16 ms·

Ethereum: A Store of Value with Cash Flow [pdf]

167 points by spir 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago
The digital scarcity argument made in the paper is weak. And that's assuming the ETH crowd doesn't change the supply formula (which no one currently understands) on a whim.
- nlitened 5y ago
  If I am not mistaken, Wikipedia says that more than half of current supply of ETH was distributed among initial investors. That’s also another part of supply formula to consider.
  - casi 5y ago
    Worth pointing out “initial investors” is anyone who sent 1 btc to the crowdfund back in 2014. It wasnt some closed off thing for vcs, anyone could participate. People just bought their tokens before the network started.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Even worse than you think. Free tokens were handed out to select influencers. Does that sound like a bribe to you? the best part, Vitalik freely admits this himself.
    - nlitened 5y ago
      Yeah, it's as if people who sponsored creation of Israel would be entitled to more than 60% of total Shekel supply—and I am sure most people would agree that it would not be a fair distribution by any measure.
    - liquidify 5y ago
      Percentages of BTC were acceptable also, so it was accessible to people with lower income / value levels.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  It is guaranteed to change, as the stated policy is "minimal viable issuance", which sounds rather subjective. How is "minimal" and "viable" determined?
devops000 5y ago
You said high cash flow due to transaction fees but it's planned a reduction in transaction fees. So in next 6 years the cash flow will be lower, right?
gillesjacobs 5y ago
I don't believe Ether is a great store of value as OP claims because it has uncertain scarcity. OP neglected to mention that supply of Ether is unlimited and tends to change readily with scaling updates and is hence unpredictable. Currently, the argument for scarcity looks good with EIP1559 where the gas fee will consist of a burned base fee and a tip to the miner resulting in overall lower fees causing a potentially deflationary supply. But Ethereum's scarcity is to a larger extends a moving target than say Bitcoin or Monero. The other reasons for investing OP mentioned were enough for me to go deep a year ago: cash flow, network effects and developer tooling/adoption like no other L1 chain. I looked at other smart contract chain's developer resources for dapp dev and no other's come close to Ethereum. I have been learning Solidity dapp development in my free time since and can recommend the experience. I don't think scarcity is a realistic point in the investment thesis.
- liquidify 5y ago
  To be fair, I don't think you can really compare many others to Monero, which is the only major cryto with the property of fungibility. Personally I consider that property so important that if a crypto doesn't consider it a first class citizen, I don't buy much or any of the crypto.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    >the only major cryto with the property of fungibility Yes agreed. Both Bitcoins and ETH tokens can be "tainted" and that taint takes for ever to "diffuse" in the chain. This makes some Bitcoins/ETH less valuable than others. For example, most valuable Bitcoins are newly mined coins (they have no history), whereas a - say - Bifinex hacked Bitcoin carries a pungent smell.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Remember when we called laundering money that because laundromats were used? Just tumble your coins! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
sherlock_h 5y ago
What mostly excites me about Ethereum ist the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. You can think of NFTs and DeFi whatever you want, the sheer amount of new applications and innovative ideas on the ethereum blockchain has been mind-boggling. My personal favorite is Sorare, which combines NFT collectibles with fantasy soccer. And sure, right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months
- ObserverNeutral 5y ago
  All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal. No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed. Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking. Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders. So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out. On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    > All those things will never break among the common folk. You should google "NFT".
    - 5y ago
ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
It will be interesting to see if interest rates in government controlled currencies and crypto currencies will stay diverged in the long run. Without the distorting action of governments printing money, interest rates might be set by market forces in "crypto land". This might lead to a long term situation where artificially low interest rates are paid in government controlled currencies, but market prices are paid in crypto currencies. Or will cheap interest rates in government controlled currencies somehow bring down the interest rates in crypto currencies? The 10 year yield of bonds in Europe is at 0%. While US bonds are currently at 1.5%. This might be an indicator, that rates in one currency will not completely control rates in other currencies.
- dharma1 5y ago
  I think the primary reason interest rates are high in crypto lending right now (also on USD stablecoins) is leveraged speculation - people using crypto as collateral to leverage their crypto positions higher (and/or yield farm) and are prepared to pay a relatively high interest rate for it (~10% on stablecoins) because the expected gains are a fair bit higher. I don’t expect this will last forever
  - ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
    You say that one can create leverage by borrowing? How does that work? Is it a contract like "You borrow me 1 ETH and I will pay back 1.1 ETH in a year. Except when X happens, then I will pay back 2 ETH"? If so, what is X?
    - runeks 5y ago
      The leverage is speculation using borrowed money. See: https://www.blueleaf.com/articles/how-leverage-works-in-investments/ https://www.blueleaf.com/articles/how-leverage-works-in-inve....
      - ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
        That does not answer my question: How a smart contract can implement lending in a way that both parties are satisfied: - The lender gets their money back plus interest. - The borrower makes a profit if the price of the borrowed currency goes up.
lottin 5y ago
The fact that something is scarce doesn't make it a store of value. Scarce simply means is in short supply, but prices aren't determined by supply alone, they are determined by supply and demand. Moreover, if an asset is in fixed supply, then its price is determined entirely by the demand. This means such an asset will only be a store of value if the demand for the asset remains strong over a long period of time, which is something the asset issuer/producer has zero influence on.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  >they are determined by supply and demand You are correct, but only in theory: this requires the precondition that people are rational economic actors. In practice, people are weird, and the scarcity of supply creates a demand. There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value". Examples: - Beanie babies - Magic the gathering cards - Pokemon cards - Baseball cards - DaVinci paintings (where anyone can have an 8k x 8k exact reproduction, but the original is worth a fortune) - etc...
