the project was delayed and delayed, and there are so many fundamental development problems with this sort of decentralized migration. Nothing quite like this has ever worked before.
But here we are and there is no obvious problem in sight. I'll keep my fingers crossed, and if it goes off without a hitch, I'll have to admit I was too pessimistic and revise my opinion of the Ethereum ecosystem upwards.
Thank you! After having seen so many pessimistic comments about the merge it's refreshing to see someone willing to change its mind.
Ethereum post-merge looks a hell of a lot like a security. We'll see what regulators do, but it's concerning that the Ethereum Foundation has been so quiet about regulatory hazard.
Also alarming is the question marks as to when you'll be able to withdraw staked Ethereum, given the security risks from attacks intended to cause slashing and the dependence on total stake for what the staking rewards are.
Do you have more specifics in what you are referring to?
Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors.
Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.
> Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.
This. Of all comments this is the centralization risk on top of proof-of-stake which will have a more involved focus on staking with it being highly likely that it now passes the Howey test that ETH looking more like a security, with the Ethereum Foundation at the center of all of this.
> Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset
Buying Eth will be the same as before. What you could say, is staking Eth is what makes it an interest-bearing asset, not just buying Eth.
As far as I understand, without any work (energy consumption) that is directly tied to the value of the asset, there's no argument left for it to be a currency, i.e. it can only be categorised as a security asset.
Buying Eth: No investment in a common enterprise, no expectation of profit nor is that non-profit derived from others. Not a security.
Staking Eth: Investment in common enterprise, expectation of profit and profit derived from others. Looks and quacks like a security.
Buying and holding Eth without staking it shouldn't be considered a security, while staking said Eth should be considered a security. At least if we're still following the "Howey Test".
If there were two tokens, one of which was stakeable and the other not, traded separately but convertible, then sure. But that's not reality. ETH's value is in part defined by its ability to bear interest. Whether you personally stake or not has no bearing on whether your ETH is a security.
Staked ETH derives profit from your own effort. You have to buy equipment (consumer-grade computer), pay for internet and energy costs to have it plugged and put your own effort in maintaining it online, operational and secure. This is basically a side-job for techies but a side-job in the end. Staked ETH rewards are thus not passive income and staked ETH is not a security. In a similar manner that rental income is taxed as income and a landowner that rents an appartment is not issuing an illegal security.
A different thing is what happens with a liquid staking token like stETH, a much better argument can be made that it quacks and walks like a security.
The profit is to be derived from the efforts of others. People staking at this point are entirely dependent on the Foundation to add the ability to withdraw your staked ETH. Do stakers expect to make a profit if the Foundation doesn't add this feature?
The foundation doesn't add anything because they don't write the clients. The foundation does research and gives grants using its resources to fund specific areas and fund related infrastructure. The next upgrade and what it includes is agreed by the various open source clients and is enforced by the validators when they decide to upgrade and implement the changes.
Besides that important clarification, validators are already receiving income for their efforts. The tips and MEV are already flowing to their wallets as we speak, it's only the issuance that is locked. The particular change required to unlock funds is rather trivial and can be implemented on your own even if you wanted to. But doing so without a large consensus of validators would fork you out of the main chain and those unlocked coins could be rather useless, this should show the delicate balance that decentralized consensus involves.
It's not passive though. You get paid for running a node and validating transactions. You stake ETH as a surety bond that you'll do it correctly.
Those things are not as coupled as you make them sound: the vast majority of people getting paid interest on their ETH won't be running a node. They'll be receiving interest passed on by exchanges or other centralised entities that are staking their ETH.
And if those entities give them some kind of token they can trade around, giving them rights to their deposit plus some profits, that token might well be a security.
But if I loan you dollars and you promise to do something profitable and give me more dollars back, that doesn't make the dollar a security.
Ethereum PoW could be seen (if you squint hard enough) as some sort of activity that produces a good (through mining) and its respective marketplace.
Ehereum PoS is just a financial asset with a weird governing structure (like a currency future? idk). It's basically standard stock.
Something is called a 'good' if it has some inherent with to some people. PoW does not. Exhaust gas isn't a good either.
PoW and PoS are both financially assets with a weird governing structure, I'd say.
I don’t even understand what I’m looking at on fake money websites anymore. A bunch of graphs that don’t correspond to anything at all? The title doesn’t even appear on the page. There’s no text content indicating what this is about. Y’all have fun with your gambling, I guess.
