84 ms·

Ethereum 2.0 launches

629 points by 0x64 6y ago

hydrogenbonds 6y ago
This is one of the biggest news for tech and finance in 2020.
- Tepix 6y ago
  It is big news but we will only see the full effect in 2022 or so.
shireboy 6y ago
Can someone ELI5 for current ETH holders? Will it split like Etherium Classic?
- Tepix 6y ago
  No, it's not splitting. Check out https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/ "What is Eth2? Eth2 refers to a set of interconnected upgrades that will make Ethereum more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable. These upgrades are being built by multiple teams from across the Ethereum ecosystem."
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    It's an entirely new coin. Holders of the existing coin don't get access to the new one unless they buy them. The cynic in me says this is just an opportunity to devalue existing ethereum currencies by making a bunch more...
    - deif 6y ago
      Well that is completely wrong and you clearly haven't read any documentation on the network upgrade.
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      So instead of the promise of a stable, ever-deflating currency value that was made by bitcoin proponents we get unbounded inflation instead? Nice! Edit: might not be the case for Eth2, but it still seems to ring true for the cryptocoin ecosystem in general: as soon as the value of one currency rises enough, alternatives will be created.
- tsujp 6y ago
  A very, very concise brief is it's a concurrent (happening at the same time) network upgrade from PoW (proof of work) to PoS (proof of stake). The new chain called the beacon chain will operate alongside the "old" one until a full cut-over happens some time in the future. Predicted 1-2 years.
- dmihal 6y ago
  Short answer: no, there's only one Ethereum and one ETH asset Long answer: The beacon chain _will_ run in parallel until the two chains are merged. Until that time, ETH in the Beacon Chain isn't transferable, so effectively not a separate asset. However, exchanges are offering Eth2 staking derivatives which they're branding as "ETH2". But it should be remembered that this is a derivative, not a separate M0 asset.
  - andrewla 6y ago
    Well, the expectation is that compliant clients will only respect transactions on Eth2 at some point and will no longer consider new blocks on Eth1 valid. At any point in time, of course, any node or set of nodes can declare a fork in the chain to be invalid and reorganize on another chain. That's what happened with Ethereum Classic and it could happen again. I think less likely unless there's a vulnerability discovered in Eth2, though. Also less likely because in some ways the Ethereum Classic incident helped cement Ethereum's place by scaring off all the ideologues and keeping the participants who were more pragmatic.
jansan 6y ago
Let the party begin.
- rocgf 6y ago
  Are we starting with this even here? Is there really no corner of the Internet that's immune to this bullcrap?
  - SwimSwimHungry 6y ago
    I've always wondered if someone could make a browser plugin to filter anything involving cryptocurrency out of web sites like HN, /. or reddit? Having to read about all this every day contributes to unnecessary anxieties and stressors some folks don't need.
    - everfree 6y ago
      I really don't see cryptocurrency pop up that often on HN or Reddit. It's usually only when a big event happens, like this post about the most actively used network launching their 2.0 update that's been in the works for the past 3-4 years. I feel like both communities generally do a good job of moderating away inconsequential cryptocurrency posts. Does seeing a fintech post on HN once in a blue moon (and choosing not to read it) really cause you that much anxiety?
      - SwimSwimHungry 6y ago
        Well not me personally. I mean some of the commenters on this thread seem to be a bit irritated and the clashing that turns up afterwards in the comments, which seems relatively unproductive. It would be nice to have a way to kind of give netizens a choice on what they want to see, similar to Reddit. As they say, ignorance is bliss.
noneeeed 6y ago
Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always seemed the most interesting.
- sshb 6y ago
  Not tldr, but explanation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q
- seibelj 6y ago
  Beginning of switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus, which will end the mining process for Ethereum and switch to securing the network by locking up funds, drastically reducing the amount of energy used to secure the network. As a side effect of the consensus change, the amount of transactions per second will scale massively. There is not universal agreement among blockchain enthusiasts that Proof of Stake is as secure as Proof of Work, but many currencies such as Cosmos and Polkadot have already implemented Proof of Stake without security issues.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    any idea on the increase in transactions per second/month/some time period? The things that have stopped me from getting into btc/eth are: - scaling issues (it can't be used as a currency if this isn't fixed) - power issues (would be nice if we didn't create a huge pointless energy sink if we could avoid it) - the amount of footguns in ethereum (I think the language is too permissive) It looks like this solves at least 2 of the three!
    - seibelj 6y ago
      At least 1000 transactions per second if not more. In terms of language security, it is possible to use a verified subset of the language in order to avoid bugs, as you can with any Turing-complete language. Few currently do, however.
jules-jules 6y ago
Congrats to the dev team and ethereum community. This is a monumental step for the future of crypto.
draw_down 6y ago
2.0, eh? First one didn’t work so good?
naringas 6y ago
One thing I haven't been able to figure out about proof of stake is this: if one entity somehow manages to control over half to the total ETH tokens, does this enable an attack analogous to bitcoin's 51% problem (which happens when one miner controls over half of the network's raw cpu power)?
- dboreham 6y ago
  Yes
- tryptophan 6y ago
  Yes. But thats the point of PoS. Why would someone who owns >50% of something want to destroy it? Literally hurting yourself more just to hurt others a lesser amount.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    Also, it would be kind of visible and hard to hide. With sufficient high profile stake holders, this would be very unlikely to happen and even harder to hide.
  - tskulbru 6y ago
    Unrealistic surely but, "Some just wants to watch the world burn"
    - flixic 6y ago
      Another aspect of PoS: it makes these attacks incredibly expensive. Currently staked value is over half a billion USD.
  - mathnmusic 6y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you own > 50% and get the ability to reverse transactions, it can still go undetected. So it's possible to hurt others without hurting yourself.
ichbinwiederda 6y ago
Why did ETH drop then?
- djohnston 6y ago
  dont try to correlate market movements with any sort of rational behaviour