  - runeks 5y ago
    > There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value". Yes. Temporarily. And a much less weird feedback loop is enough to annihilate all of this “value” at some later point in time (the “crash”).
    - randomsearch 5y ago
      A good example of this is stamp collecting. A grandparent carefully collected stamp albums for his grandchildren. They are now pretty much worthless, because the fashion for stamp collecting has gone. I hope he enjoyed the process of collecting.
      - ForHackernews 5y ago
        Is that true? Time to buy the dip in stamps! Then, I can issue NFTs for my old stamps.
qertoip 5y ago
Ethereum is easy to change (hard forks often) and so cannot be expected to preserve any key characteristics like emission curve or even the permissionless nature. In fact, Ethereum's monetary policy did change in the past.
- casi 5y ago
  The policy has always been “minimal viable issuance”
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    what does that mean in practice? who determines what's minimum and what's viable?
- dmihal 5y ago
  The protocol is still in the early stages of development. The social contract is that the protocol & monetary policy will ossify after the transition to PoS & sharding is complete.
CynicusRex 5y ago
Get your pyramid Ponzi out of here: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  i like your writing. but IMO inflation is related to "Regarding energy" section as well. Constant inflation will require the entire economy to always be active or they will slowly fall behind. you acknowledge that "you basically worked a month for free" due to you savings being devalued. If a dollar represents energy or labor, then every dollar really represents the current value of labor and a discounted, amortized accumulation of labor into the future. It's almost like inflation and the time-value of money are baked into every dollar, conceptually. Inflation forces everyone to work. Working for the sake of working isn't energy efficient either. It's probably why crypto exists at all, because people need to always be hustling to stay ahead. ...Not that you need crypto to remove inflation.
manfredz 5y ago
If there is a promise of future cash flows from transaction fees that is dependent on new holders, doesn’t that make it a pyramid, ponzi or MLM scheme?
- jxi 5y ago
  Not sure what the exact definition of those things are, but the ether burns might be a counter-example (could say it's similar to dividends), so it's not only dependent on new holders.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  It is just inflation of money supply, same as with fiat currencies.
  - tim333 5y ago
    >It's fiat 2.0, but with emojis. You say that like it's a bad thing.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Ha! emojis are great, sure. I'm just not sure there is any real innovation here, it all seems to be rather circular.
- dmihal 5y ago
  The transaction flows aren't dependent on new holders, it's dependent on users. If you somehow banned any new users from using Ethereum, existing users would continue to use Ethereum for the applications built on top of it.
needle0 5y ago
A domain where its default home page is a PDF? That's a new one... ps. And I'm not buying the "environmentally friendly" argument until proof-of-stake is actually live and completely displaces PoW in mainline production.
- fumblebee 5y ago
  If the issue is whether PoS will work is troubling you: other PoS chains like Algorand have been successfully running for well over a year. Seems in no doubt.
  - needle0 5y ago
    Maybe so, but that still doesn't change that PoS on Ethereum itself has been "coming soon" forever. Until the switch actually happens in full, it's still a power-guzzling PoW chain.
    - casi 5y ago
      Youll be happy to hear there is a hackthon going on right now testing out the move onto PoS. https://rayonism.io/ https://rayonism.io/
  - runeks 5y ago
    The potential issue isn't spontaneous breakage, but rather a determined attacker exploiting the incentive structure in an unexpected manner. And the financial motivation to do this is much greater for ETH since it's around 100 times more liquid than ALGO.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      It will likely not fail due to a direct attack on PoS. Ethereum has shown they are willing to rollback the chain in case of attacks. What's more concerning is that Proof of Wealth (which is what Stake really is), is just going to lead to those with biggest balances dictating rules to everyone else. Exactly what happened in EOS, Steem, etc... It will become a plutocracy with cute emojis.
throwastrike 5y ago
What is crypto replacing really? I’ve yet to read even a fair explanation without mental gymnastics. And I’ve been waiting to the last ten years.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-circle-of-gold-to-meganets-to.html http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-circle-of-gold-to-... "By solving the dishonesty and fungibility problems, bitcoin has radically dialed up the contagion factor for chain letter technology to a degree never experienced before. Bitcoin has become the first chain letter to go mainstream. It is the first chain letter to go global."
- xvector 5y ago
  Banks and physical currency alike. You can now transfer value simply by having a public/private key pair. No need for banks and their multi-day wire transfers. No need for KYC. You can borrow and lend on a decentralized network within minutes. Invest in markets, make purchases. All without relying on a centralized entity, and without being bound by your government. Crypto really is something beautiful to the cypherpunk in me.
  - fumblebee 5y ago
    You still need KYC at entry and exit points into the crypto market (e.g. Coinbase), you still need to transfer fiat money onto exchanges via traditional payments infrastructure. The decentralised, utopian vision only works if the entire game is played there. Also, a side note, KYC is a good thing for things like AML. The ability to dispute with centralised orgs like banks is a good thing; the major issue with decentralised solutions is that there's no accountability for issues like fraud.
    - stiltzkin 5y ago
      Things like localmonero you can trade fiat and monero without KYC.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
crispyporkbites 5y ago
Personally, I've moved all of my funds from other currencies into Ethereum. Not that I think it will make lots of money, but because Ethereum actually could have utility, and has a solution to the climate change impacts of Bitcoin. So really, if I'm going to hold any cryptocurrencies, that's where I want them