My intuition is that PoS isn't economically stable model. In PoW, the miners had interest in stability of prices because their costs were anchored in reality by the mining rig. So once you had expended the real life cost of a mining rig, your interests were to only increase the price of the coin. Whales might have wanted to manipulate prices but they ran the risk of bankrupting miners (many of them were miners).
Now the incentives are perverse. Since prices aren't anchored by real world expenses, the incentives of whale stakers is extreme price volatility, so that they can increase the share of the network they hold. They are free to pump and dump as they please even more than before because there's nothing anchoring them to reality. They get to set the price alone.
Well, they can only move the price by whatever percentage they hold in ETH. I would assume, maybe naively but not unreasonably, that a holder with no plans to sell would see staking as a mostly risk free way of generating return. So I'd assume that these big guys would be putting most, if not all, of their capital into staking. Therefore I wouldn't expect their ability to move the market to be significantly higher than total staked ETH as a percentage of total supply.
Again, naively, people panic and a smaller but substantial move could cascade, but a news article could do that as well. Stakers don't have a monopoly on the ability to cause a stampede.
Last I read on the mechanics of all of this, the emission rate, burn rate, fee burn and staking requirement were designed in such a way as to keep a certain amount of total ether staked. I don't recall what that percentage was, I think around 10% and it's not exact, this is game theoretical after all and incentives are what drives this so it will fluctuate a bit.
There are problems with not having an ongoing cost to validation, and not having assets external to the system at risk, a big one is the so called "nothing at stake" problem which ethereum claims to have solved (and have a compelling case as to why if you read about it) but I don't believe this problem you speak of is one of them. I am somewhat concerned that these metrics to maintain a certain percentage at stake will not shake out the way they planned and have to be adjusted with a hard fork, this happens in ethereum all the time with incentive structures.
The volumes of ETH trading are always orders of magnitude lower than how much the whales hold.
Market manipulation is prevalent in all markets all the time. The risk of market manipulation comes from other participants (the bigger a share of the market a whale has, the less risk he has) and from real world anchors (which are what sets the price of stocks in the longer term despite their short term randomness).
ETH whales always had the ability to do price manipulation. And they did it to some extent mostly to the upside. But they risked breaking the market if they manipulated to the downside.
The miners also had real world selling incentives. The game was rigged but at least price incentives aligned.
The problem isn't about whether PoS works. The problem is that the lack of real world anchors means the whales are free to manipulate price as they please. They can agree as a cartel on a price, low or high, beforehand, and keep buying from retail low and sell high and gain higher and higher share, manipulating both to the upside and the downside.
The problem is that PoS has no downside price manipulation disincentives, and it encourages hoarding. You'll end up like diamonds where most of those are hidden outside the market by a huge whale that exploits a monopoly on supply.
ETH that's being staked is not available on exchanges to trade. If that manipulation is occurring, then PoS will reduce it by giving whales an incentive to take their ETH off the market, to stake it instead.
If somebody is as ignorant as me as to what is this about, it’s about ETH cryptocurrency changing to Proof of Stake, take it from what seems to be the original source: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
I have a vague idea of ETH merge, but not sure what this ultrasound money site is about. From Q&A:
> Ultra sound money is an Ethereum meme focusing on the likely decrease of the ETH supply.
> If capped-supply gold is sound, decreasing-supply ether is ultra sound.
I have no idea what this last sentence means.
It's a meme. It literally says that in your quote...
Capped supply assets are good because that combats inflation, so decreasing supply must be even better (=ultra), right? That's the meme.
Maybe there is more to it but isn’t that just a wordplay wherein sound means both what music creates and a word signifying something making sense? Or so you mean something related to the supply?
Yes, there is more to it. "Soundness" is a specific term in computer science regarding a program being unable to end up in a invalid state. Usually used in type systems to describe a type system that makes your program unable to be "wrong".
The idea of "soundness" is based on this seminal paper: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milne...
"Sound" as in "stable" might be a bit that helps.
Bitcoiners often call BTC 'Sound Money' - ultrasound money is a play on that to highlight that Ethereum simply has better economics after the merge
"ultrasound" money is not money where the issuance and protocol rules can/do change at the direction of a core group of developers like they do in Ethereum
What cryptocurrency cannot adjust its protocol based on what the core developers want? You want a cryptocurrency that can launch once and never change after that, even as critical bugs are found? I don't think any cryptocurrency like that exists nor do people want it.
