11 ms·

Merge soon

133 points by yonilevy 4y ago

zionic 4y ago
This deserves to be the top spot on HN right now. Years of countless replies and mockery here across N accounts telling me this day would _never_ happen. Yet here we are, we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent. EDIT: I'm rate limited/soft banned so I can't reply to most of you/anyone until tomorrow. While I can still edit: -Cash is the ultimate scammer currency, it would take a ages for crypto to match or replace cash as the best "scam" currency" -Privacy =/= laundering. Privately transacting is not implicitly a crime. -Crypto has value as trustless value transfer outside the nation-state system, especially in these uncertain times -Smart contracts are criminally undervalued. Programmable money is the future.
- k__ 4y ago
  lol They will never be silent. The goalposts will move endlessly.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    Some people don’t trust the government, other people do. I like a liquid, fungible asset not controlled by the government. Statists don’t. It’s a philosophical debate more than a technical one at this point.
    - wedn3sday 4y ago
      Personally, I like a currency I can walk into a shop and buy a sandwich with.
      - seibelj 4y ago
        If the only use case for crypto was to buy sandwiches then it wouldn't be a trillion dollar asset class. That isn't the main use case at this point
      - bigiain 4y ago
        That makes you <checks notes> a "statist", apparently.
      - cflynnus 4y ago
        In at least one nation state, El Salvador, Bitcoin is an option for buying a sandwich with.
    - mantas 4y ago
      So the world is made of statists and tax evaders.
    - cflynnus 4y ago
      Bitcoin gives individuals the ability to better protect their wealth/savings by storing it in a form where it can easily be hidden (thus protected). It amazes me some people think that's a bad thing.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  One can be both positive about the benefit that this move brings, yet deeply negative about the overall value of crypto.
  - zionic 4y ago
    Perhaps that nuance is achievable, but I have seen none of that here. That said, I fundamentally disagree that crypto is "overall negative", and with the move to PoS the largest negative aspect of crytpo (the environmental cost of PoW) goes away.
    - Sephr 4y ago
      This merge doesn't make the environmental cost go away. It props up past environmental harms on a pedistal.
  - joe-collins 4y ago
    This is absolutely where I stand. Hurrah, Ethereum's cost on humanity and the environment is dropping drastically! Unfortunately, it still has a measurable (if no longer grotesque) cost with extremely dubious benefit.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      And what is that cost if not environmental?
      - presentation 4y ago
        Probably crime and wasted human potential
  - extragood 4y ago
    It should be rebranded as crypto speculative investment given how infrequently it's actually used as currency.
- jitl 4y ago
  My stance has been “I’ll believe it when I see it” after years of the merge being “months” away. I’m a skeptic but happy to see a major cryptocurrency switching off the planet burner.
  - zionic 4y ago
    >after years of the merge being “months” away It's only been months aways for a few months though. I have endured years of gaslighting comments like this _specifically_ from this asymmetrically moderated community, despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away. The "maybe this year" started in Jan 2020. COVID happened. They didn't start saying "within a year" again until end of 2021. Meanwhile the _beacon_ chain launched in 2020, which is what's taking over for the PoW chain in ... 1 hour. Maybe you're acting in good faith and you misheard that the beacon chain was launching 2 years ago and thought that was this. But how likely is that really?
    - Nursie 4y ago
      It's been a few months away since at least 2018 - https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-pos-staking-in-2019-3a3855e6a018 https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-po... And I can find talk about it being 'soon' from 2016 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ethereum-switch-to-proof-of-stake https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ether... So I think it's perfectly good faith to say we've been hearing about the 'imminent' switch to PoS for several years now.
    - Tenoke 4y ago
      >despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away Weird since Vitalik said it will take 'maybe a year' and can be ready 'as early in 2018' in 2017. He has admitted many times he had and promoted much shorter timeframes than reality even calling it his biggest mistake in his Twitter AMA last year. https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-proof-stake-2018-says-vitalik-buterin https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-p...