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Because Bitcoin touched an all time high and proceeded to plummet $1700+ immediately afterwards, dragging all other cryptos along with it.
  - ichbinwiederda 6y ago
    Ah cool. Makes sense.
    - mckirk 6y ago
      I mean, it really shouldn't make sense, because Bitcoin is a completely separate currency from ETH... but it's still way too deeply connected to 'anything crypto' in people's minds, it seems.
      - xorcist 6y ago
        Why would it make more sense to price it in USD? Bitcoin is the de facto base currency for all cryptocurrency exchanges.
        DennisP 6y ago
        Not really anymore. If for example you look at the ETH markets, the top 12 trading pairs by volume are with national currencies, and the first market with ETH/BTC is down at the 13th spot. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum#markets https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum#markets
ArtWomb 6y ago
Whoa, according to AllNodes, Expected ROI for Eth2 stakeholders is 16.6%, which easily beats out almost any other DeFi interest bearing account (typically ~10%)!
- flixic 6y ago
  APR depends on total staked amount, and decreases as staked Eth increases. You can see the chart here: https://launchpad.ethereum.org https://launchpad.ethereum.org Now that the launch has succeeded, I will stake some of my Eth. As more people do that, APR will fall.
  - dragonelite 6y ago
    So probably somewhere between 5~6%, maybe i should convert some of my Tezos to eth in the future.
    - jules-jules 6y ago
      In the longer term, yes. Plus you can use eth2 in defi (e.g., for lending) to generate additional yield.
      - T0Bi 6y ago
        No you can't. You can't do anything with Eth2 that is locked. Some pool staking services offer a token for each ETH staked, but you can not use the staked ETH.
        jules-jules 6y ago
        I was referring to longer term developments, in case this is unclear. Using staked ether in the defi ecosystem will be possible once withdrawal and smart contract functionality is enabled. Until then, there are liquid staking services that offer eth2 derivatives that can be used in defi, as you point out.
tormeh 6y ago
Is it still deflationary? Wondering if I should invest in the coin itself (which makes sense for deflationary coins) or a company doing something with it (which makes sense for an inflationary coin)
- nootropicat 6y ago
  At the current fee level and price eth is going to be deflationary after mining is gone (fees are going to be burned except for a small fraction). https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
- ur-whale 6y ago
  ETH was never deflationary. As a matter of fact, knowing how many ETH will be produced over a given period of time is a question I never managed to get a satisfactory answer to. There's probably an algorithm buried somewhere in the code, but it's likely not a simple one.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    On PoW, it's currently 2 ETH per block, with a little bit extra for occasional "uncle blocks." This is fixed but has been reduced a couple times by hard forks. For PoS, issuance is a formula depending on the amount staked. How that works out: https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0-economics/ https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0... If you want to dig into the actual formula, it's explained here: https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/phase0/beacon-chain/#rewards-and-penalties https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/phase0/beacon-ch... Until PoW migrates to PoS, probably in about a year, they'll operate in parallel and we'll have both rewards added together. A final factor is an upcoming change to the way transaction fees work, which will burn most of the fees instead of awarding them to validators. That will reduce net issuance further, possibly even taking it negative.
    - ur-whale 6y ago
      The point I was trying to make - apologies for not making it clearer - is that from the point of view of the ETH{insert favorite fiat currency here} market figuring out what the how the supply will behave is hard, and therefore hard to price.
awelkie 6y ago
Can someone explain how block timing works in proof-of-stake systems? As I understand it, with proof-of-work the mining difficulty increases or decreases to maintain that each block is found in roughly the same amount of time. In proof-of-stake is there also a mechanism to regulate the time for each block to be added to the blockchain?
- dirtnugget 6y ago
  No, as far as I understood the time between blocks in a PoS chain is basically just a timer (e.g. 10 seconds). There is no need to adjust that dynamically because there is no "race" to solve a problem. I guess it is even more predictable if it is not dynamically adjusted.
  - zadler 6y ago
    But that does have to be enforced via incentives/cryptography, and with reference to a clock.
    - dirtnugget 6y ago
      Well it is enforced by the protocol on which all node agree and there needs to be a mechanism for syncing clocks across nodes (also defined by the protocol) but they exist, e.g. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946264 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946264 Not 100% sure what ETH is using here but there is a mechanism. If someone would want to fake timestamps, they would need to deviate from the protocol and would thus not be on chain.
      - Benmcdonald__ 6y ago
        You are simply raising the fundamental difficulty with blockchains. How do you know what is the true chain in an adversary environment (the internet)? You gave us the question and no answer
        dirtnugget 6y ago
flixic 6y ago
I am incredibly happy about this. It's the first step for a major cryptocurrency towards ledger security that does not damage the environment via mining. I always hated how wasteful and energy-inefficient mining is. Staking reduces energy costs by many, many orders of magnitude. With lightweight clients in development, it is possible to validate chain using Raspberry Pi. I hope (but don't expect) that some time in the next 10 years Bitcoin will follow. If not, it's just so much CO2 that could have been avoided.
- konschubert 6y ago
  Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are not a problem because nobody wants to trade bitcoin, people just hodl it. Cool. But if that's what people will do, then the money raised through transaction fees will not be enough to support a sufficient hash rate to protect the network. I wrote about all this two years ago already: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-stake-will-kill-proof-of-work.html https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-stake...
  - thebean11 6y ago
    What's your take on off chain solutions like lightning as a solution to the high tx fees?
    - konschubert 6y ago
      It doesn't solve the fundamental cost problem with Proof of Work: - If people pay high effective tx fees, it's shit because, well, it's expensive. - If people pay low effective tx fees (through lightning or block size increase or whatever) then, as soon as inflation ends, the money won't be enough to pay for a sufficient hash rate.
