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Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake

172 points by sfjailbird 4y ago

upupandup 4y ago
- carlosdp 4y ago
  There's a whole ecosystem of devs working on interesting stuff that have nothing to do with finance, they just don't get mainstream headlines today. Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some projects to check out: - Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/ https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon. - Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/ https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way. - ENS [https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system. - Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/ https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc. - Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially. - Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    - kanzure 4y ago
      > It doesn’t matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters, it’s always “bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?” (plug warning) Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat positive to me at least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      > It doesn’t matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters, it’s always “bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?” We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good answer.
      - seibelj 4y ago
        Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with promise, but again, the HN crypto hater doesn't care. USDC is over $50 billion - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on crypto rails. But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting to try and argue.
        pram 4y ago
        We just had a $30B PoS coin/stablecoin platform evaporate into thin air this year, don’t even need to bring up Visa lol
        seibelj 4y ago
        And Deutsch Bank laundered hundreds of billions of euros for drug lords. What system is flawed again?
        whaaswijk 4y ago
        Is there a mechanism in place to stop people from laundering money with ethereum? This is a serious question, I’m a total noob when it comes to crypto.
        seibelj 4y ago
        You can’t stop crime, otherwise murder wouldn’t happen. If you give people a modicum of freedom then some amount of them will act with criminal intent. Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.
    - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
      > You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t want to learn. You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t agree with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm here for the ideas and the possibility of a different world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is offering developers/users.
  - yardstick 4y ago
    “ Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.” 2 issues spring to mind: - What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot expunge data like this won’t be around for long. - Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have they got financing arranged (and already in trust funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious, irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years, what’s the odds that I will still be able to access them?
    - bsamuels 4y ago
      RE the first point: you don't have to store/host 100% of the data, content can be blocklisted based on hash or other attributes so your node doesn't replicate or retransmit it. The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content. RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).
      - carlosdp 4y ago
        > dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200). The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe.
      - yardstick 4y ago
        > The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content. That’s a weak claim then. I wouldn’t call that censorship resistant at all. That’s no better than China imo. Wouldn’t be surprised- if this got popular- for people to publish blacklists you can subscribe to. Re the pricing mechanism, if the project fails/people abandon it (because the arweave economy crashes for whatever reason) what happens to the data? Paying out an endowment over time to fund the storage only works if you have people who put value in the tokens. Which could no longer exist.
- jejeyyy77 4y ago
  have you been paying attention at all?
  - crypto_mogul 4y ago
    Indeed, according to our colleagues from The Block, several assumptions have been made by Ethereum developers regarding the tentative timeframes for The Merge’s implementation.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  there is plenty of work within web3, at least for the engineers and advisors. support staff and marketing personnel are the ones being laid off with less prospects, from what I can tell. its also pretty common to form a resume for the job you want, omiting less helpful or unrelated things. I went the whole decade never telling any web2 startup I worked for about crypto, who cares if its another bear market and people are yet again souring on it
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  - game-of-throws 4y ago
    I can't wait until engineers go back to working on tracking and ads, just as nature intended.
- dangerwill 4y ago
  "I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted." - If widespread this is the best sign of health for the tech industry I have seen in years
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    Watch out what you cheer for, dangerwill. You do not want that to be the norm. It just so happens that, right now, they are discriminating towards something that you believe to be "wrong". What is "wrong" may change in the future or someone else's "wrong" may not align with your own. And considering we're talking about people's jobs and means to survive, it's not at all something to be taken lightly. At all. The applicant might not even have an interest in what they worked for, or might even opposed to it. Maybe they worked there just to survive and the pay was good. Has that ever happened to you? I know for a fact that I could not give a single fuck about few of the sectors I worked for, some of them I actively believe to be cancerous to society. I do not have the right to discard people based exclusively on their past work experience, as I'd discard myself. It just doesn't make sense from a moral standpoint, not to mention it also doesn't make sense from a competitive standpoint: I'd have a smaller pool of talent to choose from, and would discard brilliant minds simply by association to something I do not agree with (or simply don't understand) and ... for what, exactly? To make a point?
    - dangerwill 4y ago
