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Comment by zionic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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One can be both positive about the benefit that this move brings, yet deeply negative about the overall value of crypto.

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.

This merge doesn't make the environmental cost go away. It props up past environmental harms on a pedistal.

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.

And what is that cost if not environmental?

Probably crime and wasted human potential

It should be rebranded as crypto speculative investment given how infrequently it's actually used as currency.

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.

>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?

It's been a few months away since at least 2018 - 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-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.

>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-p...

Same, also a skeptic. Glad to see the project has met a minimum bar of environmental acceptability and GPUs are available again. I’ve seen this promised for so many years, so I’m not sure any congrats is really in order… Anyways I have no idea how the economics of PoS can work but hopefully people don’t lose all their money. The only complaint I have about this is I suspect the shills will be out in full force, trying to get my cash into their market cap.

> 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.

>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.

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

PoW is those with the most wealth can determine what the truth is.

I don't think this is correct. The book "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier does a good job of covering this topic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can someone summarize what is happening?

<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.

lol

They will never be silent.

The goalposts will move endlessly.

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.

Personally, I like a currency I can walk into a shop and buy a sandwich with.

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

That makes you <checks notes> a "statist", apparently.

In at least one nation state, El Salvador, Bitcoin is an option for buying a sandwich with.

So the world is made of statists and tax evaders.

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.

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