louwrentius 6y ago
I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things already. > Ethereum is a technology that lets you send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. It also powers applications that everyone can use and no one can take down. I don't have this need ever, to be frank. Who really does, looking at the larger population? > It's the world's programmable blockchain. I don't understand what this means. What does this do for real-life applications? What problem / which problems are being solved here?
- RikNieu 6y ago
  I feel that no one is using crypto currency for it's original intended purpose, and in the way it would benefit the citizens of the world the most - as liquid currency for regular & cross-border transactions. Everyone just seems to want to use it like gold, to store wealth or speculate with. This is stupid. But alas.
  - dylkil 6y ago
    >Everyone just seems to want to use it like gold, to store wealth or speculate with. Except ethereum has a decentralized composable financial ecosystem gaining traction as we speak with over $15b locked up. [1]https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-decentralized-finance-defi-574c68ff43c4?gi=137fd23cc28f https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-decentralized... [2]https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/
  - twox2 6y ago
    Well, it's very useful for LARGE and semi-clandestine cross-border transactions, but yes it's not a liquid currency. It's more of a separate economy. It's just programmable money so it's really the beginnings of a new financial system that is a bit divorced from our current one. It's not panacea for the world financial problems, but it's cool and fun.
jungong 6y ago
when danny ryan said "we finalized!", i almost burst into tears
rauljordan2020 6y ago
Eth2 dev here, maintainer of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, one of the implementations currently running the blockchain written in Go. This has been a monumental effort. There are 3 other implementations in mainnet, and consensus is running perfectly. Few other protocols in blockchain have more than one dominant implementation. The beauty of eth2 comes from its efficiency in signature aggregation: https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910. This tweet thread summarizes the importance of the technology used.
- nepthar 6y ago
  Congrats to you and everyone else! Really cool stuff here :)
- wrinkl3 6y ago
  I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    https://github.com/bitcoinjs https://github.com/bitcoinjs
  - auston 6y ago
    also: https://bcoin.io/ https://bcoin.io/
  - iso8859-1 6y ago
    It would be disingenuous to claim that the Bitcoin protocol is only defined by the consensus layer. Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 When Btcd was first released, it was pretty capable, and had lots of development. But it has fallen behind, which makes sense. Why would anybody take the risk of trusting that an alternate implementation when it doesn't decide what bitcoin is, in the end? You may have to patch bitcoind a bit to get your desired interface, but that is much less work than maintaining a full P2P and consensus layer. It is also dangerous to use you a non-standard crypto library. Check this vulnerability, which was caused by LND relying on the btcd project's library: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-October/002856.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
jamesmehaffey 6y ago
Is it still too early to estimate new application costs and performance improvements? Has anyone seen any statistics or comparisons yet? it will be interesting to see how this affects the efficiency of the platform and what this means for the adoption of other platforms.
- DennisP 6y ago
  It's too early, because right now the proof of stake chain doesn't run user transactions. It's just running in parallel, while teams do the work required to migrate the virtual machine to it.
nikolay 6y ago
One question - why didn't Bitcoin drop to zero? I know, VHS survive and Betamax didn't, but unlike Betamax, Ethereum is pretty popular for everything, not just for low-class commodity speculation.
- nkrebs13 6y ago
  This ecosystem is rapidly developing and changing; I think there's still plenty of time for BTC/ETH/LTC/XRP/etc to all exist anywhere from [0,∞). The narrative that is often pushed forward is that they have different use cases. Bitcoin is a limited-supply store of value (analogous to precious metals). BTC blockchain isn't well suited for quick transactions, but it is the blockchain that is the most robust and secure. Ethereum, being Turing complete, provides an ecosystem on which other applications can be built.
- companyhen 6y ago
  Bitcoin is the gateway into crypto. Check the marketcap, and all the pairs are tied to BTC on most major exchanges. It's also the most secure and has the largest community. It's use case is different than Ethereum's.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    >>It's also the most secure and has the largest community. Ethereum's mining fees exceed Bitcoin's: https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ That would mean it has better long-term security prospects than Bitcoin, as security is proportional the revenue earned by validators.
    - alexmat 6y ago
      That's misleading. If you factor in mining rewards, Bitcoin has much higher fees per transaction. A total of $18,000,000 more per day spent on validating Bitcoin transactions than what that website claims.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
siraben 6y ago
Having worked with Ethereum, especially the low level bytecode, one of the changes I'm most excited for that I don't see mentioned a lot is the addition of eWASM support for nodes. There's many problems with the two dominant smart contract languages Solidity and Vyper, for instance bloated codegen that had to be patched otherwise complex contracts size could not be deployed[0], or more theoretical concerns such as soundness, semantics and correctness. Part of the problem is because of no coherent shared intermediate representation and developers writing backends from scratch, and lots of reinventing of the wheel[1]. There's an ongoing project[2] to create an LLVM backend for EVM but the stack based nature is at odds with LLVM IR's bias towards register-based architectures. (EVM doesn't even have a separate stack for return addresses to implement subroutines cleanly!) The switch to eWASM would greatly improve security, efficiency and perhaps allow a diversity of languages to be used on Ethereum. It should be a matter of exposing the appropriate primitives to call other contracts, generate log events, write to the store and so on. [0] For instance, see a PR that reduces codegen from 55K to 1.6K bytes on an innocuous contract https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 [1] I'm guilty of it too; https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs/evm-assembler-talk.pdf https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs... [2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm
- hobofan 6y ago
  I guess it's not mentioned a lot as it's still ~2 years away in Phase 2, AFAIK.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Fwiw there is a proposal to add a return stack to the EVM: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2315.md https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2315.m... Your evm-assembler looks pretty interesting. It's crossed my mind before to write an evm Forth, just for fun, and the lack of a return stack so far has dissuaded me.
  - nonveumann 6y ago
    It's more than a proposal at this point, it's been accepted into the next network upgrade, Berlin, and has been implemented in all major clients for a while now.
j-pb 6y ago
Whenever someone mentions smart contracts I'm instantly reminded of that Jean Luc Picard quote: "I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible to do so... but the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And so I say to any creature who may be listening: There can be no justice, so long as laws are absolute. Life itself is an exercise in exceptions."
- api 6y ago
  I think of it this way: - Every system will be gamed, no exceptions. - It is impossible for the architects of any system to imagine all the ways it will be gamed. That's why it's not possible to create fixed laws that are just. Inevitably someone will find a hack that turns the intent of the law around while remaining true to its letter. This seems to be what dooms both pure libertarian capitalist schemes and pure socialist command economy schemes. In the former case there is not enough structure to contain exploits and no recourse when someone finds a good scam. In the latter case it's impossible for central planners to imagine the results of their plans when they are exposed to opportunistic economic agents. The fatal flaw in both ideologies is their dogmatism. It causes them to fail to adapt when flaws and exploits in the rule system are inevitably found.
  - packetlost 6y ago
    Any political or economic system built on the expectation that people won't be assholes to each other (and work with others to be assholes) is a flawed system.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      Ethereum is also built on the assumption that: - people aren't assholes - all involved parties can audit blockchain transactions - all involved parties are programmers and can audit a contract written in an esoteric programming language - all involved parties voluntarily agree to be bound by these contracts despite the fact there's no way they can be enforced
      - 6y ago
blackrock 6y ago
Who uses it?
- Sargos 6y ago
  Uses what? Ethereum? Proof of Stake? Ethereum is the most heavily used blockchain by far and powers all of DeFi which comprises of digital versions of most of the traditional finance tools. It also powers the entire NFT/collectible space which is used by many games, the NBA, and MLB. The interesting experiments such as quadratic funding and decentralized autonomous organizations are also homed on Ethereum. There's some good overviews out there if you're genuinely interested.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    So.. it’s used for sports gambling? Actually, this might be a very good use case for crypto currencies. Guaranteed payout, based on a triggered scenario.
    - everfree 6y ago
      Guaranteed payout on triggered scenario is one of the big promises of smart contracts. * Sports betting where the contract itself pays you the winnings. * Insurance where everyone pools together as peers, and the contract arbitrates payouts (think simple-to-arbitrate things at first, like flight insurance or credit default swaps). * Financial contracts like futures and options, but with arbitrary asset classes. * Open hedge funds where someone trusted manages a large portfolio, and the contract awards them with a pre-defined bonus based on performance. As long as an asset can be represented digitally, it can be awarded based on arbitrary, turing-complete conditions, and any programmer in the world can write those conditions with no permission from any bank and with no legal team. Money legos.
- gge 6y ago
  I use it everyday. I mainly use defi apps like Aave, Uniswap. I also use Ren and Curve quite often.
bedros 6y ago
is there a way to buy Ethereum 2.0 and how would holders of old Ethereum convert to v2.0
hnick 6y ago
This might be as good a place as any to ask, since I'm completely out of the loop on the scene: Are there any successful crypto schemes that use human effort (labour) instead of capital/computing effort? Something like Captcha or Mechanical Turk, hopefully something generally useful to society at large. Solving problems that computers can't (yet). It would seem to be a way to avoid the rich-get-richer aspect because hiring people wouldn't make sense - they'd get more value going it alone, so existing capital has reduced influence.
- The_Founder 6y ago
  First, absolutely not. I would love to know what something like this would look like but bottom line is that it would need to be automated and I can't think of anyway to do that. How would work be verified? It would need to be done by people and as soon as there are people verifying the work those same people would be better off verifying fake work.
- socialentity 6y ago
  Gold?
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  But then you're basically describing normal currency backed by the nation state. The state can basically print its own money because it backs up its currency with state power - whether it be enforcing laws and governmental institutions, enforcing taxation to force citizens to use its currency, funding military defensive/offensive operations, provide various welfare services to citizens to create a safety net for the economy, and using monetary policies to modulate its growth. And every one of the activities I've listed above is achieved through human labor. Obviously there is no nation that backs its currency value for an objectively "good" common cause - every nation probably only thinks within her interest for most of the time. If you want to create such an institution which can print money backed by the values you like - then the answer is much more political than technical, and the crypto algorithms alone wouldn't help you in achieving that.
  - hnick 6y ago
johndoe42377 6y ago
I am sorry to say this, but it will not fly. Amateur spaghetti code, even in a good language like Go, will not scale, by definition. Certain design decisions for achieving scalability should have been adopted from the day one. Basically, it is all the principles behind FP and Erlang - share nothing, in the first place. Scalability comes from being pure functional. This is the main conclusion from last 30 or 40 years of CS research. Stateless and share-nothing applies to protocols and services too. This is why so many failed with so called micro-services - only stateless will work. Things of the scale of Ethereum require deep CS knowledge. Just being overconfident and too cocky is not enough.
- Benmcdonald__ 6y ago
  They don't even have sound theory to how the network will work. I think bad code is the last of their problems
mahiucode 6y ago
Good