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Proof of Stake just means those with the biggest money bags (stake sounds so much better than wealth) rule over you, explicitly. It is simply plutocracy, but with cute emojis.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    So we don’t have plutocracy in the current fiat money system(s)? Relative inequality is super low and investment opportunities abound for all income levels? We don’t have a plutocracy in PoW coins like BTC either right? Super cheap and easy to spin up a mining operation I heard.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Given that nearly every miner and large exchange/business tried and failed to force changes to BTC, I'd argue that influence of plutocrats on the fundamental properties of Bitcoin is significantly lower. Failure of the New York Agreement is certainly more reassuring than never-ending hard forks.
      - suikadayo 5y ago
        Yeah, and any discussion surrounding hard forks was allowed right in the open on /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk, leading to informed node operators.. oh wait, that didn't happen, people got banned.
  - dmihal 5y ago
    And Proof of Work means those with access to cheap electricity rule over the network, which is why most mining happens in western China.
tim333 5y ago
The start of the document: >The purpose of this memo is not to denounce Bitcoin. Bitcoin enjoys a growing institutional spotlight, a compelling narrative as digital gold, and a portfolio allocation as an inflation hedge. However, institutional allocation into the Ethereum ecosystem is currently low... You can denounce bitcoin for the CO2 emissions though. At least etherium is trying to go proof of stake. If institutions pile into bitcoin the price and emissions will 10x which I'm not sure is on. Governments can't control bitcoin but they can control institutions.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Put another way, if institutions pile into bitcoin, the value of produced energy will rise, and green energy infrastructure projects which were previously marginal would become profitable and thus executed.
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Uh... Also tons of coal will be burned. BTW "green" energy products are not 100% sustainable. Lots of rare earth metals and other mined materials go into solar panels. We can't recycle solar panels right now, neither wind turbine blades. Hydro destroys riparian ecosystems. Useless uses of energy cannot be construed as good for the world.
prova1 5y ago
i like it
- prova1 5y ago
  eeeee
ddeyar 5y ago
A planned upgrade of 6 years? How would that be in the future? How long does it take to fix a minor issue? Tezos for example is able to evolve every 3-4 months without forking and is PoS since 2017. Also they're doing a better job on security. https://tezos.com/ https://tezos.com/
- zertrin 5y ago
  Not doubting any of your statements, but why have I never heard of it before? If it is good why hasn't it displaced ethereum and become more mainstream? Are there any cons that prevent it to become more prominent? (sincere question from me, I am curious to know more)
  - dmihal 5y ago
    The same reason that Bitcoin hasn't been displaced by newer projects. Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.
  - ddeyar 5y ago
    This is are very good question. I really don't know why the mainstream ignored this project so far. Compared to some other projects, there is no single person in the center of the project, so there is no one to be hyped. This is sad but it seems to be a disadvantage. The loudest are getting attention and with so many projects out there, the tezos community was a long time pretty silent. The smart contract language is completely different from solidity. Its a functional language which allows formal verification. This is one reason which makes it harder for developers to migrate to tezos. It's easeier to migrate to an ethereum clone. Sapling came with the edo upgrade this year, this allows privacy preserving smart contracts. Gas price is extremly low. A part of the nft hype has already migrated to tezos because of PoS and low gas prices. See the stats here https://better-call.dev/stats/mainnet/general https://better-call.dev/stats/mainnet/general The next upgrade is currently in the voting phase. When you're technically interested in it see here http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html Last week a marketing campaign started, maybe you will see an add somewhere in the near future. A lot is going on in adoption atm, here a few recent news: banking https://xtz.news/adoption/french-banking-giant-societe-generale-issues-the-first-structured-product-on-the-tezos-blockchain/ https://xtz.news/adoption/french-banking-giant-societe-gener... gaming https://xtz.news/adoption/ubisoft-become-a-tezos-corporate-baker-as-the-gaming-giant-explores-new-possibilities-for-players-and-developers/ https://xtz.news/adoption/ubisoft-become-a-tezos-corporate-b... stablecoin https://xtz.news/adoption/groupe-casino-with-11000-stores-to-launch-a-stablecoin-on-tezos/ https://xtz.news/adoption/groupe-casino-with-11000-stores-to... digital identity https://xtz.news/adoption/spruce-systems-makes-it-into-y-combinator-ycw21-the-most-prestigious-accelerator-in-the-world/ https://xtz.news/adoption/spruce-systems-makes-it-into-y-com...
zoshi 5y ago
Cash flow is for businesses. Ethereum doesn’t know what it is. The rules are always changing, running a full node is practically impossible, and issuance is always changing. It’s not even clear that the features claimed in this paper will be true one year from now. Multiple consensus failures (most recently this last month) and constant design changes do not provide a secure foundation for sound money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tim333 5y ago
  It could be a case of the perfect is the enemy of the good though. I mean Ethereum isn't perfect but not much else is either.
  - zoshi 5y ago
    If I’m going to stick my savings in a cryptocurrency, I want the network to be stable for the foreseeable future (and be private, but that’s another story).
    - jakupovic 5y ago
      You can have your own network/blockchain but none would pay for it. Hence the problem.
      - zoshi 5y ago
        By “private” I meant transaction privacy, which is offered by Monero.
- meowkit 5y ago
  So what you’re saying is that this random pdf website is the ultimate say on what Ethereum is? Not maybe what the EF has to say? https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/ https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/
- 5y ago
cryptica 5y ago
It's disturbing how tribalism is allowing people to completely ignore reality. Ethereum's blockchain uses up over 1 terrabyte of space. Because Ethereum nodes do not provide any search feature natively, most third-party software integrations end up being implemented via the use of centralized services (which defeats the whole purpose of Ethereum). As for Bitcoin using the same amount of electricity as an entire country to perform 2 transactions per second, that is also shocking. But modern fiat money-printing allows all pyramid schemes to thrive. I'm convinced that if Bernie Madoff had managed to keep his ponzi scheme going just one more decade, he would never have been caught.
- tim333 5y ago
