from Hacker News

Merge soon

by yonilevy on 9/15/22, 4:44 AM with 129 comments

• by lacker on 9/15/22, 5:42 AM

  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.

• by paul_funyun on 9/15/22, 5:29 AM

  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.

• by eyelidlessness on 9/15/22, 6:24 AM

  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.

• by machina_ex_deus on 9/15/22, 6:00 AM

  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.

• by sdfhbdf on 9/15/22, 5:32 AM

  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/

• by cflynnus on 9/15/22, 5:50 AM

  "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

• by Nursie on 9/15/22, 6:45 AM

  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.

• by RestlessMind on 9/15/22, 5:27 AM

  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?

• by mudrockbestgirl on 9/15/22, 5:22 AM

  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.

• by technion on 9/15/22, 5:47 AM

  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?

• by jeroenhd on 9/15/22, 5:54 AM

  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.

• by mamoriamohit on 9/15/22, 7:11 AM

  Interesting that it has started deflating already!

• by schizo89 on 9/15/22, 6:47 AM

  It's merged

• by zionic on 9/15/22, 5:14 AM

  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.

• by kevinak on 9/15/22, 6:14 AM

  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.