629 points by 0x64 6y ago

hydrogenbonds 6y ago

This is one of the biggest news for tech and finance in 2020.

Tepix 6y ago
It is big news but we will only see the full effect in 2022 or so.

shireboy 6y ago

Can someone ELI5 for current ETH holders? Will it split like Etherium Classic?

Tepix 6y ago
No, it's not splitting. Check out https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/ "What is Eth2? Eth2 refers to a set of interconnected upgrades that will make Ethereum more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable. These upgrades are being built by multiple teams from across the Ethereum ecosystem."
- londons_explore 6y ago
  It's an entirely new coin. Holders of the existing coin don't get access to the new one unless they buy them. The cynic in me says this is just an opportunity to devalue existing ethereum currencies by making a bunch more...
  - deif 6y ago
    Well that is completely wrong and you clearly haven't read any documentation on the network upgrade.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    So instead of the promise of a stable, ever-deflating currency value that was made by bitcoin proponents we get unbounded inflation instead? Nice! Edit: might not be the case for Eth2, but it still seems to ring true for the cryptocoin ecosystem in general: as soon as the value of one currency rises enough, alternatives will be created.
tsujp 6y ago
A very, very concise brief is it's a concurrent (happening at the same time) network upgrade from PoW (proof of work) to PoS (proof of stake). The new chain called the beacon chain will operate alongside the "old" one until a full cut-over happens some time in the future. Predicted 1-2 years.
dmihal 6y ago
Short answer: no, there's only one Ethereum and one ETH asset Long answer: The beacon chain _will_ run in parallel until the two chains are merged. Until that time, ETH in the Beacon Chain isn't transferable, so effectively not a separate asset. However, exchanges are offering Eth2 staking derivatives which they're branding as "ETH2". But it should be remembered that this is a derivative, not a separate M0 asset.
- andrewla 6y ago
  Well, the expectation is that compliant clients will only respect transactions on Eth2 at some point and will no longer consider new blocks on Eth1 valid. At any point in time, of course, any node or set of nodes can declare a fork in the chain to be invalid and reorganize on another chain. That's what happened with Ethereum Classic and it could happen again. I think less likely unless there's a vulnerability discovered in Eth2, though. Also less likely because in some ways the Ethereum Classic incident helped cement Ethereum's place by scaring off all the ideologues and keeping the participants who were more pragmatic.

jansan 6y ago

Let the party begin.

rocgf 6y ago
Are we starting with this even here? Is there really no corner of the Internet that's immune to this bullcrap?
- SwimSwimHungry 6y ago
  I've always wondered if someone could make a browser plugin to filter anything involving cryptocurrency out of web sites like HN, /. or reddit? Having to read about all this every day contributes to unnecessary anxieties and stressors some folks don't need.
  - everfree 6y ago
    I really don't see cryptocurrency pop up that often on HN or Reddit. It's usually only when a big event happens, like this post about the most actively used network launching their 2.0 update that's been in the works for the past 3-4 years. I feel like both communities generally do a good job of moderating away inconsequential cryptocurrency posts. Does seeing a fintech post on HN once in a blue moon (and choosing not to read it) really cause you that much anxiety?
    - SwimSwimHungry 6y ago
      Well not me personally. I mean some of the commenters on this thread seem to be a bit irritated and the clashing that turns up afterwards in the comments, which seems relatively unproductive. It would be nice to have a way to kind of give netizens a choice on what they want to see, similar to Reddit. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

noneeeed 6y ago

Can anyone give a TLDR of what is significant about Ethereum 2.0 for those of us who don't follow this stuff much? As blockchain tech goes, Ethereum always seemed the most interesting.

sshb 6y ago
Not tldr, but explanation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q
seibelj 6y ago
Beginning of switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus, which will end the mining process for Ethereum and switch to securing the network by locking up funds, drastically reducing the amount of energy used to secure the network. As a side effect of the consensus change, the amount of transactions per second will scale massively. There is not universal agreement among blockchain enthusiasts that Proof of Stake is as secure as Proof of Work, but many currencies such as Cosmos and Polkadot have already implemented Proof of Stake without security issues.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  any idea on the increase in transactions per second/month/some time period? The things that have stopped me from getting into btc/eth are: - scaling issues (it can't be used as a currency if this isn't fixed) - power issues (would be nice if we didn't create a huge pointless energy sink if we could avoid it) - the amount of footguns in ethereum (I think the language is too permissive) It looks like this solves at least 2 of the three!
  - seibelj 6y ago
    At least 1000 transactions per second if not more. In terms of language security, it is possible to use a verified subset of the language in order to avoid bugs, as you can with any Turing-complete language. Few currently do, however.

jules-jules 6y ago

Congrats to the dev team and ethereum community. This is a monumental step for the future of crypto.

draw_down 6y ago

2.0, eh? First one didn’t work so good?

naringas 6y ago

One thing I haven't been able to figure out about proof of stake is this: if one entity somehow manages to control over half to the total ETH tokens, does this enable an attack analogous to bitcoin's 51% problem (which happens when one miner controls over half of the network's raw cpu power)?

dboreham 6y ago
Yes
tryptophan 6y ago
Yes. But thats the point of PoS. Why would someone who owns >50% of something want to destroy it? Literally hurting yourself more just to hurt others a lesser amount.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Also, it would be kind of visible and hard to hide. With sufficient high profile stake holders, this would be very unlikely to happen and even harder to hide.
- tskulbru 6y ago
  Unrealistic surely but, "Some just wants to watch the world burn"
  - flixic 6y ago
    Another aspect of PoS: it makes these attacks incredibly expensive. Currently staked value is over half a billion USD.
- mathnmusic 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you own > 50% and get the ability to reverse transactions, it can still go undetected. So it's possible to hurt others without hurting yourself.

ichbinwiederda 6y ago

Why did ETH drop then?

djohnston 6y ago
dont try to correlate market movements with any sort of rational behaviour
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
howlgarnish 6y ago
Because Bitcoin touched an all time high and proceeded to plummet $1700+ immediately afterwards, dragging all other cryptos along with it.
- ichbinwiederda 6y ago
  Ah cool. Makes sense.
  - mckirk 6y ago
    I mean, it really shouldn't make sense, because Bitcoin is a completely separate currency from ETH... but it's still way too deeply connected to 'anything crypto' in people's minds, it seems.
    - xorcist 6y ago
      Why would it make more sense to price it in USD? Bitcoin is the de facto base currency for all cryptocurrency exchanges.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        Not really anymore. If for example you look at the ETH markets, the top 12 trading pairs by volume are with national currencies, and the first market with ETH/BTC is down at the 13th spot. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum#markets https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum#markets