  - eth_holder99 4y ago
- pbreit 4y ago
  Can someone summarize what is happening?
  - bigiain 4y ago
    <snark> The people who are Etherium-wealthy are changing Etherium to mean they stay wealthy without having to burn the planet solving meaningless puzzles, while at the same time creating an insurmountable barrier to anybody else becoming obscenely Etherium-wealthy like they are. This is apparently a "good thing". The real world continues to not care.
- fermentation 4y ago
  there’s been much discussion here about how PoS does little to provide a decentralized monetary system since it appears to be built with the idea those with the most money should determine what the “truth” is
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    PoW is those with the most wealth can determine what the truth is.
    - cflynnus 4y ago
      I don't think this is correct. The book "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier does a good job of covering this topic.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      No, in PoW those with the most hashrate determine what the order of transactions is. Most of the world's computing power is in personal computers, so it is at least somewhat fairly distributed.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        In theoretical terms, wealth can be turned into hashrate. In practical terms, most of BTC is mined on dedicated mining rigs by a relatively small number of players.
- rvz 4y ago
  Yes. The environmental argument of Ethereum 'burning up the planet' is now about to be addressed and that will silence the endless criticism made by the extreme crypto skeptics about Ethereum incinerating the planet. They will now just congratulate the re-centralization of Ethereum running on Proof-of-Stake. The crypto-skeptics will never be silent, but I can assure you that crypto is still here to stay, with some crypto projects surviving and some of them will not survive.
- muglug 4y ago
  > we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent. One very popular cryptocurrency is making the switch. That still leaves Bitcoin, with double the trading volume, and most of the other popular cryptocurrencies. More importantly it doesn't change the fundamental problem with crypto: it's deliberately difficult to regulate, which means that it's still a scammer's paradise. And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions.
  - Tenoke 4y ago
    >most of the other popular cryptocurrencies. Untrue. Check e.g. top 10, 20 or 50 on Coinmarketcap. Most are PoS. Further, with Ethereum being PoS the mining behind everything except Bitcoin is a rounding error. >And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions. You might want to look into stablecoins or more generally into Ethereum if you think using it for daily transactions is the main usecase.
- cflynnus 4y ago
  Strongly disagree that PoW is a form of "shackles" PoW = bad is an Ethereum marketing narrative. The Bitcoin community has many robust counterarguments to this narrative.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
The biggest gap between people involved with the Ethereum ecosystem vs. mainstream media seems to be that the former are focused on the economic impact of The Merge, while the latter is focused on the environmental impact. Don't get me wrong, reducing energy costs is great and everyone agrees with that, but the resulting changes in monetary policy are probably even more impactful. But of course this is not sensationalist or simple enough for the media to focus on. The charts on this website are great, but people outside of the ecosystem likely won't understand them, which is a real problem if Ethereum wants adoption.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on. A fraction of a percent of the population cares about Etherum's impact on the way they already conduct business.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    > Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on I don't know in which world you live in, but from where I'm sitting, it sure as hell doesn't look like this.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Not everyone is equally motivated, that's for damn sure.
- pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  False dichotomy. What nobody pays attention to is that the entire thing is a cartel and only incentivizes restricting freedom over time and automating turmoil. It’s a complete disgrace to what cyberspace represents. It’s an opportunistic, exploitative, incompatible, deprecated, deficient paradigm stuck in a physically-constrained view of the future perpetually hindering progress due to preventing the mind in being able to contemplate non-physical things as infinite. Pathetic, sad, crappy, leaky. All driven by greed and ignorance. People are being played to act as pawns for the same “elite controllers” that they complain about; being led to perpetuate playing the same game. The only thing worse than actual scarcity is completely artificial scarcity and erecting simulacra around that notion as if it were real. Way to go building an actual matrix of ignorance and slavery.