  >Ethereum's blockchain uses up over 1 terrabyte Presumably any currency that records all the world's transactions is going to have terabytes if not petabytes of data. Either you go with a tech that will support big data or you limit the transactions like bitcoin making it impractical as an everyday payment mechanism? For me the important part of decentralized is it can be run in different places so governments can't shut it down, not that everyone can process the world's transactions on their laptop.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    Why should it be a single world currency? Why not just have a system of multiple currencies which can be accepted interchangeably as payment? Automatic valuation and conversion of a cryptocurrency is possible. It can even be done in a decentralized way without trusting anyone.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      You get much greater interoperability / a much larger market when everyone is on the same ledger, using the same protocol to exchange value. There are use-cases where a smaller more specialized ledger will be more optimal, but there is a very large set of use-cases for the 'financial protocol with a huge number of users'.
RichardHeart 5y ago
Proof of work cryptocurrency mining is a wasteful industry that proof of stake gets rid of. Rejoice.
astoor 5y ago
I know most of us technical people here dismiss Ethereum as being just another new fangled pyramid scheme like Bitcoin and the others, but you've got to hand it to them, it is very well-disguised with plausible deniability (DApps, DeFi, etc.), and they keep on coming up with new ways to make it self-sustaining (ICOs, NFTs, etc.).
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Ethereum is passé. Dogecoin is far superior and much wow better suited for the current meme era. Which is reflected in the share price.
svarog-run 5y ago
ah. Learning what ethereum is by looking into a random pdf by an unknown twitter user. Never change your pseudointellectuallity hn, never change
- takeiteasyy 5y ago
  never change your creditentialism
rauljordan2020 5y ago
I am one of the implementers of Ethereum Proof of Stake (https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and I would like to clarify a lot of misconceptions around Ethereum and why we find this technology so exciting: - Proof of stake has serious flaws if done from scratch, as you are trying to secure a network using value created out of thin air. Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake from proof of work, and has already built up a security pool of over $200bn USD market cap and a significant amount of activity. ETH as the native asset required for proof of stake has enough security pool to allow the migration to make sense. - "You have been talking about proof of stake for years, wake me up when it happens". We launched proof of stake on December 1st, 2020 https://www.coindesk.com/valid-points-ether-staked-eth-2-0-q1 https://www.coindesk.com/valid-points-ether-staked-eth-2-0-q.... This runs as a parallel chain that users deposit ETH into to participate in consensus via a bridge contract. The next step is to merge the current Ethereum chain to use this new chain's consensus, and we are working on this to happen late this year. - "There is a vibrant developer community, but for what? All speculation?" Yes, speculation was and is ever present in this new technology given how permissionless it is. This means anyone around the world can interact with the blockchain without a gatekeeper. However, there is an incredible amount of financial innovation happening on Ethereum that didn't even exist back in 2017. Really well-thought out stablecoins, flash loans (which are a blockchain native concept), automated market makers such as Uniswap which had more trading volume than Coinbase https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/79775/uniswap-coinbase-monthly-volume-september https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/79775/uniswap-coinbase.... We have privacy technologies such as Aztec Protocol or Tornado Cash. We have zero-knowledge proof games such as DarkForest. What makes me personally excited is that Ethereum is like this global, shared computer where every application deployed immediately opens a composable API for others to interact with by design, creating infinite possibilities. - Ethereum's development is far more decentralized today than it was years ago. Ethereum proof of stake was developed by 4 independent teams, unaffiliated with the Ethereum Foundation, and had a successful launch this past December 1st, 2020, and no, Vitalik cannot roll back the chain. - "Some other blockchain already had proof of stake and have been running for years". What makes Ethereum proof of stake special is it takes no compromises between decentralization, security, and scalability. At the base layer of the blockchain, Ethereum uses really neat cryptography known as BLS signatures (https://medium.com/cryptoadvance/bls-signatures-better-than-schnorr-5a7fe30ea716 https://medium.com/cryptoadvance/bls-signatures-better-than-...), which allow for signature aggregation at scale. This means there can hundreds of thousands or millions of consensus participants with minimal network overhead, compared to other chains which have a permissioned set of < 100 consensus participants. Moreover, Ethereum is fully permissionless at the consensus. Anyone can run a validator at home easily on a consumer laptop. You don't need to buy ASICs, live in a country where electricity is cheap, or anything of that nature. I urge everyone here to look deeper into Ethereum for what it offers and look at the depth of innovation happening in this ecosystem. Happy to answer any questions, as there seems to be a lot of misinformation.
johndoe42377 5y ago
Bullshit. And it will die under weight of technical debt made by very ambitious and very incompetent early devs. It won't scale. For that different programming paradigm, design decisions and set of tools are required.
Animats 5y ago
Did Etherium actually switch to proof of stake? That's been talked up for years, but has been delayed several times. The original date was January 2020, but as of now, I can't find a firm date. One Etherium page intended to get people to lock up ETH to stake the system says "Withdrawals won't be live right away. You won't be able to withdraw your stake until future upgrades are deployed. Withdrawals should be available once mainnet has docked with the Beacon Chain system." It's always a bad sign in the cryptocurrency world when withdrawals are delayed. The paper is written as if the change to proof of stake has happened.
- chillacy 5y ago
  I was looking this up recently. There's a 3 phase plan to switch to proof of stake, the first phase of launching a new chain is complete, but it could take years to complete this migration.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Calling it 'Etherium' to provoke Ethereum advocates is completely inappropriate as per HN rules.
  - izolate 5y ago
    So is assuming bad faith against HN rules. Etherium seems like an innocent error.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      This user has commented on Ethereum posts numerous times, and I have actually corrected them on the spelling in the past. That this is deliberate provocating/trolling is not an assumption.
- spir 5y ago
  Ethereum will likely switch to proof of stake later this year, or perhaps Q1 2022 at the latest. https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1379052831982956547 https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1379052831982956547