      There is a difference between industries that are cancerous to society (of which there are many and very few of us have clean hands at this standard) and open, obvious scams. Scams where the software IS the scam and so the software developers involved are culpable. If someone put on their resume that they had previously been employed writing malware then I think it is quite fair to blacklist them too. I get the overall point you are making, but it is just a rehash of the free speech absolutist position which, in my opinion (that you will not change), inevitably and continuously attempts to shield the worst abusers of society. And if it turns out that I end up working on something horrible and don't get out immediately and scrub it off my resume? Then I deserve to take reputational damage
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  > I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto is souring. During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted. Some of the best engineers and researchers I've ever worked with were in the blockchain space. Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. I work for a pretty cool startup in the defense sector that appreciated the experience I've had in distributed systems from my several years working on projects like Cardano.
  - upupandup 4y ago
    > Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. Not companies that care about PR and want to distance themselves from crypto space. Those engineers and researchers unfortunately have been tricked into thinking that crypto would be here to stay as were the hundreds and thousands of investors that were duped into an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that serves no real purpose other than the monetary incentives of a closed few.
    - xur17 4y ago
      Crypto prices have gone down a bit from their peak, but it sure seems like crypto is here to stay. In fact, I'd be happy to make a bet that the crypto industry will exist in 10 years, and will have a larger market cap than it does today.
      - purerandomness 4y ago
        No argument here, after all Rube Goldberg machines and scammers will likely exist in 10 years as well.
        birracerveza 4y ago
        Sore losers as well.
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  > HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes I am about as bearish on crypto as it gets but I have a very hard time believing this. It’s definitely not true at the major tech companies.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Please tell me which companies are doing that, I also would like to put them on a "places I never want to work" list.
ayoubbhihi 4y ago
There is growing confidence that the Ethereum Merge, scheduled for mid-September, won’t be postponed after the Goerli merge went smoothly.
carlosdp 4y ago
For those interested, this is a site that predicts when the merge will happen based on the current hash-rate. Currently looking like September 15! https://bordel.wtf/ https://bordel.wtf/
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  So I should start looking for used GPU prices dropping from the 16th onwards?
nodejsthrowaway 4y ago
One of Ethereum's core goals is decentralisation. How does Ethereum plan to deal Proof of Stake naturally monopolizing block creation and the Ether supply? In my estimation there are many compounding factors such as MEV and liquid staking with a massive economy of scale for first movers that combined with staking interest might make the top staking provider eventually hold the vast majority of Ether. If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating 99% of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking with a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next?
- rcxdude 4y ago
  It's the same forces which push proof of work to the same conclusion, so it's not made much difference to the problem.
  - Salgat 4y ago
    The difference is that if a miner does nothing, eventually they stop making money regardless of how many coins they have. If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and collect even more indefinitely with no additional investment beyond running a very cheap node (or just letting someone else host it). Staking is just trivial in comparison, it's apples and oranges.
    - yokem55 4y ago
      The flip side of this though is that stakers can have their capital burned because of misbehavior. If a staker gets too entrenched and the other folks in the network don't want them around anymore, their stake can be slashed. Proof of work cannot destroy the equipment of a hostile miner, only wipe everyone's equipment out with an algorithm change.
      - jimmydorry 4y ago
        If a staker gets too entrenched, by what mechanism will the minority slash the majority staker's stake?
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
I confess deep ignorance, here, but: Why would miners go along with this switch, given it's going to eliminate their profits? Why wouldn't they just fork the chain and continue to run a PoW version? What would force people to switch to the new PoS version?
- rawrmaan 4y ago
  There will be forks, but only the PoS one will have stablecoins with actual backing (e.g. any value at all): https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-proof-work-fork https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-p...
  - toinewx 4y ago
    justin sun has said his "stable" coin usdd will support the pow fork
    - DennisP 4y ago
      USDD has a market cap of $745 million. By comparison, USDC is at $54 billion, USDT is $67 billion, and both are only supporting PoS. https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-confirms-its-throwing-weight-behind-the-post-merge-ethereum-chain https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-confi...
    - baby 4y ago
      What an ass
    - ecommerceguy 4y ago
      This made me chuckle. How anyone thinks Sun has any interest in anything besides enriching himself is delusional. Pro pump and dumper, thats all. He is an artist at the top of his game, I'll give him that!
- ruuda 4y ago
  I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc., wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value, similar to Ethereum Classic.
ChadNauseam 4y ago
For anyone curious what the merge means, in my limited understanding: 1. Transactions will get slightly cheaper, but only because they're increasing the block rate from every 13 seconds to every 12 seconds, not anything specific to the other cool stuff in the merge 2. The network will switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, meaning that there will no longer be GPU demand or substantial energy consumption attributable to the Ethereum network. 3. For a cryptocurrency to be secure there has to be some barrier to participating in consensus. Now, instead of having to have a fancy GPU to run an Ethereum validator, the barrier will be that you instead have to "stake" 32 Ethereum (and risk losing it if your validator misbehaves). A staking reward of (I think) 5% a year will be issued for your trouble. 4. The Ethereum network will be more resistant to "short-range" forks, that is, forks that diverged from the proper chain "recently". (More resistant in the sense that it will be more expensive to execute an attack like that.) 5. Once you've staked your 32 Ethereum, you currently can't "unstake" it. The ability to withdraw your stake will be added in a future eth fork. It will have to be gated by some delay (maybe you can only withdraw your stake 6 months after you staked it). Attacking the chain via a "long-range" fork, that is, a fork that diverges from the proper chain longer ago than the withdrawal period, will be much cheaper or possibly even free. 6. Ethereum will still favor liveness over consistency. An attacker can't stop the chain, but they can prevent it from finalizing for a time (at expense to themselves). 7. Token issuance will go down, probably to below the burn rate, so the base Ethereum supply will go down over time 8. The chain will get deterministic finality after some number of blocks (I think something like a day's worth). That means that, once a block is finalized, it will never be rewritten. Network outages or attacks can prevent blocks from finalizing.