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but it is good to see one of the major ones move away from endlessly thrashing hardware and consuming huge amounts of energy.
So congrats, that's one major negative externality tackled, assuming that this all works out.
An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should be celebrated here. Else, what is the point in calling ourselves "Hacker" News?
What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software?
How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
Several reasons come to mind:
- Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems. Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement. And they can be done asynchronously, at the discretion of the user. If you think about it, deployment for this type of software boils down to uploading build artifacts into a public folder.
- Most other massively deployed software is developed by a single organization that completely owns the pipe. Ethereum has multiple client teams that need to coordinate and rigorously test their specs.
- Any failure has potential to severely damage the reputation of Ethereum, and in turn a multi-billion dollar market.
> Operating systems, browsers, etc are not distributed systems
This is a hilarious statement.
> Their deployment procedure has no availability or liveness requirement.
Only to be followed by this.
Your average software update does not put 200B at risk.
Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that.
The average Fortune 500 internal software upgrade probably has more real revenue on the line than an Ethereum update.
Imagine that this update fails and Ethereum goes down. Who’s going to actually notice? Traders on exchanges like Coinbase or Binance wouldn’t be affected. The price would crash, sure, but their actual trades aren’t on Ethereum. Crypto is all about perception of decentralization. It’s a story, not a product.
It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap. Is Apple really worth $2.5 trillion? I dunno, seems like a lot, but the market determines what things are worth.
But for the record, there's more than $100B in USD-backed (cash and equivalents-backed) assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Plus billions of dollars worth of on-chain organizations and applications that exist (Uniswap, Aave, Compound, GMX, etc). More than $28B moves on chain every day: https://money-movers.info/
> "It's not a made up number any more than a stock's market cap."
This is a common crypto talking point but it makes no sense.
Companies are regularly acquired at a premium to their market cap, often in cash. For instance, Elon Musk signed an agreement to pay $44 billion to take Twitter private. Assuming the deal goes through, every single shareholder of Twitter is going to receive cash in exchange for their shares.
There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.
> Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets.
Every honest crypto market participant has long admitted that no one currently knows a good model for valuing crypto tokens. Indeed this is widely accepted. As a result, there is such a massive speculative premium placed on them and their prices are extremely volatile.
However, Ethereum will now pay a yield native to the protocol and so discounted [cashflows][1] apply in "Eth" terms. To try to value that ["internet dividend"][0] in USD is, however, still speculation and so ultimately reliant on global [liquidity][2] conditions (how much banks "print").
[0]: https://link.medium.com/HGOCQMUbltb The Web 3.0 Yield Curve
[1]: https://ethereumcashflow.com (pdf)
> There's no such process for cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't make any sense for someone to acquire every instance of a coin. Coins don't pay dividends. They don't represent any kind of underlying assets. It's just weird to pretend that they have a market cap in the same sense as stocks.
Feel free to come back to these comments in 10-20 years, but one of the moonshot goals is to make blockchain networks base layers for all financial processes in the world and implement all the things you want from any asset class as applications on top of a globally distributed virtual computer.
Additionally, the same arguments can be made of any fiat currency. The US dollar doesn't represent anything except >faith in a system<. The relative value of any blockchain is the >faith in it as a system<.
> "the same arguments can be made of any fiat currency"
That's just moving the goalposts because we were talking about market cap of stocks specifically.
I'm happy to check back in 10-20 years. I made an Ethereum wallet in 2017 and still haven't used it for anything meaningful. Anecdotally, the same seems to apply to everyone I know. I honestly don't think that will have changed by 2032. I don't think my stock portfolio will be on Ethereum then.
Not necessarily — commodities like gold have similar properties and they are also generally given a market cap.
However commodities also have inherent utility that cryptocurrency doesn’t.
Ethereum has actual users who pay to run applications built on top of it.
Pretty bad example because Elon Musk is currently in court to back out of the deal or get the price reduced.
Companies are also regularly liquidated for next to nothing or go bankrupt and disappear altogether (ie Enron, Lehman, et al).
There is no such process for cryptos because they are decentralized and no one owns 100% of the supply or has the authority to authorize a takeover. They are more akin to commodities in that sense. Could you buy all the world's lumber supply? Of course not, not even if you were Musk.