167 points by spir 5y ago

The digital scarcity argument made in the paper is weak. And that's assuming the ETH crowd doesn't change the supply formula (which no one currently understands) on a whim.

nlitened 5y ago
If I am not mistaken, Wikipedia says that more than half of current supply of ETH was distributed among initial investors. That’s also another part of supply formula to consider.
- casi 5y ago
  Worth pointing out “initial investors” is anyone who sent 1 btc to the crowdfund back in 2014. It wasnt some closed off thing for vcs, anyone could participate. People just bought their tokens before the network started.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Even worse than you think. Free tokens were handed out to select influencers. Does that sound like a bribe to you? the best part, Vitalik freely admits this himself.
  - nlitened 5y ago
    Yeah, it's as if people who sponsored creation of Israel would be entitled to more than 60% of total Shekel supply—and I am sure most people would agree that it would not be a fair distribution by any measure.
  - liquidify 5y ago
    Percentages of BTC were acceptable also, so it was accessible to people with lower income / value levels.
inter_netuser 5y ago
It is guaranteed to change, as the stated policy is "minimal viable issuance", which sounds rather subjective. How is "minimal" and "viable" determined?

devops000 5y ago

You said high cash flow due to transaction fees but it's planned a reduction in transaction fees. So in next 6 years the cash flow will be lower, right?

gillesjacobs 5y ago

I don't believe Ether is a great store of value as OP claims because it has uncertain scarcity. OP neglected to mention that supply of Ether is unlimited and tends to change readily with scaling updates and is hence unpredictable. Currently, the argument for scarcity looks good with EIP1559 where the gas fee will consist of a burned base fee and a tip to the miner resulting in overall lower fees causing a potentially deflationary supply. But Ethereum's scarcity is to a larger extends a moving target than say Bitcoin or Monero. The other reasons for investing OP mentioned were enough for me to go deep a year ago: cash flow, network effects and developer tooling/adoption like no other L1 chain. I looked at other smart contract chain's developer resources for dapp dev and no other's come close to Ethereum. I have been learning Solidity dapp development in my free time since and can recommend the experience. I don't think scarcity is a realistic point in the investment thesis.

liquidify 5y ago
To be fair, I don't think you can really compare many others to Monero, which is the only major cryto with the property of fungibility. Personally I consider that property so important that if a crypto doesn't consider it a first class citizen, I don't buy much or any of the crypto.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  >the only major cryto with the property of fungibility Yes agreed. Both Bitcoins and ETH tokens can be "tainted" and that taint takes for ever to "diffuse" in the chain. This makes some Bitcoins/ETH less valuable than others. For example, most valuable Bitcoins are newly mined coins (they have no history), whereas a - say - Bifinex hacked Bitcoin carries a pungent smell.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Remember when we called laundering money that because laundromats were used? Just tumble your coins! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler

sherlock_h 5y ago

What mostly excites me about Ethereum ist the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. You can think of NFTs and DeFi whatever you want, the sheer amount of new applications and innovative ideas on the ethereum blockchain has been mind-boggling. My personal favorite is Sorare, which combines NFT collectibles with fantasy soccer. And sure, right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months

ObserverNeutral 5y ago
All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal. No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed. Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking. Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders. So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out. On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > All those things will never break among the common folk. You should google "NFT".
  - 5y ago

ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago

It will be interesting to see if interest rates in government controlled currencies and crypto currencies will stay diverged in the long run. Without the distorting action of governments printing money, interest rates might be set by market forces in "crypto land". This might lead to a long term situation where artificially low interest rates are paid in government controlled currencies, but market prices are paid in crypto currencies. Or will cheap interest rates in government controlled currencies somehow bring down the interest rates in crypto currencies? The 10 year yield of bonds in Europe is at 0%. While US bonds are currently at 1.5%. This might be an indicator, that rates in one currency will not completely control rates in other currencies.

dharma1 5y ago
I think the primary reason interest rates are high in crypto lending right now (also on USD stablecoins) is leveraged speculation - people using crypto as collateral to leverage their crypto positions higher (and/or yield farm) and are prepared to pay a relatively high interest rate for it (~10% on stablecoins) because the expected gains are a fair bit higher. I don’t expect this will last forever
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
  You say that one can create leverage by borrowing? How does that work? Is it a contract like "You borrow me 1 ETH and I will pay back 1.1 ETH in a year. Except when X happens, then I will pay back 2 ETH"? If so, what is X?
  - runeks 5y ago
    The leverage is speculation using borrowed money. See: https://www.blueleaf.com/articles/how-leverage-works-in-investments/ https://www.blueleaf.com/articles/how-leverage-works-in-inve....
    - ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
      That does not answer my question: How a smart contract can implement lending in a way that both parties are satisfied: - The lender gets their money back plus interest. - The borrower makes a profit if the price of the borrowed currency goes up.

lottin 5y ago

The fact that something is scarce doesn't make it a store of value. Scarce simply means is in short supply, but prices aren't determined by supply alone, they are determined by supply and demand. Moreover, if an asset is in fixed supply, then its price is determined entirely by the demand. This means such an asset will only be a store of value if the demand for the asset remains strong over a long period of time, which is something the asset issuer/producer has zero influence on.

ur-whale 5y ago
>they are determined by supply and demand You are correct, but only in theory: this requires the precondition that people are rational economic actors. In practice, people are weird, and the scarcity of supply creates a demand. There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value". Examples: - Beanie babies - Magic the gathering cards - Pokemon cards - Baseball cards - DaVinci paintings (where anyone can have an 8k x 8k exact reproduction, but the original is worth a fortune) - etc...
- runeks 5y ago
  > There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value". Yes. Temporarily. And a much less weird feedback loop is enough to annihilate all of this “value” at some later point in time (the “crash”).
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    A good example of this is stamp collecting. A grandparent carefully collected stamp albums for his grandchildren. They are now pretty much worthless, because the fashion for stamp collecting has gone. I hope he enjoyed the process of collecting.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      Is that true? Time to buy the dip in stamps! Then, I can issue NFTs for my old stamps.

qertoip 5y ago

Ethereum is easy to change (hard forks often) and so cannot be expected to preserve any key characteristics like emission curve or even the permissionless nature. In fact, Ethereum's monetary policy did change in the past.

casi 5y ago
The policy has always been “minimal viable issuance”
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  what does that mean in practice? who determines what's minimum and what's viable?
dmihal 5y ago
The protocol is still in the early stages of development. The social contract is that the protocol & monetary policy will ossify after the transition to PoS & sharding is complete.