RestlessMind 4y ago
An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should be celebrated here. Else, what is the point in calling ourselves "Hacker" News?
- pavlov 4y ago
  What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
  - sterlind 4y ago
    proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
    - throw827474737 4y ago
      and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
      - meowkit 4y ago
        Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
        sterlind 4y ago
        I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.
paul_funyun 4y ago
Ethereum post-merge looks a hell of a lot like a security. We'll see what regulators do, but it's concerning that the Ethereum Foundation has been so quiet about regulatory hazard. Also alarming is the question marks as to when you'll be able to withdraw staked Ethereum, given the security risks from attacks intended to cause slashing and the dependence on total stake for what the staking rewards are.
- dmak 4y ago
  Do you have more specifics in what you are referring to?
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    Ethereum PoW could be seen (if you squint hard enough) as some sort of activity that produces a good (through mining) and its respective marketplace. Ehereum PoS is just a financial asset with a weird governing structure (like a currency future? idk). It's basically standard stock.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vanviegen 4y ago
      Something is called a 'good' if it has some inherent with to some people. PoW does not. Exhaust gas isn't a good either. PoW and PoS are both financially assets with a weird governing structure, I'd say.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors. Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.
sdfhbdf 4y ago
If somebody is as ignorant as me as to what is this about, it’s about ETH cryptocurrency changing to Proof of Stake, take it from what seems to be the original source: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I have a vague idea of ETH merge, but not sure what this ultrasound money site is about. From Q&A: > Ultra sound money is an Ethereum meme focusing on the likely decrease of the ETH supply. > If capped-supply gold is sound, decreasing-supply ether is ultra sound. I have no idea what this last sentence means.
  - mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
    It's a meme. It literally says that in your quote... Capped supply assets are good because that combats inflation, so decreasing supply must be even better (=ultra), right? That's the meme.
  - catach 4y ago
    "Sound" as in "stable" might be a bit that helps.
  - sdfhbdf 4y ago
    Maybe there is more to it but isn’t that just a wordplay wherein sound means both what music creates and a word signifying something making sense? Or so you mean something related to the supply?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Yes, there is more to it. "Soundness" is a specific term in computer science regarding a program being unable to end up in a invalid state. Usually used in type systems to describe a type system that makes your program unable to be "wrong". The idea of "soundness" is based on this seminal paper: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milner-polymorphism.pdf https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milne...
lacker 4y ago
I have been skeptical for a long time that the transition to proof of stake would actually happen. It just seemed like the project was delayed and delayed, and there are so many fundamental development problems with this sort of decentralized migration. Nothing quite like this has ever worked before. But here we are and there is no obvious problem in sight. I'll keep my fingers crossed, and if it goes off without a hitch, I'll have to admit I was too pessimistic and revise my opinion of the Ethereum ecosystem upwards.
- CastFX 4y ago
  Thank you! After having seen so many pessimistic comments about the merge it's refreshing to see someone willing to change its mind.
technion 4y ago
This site does a good job of laying out an awful lot of information. Looks like NextJS - can I ask what was used for the UI and charts?
cflynnus 4y ago
"ultrasound" money is not money where the issuance and protocol rules can/do change at the direction of a core group of developers like they do in Ethereum
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- capableweb 4y ago
  What cryptocurrency cannot adjust its protocol based on what the core developers want? You want a cryptocurrency that can launch once and never change after that, even as critical bugs are found? I don't think any cryptocurrency like that exists nor do people want it.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