Ethereum has been a yield producing asset since Beacon chain went live in December of 2020.
> Crypto market cap is a made up, manipulated number. The actual amount of dollars in Ethereum is nothing even close to that.
Would you apply same reasoning to NASDAQ stocks? Or Gold market cap?
I mean META stock is down 60% YoY and the revenue is the same. Hard to argue what is "manipulated" vs. perception
How is it at risk? If something goes wrong you can always return to the old chain.
The old chain will continue to exist anyways because some people dislike Proof of Stake.
proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
>not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure
Is there any good writeup or video essay about how incentives and control will change? I'm a bit sceptical about this part. Feels like ethereum owners now have a big incentive to make this change benefit them rather than the utility of ethereum. Like I heard this will make it even more deflationary which seems like an odd choice.
and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.
exactly! hence why I think this must be the most harrowing software upgrade of all time.
> What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software?
> How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
The code size for the core software of Ethereum isn't huge. It's possible for one person to understand it, and it's much simpler than iOS, Android or Windows. There are many things running on top, but those are supposd to keep running, similar to applications when you upgrade an OS.
But the finance attached to Ethereum is huge. I checked the figures just now.
$194 billion of ETH is being transferred from one blockchain mechanism to a radically different one, in about 40 minutes (estimated). Instantly, in what is effectively a single special transaction.
The consensus algorithm around that transaction is special and complicated, and it will only ever run once. It has been very carefully tested in advance by many teams at different companies, because it coordinates a handover between two robust but very different kinds of consensus protocols that don't normally link up.
It's unusual for another reason: Blockchains rarely merge two existing blockchains into one. Forking is more common, but not merging two different kinds of blockchains.
This is also an open source style software upgrade, because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago, and nothing forces people to upgrade, only incentive and getting the news out to them.
Not only is the consensus algorithm different, the p2p networking protocols are also different after the merge. There are many changes, though most of them are running already on one of the two chains being merged together.
Countless third party applications, defi, secondary blockchains and so on running on top are supposed to be able to continue running, seamlessly. There's a lot of those, running from many authors and companies, and some of those have their own financial value that's not even counted in the $194 billion I mentioned above. Their total value is not clear.
Those third party applications have not, in general, been tested on the new system. Nobody can be sure exactly which ones or how many will fall over, because it has not been possible to test them. It's a big like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10: Applications are not supposed to be affected if the OS authors did it right.
Unlike most software updates rolled out on large networks, which can be done gradually with the old and new running alongside each other for a while, the Ethereum Merge is one single transaction to transfer everything over including protocols, and requires the whole network to do it all at the same virtual time.
Nobody knows in advance which block will contain the transition. Only the statistical conditions for the transition are set, and there is a kind of meta-consensus protocol to ensure the transfer between very different consensus mechanisms is itself going to satisfy special rules of both consensus mechanisms during the handover.
When it's over, the merge code will probably be deleted from client software, because it is only supposed to run once.
There will be future upgrades, as there have been "hard forks" in the past, but they don't appear require such high levels of carefulness and coordination as the merge. That said, maybe things like the planned switch to sharding, state expiry, change of hash tree structure, and zk rollups will be fairly radical too.
> It's also a software upgrade because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago.
"upgrade" is the wrong term. Not 100% of users will accept the new software so after this event called "The Merge" there will be 2 competing Ethereum networks (actually 3 because there's already "ethereum classic" from the last time Ethereum forked). The correct term is "fork." Yes the Vitalik endorsed fork will acquire most of the economic value, but that just highlights the degree to which Ethereum is centralized. There are key figures in ETH that force breaking rules changes on users. Bitcoin is very different.
> Not 100% of users will accept the new software so after this event called "The Merge" there will be 2 competing Ethereum networks (actually 3 because there's already "ethereum classic" from the last time Ethereum forked).
It's not actually that simple. After the merge, non-upgraded PoW nodes will automatically wind down and self-destruct according to the built-in difficulty bomb curve which is part of PoW.
For PoW Ethereum to continue running in a useful way to whoever wants to use it, a majority of PoW users would need to upgrade to a new PoW fork that changes the difficulty bomb curve. They have to coordinate and agree that fork, as different bomb curves are incompatible.
That would require a majority of PoW users to perform a coordinated softare upgrade, agreed with each other. There's no default PoW Ethereum that can keep working for a long time if people don't deliberately agree on and roll out a new fork.