ArtWomb 6y ago

Whoa, according to AllNodes, Expected ROI for Eth2 stakeholders is 16.6%, which easily beats out almost any other DeFi interest bearing account (typically ~10%)!

flixic 6y ago
APR depends on total staked amount, and decreases as staked Eth increases. You can see the chart here: https://launchpad.ethereum.org https://launchpad.ethereum.org Now that the launch has succeeded, I will stake some of my Eth. As more people do that, APR will fall.
- dragonelite 6y ago
  So probably somewhere between 5~6%, maybe i should convert some of my Tezos to eth in the future.
  - jules-jules 6y ago
    In the longer term, yes. Plus you can use eth2 in defi (e.g., for lending) to generate additional yield.
    - T0Bi 6y ago
      No you can't. You can't do anything with Eth2 that is locked. Some pool staking services offer a token for each ETH staked, but you can not use the staked ETH.
      - jules-jules 6y ago
        I was referring to longer term developments, in case this is unclear. Using staked ether in the defi ecosystem will be possible once withdrawal and smart contract functionality is enabled. Until then, there are liquid staking services that offer eth2 derivatives that can be used in defi, as you point out.

tormeh 6y ago

Is it still deflationary? Wondering if I should invest in the coin itself (which makes sense for deflationary coins) or a company doing something with it (which makes sense for an inflationary coin)

nootropicat 6y ago
At the current fee level and price eth is going to be deflationary after mining is gone (fees are going to be burned except for a small fraction). https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
ur-whale 6y ago
ETH was never deflationary. As a matter of fact, knowing how many ETH will be produced over a given period of time is a question I never managed to get a satisfactory answer to. There's probably an algorithm buried somewhere in the code, but it's likely not a simple one.
- DennisP 6y ago
  On PoW, it's currently 2 ETH per block, with a little bit extra for occasional "uncle blocks." This is fixed but has been reduced a couple times by hard forks. For PoS, issuance is a formula depending on the amount staked. How that works out: https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0-economics/ https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/eth-2.0... If you want to dig into the actual formula, it's explained here: https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/phase0/beacon-chain/#rewards-and-penalties https://benjaminion.xyz/eth2-annotated-spec/phase0/beacon-ch... Until PoW migrates to PoS, probably in about a year, they'll operate in parallel and we'll have both rewards added together. A final factor is an upcoming change to the way transaction fees work, which will burn most of the fees instead of awarding them to validators. That will reduce net issuance further, possibly even taking it negative.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    The point I was trying to make - apologies for not making it clearer - is that from the point of view of the ETH{insert favorite fiat currency here} market figuring out what the how the supply will behave is hard, and therefore hard to price.

awelkie 6y ago

Can someone explain how block timing works in proof-of-stake systems? As I understand it, with proof-of-work the mining difficulty increases or decreases to maintain that each block is found in roughly the same amount of time. In proof-of-stake is there also a mechanism to regulate the time for each block to be added to the blockchain?

dirtnugget 6y ago
No, as far as I understood the time between blocks in a PoS chain is basically just a timer (e.g. 10 seconds). There is no need to adjust that dynamically because there is no "race" to solve a problem. I guess it is even more predictable if it is not dynamically adjusted.
- zadler 6y ago
  But that does have to be enforced via incentives/cryptography, and with reference to a clock.
  - dirtnugget 6y ago
    Well it is enforced by the protocol on which all node agree and there needs to be a mechanism for syncing clocks across nodes (also defined by the protocol) but they exist, e.g. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946264 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8946264 Not 100% sure what ETH is using here but there is a mechanism. If someone would want to fake timestamps, they would need to deviate from the protocol and would thus not be on chain.
    - Benmcdonald__ 6y ago
      You are simply raising the fundamental difficulty with blockchains. How do you know what is the true chain in an adversary environment (the internet)? You gave us the question and no answer
      - dirtnugget 6y ago

flixic 6y ago

I am incredibly happy about this. It's the first step for a major cryptocurrency towards ledger security that does not damage the environment via mining. I always hated how wasteful and energy-inefficient mining is. Staking reduces energy costs by many, many orders of magnitude. With lightweight clients in development, it is possible to validate chain using Raspberry Pi. I hope (but don't expect) that some time in the next 10 years Bitcoin will follow. If not, it's just so much CO2 that could have been avoided.

konschubert 6y ago
Eventually Proof of Work WILL kill Bitcoin - but I have to admit this may be decades out in the future. Right now, most of the mining is financed via inflation. But as this comes to an end, eventually, the cost of mining will be borne by anyone making transactions on the network through tx fees. Somebody has to pay the electricity bill on all these ASICs. EDIT: One could try to argue that high transaction costs are not a problem because nobody wants to trade bitcoin, people just hodl it. Cool. But if that's what people will do, then the money raised through transaction fees will not be enough to support a sufficient hash rate to protect the network. I wrote about all this two years ago already: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-stake-will-kill-proof-of-work.html https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-stake...
- thebean11 6y ago
  What's your take on off chain solutions like lightning as a solution to the high tx fees?
  - konschubert 6y ago
    It doesn't solve the fundamental cost problem with Proof of Work: - If people pay high effective tx fees, it's shit because, well, it's expensive. - If people pay low effective tx fees (through lightning or block size increase or whatever) then, as soon as inflation ends, the money won't be enough to pay for a sufficient hash rate.

louwrentius 6y ago

I don't understand this. I don't understand any of it. I don't understand cryptocurrencies. I don't understand what problems they really solve. > "Ethereum is open access to digital money and data-friendly services for everyone – no matter your background or location. It's a community-built technology behind the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) and thousands of applications you can use today." I can do all these things already. > Ethereum is a technology that lets you send cryptocurrency to anyone for a small fee. It also powers applications that everyone can use and no one can take down. I don't have this need ever, to be frank. Who really does, looking at the larger population? > It's the world's programmable blockchain. I don't understand what this means. What does this do for real-life applications? What problem / which problems are being solved here?