My intuition is that PoS isn't economically stable model. In PoW, the miners had interest in stability of prices because their costs were anchored in reality by the mining rig. So once you had expended the real life cost of a mining rig, your interests were to only increase the price of the coin. Whales might have wanted to manipulate prices but they ran the risk of bankrupting miners (many of them were miners). Now the incentives are perverse. Since prices aren't anchored by real world expenses, the incentives of whale stakers is extreme price volatility, so that they can increase the share of the network they hold. They are free to pump and dump as they please even more than before because there's nothing anchoring them to reality. They get to set the price alone.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Well, they can only move the price by whatever percentage they hold in ETH. I would assume, maybe naively but not unreasonably, that a holder with no plans to sell would see staking as a mostly risk free way of generating return. So I'd assume that these big guys would be putting most, if not all, of their capital into staking. Therefore I wouldn't expect their ability to move the market to be significantly higher than total staked ETH as a percentage of total supply. Again, naively, people panic and a smaller but substantial move could cascade, but a news article could do that as well. Stakers don't have a monopoly on the ability to cause a stampede. Last I read on the mechanics of all of this, the emission rate, burn rate, fee burn and staking requirement were designed in such a way as to keep a certain amount of total ether staked. I don't recall what that percentage was, I think around 10% and it's not exact, this is game theoretical after all and incentives are what drives this so it will fluctuate a bit. There are problems with not having an ongoing cost to validation, and not having assets external to the system at risk, a big one is the so called "nothing at stake" problem which ethereum claims to have solved (and have a compelling case as to why if you read about it) but I don't believe this problem you speak of is one of them. I am somewhat concerned that these metrics to maintain a certain percentage at stake will not shake out the way they planned and have to be adjusted with a hard fork, this happens in ethereum all the time with incentive structures.
  - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
jeroenhd 4y ago
This is good. It took way too long to get here, but it's good that Ethereum is finally fixing its "waste energy to create coupons" system. I still don't really see the point of most ethereum applications but at least it's trying to burn the planet much slower now. All eyes should now be on Bitcoin to also switch to a non-planet-burning proofing system. Ethereum proved that it can happen and all other blockchains should be held to a similar standard.
- cflynnus 4y ago
  Labeling Bitcoin mining as "wasteful" is a subjective opinion not an objective truth. Mining does produce something: physics backed security guarantees, which has a value that's determined by a free market (see Bitcoin price/market cap).
kevinak 4y ago
Pretty sad to see so many people hate on proof-of-work. I can only assume it's because they have read shallow articles that tell them "Bitcoin uses X amount of energy therefore it must be bad, because using energy is bad" or something along those lines. It's not so simple. Proof of work solves issues like: - What to do with electricity before the generating source is connected to the grid - Reduces carbon emissions by incentivising the burning of methane gas (20x worse than CO2) - Makes it more viable to research new energy sources by lowering the cost. - Acts as a load-balancer for the grid and makes it way more stable. This in turn means that we can build out huge amounts of solar and wind that rely on the weather. Of course there are situations where Bitcoin is mined using non-renewable sources but if you believe that Solar and Wind are so cheap, then that issue will sort itself out, no? And it won't take long. If you're an environmentalist and you want to solve the global issue of CO2 emissions, Bitcoin (and PoW) is a very very valuable tool. Don't throw it away because of a faulty belief.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I don’t even understand what I’m looking at on fake money websites anymore. A bunch of graphs that don’t correspond to anything at all? The title doesn’t even appear on the page. There’s no text content indicating what this is about. Y’all have fun with your gambling, I guess.
michaelsbradley 4y ago
Nursie 4y ago
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but it is good to see one of the major ones move away from endlessly thrashing hardware and consuming huge amounts of energy. So congrats, that's one major negative externality tackled, assuming that this all works out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
schizo89 4y ago
It's merged
mamoriamohit 4y ago
Interesting that it has started deflating already!