CynicusRex 5y ago

Get your pyramid Ponzi out of here: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html.

devmunchies 5y ago
i like your writing. but IMO inflation is related to "Regarding energy" section as well. Constant inflation will require the entire economy to always be active or they will slowly fall behind. you acknowledge that "you basically worked a month for free" due to you savings being devalued. If a dollar represents energy or labor, then every dollar really represents the current value of labor and a discounted, amortized accumulation of labor into the future. It's almost like inflation and the time-value of money are baked into every dollar, conceptually. Inflation forces everyone to work. Working for the sake of working isn't energy efficient either. It's probably why crypto exists at all, because people need to always be hustling to stay ahead. ...Not that you need crypto to remove inflation.

manfredz 5y ago

If there is a promise of future cash flows from transaction fees that is dependent on new holders, doesn’t that make it a pyramid, ponzi or MLM scheme?

jxi 5y ago
Not sure what the exact definition of those things are, but the ether burns might be a counter-example (could say it's similar to dividends), so it's not only dependent on new holders.
inter_netuser 5y ago
It is just inflation of money supply, same as with fiat currencies.
- tim333 5y ago
  >It's fiat 2.0, but with emojis. You say that like it's a bad thing.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Ha! emojis are great, sure. I'm just not sure there is any real innovation here, it all seems to be rather circular.
dmihal 5y ago
The transaction flows aren't dependent on new holders, it's dependent on users. If you somehow banned any new users from using Ethereum, existing users would continue to use Ethereum for the applications built on top of it.

needle0 5y ago

A domain where its default home page is a PDF? That's a new one... ps. And I'm not buying the "environmentally friendly" argument until proof-of-stake is actually live and completely displaces PoW in mainline production.

fumblebee 5y ago
If the issue is whether PoS will work is troubling you: other PoS chains like Algorand have been successfully running for well over a year. Seems in no doubt.
- needle0 5y ago
  Maybe so, but that still doesn't change that PoS on Ethereum itself has been "coming soon" forever. Until the switch actually happens in full, it's still a power-guzzling PoW chain.
  - casi 5y ago
    Youll be happy to hear there is a hackthon going on right now testing out the move onto PoS. https://rayonism.io/ https://rayonism.io/
- runeks 5y ago
  The potential issue isn't spontaneous breakage, but rather a determined attacker exploiting the incentive structure in an unexpected manner. And the financial motivation to do this is much greater for ETH since it's around 100 times more liquid than ALGO.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    It will likely not fail due to a direct attack on PoS. Ethereum has shown they are willing to rollback the chain in case of attacks. What's more concerning is that Proof of Wealth (which is what Stake really is), is just going to lead to those with biggest balances dictating rules to everyone else. Exactly what happened in EOS, Steem, etc... It will become a plutocracy with cute emojis.

throwastrike 5y ago

What is crypto replacing really? I’ve yet to read even a fair explanation without mental gymnastics. And I’ve been waiting to the last ten years.

kgwgk 5y ago
http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-circle-of-gold-to-meganets-to.html http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-circle-of-gold-to-... "By solving the dishonesty and fungibility problems, bitcoin has radically dialed up the contagion factor for chain letter technology to a degree never experienced before. Bitcoin has become the first chain letter to go mainstream. It is the first chain letter to go global."
xvector 5y ago
Banks and physical currency alike. You can now transfer value simply by having a public/private key pair. No need for banks and their multi-day wire transfers. No need for KYC. You can borrow and lend on a decentralized network within minutes. Invest in markets, make purchases. All without relying on a centralized entity, and without being bound by your government. Crypto really is something beautiful to the cypherpunk in me.
- fumblebee 5y ago
  You still need KYC at entry and exit points into the crypto market (e.g. Coinbase), you still need to transfer fiat money onto exchanges via traditional payments infrastructure. The decentralised, utopian vision only works if the entire game is played there. Also, a side note, KYC is a good thing for things like AML. The ability to dispute with centralised orgs like banks is a good thing; the major issue with decentralised solutions is that there's no accountability for issues like fraud.
  - stiltzkin 5y ago
    Things like localmonero you can trade fiat and monero without KYC.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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crispyporkbites 5y ago

Personally, I've moved all of my funds from other currencies into Ethereum. Not that I think it will make lots of money, but because Ethereum actually could have utility, and has a solution to the climate change impacts of Bitcoin. So really, if I'm going to hold any cryptocurrencies, that's where I want them

inter_netuser 5y ago
Proof of Stake just means those with the biggest money bags (stake sounds so much better than wealth) rule over you, explicitly. It is simply plutocracy, but with cute emojis.
- meowkit 5y ago
  So we don’t have plutocracy in the current fiat money system(s)? Relative inequality is super low and investment opportunities abound for all income levels? We don’t have a plutocracy in PoW coins like BTC either right? Super cheap and easy to spin up a mining operation I heard.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Given that nearly every miner and large exchange/business tried and failed to force changes to BTC, I'd argue that influence of plutocrats on the fundamental properties of Bitcoin is significantly lower. Failure of the New York Agreement is certainly more reassuring than never-ending hard forks.
    - suikadayo 5y ago
      Yeah, and any discussion surrounding hard forks was allowed right in the open on /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk, leading to informed node operators.. oh wait, that didn't happen, people got banned.
- dmihal 5y ago
  And Proof of Work means those with access to cheap electricity rule over the network, which is why most mining happens in western China.