- tromp 4y ago
  > to be secure there has to be some barrier to running a validator There only has to be a barrier for receiving rewards. Bitcoin full nodes validate everything but receive no rewards, and need no barriers.
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    True, my phrasing was misleading (I used the Ethereum terminology, where a validator is not just any node that validates the chain, but one that participates in consensus). Edited my comment accordingly
ecommerceguy 4y ago
Does this mean I can finally sell the coins I inadvertently locked up? After 10 plus years and no killer app I'm done supporting crypto. It's a scam.
- vlod 4y ago
  >It's a scam. Obviously you wouldn't want to profit from that. How about donating your profits to a charity if you feel so strongly? Ethereum price ~10 years ago, probably less than a dollar. Ethereum price today, ~ $1900
  - ecommerceguy 4y ago
    I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale for that statement? Maybe I should be more clear, without ANY application or use for ANY crypto besides pump and dump schemes, ALL crypto, IMO, is a scam. Crypto has been a thing for 10 years, longer if you count egold and liberty cash (or whatever that was called). And to clarify again, my eth has been locked up in "staking" for what 2 years now without me being able to sell it. I'm looking forward to offloading it all and reap my gains, doesn't change how I feel about it.
    - olalonde 4y ago
      > I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale for that statement? How can you sell your ETH in good conscience knowing that it's a scam? Wouldn't that make you a scammer?
      - ecommerceguy 4y ago
        I've said in another comment I've participated in the scam, 5 years ago, I'll take my gains and walk. Back then I was under the impression that there would be some sort of killer app by now. There isn't and never will be. I've identified the scam, it's all pump and dump and an inflation sink.
bilsbie 4y ago
So proof of stake isn’t a holy grail? It’s completely achievable technology?
- wmf 4y ago
  Yes, PoS has been running safely for 1-2 years. (Ethereum isn't the first working PoS chain but it will be the largest one by far.)
  - 0x64 4y ago
    There's a massive difference in the decentralization of Ethereum's PoS implementation vs. Cardano, which uses delegated PoS.
    - wmf 4y ago
      If only there were other PoS chains.
    - ypeterholmes 4y ago
      How so?
      - DennisP 4y ago
        Ethereum uses signature aggregation to allow for a very large number of full-fledged staking nodes. Most PoS chains have a small number of full-fledged nodes, and everybody else delegates their stake to one of those.
- baby 4y ago
  Yes, it’s been running for years on many other chains and most new chains have adopted PoS (I can’t remember the last time I heard about PoW in state of the art blockchains).
bilsbie 4y ago
Will existing coins be moved over automatically?
- wmf 4y ago
  Yes. (There's actually no "over" since it's a continuation of the same blockchain just with different consensus rules.)
BucketsMcG 4y ago
Interesting choice to name it after a Berlin park known for being full of drug dealers, muggers and ne'er-do-wells.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Görli is also close to FullNode[0], the office building where plenty of blockchain projects were based. [0] https://www.fullnode.berlin/ https://www.fullnode.berlin/
- gemduster 4y ago
  Oh please. Give me a break. As if the park doesn't have a richer history than that.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    Rinkeby is pretty rough, and has basically no other reputation than being dodgy either. So someone likes to pick the rougher spots. Maybe someone who likes rap and they are mentioned in lyrics or something like that.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    It, uh, kind of doesn't? For most of its life post-WW2 it was a coal depot. The park was built ~1990 and by ~2005 it was known for its drug culture. ETA: A defense of the "rich history" of Görli is what finally got you to comment after 3 years?!
- pa7x1 4y ago
  Names of the Ethereum testnets were chosen after Metro stations. Ropsten, Sepolia, Goerli, Rinkeby, Kovan...
gemduster 4y ago
[dead]
mavu 4y ago
I am looking forward to the moment, when all the people who consider this the 2nd coming of christ equivalent for the crypto world realize that it's just business as usual.
- wmf 4y ago
  IMO the Merge will "prove" that PoS works and thus bring a lot of pressure to bear on PoW coins for being obviously wasteful.
  - tmalsburg2 4y ago
    Hasn’t Cardano already shown that POS works and it did not have the effect that you predict? I’m afraid most people in the crypto world don’t care one bit about the carbon foot print of these technologies.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      Cardano has a tiny market compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. And as we've seen over the years, a lot of problems only show up at scale. So if Ethereum is able to run PoS safely, it will be a much bigger deal.
- mFixman 4y ago
  I'm excited about this. Bitcoin and crypto use an obscene amount of energy and are basically impossible to ban. A working proof-of-stake system in a non-shitcoin will pile pressure on all cryptocurrencies to move to that system to use less energy.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Most crypto projects and blockchains aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum are already using proof of stake for consensus. But otherwise I agree, it will give more confidence in PoS to see it securing Ethereum.
- cypress66 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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skizm 4y ago
Random brain dump of questions: Does proof-of-stake generally mean the more money you have the more influence you get over the consensus? If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? How does this affect mining pools? Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different?
- sschueller 4y ago
  Doesn't the same apply to PoW? The more money you have the more HW you can buy/rent to mine.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    As someone with a huge number of GPUs and many megawatts of power mining ETH for many years now... it isn't that easy.
- rglullis 4y ago
  No, protocol changes are not affected by the amount of ETH staked. > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different? Harder. With Ethereum's consensus, you need 2/3 of the validators conspiring to produce an attack on the chain.