133 points by yonilevy 4y ago

This deserves to be the top spot on HN right now. Years of countless replies and mockery here across N accounts telling me this day would _never_ happen. Yet here we are, we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent. EDIT: I'm rate limited/soft banned so I can't reply to most of you/anyone until tomorrow. While I can still edit: -Cash is the ultimate scammer currency, it would take a ages for crypto to match or replace cash as the best "scam" currency" -Privacy =/= laundering. Privately transacting is not implicitly a crime. -Crypto has value as trustless value transfer outside the nation-state system, especially in these uncertain times -Smart contracts are criminally undervalued. Programmable money is the future.

k__ 4y ago
lol They will never be silent. The goalposts will move endlessly.
- seibelj 4y ago
  Some people don’t trust the government, other people do. I like a liquid, fungible asset not controlled by the government. Statists don’t. It’s a philosophical debate more than a technical one at this point.
  - wedn3sday 4y ago
    Personally, I like a currency I can walk into a shop and buy a sandwich with.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      If the only use case for crypto was to buy sandwiches then it wouldn't be a trillion dollar asset class. That isn't the main use case at this point
    - bigiain 4y ago
      That makes you <checks notes> a "statist", apparently.
    - cflynnus 4y ago
      In at least one nation state, El Salvador, Bitcoin is an option for buying a sandwich with.
  - mantas 4y ago
    So the world is made of statists and tax evaders.
  - cflynnus 4y ago
    Bitcoin gives individuals the ability to better protect their wealth/savings by storing it in a form where it can easily be hidden (thus protected). It amazes me some people think that's a bad thing.
robin_reala 4y ago
One can be both positive about the benefit that this move brings, yet deeply negative about the overall value of crypto.
- zionic 4y ago
  Perhaps that nuance is achievable, but I have seen none of that here. That said, I fundamentally disagree that crypto is "overall negative", and with the move to PoS the largest negative aspect of crytpo (the environmental cost of PoW) goes away.
  - Sephr 4y ago
    This merge doesn't make the environmental cost go away. It props up past environmental harms on a pedistal.
- joe-collins 4y ago
  This is absolutely where I stand. Hurrah, Ethereum's cost on humanity and the environment is dropping drastically! Unfortunately, it still has a measurable (if no longer grotesque) cost with extremely dubious benefit.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    And what is that cost if not environmental?
    - presentation 4y ago
      Probably crime and wasted human potential
- extragood 4y ago
  It should be rebranded as crypto speculative investment given how infrequently it's actually used as currency.
jitl 4y ago
My stance has been “I’ll believe it when I see it” after years of the merge being “months” away. I’m a skeptic but happy to see a major cryptocurrency switching off the planet burner.
- zionic 4y ago
  >after years of the merge being “months” away It's only been months aways for a few months though. I have endured years of gaslighting comments like this _specifically_ from this asymmetrically moderated community, despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away. The "maybe this year" started in Jan 2020. COVID happened. They didn't start saying "within a year" again until end of 2021. Meanwhile the _beacon_ chain launched in 2020, which is what's taking over for the PoW chain in ... 1 hour. Maybe you're acting in good faith and you misheard that the beacon chain was launching 2 years ago and thought that was this. But how likely is that really?
  - Nursie 4y ago
    It's been a few months away since at least 2018 - https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-pos-staking-in-2019-3a3855e6a018 https://medium.com/@jyspark/getting-prepared-for-ethereum-po... And I can find talk about it being 'soon' from 2016 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ethereum-switch-to-proof-of-stake https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33802343/when-will-ether... So I think it's perfectly good faith to say we've been hearing about the 'imminent' switch to PoS for several years now.
  - Tenoke 4y ago
    >despite knowing for example in 2017 that PoS was years away Weird since Vitalik said it will take 'maybe a year' and can be ready 'as early in 2018' in 2017. He has admitted many times he had and promoted much shorter timeframes than reality even calling it his biggest mistake in his Twitter AMA last year. https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-proof-stake-2018-says-vitalik-buterin https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/25/ethereum-may-upgrade-p...
- eth_holder99 4y ago
pbreit 4y ago
Can someone summarize what is happening?
- bigiain 4y ago
  <snark> The people who are Etherium-wealthy are changing Etherium to mean they stay wealthy without having to burn the planet solving meaningless puzzles, while at the same time creating an insurmountable barrier to anybody else becoming obscenely Etherium-wealthy like they are. This is apparently a "good thing". The real world continues to not care.
fermentation 4y ago
there’s been much discussion here about how PoS does little to provide a decentralized monetary system since it appears to be built with the idea those with the most money should determine what the “truth” is
- aidenn0 4y ago
  PoW is those with the most wealth can determine what the truth is.
  - cflynnus 4y ago
    I don't think this is correct. The book "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier does a good job of covering this topic.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    No, in PoW those with the most hashrate determine what the order of transactions is. Most of the world's computing power is in personal computers, so it is at least somewhat fairly distributed.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      In theoretical terms, wealth can be turned into hashrate. In practical terms, most of BTC is mined on dedicated mining rigs by a relatively small number of players.
rvz 4y ago
Yes. The environmental argument of Ethereum 'burning up the planet' is now about to be addressed and that will silence the endless criticism made by the extreme crypto skeptics about Ethereum incinerating the planet. They will now just congratulate the re-centralization of Ethereum running on Proof-of-Stake. The crypto-skeptics will never be silent, but I can assure you that crypto is still here to stay, with some crypto projects surviving and some of them will not survive.
muglug 4y ago
> we're finally about to break away from the shackles of PoW and the crypto skeptics are silent. One very popular cryptocurrency is making the switch. That still leaves Bitcoin, with double the trading volume, and most of the other popular cryptocurrencies. More importantly it doesn't change the fundamental problem with crypto: it's deliberately difficult to regulate, which means that it's still a scammer's paradise. And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  >most of the other popular cryptocurrencies. Untrue. Check e.g. top 10, 20 or 50 on Coinmarketcap. Most are PoS. Further, with Ethereum being PoS the mining behind everything except Bitcoin is a rounding error. >And Ethereum's price can still fluctuate wildly on any given day, making it unsuitable for most real-world transactions. You might want to look into stablecoins or more generally into Ethereum if you think using it for daily transactions is the main usecase.
cflynnus 4y ago
Strongly disagree that PoW is a form of "shackles" PoW = bad is an Ethereum marketing narrative. The Bitcoin community has many robust counterarguments to this narrative.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