RikNieu 6y ago
I feel that no one is using crypto currency for it's original intended purpose, and in the way it would benefit the citizens of the world the most - as liquid currency for regular & cross-border transactions. Everyone just seems to want to use it like gold, to store wealth or speculate with. This is stupid. But alas.
- dylkil 6y ago
  >Everyone just seems to want to use it like gold, to store wealth or speculate with. Except ethereum has a decentralized composable financial ecosystem gaining traction as we speak with over $15b locked up. [1]https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-decentralized-finance-defi-574c68ff43c4?gi=137fd23cc28f https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-decentralized... [2]https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/
- twox2 6y ago
  Well, it's very useful for LARGE and semi-clandestine cross-border transactions, but yes it's not a liquid currency. It's more of a separate economy. It's just programmable money so it's really the beginnings of a new financial system that is a bit divorced from our current one. It's not panacea for the world financial problems, but it's cool and fun.

jungong 6y ago

when danny ryan said "we finalized!", i almost burst into tears

rauljordan2020 6y ago

Eth2 dev here, maintainer of https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm, one of the implementations currently running the blockchain written in Go. This has been a monumental effort. There are 3 other implementations in mainnet, and consensus is running perfectly. Few other protocols in blockchain have more than one dominant implementation. The beauty of eth2 comes from its efficiency in signature aggregation: https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910 https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1330150362427387910. This tweet thread summarizes the importance of the technology used.

nepthar 6y ago
Congrats to you and everyone else! Really cool stuff here :)
wrinkl3 6y ago
I remember Satoshi's old posts where he claimed that Bitcoin Core was the only viable full implementation of the Bitcoin protocol since it had too many quirks to be efficiently standardized and reimplemented. I wonder if that's still true.
- verdverm 6y ago
  https://github.com/bitcoinjs https://github.com/bitcoinjs
- auston 6y ago
  also: https://bcoin.io/ https://bcoin.io/
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  It would be disingenuous to claim that the Bitcoin protocol is only defined by the consensus layer. Then, if you require P2P protocol compatibility, I would say this issue shows that nobody really cares about alternate implementations: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/issues/1661 When Btcd was first released, it was pretty capable, and had lots of development. But it has fallen behind, which makes sense. Why would anybody take the risk of trusting that an alternate implementation when it doesn't decide what bitcoin is, in the end? You may have to patch bitcoind a bit to get your desired interface, but that is much less work than maintaining a full P2P and consensus layer. It is also dangerous to use you a non-standard crypto library. Check this vulnerability, which was caused by LND relying on the btcd project's library: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2020-October/002856.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

jamesmehaffey 6y ago

Is it still too early to estimate new application costs and performance improvements? Has anyone seen any statistics or comparisons yet? it will be interesting to see how this affects the efficiency of the platform and what this means for the adoption of other platforms.

DennisP 6y ago
It's too early, because right now the proof of stake chain doesn't run user transactions. It's just running in parallel, while teams do the work required to migrate the virtual machine to it.

nikolay 6y ago

One question - why didn't Bitcoin drop to zero? I know, VHS survive and Betamax didn't, but unlike Betamax, Ethereum is pretty popular for everything, not just for low-class commodity speculation.

nkrebs13 6y ago
This ecosystem is rapidly developing and changing; I think there's still plenty of time for BTC/ETH/LTC/XRP/etc to all exist anywhere from [0,∞). The narrative that is often pushed forward is that they have different use cases. Bitcoin is a limited-supply store of value (analogous to precious metals). BTC blockchain isn't well suited for quick transactions, but it is the blockchain that is the most robust and secure. Ethereum, being Turing complete, provides an ecosystem on which other applications can be built.
companyhen 6y ago
Bitcoin is the gateway into crypto. Check the marketcap, and all the pairs are tied to BTC on most major exchanges. It's also the most secure and has the largest community. It's use case is different than Ethereum's.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  >>It's also the most secure and has the largest community. Ethereum's mining fees exceed Bitcoin's: https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ That would mean it has better long-term security prospects than Bitcoin, as security is proportional the revenue earned by validators.
  - alexmat 6y ago
    That's misleading. If you factor in mining rewards, Bitcoin has much higher fees per transaction. A total of $18,000,000 more per day spent on validating Bitcoin transactions than what that website claims.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago

siraben 6y ago

Having worked with Ethereum, especially the low level bytecode, one of the changes I'm most excited for that I don't see mentioned a lot is the addition of eWASM support for nodes. There's many problems with the two dominant smart contract languages Solidity and Vyper, for instance bloated codegen that had to be patched otherwise complex contracts size could not be deployed[0], or more theoretical concerns such as soundness, semantics and correctness. Part of the problem is because of no coherent shared intermediate representation and developers writing backends from scratch, and lots of reinventing of the wheel[1]. There's an ongoing project[2] to create an LLVM backend for EVM but the stack based nature is at odds with LLVM IR's bias towards register-based architectures. (EVM doesn't even have a separate stack for return addresses to implement subroutines cleanly!) The switch to eWASM would greatly improve security, efficiency and perhaps allow a diversity of languages to be used on Ethereum. It should be a matter of exposing the appropriate primitives to call other contracts, generate log events, write to the store and so on. [0] For instance, see a PR that reduces codegen from 55K to 1.6K bytes on an innocuous contract https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 [1] I'm guilty of it too; https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs/evm-assembler-talk.pdf https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs... [2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm

hobofan 6y ago
I guess it's not mentioned a lot as it's still ~2 years away in Phase 2, AFAIK.
DennisP 6y ago
Fwiw there is a proposal to add a return stack to the EVM: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2315.md https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-2315.m... Your evm-assembler looks pretty interesting. It's crossed my mind before to write an evm Forth, just for fun, and the lack of a return stack so far has dissuaded me.
- nonveumann 6y ago
  It's more than a proposal at this point, it's been accepted into the next network upgrade, Berlin, and has been implemented in all major clients for a while now.

