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Vitalik: Ethereum Merge Just Finalized

twitter.com

94 points by m1guelpf 3 years ago · 27 comments

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edf13 3 years ago

And even here the spam/bot tweets are present...

https://twitter.com/indosat/status/1570322826363559936

What's more worrying is that people are sending ETH to the scammers wallet: https://etherscan.io/address/0x266cfB7f9c908591FD69d79Dd46B4...

Currently at: $57k USD!

Someone recently sent $12k USD! https://etherscan.io/tx/0x30661485e12c1e3991369110b6a511f9c2...

  • viraptor 3 years ago

    Fortunately lots of it may be sent by the scammer themselves to add some soc-eng "proof" that others are also sending money.

qalmakka 3 years ago

I hope this and future endeavors will stop the GPU hoarding madness for good.

ralusek 3 years ago

Can someone explain why the move to PoS isn't going to reduce transaction time, increase network capacity, and reduce gas prices? Is this because of arbitrary parameters in place in order to keep that true?

From a technical perspective, I don't know how a consensus mechanism moving from a system for which slowness/hardness is the mechanism...to instead moving to a system for which slowness need not even be a factor, could possibly not result in faster transaction speeds.

  • em_te 3 years ago

    Transaction time was arbitrarily set to allow time for a majority of parties on the Internet to verify transactions. It is a trade off of speed versus security. It was picked as a common denominator so that people on the opposite side of the globe and on slightly slower connections can participate in the verification process. That's why changing to PoS doesn't affect it.

    Network capacity isn't affected because the amount of data exchanged is the same.

    Gas prices isn't affected because gas price is only correlated with the transactions per second (which isn't changed as transaction time isn't changed) and demand and supply for transactions. When lots of people need to make transactions, demand goes up and price goes up. Vice versa. This is the same with other chains too.

    Some chains intentionally lower the transaction time to increase throughput to achieve a lower gas fee, but the disadvantage is that only fast peers can verify the transactions fast enough which leads to centralization.

  • mratsim 3 years ago

    The "only" thing that change was the consensus algorithm.

    That's good software engineering practice when you have hundreds of billions at stake. Minimize the bug surface.

    Furthermore there are other concerns, Ethereum prides itself in running on the most modest of hardware. Many stakers are staking on Raspberry Pi 4.

    A blockchain with large transaction speed require very powerful machines. It becomes impossible to sync with less than 1Gbps of bandwidth and storage cost becomes prohibitive.

    Doing so before implementing state expiry/rent to reflect the cost of storing data in a blockchain will reduce decentralization as hardware requirements require professionalization of node operators.

    Furthermore there is the rollup-centric roadmap for future scalability: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/r26hhv/rollupce...

  • landemva 3 years ago

    They could go faster, but then they would be like the centralized Solana chain which is controlled by VCs. High throughput is easier using a centralized data center.

    Decentralization is good and is challenging to scale. I see eth making the right moves to keep the chain decentralized and accesible to those running nodes at home.

    • clarkeni 3 years ago

      Solana has a higher nakamoto coefficient than ethereum. It’s faster due to higher base validator requirements and technical improvements (such as proof of history, etc). Which makes sense as it’s a newer chain.

  • 70rd 3 years ago

    There's a tradeoff between decentralization and throughput. In the extreme, only people owning entire datacenters could operate a full 'node' that would be processing 1 000 000 TPS.

    Slowness is not the mechanism, ETH had ~13 second block times before the merge. Bitcoin is slow because the difficulty is targeting longer block times, not because of inherent need for slowness. Difficulty is only required so that adverserial agents (with less than 51% of hashpower) can't rewrite the chain and change transactions.

amanzi 3 years ago

My only crypto-mining success is that I mined an ether back in the day when it was worth $10. I have it stashed away for a rainy day, but I have no idea if it's going to be worth anything in the future. Can anyone give a TLDR of what this merge means?

  • bsaul 3 years ago

    They changed the underlying algorithm for determining who to trust to validate transactions in the system. This new algorithm requires 1% of the computer power of the previous one, and supposedly work just as fine.

xnorswap 3 years ago

Twitter really needs to sort out what it means to be "verified", when you're presented with this: https://imgur.com/a/HjOF0gS

It's so barely different to an actual twitter thread where the same person is saying all three parts.

  • Gigachad 3 years ago

    Verified users shouldn’t be allowed to change their name without approval ideally. Guess it’s just too much work for the company.

  • can16358p 3 years ago

    Why would they?

    It would decrease engagement. A significant portion of Twitter is bots and fake profiles/scams and Twitter isn't best known for caring about users or being honest.

    More engagement (even if from fake profiles) = more ads to show = more money.

    This would decrease trust in the platform in the long run for sure but they probably think they're too big to fail without a good competition anyway.

    • mratsim 3 years ago

      > More engagement (even if from fake profiles) = more ads to show = more money.

      I'm surprised bots actually load ads.

  • zapdrive 3 years ago

    In another news, Twitter is looking for fucks to give, none found yet. Search in progress

  • jbirer 3 years ago

    I have long suspected that Twitter (or people at Twitter) are colluding with the crypto scammers for a payout.

pwdisswordfish9 3 years ago

Merge of what? Trans-dimensional merge like CWC believes in?

Yuioup 3 years ago

3 posts about this nonsense on the front page. Can we please stop destroying the planet with this global pyramid scheme?

Seriously why isn't there a UN summit to tackle the Crypto problem?

  • dang 3 years ago

    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • bsaul 3 years ago

    Not a big fan of crypto, but at least the ethereum chain is building a very interesting stack of technologies (smart contract, token, etc).

    If any major crypto project has the chance of one day becoming useful at anything, my bet would be on this one.

    • mccorrinall 3 years ago

      Bitcoin has almost the same capabilities for smart contracts, except loops! Tokens can be implemented as well, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins

      I am with Hal Finney here: Any successful replacement of the Bitcoin block chain will forever undermine the credibility of any successor. How is an investor to know that it won't happen again?

      Rebooting now may benefit a few thousand early adopters. What happens when hundreds of millions use Bitcoin 2? They'll be just as jealous and envious of you as you are of others. Given the precedent you want to set, how will you argue against yet another reboot?

      There is no point in ETH except making money.

  • ok_dad 3 years ago

    Well at least now they don’t use as much power.

    • peyton 3 years ago

      Based on parent comment, guess that wasn’t really the issue for the authoritarians.

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