The biggest gap between people involved with the Ethereum ecosystem vs. mainstream media seems to be that the former are focused on the economic impact of The Merge, while the latter is focused on the environmental impact. Don't get me wrong, reducing energy costs is great and everyone agrees with that, but the resulting changes in monetary policy are probably even more impactful. But of course this is not sensationalist or simple enough for the media to focus on. The charts on this website are great, but people outside of the ecosystem likely won't understand them, which is a real problem if Ethereum wants adoption.

smoldesu 4y ago
Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on. A fraction of a percent of the population cares about Etherum's impact on the way they already conduct business.
- shafyy 4y ago
  > Everyone has a mutual interest in not destroying the world we live on I don't know in which world you live in, but from where I'm sitting, it sure as hell doesn't look like this.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Not everyone is equally motivated, that's for damn sure.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
False dichotomy. What nobody pays attention to is that the entire thing is a cartel and only incentivizes restricting freedom over time and automating turmoil. It’s a complete disgrace to what cyberspace represents. It’s an opportunistic, exploitative, incompatible, deprecated, deficient paradigm stuck in a physically-constrained view of the future perpetually hindering progress due to preventing the mind in being able to contemplate non-physical things as infinite. Pathetic, sad, crappy, leaky. All driven by greed and ignorance. People are being played to act as pawns for the same “elite controllers” that they complain about; being led to perpetuate playing the same game. The only thing worse than actual scarcity is completely artificial scarcity and erecting simulacra around that notion as if it were real. Way to go building an actual matrix of ignorance and slavery.

RestlessMind 4y ago

An open source project pulling off one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software development thanks to efforts of a distributed group of people should be celebrated here. Else, what is the point in calling ourselves "Hacker" News?