  - ruuda 4y ago
    You can halt the chain with 1/3 of the stake though. In Ethereum, that would trigger an inactivity leak that eats away your stake until it’s less than 1/3 of the stake, and consensus can be achieved again.
- ruuda 4y ago
  > If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? With the current price of ETH, it’s unlikely that a single entity could gain enough of the supply to do anything like this, but it is a valid concern for smaller chains. > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? Block proposers can already do this. How often you get to be block proposer, is proportional to the amount of stake you have.
jl6 4y ago
Clearly there is some group of people with the power and influence to make this decision. How does that group compare to, say, US central bankers, in terms of transparency and democratic accountability? Edit: To be clear, I’m not talking about banking operations, I’m talking about decision making by central bank leadership. One of the purported benefits of crypto is independence from the shadowy cabals that run the US dollar. Except the Treasury isn’t actually all that shadowy - the staff have names, and are appointed through an ultimately democratic process. Whereas I really have no idea who is pulling the strings behind crypto and who they are accountable to. The original vision was for decentralized finance where nobody could pull the strings, but the level of coordination on display here in the PoW-to-PoS switch makes it obvious that strings exist and they are capable of being pulled.
- jakswa 4y ago
  At first bluff, I'd expect a ton of example and implementation code to be open-sourced. I still don't know what nightmare code is crawling CSV/ZIP (forget which) files daily doing ACH transfers, but afaik that's still how electronic banking is done? Would love to learn I'm outdated there.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  The development is in the open, happening through PRs on GitHub and across several independent client teams. You can join the R&D discord (I’m there as a casual observer) and watch or engage in technical discussions. You can propose EIPs or make suggestions about how the chain should work, and everybody can collectively decide it is a good or bad idea for the protocol. Overall it’s very open, although they do have to draw the line somewhere and I assume the core dev’s weekly zoom calls and standups are not open to everybody to join lest it degrade into madness (these devs work across a range of independent companies and orgs fwiw). Even these calls and notes are shared btw.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Who will implement the final decision?
leashless 4y ago
I introduced the Serenity (proof of stake) step of the Ethereum release process in this 2015 blog post for the Foundation. You might find it interesting to look back and see how we got here. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process...
pa7x1 4y ago
The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of ~2000 or 99.95%. You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/
- rglullis 4y ago
  To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by them while running is less than the energy consumed by videogame consoles around the world while idling. Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    >"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
      - belltaco 4y ago
        Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
        rglullis 4y ago
        And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
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boppo1 4y ago
I read the Bitcoin whitepaper+some other technical document (I think) and have a real solid grasp on how that works. Ethereum, although I have used defi/erc20/uniswap/etc, I've got no idea how it works. Validators, shards, miners... is there a single source I can go to to learn it all? I've got a pretty high technical threshold so if it gets mathy I'm not intimidated. I just want to finally know how it works.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  There are many parts to Ethereum and it’s PoS system so I don’t think you will be able to grasp it all in a short read. This is a good start: https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__foreword.html https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__forewor...
  - randomsearch 4y ago
    That scares me. I’d want it to be a system so simple anyone could grasp the fundamentals very quickly. Reason being, it’s so important and complexity breeds oversights and bugs. Security is hard.
    - mattdesl 4y ago
      Most things in society start out simple and grow more complex as we add more speed, security, applications, and so on. See also: medicine, science, flight, computers, the internet. Bitcoin is a very simple system and very limited in its capabilities, but as far as modern blockchains go it is like the early room-size computers, Ford Model T, or Wright Flyer.
- deleted 4y ago
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- DennisP 4y ago
  If you really want to dig in, here are the key papers on the PoS algorithm: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 To learn about the sharding plan and various other stuff in the roadmap, this is a great technical overview: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-ethereum https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...
LittlePeter 4y ago
Off-topic. What's up with that giant meaningless Ethereum logo image occupying 90% of my screen. Why are websites doing this?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Are you using NoScript or an adblocker? It is probably blocking a third-party script from loading that the site needs to render the rest of the page.
  - LittlePeter 4y ago
    Yup I use ad blocker.
  - lynndotpy 4y ago
    I get this too for the same reason, ad/script blocking. It really tickles me to imagine the bewilderment of seeing a webdesign trend of starting every page with a giant static logo.
ShaneMcGowan 4y ago
So is the price of Ethereum going to go up a load now since you don’t need to buy GPUs, you just buy Ethereum itself?
- cmckn 4y ago
  I'm not sure how the incentives will play out. It takes $60k at the time of writing to become a validator, and they've yet to implement the mechanism to exit your stake; so I think there will be some hesitancy to become one. The more validators there are, the worse odds that yours will be chosen to handle a block; and I believe as the number of validators increases the reward per block also decreases (though it's been a while since I read the proposal).
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Not too much hesitancy, there's already about 12% of the current supply of ETH on the proof-of-stake network.
kloch 4y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens with ETC if ETH miners switch to that after the merge. Does hashpower follow value, or does value follow hashpower?
BonoboIO 4y ago
Am I Right that gpu demand will crash, because nobody needs gpus for mining ethereum any more? Yes gaming and ai, but ethereum Mining was a large part of the gpu market.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  It’s likely.