> Bitcoin is very different.
Bitcoin has a difficulty bomb too (when coin issuing stops), so Bitcoin may eventually self-destruct too, if nobody steps up to coordinate a new fork of Bitcoin and a majority of users accept the new fork.
> Bitcoin has a difficulty bomb too, so Bitcoin will eventually self-destruct, if nobody steps up to coordinate a new fork of Bitcoin and a majority of users accept the new fork.
What bullshit is this? bitcoin doesn't have a difficulty bomb
It has a much weaker version, it's just not called a difficulty bomb, it's called the 21M bitcoin limit and the halvings leading up to it. As that limit is approached, Bitcoin mining gradually becomes less profitable.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/cryptocurrency/what-happens-after-a...
iOS / Windows etc are not open source and are delivered by centralized entities (Apple, Microsoft). Android is open source but is also delivered by a single company (Google). Maybe my phrasing didn't reflect it but I meant one of the biggest upgrades for an open source project done by a distributed group of developers.
"upgrade" is a misnomer. It's a "fork" There will be 2 competing versions of Ethereum after this. Actually there will be 3 because there's already ethereum classic from the last time Ethereum hard forked.
Yes, but two of the networks will remain/be wee; the other (Ethereum mainnet)... not so much.
It's just another cryptocurrency fork. It's not particularly more work or harder impact than your average Debian point release, with the most obvious difference being that there are fewer users affected.
Eh, what's the worst that could happen?
If they mess up they can just roll back the immutable blockchain again, same way they did it last time
The project was way smaller back then and it was easier to coordinate the community (which was required for a rollback like that). It's highly unlikely to ever happen again.
No, it's absolutely not as significant as you make it. Nobody outside the crypto community really cares.
Hello hello crypto fans, someone overestimating the significance and importance of some open source project here? lol
Also PoS fans watch out and lets talk again in the future, I believe you are loosing some of your desired properties and may be surprised long-term..
Exactly. This is a triumph and the entire open source community should be celebrating
Disagree. This is a centralized project forcing a set of breaking consensus rule changes on users. Literally "upgrade your software or your money is gone"
Bitcoin has hard guarantees of user rights. Ethereum is a centralized project masquerading as decentralized.
Dude, the entire point of crypto is freedom and choice. If you like protocols that don't change their consensus rules, stick with Bitcoin. Nothing wrong with that.
Uh, that's just wrong. If you don't upgrade your software your money is not gone.
If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.
I mean, you can still transact. As long as you have your private key, you can transact. For example, there is going to be a "Proof of Work" fork of ETH after the merge. Price will dump on day one, but it will be there, and will tick away, and you'll still be able to move your ETH on both chains. But one will be considered canonical, because the community has gone with it.
Same thing has happened to Bitcoin multiple times. BCH, BTG, etc.
I think it's just as simple as "if you want to interact with people through software you have to use the same software as them." Nothing controversial about it, its just that the interaction isn't chatting over telegram, it's transacting.
There's nothing stopping you from selling your ether to someone who wants it and deploying that capital on something else. Or ignoring it and forking the chain and keeping your fork ether. "But it's valueless" I hear you say, see my above paragraph for the answer to that one.
This commenter here is right you know. They (Ethereum Foundation) decide what the 'trademarked' Ethereum uses and if you are not on whatever they ultimately move to, well your money is unusable and locked. PoS is an increased risk of censorship and it is quite possible for regulators to even tell validator providers to censor addresses if they want to be compliant with regulations.
It is the re-centralization of Ethereum and will be made worse with Proof-of-Stake.
There only needs to be a single miner that uses PoW and you can freely move your funds to other wallets. You can even start the miner yourself.
So no, your funds are definitely not lost. You might be the only one connected to the "network" but wasn't this the promise of cryptocurrency decentralization?
well the PoS fork tokens will acquire 99% the value of the current ethereum tokens, so if you want to access that you've got to upgrade your software. You are right tho you'll continue to be able to interact with the PoW network.
This couldn’t be more wrong or dishonest. The merge has been part of the plan since 2016. The users were onboard with this from the beginning.
Bitcoin has had hard forks before as well man.
No, this is a blockchain "triumph" only blockchain people care about.