pavlov 4y ago
What makes this one of the biggest upgrades in the history of software? How many Ethereum nodes are there compared to, say, iOS or Android or Windows deployments? What’s their hardware diversity? What’s the complexity of Ethereum compared to the aforementioned operating systems?
- sterlind 4y ago
  proof of stake is extraordinarily complicated to get right. that's why it took so long. not only is the code changing, but so is the entire incentive structure of a huge virtual economy, running the code in a sprawling, Byzantine, decentralized system, while trying to keep a miner's revolt from sabotaging the whole deal.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    and when the simplest etherum contracts with many reviewer eyes allowed for exploits, how is anyone confident that this has been achieved correctly?
    - meowkit 4y ago
      Because there have been several testnet merges (including a shadow merge of the mainnet) that have been successful and identified issues that have been fixed.
      - sterlind 4y ago
        I'm sure they've found and fixed issues. are you sure they've found and fixed all the issues? if I were a hacker, and I found a juicy bug in PoS, I'd sit on it until merge. either make money by shorting ETH and then wreaking havoc, or sell it to someone else so I don't get my hands dirty.

paul_funyun 4y ago

Ethereum post-merge looks a hell of a lot like a security. We'll see what regulators do, but it's concerning that the Ethereum Foundation has been so quiet about regulatory hazard. Also alarming is the question marks as to when you'll be able to withdraw staked Ethereum, given the security risks from attacks intended to cause slashing and the dependence on total stake for what the staking rewards are.

dmak 4y ago
Do you have more specifics in what you are referring to?
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Ethereum PoW could be seen (if you squint hard enough) as some sort of activity that produces a good (through mining) and its respective marketplace. Ehereum PoS is just a financial asset with a weird governing structure (like a currency future? idk). It's basically standard stock.
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  - vanviegen 4y ago
    Something is called a 'good' if it has some inherent with to some people. PoW does not. Exhaust gas isn't a good either. PoW and PoS are both financially assets with a weird governing structure, I'd say.
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- jhugo 4y ago
  Staking ETH pays interest, so buying ETH is buying an interest-bearing asset (i.e. a security). Some of the biggest players in staking will be exchanges who will likely give some (most) of the interest they earn to their depositors. Those exchanges are then a ripe target for existing securities regulation, and they'll also be the biggest validators on the network, so risk for them is risk for the whole network.

sdfhbdf 4y ago

If somebody is as ignorant as me as to what is this about, it’s about ETH cryptocurrency changing to Proof of Stake, take it from what seems to be the original source: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/

thrdbndndn 4y ago
I have a vague idea of ETH merge, but not sure what this ultrasound money site is about. From Q&A: > Ultra sound money is an Ethereum meme focusing on the likely decrease of the ETH supply. > If capped-supply gold is sound, decreasing-supply ether is ultra sound. I have no idea what this last sentence means.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  It's a meme. It literally says that in your quote... Capped supply assets are good because that combats inflation, so decreasing supply must be even better (=ultra), right? That's the meme.
- catach 4y ago
  "Sound" as in "stable" might be a bit that helps.
- sdfhbdf 4y ago
  Maybe there is more to it but isn’t that just a wordplay wherein sound means both what music creates and a word signifying something making sense? Or so you mean something related to the supply?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Yes, there is more to it. "Soundness" is a specific term in computer science regarding a program being unable to end up in a invalid state. Usually used in type systems to describe a type system that makes your program unable to be "wrong". The idea of "soundness" is based on this seminal paper: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milner-polymorphism.pdf https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/sp2013/project/milne...

lacker 4y ago

I have been skeptical for a long time that the transition to proof of stake would actually happen. It just seemed like the project was delayed and delayed, and there are so many fundamental development problems with this sort of decentralized migration. Nothing quite like this has ever worked before. But here we are and there is no obvious problem in sight. I'll keep my fingers crossed, and if it goes off without a hitch, I'll have to admit I was too pessimistic and revise my opinion of the Ethereum ecosystem upwards.