172 points by sfjailbird 4y ago

carlosdp 4y ago
There's a whole ecosystem of devs working on interesting stuff that have nothing to do with finance, they just don't get mainstream headlines today. Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some projects to check out: - Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/ https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon. - Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/ https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way. - ENS [https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system. - Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/ https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc. - Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially. - Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
- seibelj 4y ago
  - kanzure 4y ago
    > It doesn’t matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters, it’s always “bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?” (plug warning) Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat positive to me at least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32294951
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    > It doesn’t matter how much you argue with HN crypto haters, it’s always “bUt WhY nOt a SqL DaTaBaSe?” We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good answer.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      Parent comment linked to a bunch of projects with promise, but again, the HN crypto hater doesn't care. USDC is over $50 billion - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on crypto rails. But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting to try and argue.
      - pram 4y ago
        We just had a $30B PoS coin/stablecoin platform evaporate into thin air this year, don’t even need to bring up Visa lol
        seibelj 4y ago
        And Deutsch Bank laundered hundreds of billions of euros for drug lords. What system is flawed again?
        whaaswijk 4y ago
        Is there a mechanism in place to stop people from laundering money with ethereum? This is a serious question, I’m a total noob when it comes to crypto.
        seibelj 4y ago
        You can’t stop crime, otherwise murder wouldn’t happen. If you give people a modicum of freedom then some amount of them will act with criminal intent. Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.
  - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    > You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t want to learn. You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t agree with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm here for the ideas and the possibility of a different world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is offering developers/users.
- yardstick 4y ago
  “ Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.” 2 issues spring to mind: - What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot expunge data like this won’t be around for long. - Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have they got financing arranged (and already in trust funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious, irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years, what’s the odds that I will still be able to access them?
  - bsamuels 4y ago
    RE the first point: you don't have to store/host 100% of the data, content can be blocklisted based on hash or other attributes so your node doesn't replicate or retransmit it. The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content. RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).
    - carlosdp 4y ago
      > dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200). The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe.
    - yardstick 4y ago
      > The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content. That’s a weak claim then. I wouldn’t call that censorship resistant at all. That’s no better than China imo. Wouldn’t be surprised- if this got popular- for people to publish blacklists you can subscribe to. Re the pricing mechanism, if the project fails/people abandon it (because the arweave economy crashes for whatever reason) what happens to the data? Paying out an endowment over time to fund the storage only works if you have people who put value in the tokens. Which could no longer exist.
jejeyyy77 4y ago
have you been paying attention at all?
- crypto_mogul 4y ago
  Indeed, according to our colleagues from The Block, several assumptions have been made by Ethereum developers regarding the tentative timeframes for The Merge’s implementation.
yieldcrv 4y ago
there is plenty of work within web3, at least for the engineers and advisors. support staff and marketing personnel are the ones being laid off with less prospects, from what I can tell. its also pretty common to form a resume for the job you want, omiting less helpful or unrelated things. I went the whole decade never telling any web2 startup I worked for about crypto, who cares if its another bear market and people are yet again souring on it
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
- game-of-throws 4y ago
  I can't wait until engineers go back to working on tracking and ads, just as nature intended.
dangerwill 4y ago
"I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted." - If widespread this is the best sign of health for the tech industry I have seen in years
- birracerveza 4y ago
  Watch out what you cheer for, dangerwill. You do not want that to be the norm. It just so happens that, right now, they are discriminating towards something that you believe to be "wrong". What is "wrong" may change in the future or someone else's "wrong" may not align with your own. And considering we're talking about people's jobs and means to survive, it's not at all something to be taken lightly. At all. The applicant might not even have an interest in what they worked for, or might even opposed to it. Maybe they worked there just to survive and the pay was good. Has that ever happened to you? I know for a fact that I could not give a single fuck about few of the sectors I worked for, some of them I actively believe to be cancerous to society. I do not have the right to discard people based exclusively on their past work experience, as I'd discard myself. It just doesn't make sense from a moral standpoint, not to mention it also doesn't make sense from a competitive standpoint: I'd have a smaller pool of talent to choose from, and would discard brilliant minds simply by association to something I do not agree with (or simply don't understand) and ... for what, exactly? To make a point?
  - dangerwill 4y ago
    There is a difference between industries that are cancerous to society (of which there are many and very few of us have clean hands at this standard) and open, obvious scams. Scams where the software IS the scam and so the software developers involved are culpable. If someone put on their resume that they had previously been employed writing malware then I think it is quite fair to blacklist them too. I get the overall point you are making, but it is just a rehash of the free speech absolutist position which, in my opinion (that you will not change), inevitably and continuously attempts to shield the worst abusers of society. And if it turns out that I end up working on something horrible and don't get out immediately and scrub it off my resume? Then I deserve to take reputational damage
EddySchauHai 4y ago
> I've also noticed a more disturbing trend: HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes as public sentiment towards anything crypto is souring. During interviews, I see candidates who answer yes to whether they had worked on a blockchain or crypto projects being blacklisted. Some of the best engineers and researchers I've ever worked with were in the blockchain space. Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. I work for a pretty cool startup in the defense sector that appreciated the experience I've had in distributed systems from my several years working on projects like Cardano.
- upupandup 4y ago
  > Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. Not companies that care about PR and want to distance themselves from crypto space. Those engineers and researchers unfortunately have been tricked into thinking that crypto would be here to stay as were the hundreds and thousands of investors that were duped into an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that serves no real purpose other than the monetary incentives of a closed few.
  - xur17 4y ago
    Crypto prices have gone down a bit from their peak, but it sure seems like crypto is here to stay. In fact, I'd be happy to make a bet that the crypto industry will exist in 10 years, and will have a larger market cap than it does today.
    - purerandomness 4y ago
      No argument here, after all Rube Goldberg machines and scammers will likely exist in 10 years as well.
      - birracerveza 4y ago
        Sore losers as well.
kevinventullo 4y ago
> HR and head hunters increasingly filter out Solidity/Ethereum/Blockchain keywords on resumes I am about as bearish on crypto as it gets but I have a very hard time believing this. It’s definitely not true at the major tech companies.
rglullis 4y ago
Please tell me which companies are doing that, I also would like to put them on a "places I never want to work" list.