The biggest gap between people involved with the Ethereum ecosystem vs. mainstream media seems to be that the former are focused on the economic impact of The Merge, while the latter is focused on the environmental impact. Don't get me wrong, reducing energy costs is great and everyone agrees with that, but the resulting changes in monetary policy are probably even more impactful. But of course this is not sensationalist or simple enough for the media to focus on.
The charts on this website are great, but people outside of the ecosystem likely won't understand them, which is a real problem if Ethereum wants adoption.
False dichotomy.
What nobody pays attention to is that the entire thing is a cartel and only incentivizes restricting freedom over time and automating turmoil.
It’s a complete disgrace to what cyberspace represents. It’s an opportunistic, exploitative, incompatible, deprecated, deficient paradigm stuck in a physically-constrained view of the future perpetually hindering progress due to preventing the mind in being able to contemplate non-physical things as infinite.
Pathetic, sad, crappy, leaky.
All driven by greed and ignorance.
People are being played to act as pawns for the same “elite controllers” that they complain about; being led to perpetuate playing the same game. The only thing worse than actual scarcity is completely artificial scarcity and erecting simulacra around that notion as if it were real. Way to go building an actual matrix of ignorance and slavery.
bitter about something?
Some things warrant bitterness
That's a personally philosophical stance rather than an objective truth. Like anarchism vs communism vs capitalism.
Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on. A fraction of a percent of the population cares about Etherum's impact on the way they already conduct business.
> Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on
I don't know in which world you live in, but from where I'm sitting, it sure as hell doesn't look like this.
Not everyone is equally motivated, that's for damn sure.
This site does a good job of laying out an awful lot of information. Looks like NextJS - can I ask what was used for the UI and charts?
This is good. It took way too long to get here, but it's good that Ethereum is finally fixing its "waste energy to create coupons" system. I still don't really see the point of most ethereum applications but at least it's trying to burn the planet much slower now.
All eyes should now be on Bitcoin to also switch to a non-planet-burning proofing system. Ethereum proved that it can happen and all other blockchains should be held to a similar standard.
Labeling Bitcoin mining as "wasteful" is a subjective opinion not an objective truth. Mining does produce something: physics backed security guarantees, which has a value that's determined by a free market (see Bitcoin price/market cap).
Interesting that it has started deflating already!
It's merged
This deserves to be the top spot on HN right now. Years of countless replies and mockery here across N accounts telling me this day would _never_ happen. Yet here we are, we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent.
EDIT: I'm rate limited/soft banned so I can't reply to most of you/anyone until tomorrow. While I can still edit:
-Cash is the ultimate scammer currency, it would take a ages for crypto to match or replace cash as the best "scam" currency"
-Privacy =/= laundering. Privately transacting is not implicitly a crime.
-Crypto has value as trustless value transfer outside the nation-state system, especially in these uncertain times
-Smart contracts are criminally undervalued. Programmable money is the future.
One can be both positive about the benefit that this move brings, yet deeply negative about the overall value of crypto.
This is absolutely where I stand. Hurrah, Ethereum's cost on humanity and the environment is dropping drastically! Unfortunately, it still has a measurable (if no longer grotesque) cost with extremely dubious benefit.
And what is that cost if not environmental?
Probably crime and wasted human potential
It should be rebranded as crypto speculative investment given how infrequently it's actually used as currency.
Perhaps that nuance is achievable, but I have seen none of that here.
That said, I fundamentally disagree that crypto is "overall negative", and with the move to PoS the largest negative aspect of crytpo (the environmental cost of PoW) goes away.
This merge doesn't make the environmental cost go away. It props up past environmental harms on a pedistal.
My stance has been “I’ll believe it when I see it” after years of the merge being “months” away. I’m a skeptic but happy to see a major cryptocurrency switching off the planet burner.
Same, also a skeptic. Glad to see the project has met a minimum bar of environmental acceptability and GPUs are available again. I’ve seen this promised for so many years, so I’m not sure any congrats is really in order… Anyways I have no idea how the economics of PoS can work but hopefully people don’t lose all their money. The only complaint I have about this is I suspect the shills will be out in full force, trying to get my cash into their market cap.
>after years of the merge being “months” away
It's only been months aways for a few months though. I have endured years of gaslighting comments like this _specifically_ from this asymmetrically moderated community, despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away. The "maybe this year" started in Jan 2020. COVID happened. They didn't start saying "within a year" again until end of 2021.
Meanwhile the _beacon_ chain launched in 2020, which is what's taking over for the PoW chain in ... 1 hour.