tim333 5y ago

The start of the document: >The purpose of this memo is not to denounce Bitcoin. Bitcoin enjoys a growing institutional spotlight, a compelling narrative as digital gold, and a portfolio allocation as an inflation hedge. However, institutional allocation into the Ethereum ecosystem is currently low... You can denounce bitcoin for the CO2 emissions though. At least etherium is trying to go proof of stake. If institutions pile into bitcoin the price and emissions will 10x which I'm not sure is on. Governments can't control bitcoin but they can control institutions.

cwkoss 5y ago
Put another way, if institutions pile into bitcoin, the value of produced energy will rise, and green energy infrastructure projects which were previously marginal would become profitable and thus executed.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Uh... Also tons of coal will be burned. BTW "green" energy products are not 100% sustainable. Lots of rare earth metals and other mined materials go into solar panels. We can't recycle solar panels right now, neither wind turbine blades. Hydro destroys riparian ecosystems. Useless uses of energy cannot be construed as good for the world.

prova1 5y ago

i like it

prova1 5y ago
eeeee

ddeyar 5y ago

A planned upgrade of 6 years? How would that be in the future? How long does it take to fix a minor issue? Tezos for example is able to evolve every 3-4 months without forking and is PoS since 2017. Also they're doing a better job on security. https://tezos.com/ https://tezos.com/

zertrin 5y ago
Not doubting any of your statements, but why have I never heard of it before? If it is good why hasn't it displaced ethereum and become more mainstream? Are there any cons that prevent it to become more prominent? (sincere question from me, I am curious to know more)
- dmihal 5y ago
  The same reason that Bitcoin hasn't been displaced by newer projects. Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.
- ddeyar 5y ago
  This is are very good question. I really don't know why the mainstream ignored this project so far. Compared to some other projects, there is no single person in the center of the project, so there is no one to be hyped. This is sad but it seems to be a disadvantage. The loudest are getting attention and with so many projects out there, the tezos community was a long time pretty silent. The smart contract language is completely different from solidity. Its a functional language which allows formal verification. This is one reason which makes it harder for developers to migrate to tezos. It's easeier to migrate to an ethereum clone. Sapling came with the edo upgrade this year, this allows privacy preserving smart contracts. Gas price is extremly low. A part of the nft hype has already migrated to tezos because of PoS and low gas prices. See the stats here https://better-call.dev/stats/mainnet/general https://better-call.dev/stats/mainnet/general The next upgrade is currently in the voting phase. When you're technically interested in it see here http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html Last week a marketing campaign started, maybe you will see an add somewhere in the near future. A lot is going on in adoption atm, here a few recent news: banking https://xtz.news/adoption/french-banking-giant-societe-generale-issues-the-first-structured-product-on-the-tezos-blockchain/ https://xtz.news/adoption/french-banking-giant-societe-gener... gaming https://xtz.news/adoption/ubisoft-become-a-tezos-corporate-baker-as-the-gaming-giant-explores-new-possibilities-for-players-and-developers/ https://xtz.news/adoption/ubisoft-become-a-tezos-corporate-b... stablecoin https://xtz.news/adoption/groupe-casino-with-11000-stores-to-launch-a-stablecoin-on-tezos/ https://xtz.news/adoption/groupe-casino-with-11000-stores-to... digital identity https://xtz.news/adoption/spruce-systems-makes-it-into-y-combinator-ycw21-the-most-prestigious-accelerator-in-the-world/ https://xtz.news/adoption/spruce-systems-makes-it-into-y-com...

zoshi 5y ago

Cash flow is for businesses. Ethereum doesn’t know what it is. The rules are always changing, running a full node is practically impossible, and issuance is always changing. It’s not even clear that the features claimed in this paper will be true one year from now. Multiple consensus failures (most recently this last month) and constant design changes do not provide a secure foundation for sound money.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tim333 5y ago
It could be a case of the perfect is the enemy of the good though. I mean Ethereum isn't perfect but not much else is either.
- zoshi 5y ago
  If I’m going to stick my savings in a cryptocurrency, I want the network to be stable for the foreseeable future (and be private, but that’s another story).
  - jakupovic 5y ago
    You can have your own network/blockchain but none would pay for it. Hence the problem.
    - zoshi 5y ago
      By “private” I meant transaction privacy, which is offered by Monero.
meowkit 5y ago
So what you’re saying is that this random pdf website is the ultimate say on what Ethereum is? Not maybe what the EF has to say? https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/ https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/
5y ago

cryptica 5y ago

It's disturbing how tribalism is allowing people to completely ignore reality. Ethereum's blockchain uses up over 1 terrabyte of space. Because Ethereum nodes do not provide any search feature natively, most third-party software integrations end up being implemented via the use of centralized services (which defeats the whole purpose of Ethereum). As for Bitcoin using the same amount of electricity as an entire country to perform 2 transactions per second, that is also shocking. But modern fiat money-printing allows all pyramid schemes to thrive. I'm convinced that if Bernie Madoff had managed to keep his ponzi scheme going just one more decade, he would never have been caught.

tim333 5y ago
>Ethereum's blockchain uses up over 1 terrabyte Presumably any currency that records all the world's transactions is going to have terabytes if not petabytes of data. Either you go with a tech that will support big data or you limit the transactions like bitcoin making it impractical as an everyday payment mechanism? For me the important part of decentralized is it can be run in different places so governments can't shut it down, not that everyone can process the world's transactions on their laptop.
- cryptica 5y ago
  Why should it be a single world currency? Why not just have a system of multiple currencies which can be accepted interchangeably as payment? Automatic valuation and conversion of a cryptocurrency is possible. It can even be done in a decentralized way without trusting anyone.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    You get much greater interoperability / a much larger market when everyone is on the same ledger, using the same protocol to exchange value. There are use-cases where a smaller more specialized ledger will be more optimal, but there is a very large set of use-cases for the 'financial protocol with a huge number of users'.