There is growing confidence that the Ethereum Merge, scheduled for mid-September, won’t be postponed after the Goerli merge went smoothly.

carlosdp 4y ago

For those interested, this is a site that predicts when the merge will happen based on the current hash-rate. Currently looking like September 15! https://bordel.wtf/ https://bordel.wtf/

jiggawatts 4y ago
So I should start looking for used GPU prices dropping from the 16th onwards?

nodejsthrowaway 4y ago

One of Ethereum's core goals is decentralisation. How does Ethereum plan to deal Proof of Stake naturally monopolizing block creation and the Ether supply? In my estimation there are many compounding factors such as MEV and liquid staking with a massive economy of scale for first movers that combined with staking interest might make the top staking provider eventually hold the vast majority of Ether. If the company that runs Lido is responsible for validating 99% of the blocks and the US Treasury Department comes knocking with a list of bad actors to blacklist, what happens next?

rcxdude 4y ago
It's the same forces which push proof of work to the same conclusion, so it's not made much difference to the problem.
- Salgat 4y ago
  The difference is that if a miner does nothing, eventually they stop making money regardless of how many coins they have. If a staker does nothing, they continue to collect and collect even more indefinitely with no additional investment beyond running a very cheap node (or just letting someone else host it). Staking is just trivial in comparison, it's apples and oranges.
  - yokem55 4y ago
    The flip side of this though is that stakers can have their capital burned because of misbehavior. If a staker gets too entrenched and the other folks in the network don't want them around anymore, their stake can be slashed. Proof of work cannot destroy the equipment of a hostile miner, only wipe everyone's equipment out with an algorithm change.
    - jimmydorry 4y ago
      If a staker gets too entrenched, by what mechanism will the minority slash the majority staker's stake?

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

I confess deep ignorance, here, but: Why would miners go along with this switch, given it's going to eliminate their profits? Why wouldn't they just fork the chain and continue to run a PoW version? What would force people to switch to the new PoS version?

rawrmaan 4y ago
There will be forks, but only the PoS one will have stablecoins with actual backing (e.g. any value at all): https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-proof-work-fork https://decrypt.co/107094/circle-will-not-support-ethereum-p...
- toinewx 4y ago
  justin sun has said his "stable" coin usdd will support the pow fork
  - DennisP 4y ago
    USDD has a market cap of $745 million. By comparison, USDC is at $54 billion, USDT is $67 billion, and both are only supporting PoS. https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-confirms-its-throwing-weight-behind-the-post-merge-ethereum-chain https://cointelegraph.com/news/usdt-issuer-tether-also-confi...
  - baby 4y ago
    What an ass
  - ecommerceguy 4y ago
    This made me chuckle. How anyone thinks Sun has any interest in anything besides enriching himself is delusional. Pro pump and dumper, thats all. He is an artist at the top of his game, I'll give him that!
ruuda 4y ago
I wondered about this for a long time as well. Exchanges, RPC providers like Infura, wallet developers, dapp websites, etc., wouldn't endorse such a fork, so it wouldn't gain adoption. It might still happen, but it would fail to capture much value, similar to Ethereum Classic.

ChadNauseam 4y ago

For anyone curious what the merge means, in my limited understanding: 1. Transactions will get slightly cheaper, but only because they're increasing the block rate from every 13 seconds to every 12 seconds, not anything specific to the other cool stuff in the merge 2. The network will switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, meaning that there will no longer be GPU demand or substantial energy consumption attributable to the Ethereum network. 3. For a cryptocurrency to be secure there has to be some barrier to participating in consensus. Now, instead of having to have a fancy GPU to run an Ethereum validator, the barrier will be that you instead have to "stake" 32 Ethereum (and risk losing it if your validator misbehaves). A staking reward of (I think) 5% a year will be issued for your trouble. 4. The Ethereum network will be more resistant to "short-range" forks, that is, forks that diverged from the proper chain "recently". (More resistant in the sense that it will be more expensive to execute an attack like that.) 5. Once you've staked your 32 Ethereum, you currently can't "unstake" it. The ability to withdraw your stake will be added in a future eth fork. It will have to be gated by some delay (maybe you can only withdraw your stake 6 months after you staked it). Attacking the chain via a "long-range" fork, that is, a fork that diverges from the proper chain longer ago than the withdrawal period, will be much cheaper or possibly even free. 6. Ethereum will still favor liveness over consistency. An attacker can't stop the chain, but they can prevent it from finalizing for a time (at expense to themselves). 7. Token issuance will go down, probably to below the burn rate, so the base Ethereum supply will go down over time 8. The chain will get deterministic finality after some number of blocks (I think something like a day's worth). That means that, once a block is finalized, it will never be rewritten. Network outages or attacks can prevent blocks from finalizing.

tromp 4y ago
> to be secure there has to be some barrier to running a validator There only has to be a barrier for receiving rewards. Bitcoin full nodes validate everything but receive no rewards, and need no barriers.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  True, my phrasing was misleading (I used the Ethereum terminology, where a validator is not just any node that validates the chain, but one that participates in consensus). Edited my comment accordingly

ecommerceguy 4y ago

Does this mean I can finally sell the coins I inadvertently locked up? After 10 plus years and no killer app I'm done supporting crypto. It's a scam.