CastFX 4y ago
Thank you! After having seen so many pessimistic comments about the merge it's refreshing to see someone willing to change its mind.

technion 4y ago

This site does a good job of laying out an awful lot of information. Looks like NextJS - can I ask what was used for the UI and charts?

cflynnus 4y ago

"ultrasound" money is not money where the issuance and protocol rules can/do change at the direction of a core group of developers like they do in Ethereum

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capableweb 4y ago
What cryptocurrency cannot adjust its protocol based on what the core developers want? You want a cryptocurrency that can launch once and never change after that, even as critical bugs are found? I don't think any cryptocurrency like that exists nor do people want it.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

My intuition is that PoS isn't economically stable model. In PoW, the miners had interest in stability of prices because their costs were anchored in reality by the mining rig. So once you had expended the real life cost of a mining rig, your interests were to only increase the price of the coin. Whales might have wanted to manipulate prices but they ran the risk of bankrupting miners (many of them were miners). Now the incentives are perverse. Since prices aren't anchored by real world expenses, the incentives of whale stakers is extreme price volatility, so that they can increase the share of the network they hold. They are free to pump and dump as they please even more than before because there's nothing anchoring them to reality. They get to set the price alone.

betwixthewires 4y ago
Well, they can only move the price by whatever percentage they hold in ETH. I would assume, maybe naively but not unreasonably, that a holder with no plans to sell would see staking as a mostly risk free way of generating return. So I'd assume that these big guys would be putting most, if not all, of their capital into staking. Therefore I wouldn't expect their ability to move the market to be significantly higher than total staked ETH as a percentage of total supply. Again, naively, people panic and a smaller but substantial move could cascade, but a news article could do that as well. Stakers don't have a monopoly on the ability to cause a stampede. Last I read on the mechanics of all of this, the emission rate, burn rate, fee burn and staking requirement were designed in such a way as to keep a certain amount of total ether staked. I don't recall what that percentage was, I think around 10% and it's not exact, this is game theoretical after all and incentives are what drives this so it will fluctuate a bit. There are problems with not having an ongoing cost to validation, and not having assets external to the system at risk, a big one is the so called "nothing at stake" problem which ethereum claims to have solved (and have a compelling case as to why if you read about it) but I don't believe this problem you speak of is one of them. I am somewhat concerned that these metrics to maintain a certain percentage at stake will not shake out the way they planned and have to be adjusted with a hard fork, this happens in ethereum all the time with incentive structures.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago

This is good. It took way too long to get here, but it's good that Ethereum is finally fixing its "waste energy to create coupons" system. I still don't really see the point of most ethereum applications but at least it's trying to burn the planet much slower now. All eyes should now be on Bitcoin to also switch to a non-planet-burning proofing system. Ethereum proved that it can happen and all other blockchains should be held to a similar standard.

cflynnus 4y ago
Labeling Bitcoin mining as "wasteful" is a subjective opinion not an objective truth. Mining does produce something: physics backed security guarantees, which has a value that's determined by a free market (see Bitcoin price/market cap).

kevinak 4y ago

Pretty sad to see so many people hate on proof-of-work. I can only assume it's because they have read shallow articles that tell them "Bitcoin uses X amount of energy therefore it must be bad, because using energy is bad" or something along those lines. It's not so simple. Proof of work solves issues like: - What to do with electricity before the generating source is connected to the grid - Reduces carbon emissions by incentivising the burning of methane gas (20x worse than CO2) - Makes it more viable to research new energy sources by lowering the cost. - Acts as a load-balancer for the grid and makes it way more stable. This in turn means that we can build out huge amounts of solar and wind that rely on the weather. Of course there are situations where Bitcoin is mined using non-renewable sources but if you believe that Solar and Wind are so cheap, then that issue will sort itself out, no? And it won't take long. If you're an environmentalist and you want to solve the global issue of CO2 emissions, Bitcoin (and PoW) is a very very valuable tool. Don't throw it away because of a faulty belief.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I don’t even understand what I’m looking at on fake money websites anymore. A bunch of graphs that don’t correspond to anything at all? The title doesn’t even appear on the page. There’s no text content indicating what this is about. Y’all have fun with your gambling, I guess.

michaelsbradley 4y ago

Nursie 4y ago

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but it is good to see one of the major ones move away from endlessly thrashing hardware and consuming huge amounts of energy. So congrats, that's one major negative externality tackled, assuming that this all works out.

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schizo89 4y ago

It's merged

mamoriamohit 4y ago

Interesting that it has started deflating already!