Maybe you're acting in good faith and you misheard that the beacon chain was launching 2 years ago and thought that was this. But how likely is that really?
>despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away
Weird since Vitalik said it will take 'maybe a year' and can be ready 'as early in 2018' in 2017. He has admitted many times he had and promoted much shorter timeframes than reality even calling it his biggest mistake in his Twitter AMA last year.
https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-p...
It's been a few months away since at least 2018 - https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-po...
And I can find talk about it being 'soon' from 2016 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ether...
So I think it's perfectly good faith to say we've been hearing about the 'imminent' switch to PoS for several years now.
> we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent.
One very popular cryptocurrency is making the switch. That still leaves Bitcoin, with double the trading volume, and most of the other popular cryptocurrencies.
More importantly it doesn't change the fundamental problem with crypto: it's deliberately difficult to regulate, which means that it's still a scammer's paradise.
And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions.
>most of the other popular cryptocurrencies.
Untrue. Check e.g. top 10, 20 or 50 on Coinmarketcap. Most are PoS. Further, with Ethereum being PoS the mining behind everything except Bitcoin is a rounding error.
>And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions.
You might want to look into stablecoins or more generally into Ethereum if you think using it for daily transactions is the main usecase.
there’s been much discussion here about how PoS does little to provide a decentralized monetary system since it appears to be built with the idea those with the most money should determine what the “truth” is
PoW is those with the most wealth can determine what the truth is.
No, in PoW those with the most hashrate determine what the order of transactions is. Most of the world's computing power is in personal computers, so it is at least somewhat fairly distributed.
In theoretical terms, wealth can be turned into hashrate. In practical terms, most of BTC is mined on dedicated mining rigs by a relatively small number of players.
I don't think this is correct. The book "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier does a good job of covering this topic.
Strongly disagree that PoW is a form of "shackles" PoW = bad is an Ethereum marketing narrative. The Bitcoin community has many robust counterarguments to this narrative.
Yes. The environmental argument of Ethereum 'burning up the planet' is now about to be addressed and that will silence the endless criticism made by the extreme crypto skeptics about Ethereum incinerating the planet.
They will now just congratulate the re-centralization of Ethereum running on Proof-of-Stake.
The crypto-skeptics will never be silent, but I can assure you that crypto is still here to stay, with some crypto projects surviving and some of them will not survive.
Can someone summarize what is happening?
<snark> The people who are Etherium-wealthy are changing Etherium to mean they stay wealthy without having to burn the planet solving meaningless puzzles, while at the same time creating an insurmountable barrier to anybody else becoming obscenely Etherium-wealthy like they are. This is apparently a "good thing". The real world continues to not care.
lol
They will never be silent.
The goalposts will move endlessly.
Some people don’t trust the government, other people do. I like a liquid, fungible asset not controlled by the government. Statists don’t. It’s a philosophical debate more than a technical one at this point.
Personally, I like a currency I can walk into a shop and buy a sandwich with.
That makes you <checks notes> a "statist", apparently.
If the only use case for crypto was to buy sandwiches then it wouldn't be a trillion dollar asset class. That isn't the main use case at this point
In at least one nation state, El Salvador, Bitcoin is an option for buying a sandwich with.
Bitcoin gives individuals the ability to better protect their wealth/savings by storing it in a form where it can easily be hidden (thus protected). It amazes me some people think that's a bad thing.
So the world is made of statists and tax evaders.
Pretty sad to see so many people hate on proof-of-work. I can only assume it's because they have read shallow articles that tell them "Bitcoin uses X amount of energy therefore it must be bad, because using energy is bad" or something along those lines. It's not so simple.
Proof of work solves issues like: - What to do with electricity before the generating source is connected to the grid
- Reduces carbon emissions by incentivising the burning of methane gas (20x worse than CO2)
- Makes it more viable to research new energy sources by lowering the cost.
- Acts as a load-balancer for the grid and makes it way more stable. This in turn means that we can build out huge amounts of solar and wind that rely on the weather.
Of course there are situations where Bitcoin is mined using non-renewable sources but if you believe that Solar and Wind are so cheap, then that issue will sort itself out, no? And it won't take long.
If you're an environmentalist and you want to solve the global issue of CO2 emissions, Bitcoin (and PoW) is a very very valuable tool. Don't throw it away because of a faulty belief.