vlod 4y ago
>It's a scam. Obviously you wouldn't want to profit from that. How about donating your profits to a charity if you feel so strongly? Ethereum price ~10 years ago, probably less than a dollar. Ethereum price today, ~ $1900
- ecommerceguy 4y ago
  I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale for that statement? Maybe I should be more clear, without ANY application or use for ANY crypto besides pump and dump schemes, ALL crypto, IMO, is a scam. Crypto has been a thing for 10 years, longer if you count egold and liberty cash (or whatever that was called). And to clarify again, my eth has been locked up in "staking" for what 2 years now without me being able to sell it. I'm looking forward to offloading it all and reap my gains, doesn't change how I feel about it.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    > I'll stand by my statement. I'm not sure why I should give my etherium proceeds away to "charity". What's your rationale for that statement? How can you sell your ETH in good conscience knowing that it's a scam? Wouldn't that make you a scammer?
    - ecommerceguy 4y ago
      I've said in another comment I've participated in the scam, 5 years ago, I'll take my gains and walk. Back then I was under the impression that there would be some sort of killer app by now. There isn't and never will be. I've identified the scam, it's all pump and dump and an inflation sink.

bilsbie 4y ago

So proof of stake isn’t a holy grail? It’s completely achievable technology?

wmf 4y ago
Yes, PoS has been running safely for 1-2 years. (Ethereum isn't the first working PoS chain but it will be the largest one by far.)
- 0x64 4y ago
  There's a massive difference in the decentralization of Ethereum's PoS implementation vs. Cardano, which uses delegated PoS.
  - wmf 4y ago
    If only there were other PoS chains.
  - ypeterholmes 4y ago
    How so?
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Ethereum uses signature aggregation to allow for a very large number of full-fledged staking nodes. Most PoS chains have a small number of full-fledged nodes, and everybody else delegates their stake to one of those.
baby 4y ago
Yes, it’s been running for years on many other chains and most new chains have adopted PoS (I can’t remember the last time I heard about PoW in state of the art blockchains).

bilsbie 4y ago

Will existing coins be moved over automatically?

wmf 4y ago
Yes. (There's actually no "over" since it's a continuation of the same blockchain just with different consensus rules.)

BucketsMcG 4y ago

Interesting choice to name it after a Berlin park known for being full of drug dealers, muggers and ne'er-do-wells.

rglullis 4y ago
Görli is also close to FullNode[0], the office building where plenty of blockchain projects were based. [0] https://www.fullnode.berlin/ https://www.fullnode.berlin/
gemduster 4y ago
Oh please. Give me a break. As if the park doesn't have a richer history than that.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Rinkeby is pretty rough, and has basically no other reputation than being dodgy either. So someone likes to pick the rougher spots. Maybe someone who likes rap and they are mentioned in lyrics or something like that.
- morelisp 4y ago
  It, uh, kind of doesn't? For most of its life post-WW2 it was a coal depot. The park was built ~1990 and by ~2005 it was known for its drug culture. ETA: A defense of the "rich history" of Görli is what finally got you to comment after 3 years?!
pa7x1 4y ago
Names of the Ethereum testnets were chosen after Metro stations. Ropsten, Sepolia, Goerli, Rinkeby, Kovan...

gemduster 4y ago

[dead]

mavu 4y ago

I am looking forward to the moment, when all the people who consider this the 2nd coming of christ equivalent for the crypto world realize that it's just business as usual.

wmf 4y ago
IMO the Merge will "prove" that PoS works and thus bring a lot of pressure to bear on PoW coins for being obviously wasteful.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  Hasn’t Cardano already shown that POS works and it did not have the effect that you predict? I’m afraid most people in the crypto world don’t care one bit about the carbon foot print of these technologies.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Cardano has a tiny market compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. And as we've seen over the years, a lot of problems only show up at scale. So if Ethereum is able to run PoS safely, it will be a much bigger deal.
mFixman 4y ago
I'm excited about this. Bitcoin and crypto use an obscene amount of energy and are basically impossible to ban. A working proof-of-stake system in a non-shitcoin will pile pressure on all cryptocurrencies to move to that system to use less energy.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Most crypto projects and blockchains aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum are already using proof of stake for consensus. But otherwise I agree, it will give more confidence in PoS to see it securing Ethereum.
cypress66 4y ago

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skizm 4y ago

Random brain dump of questions: Does proof-of-stake generally mean the more money you have the more influence you get over the consensus? If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? How does this affect mining pools? Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different?

sschueller 4y ago
Doesn't the same apply to PoW? The more money you have the more HW you can buy/rent to mine.
- latchkey 4y ago
  As someone with a huge number of GPUs and many megawatts of power mining ETH for many years now... it isn't that easy.
rglullis 4y ago
No, protocol changes are not affected by the amount of ETH staked. > Is a 51% attack any easier/harder/different? Harder. With Ethereum's consensus, you need 2/3 of the validators conspiring to produce an attack on the chain.
- ruuda 4y ago
  You can halt the chain with 1/3 of the stake though. In Ethereum, that would trigger an inactivity leak that eats away your stake until it’s less than 1/3 of the stake, and consensus can be achieved again.
ruuda 4y ago
> If yes, how could this manifest itself if a bad actor had a lot of ETH and tried to manipulate the chain? With the current price of ETH, it’s unlikely that a single entity could gain enough of the supply to do anything like this, but it is a valid concern for smaller chains. > Could they theoretically jump favored transactions to the front of the line and/or charge less fees for their own transactions? Block proposers can already do this. How often you get to be block proposer, is proportional to the amount of stake you have.