RichardHeart 5y ago

Proof of work cryptocurrency mining is a wasteful industry that proof of stake gets rid of. Rejoice.

astoor 5y ago

I know most of us technical people here dismiss Ethereum as being just another new fangled pyramid scheme like Bitcoin and the others, but you've got to hand it to them, it is very well-disguised with plausible deniability (DApps, DeFi, etc.), and they keep on coming up with new ways to make it self-sustaining (ICOs, NFTs, etc.).

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

Ethereum is passé. Dogecoin is far superior and much wow better suited for the current meme era. Which is reflected in the share price.

svarog-run 5y ago

ah. Learning what ethereum is by looking into a random pdf by an unknown twitter user. Never change your pseudointellectuallity hn, never change

takeiteasyy 5y ago
never change your creditentialism

rauljordan2020 5y ago

I am one of the implementers of Ethereum Proof of Stake (https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm) and I would like to clarify a lot of misconceptions around Ethereum and why we find this technology so exciting: - Proof of stake has serious flaws if done from scratch, as you are trying to secure a network using value created out of thin air. Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake from proof of work, and has already built up a security pool of over $200bn USD market cap and a significant amount of activity. ETH as the native asset required for proof of stake has enough security pool to allow the migration to make sense. - "You have been talking about proof of stake for years, wake me up when it happens". We launched proof of stake on December 1st, 2020 https://www.coindesk.com/valid-points-ether-staked-eth-2-0-q1 https://www.coindesk.com/valid-points-ether-staked-eth-2-0-q.... This runs as a parallel chain that users deposit ETH into to participate in consensus via a bridge contract. The next step is to merge the current Ethereum chain to use this new chain's consensus, and we are working on this to happen late this year. - "There is a vibrant developer community, but for what? All speculation?" Yes, speculation was and is ever present in this new technology given how permissionless it is. This means anyone around the world can interact with the blockchain without a gatekeeper. However, there is an incredible amount of financial innovation happening on Ethereum that didn't even exist back in 2017. Really well-thought out stablecoins, flash loans (which are a blockchain native concept), automated market makers such as Uniswap which had more trading volume than Coinbase https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/79775/uniswap-coinbase-monthly-volume-september https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/79775/uniswap-coinbase.... We have privacy technologies such as Aztec Protocol or Tornado Cash. We have zero-knowledge proof games such as DarkForest. What makes me personally excited is that Ethereum is like this global, shared computer where every application deployed immediately opens a composable API for others to interact with by design, creating infinite possibilities. - Ethereum's development is far more decentralized today than it was years ago. Ethereum proof of stake was developed by 4 independent teams, unaffiliated with the Ethereum Foundation, and had a successful launch this past December 1st, 2020, and no, Vitalik cannot roll back the chain. - "Some other blockchain already had proof of stake and have been running for years". What makes Ethereum proof of stake special is it takes no compromises between decentralization, security, and scalability. At the base layer of the blockchain, Ethereum uses really neat cryptography known as BLS signatures (https://medium.com/cryptoadvance/bls-signatures-better-than-schnorr-5a7fe30ea716 https://medium.com/cryptoadvance/bls-signatures-better-than-...), which allow for signature aggregation at scale. This means there can hundreds of thousands or millions of consensus participants with minimal network overhead, compared to other chains which have a permissioned set of < 100 consensus participants. Moreover, Ethereum is fully permissionless at the consensus. Anyone can run a validator at home easily on a consumer laptop. You don't need to buy ASICs, live in a country where electricity is cheap, or anything of that nature. I urge everyone here to look deeper into Ethereum for what it offers and look at the depth of innovation happening in this ecosystem. Happy to answer any questions, as there seems to be a lot of misinformation.

johndoe42377 5y ago

Bullshit. And it will die under weight of technical debt made by very ambitious and very incompetent early devs. It won't scale. For that different programming paradigm, design decisions and set of tools are required.

Animats 5y ago

Did Etherium actually switch to proof of stake? That's been talked up for years, but has been delayed several times. The original date was January 2020, but as of now, I can't find a firm date. One Etherium page intended to get people to lock up ETH to stake the system says "Withdrawals won't be live right away. You won't be able to withdraw your stake until future upgrades are deployed. Withdrawals should be available once mainnet has docked with the Beacon Chain system." It's always a bad sign in the cryptocurrency world when withdrawals are delayed. The paper is written as if the change to proof of stake has happened.

chillacy 5y ago
I was looking this up recently. There's a 3 phase plan to switch to proof of stake, the first phase of launching a new chain is complete, but it could take years to complete this migration.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Calling it 'Etherium' to provoke Ethereum advocates is completely inappropriate as per HN rules.
- izolate 5y ago
  So is assuming bad faith against HN rules. Etherium seems like an innocent error.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    This user has commented on Ethereum posts numerous times, and I have actually corrected them on the spelling in the past. That this is deliberate provocating/trolling is not an assumption.
spir 5y ago
Ethereum will likely switch to proof of stake later this year, or perhaps Q1 2022 at the latest. https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1379052831982956547 https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1379052831982956547