j-pb 6y ago

Whenever someone mentions smart contracts I'm instantly reminded of that Jean Luc Picard quote: "I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible to do so... but the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And so I say to any creature who may be listening: There can be no justice, so long as laws are absolute. Life itself is an exercise in exceptions."

api 6y ago
I think of it this way: - Every system will be gamed, no exceptions. - It is impossible for the architects of any system to imagine all the ways it will be gamed. That's why it's not possible to create fixed laws that are just. Inevitably someone will find a hack that turns the intent of the law around while remaining true to its letter. This seems to be what dooms both pure libertarian capitalist schemes and pure socialist command economy schemes. In the former case there is not enough structure to contain exploits and no recourse when someone finds a good scam. In the latter case it's impossible for central planners to imagine the results of their plans when they are exposed to opportunistic economic agents. The fatal flaw in both ideologies is their dogmatism. It causes them to fail to adapt when flaws and exploits in the rule system are inevitably found.
- packetlost 6y ago
  Any political or economic system built on the expectation that people won't be assholes to each other (and work with others to be assholes) is a flawed system.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    Ethereum is also built on the assumption that: - people aren't assholes - all involved parties can audit blockchain transactions - all involved parties are programmers and can audit a contract written in an esoteric programming language - all involved parties voluntarily agree to be bound by these contracts despite the fact there's no way they can be enforced
    - 6y ago

blackrock 6y ago

Who uses it?

Sargos 6y ago
Uses what? Ethereum? Proof of Stake? Ethereum is the most heavily used blockchain by far and powers all of DeFi which comprises of digital versions of most of the traditional finance tools. It also powers the entire NFT/collectible space which is used by many games, the NBA, and MLB. The interesting experiments such as quadratic funding and decentralized autonomous organizations are also homed on Ethereum. There's some good overviews out there if you're genuinely interested.
- blackrock 6y ago
  So.. it’s used for sports gambling? Actually, this might be a very good use case for crypto currencies. Guaranteed payout, based on a triggered scenario.
  - everfree 6y ago
    Guaranteed payout on triggered scenario is one of the big promises of smart contracts. * Sports betting where the contract itself pays you the winnings. * Insurance where everyone pools together as peers, and the contract arbitrates payouts (think simple-to-arbitrate things at first, like flight insurance or credit default swaps). * Financial contracts like futures and options, but with arbitrary asset classes. * Open hedge funds where someone trusted manages a large portfolio, and the contract awards them with a pre-defined bonus based on performance. As long as an asset can be represented digitally, it can be awarded based on arbitrary, turing-complete conditions, and any programmer in the world can write those conditions with no permission from any bank and with no legal team. Money legos.
gge 6y ago
I use it everyday. I mainly use defi apps like Aave, Uniswap. I also use Ren and Curve quite often.

bedros 6y ago

is there a way to buy Ethereum 2.0 and how would holders of old Ethereum convert to v2.0

hnick 6y ago

This might be as good a place as any to ask, since I'm completely out of the loop on the scene: Are there any successful crypto schemes that use human effort (labour) instead of capital/computing effort? Something like Captcha or Mechanical Turk, hopefully something generally useful to society at large. Solving problems that computers can't (yet). It would seem to be a way to avoid the rich-get-richer aspect because hiring people wouldn't make sense - they'd get more value going it alone, so existing capital has reduced influence.

The_Founder 6y ago
First, absolutely not. I would love to know what something like this would look like but bottom line is that it would need to be automated and I can't think of anyway to do that. How would work be verified? It would need to be done by people and as soon as there are people verifying the work those same people would be better off verifying fake work.
socialentity 6y ago
Gold?
lasagnaphil 6y ago
But then you're basically describing normal currency backed by the nation state. The state can basically print its own money because it backs up its currency with state power - whether it be enforcing laws and governmental institutions, enforcing taxation to force citizens to use its currency, funding military defensive/offensive operations, provide various welfare services to citizens to create a safety net for the economy, and using monetary policies to modulate its growth. And every one of the activities I've listed above is achieved through human labor. Obviously there is no nation that backs its currency value for an objectively "good" common cause - every nation probably only thinks within her interest for most of the time. If you want to create such an institution which can print money backed by the values you like - then the answer is much more political than technical, and the crypto algorithms alone wouldn't help you in achieving that.
- hnick 6y ago

johndoe42377 6y ago

I am sorry to say this, but it will not fly. Amateur spaghetti code, even in a good language like Go, will not scale, by definition. Certain design decisions for achieving scalability should have been adopted from the day one. Basically, it is all the principles behind FP and Erlang - share nothing, in the first place. Scalability comes from being pure functional. This is the main conclusion from last 30 or 40 years of CS research. Stateless and share-nothing applies to protocols and services too. This is why so many failed with so called micro-services - only stateless will work. Things of the scale of Ethereum require deep CS knowledge. Just being overconfident and too cocky is not enough.

Benmcdonald__ 6y ago
They don't even have sound theory to how the network will work. I think bad code is the last of their problems

mahiucode 6y ago

Good