jl6 4y ago

Clearly there is some group of people with the power and influence to make this decision. How does that group compare to, say, US central bankers, in terms of transparency and democratic accountability? Edit: To be clear, I’m not talking about banking operations, I’m talking about decision making by central bank leadership. One of the purported benefits of crypto is independence from the shadowy cabals that run the US dollar. Except the Treasury isn’t actually all that shadowy - the staff have names, and are appointed through an ultimately democratic process. Whereas I really have no idea who is pulling the strings behind crypto and who they are accountable to. The original vision was for decentralized finance where nobody could pull the strings, but the level of coordination on display here in the PoW-to-PoS switch makes it obvious that strings exist and they are capable of being pulled.

jakswa 4y ago
At first bluff, I'd expect a ton of example and implementation code to be open-sourced. I still don't know what nightmare code is crawling CSV/ZIP (forget which) files daily doing ACH transfers, but afaik that's still how electronic banking is done? Would love to learn I'm outdated there.
mattdesl 4y ago
The development is in the open, happening through PRs on GitHub and across several independent client teams. You can join the R&D discord (I’m there as a casual observer) and watch or engage in technical discussions. You can propose EIPs or make suggestions about how the chain should work, and everybody can collectively decide it is a good or bad idea for the protocol. Overall it’s very open, although they do have to draw the line somewhere and I assume the core dev’s weekly zoom calls and standups are not open to everybody to join lest it degrade into madness (these devs work across a range of independent companies and orgs fwiw). Even these calls and notes are shared btw.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Who will implement the final decision?

leashless 4y ago

I introduced the Serenity (proof of stake) step of the Ethereum release process in this 2015 blog post for the Foundation. You might find it interesting to look back and see how we got here. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process...

pa7x1 4y ago

The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of ~2000 or 99.95%. You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

rglullis 4y ago
To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by them while running is less than the energy consumed by videogame consoles around the world while idling. Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.
- belltaco 4y ago
  >"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
    - belltaco 4y ago
      Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

boppo1 4y ago

I read the Bitcoin whitepaper+some other technical document (I think) and have a real solid grasp on how that works. Ethereum, although I have used defi/erc20/uniswap/etc, I've got no idea how it works. Validators, shards, miners... is there a single source I can go to to learn it all? I've got a pretty high technical threshold so if it gets mathy I'm not intimidated. I just want to finally know how it works.

mattdesl 4y ago
There are many parts to Ethereum and it’s PoS system so I don’t think you will be able to grasp it all in a short read. This is a good start: https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__foreword.html https://eth2.incessant.ink/book/00__introduction/00__forewor...
- randomsearch 4y ago
  That scares me. I’d want it to be a system so simple anyone could grasp the fundamentals very quickly. Reason being, it’s so important and complexity breeds oversights and bugs. Security is hard.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Most things in society start out simple and grow more complex as we add more speed, security, applications, and so on. See also: medicine, science, flight, computers, the internet. Bitcoin is a very simple system and very limited in its capabilities, but as far as modern blockchains go it is like the early room-size computers, Ford Model T, or Wright Flyer.
deleted 4y ago
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DennisP 4y ago
If you really want to dig in, here are the key papers on the PoS algorithm: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052 To learn about the sharding plan and various other stuff in the roadmap, this is a great technical overview: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-ethereum https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...

LittlePeter 4y ago

Off-topic. What's up with that giant meaningless Ethereum logo image occupying 90% of my screen. Why are websites doing this?

timbit42 4y ago
Are you using NoScript or an adblocker? It is probably blocking a third-party script from loading that the site needs to render the rest of the page.
- LittlePeter 4y ago
  Yup I use ad blocker.
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  I get this too for the same reason, ad/script blocking. It really tickles me to imagine the bewilderment of seeing a webdesign trend of starting every page with a giant static logo.

ShaneMcGowan 4y ago

So is the price of Ethereum going to go up a load now since you don’t need to buy GPUs, you just buy Ethereum itself?

cmckn 4y ago
I'm not sure how the incentives will play out. It takes $60k at the time of writing to become a validator, and they've yet to implement the mechanism to exit your stake; so I think there will be some hesitancy to become one. The more validators there are, the worse odds that yours will be chosen to handle a block; and I believe as the number of validators increases the reward per block also decreases (though it's been a while since I read the proposal).
- DennisP 4y ago
  Not too much hesitancy, there's already about 12% of the current supply of ETH on the proof-of-stake network.

kloch 4y ago

It will be interesting to see what happens with ETC if ETH miners switch to that after the merge. Does hashpower follow value, or does value follow hashpower?

BonoboIO 4y ago

Am I Right that gpu demand will crash, because nobody needs gpus for mining ethereum any more? Yes gaming and ai, but ethereum Mining was a large part of the gpu market.

mattdesl 4y ago
It’s likely.