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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
> 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.
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
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.
<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.
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.
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.
>Just line up the number of people who died / got sick of non-COVID19 diseases in 2020
This is _extremely_ difficult to do, as a mix of both incentive structures and poor policy lead to any death with a positive PCR test being counted as a COVID death.
It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".
COVID19 doesn't even play a role until 2 or 3 lines later. Doctors write down "Killed by X" which was caused by "Y" which was caused by "Z". COVID19 is never "X", its always Y, Z, or later.
---------
Because we have these statistics, we can correlate "X" causes. If "X" is "blunt force trauma to the head", it is unlikely that "Y" or "Z" will be COVID19.
But don't take my word for it. There's plenty of death certificates, and such data has been coallated together.
See Table 2 in this list, as an example. You can see that the immediate cause of death for most COVID19 patients is Pneumonia, unspecified (J18.9), followed by Acute respiratory failure (J96.0).
Which of these ICD codes do you think is being misclassified as a COVID19 death? Please be specific. Any such large scale misclassification would be obviously in the data here.
You're right. At one point I read it was as high as 10 years that the average person who died of covid could have otherwise lived on for. I suspect that number has changed a few times over the pandemic, but even a few years more years with a loved one is priceless, losing anything close to a decade would be a massive loss.
I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.
It doesn’t matter anyway. The data required to support our mitigations stopped mattering a long long time ago. ..Sometime back when the “4% kill rate” predicted by the imperial college paper turned out to be very very wrong and when all those temporary military hospital things got closed because they weren’t being used. That might have been a good time to reevaluate what the fuck we were doing but instead of celebrating the fact that Covid wasn’t nearly as bad as predicted we just doubled down for a year and a half more instead.
Honestly it’s best to just take the numbers at face value and assume any overcount is balanced by undercounts.
If 95% of people died from covid, and 5% died with covid, then basically for all intents and purposes and how we use this data, the distinction is irrelevant.
I agree. I just take the numbers at face value. Trying to suggest they are under or over counted is a fools errand. It will take decades of distance from this event for cooler heads to tally up what really happened.
>You are mixing up mortality and mortality attributed to COVID.
There's also the problem of governments playing funny games around deaths and "vaccinated". Someone who died from an adverse reaction immediately following their shot would not count as a vaccinated death, because the _definition_ of "vaccinated" meant you completed the vaccine schedule which was multiple shots over time.
In trials the vaccines were tested in tens of thousands of people where adverse reactions were meticulously recorded and there just isn’t any evidence that the vaccines caused immediate death in anybody.
Then beyond that there isn’t any evidence that there also is a government conspiracy following the first dubious claim.
>They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering
How is HN so consistently cryptophobic?
Imagine the reaction you’d get here suggesting say, E2EE is “explicitly a product for {crime}”. You’d be rightly mocked, but throw in crypto and it’s like 75% of the people here lose basic reasoning skills. I’d be less frustrated if it wasn’t so common.
No, it’s like saying E2EE encryption is designed to secure private communications between two parties, which is what it’s designed to do.
Mixers are designed to facilitate money laundering. You can claim it’s for legitimate privacy, etc but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s money laundering.
I have no horse in this race and pardon my nitpicking but those two phrases are not equivalent.
For E2EE,you describe the base level capability: Secure message between two parties.
For Mixers, you describe an act that the capability of making money hard to trace enables: Money laundering. If you applied a similar argument to E2EE (as many have and will keep doing), encrypted communications are a way for people to do illegal things away from the eyes of the law. Trade illegal items, send banned/illegal/questionable content, etc.
From a pure capability standpoint, mixers, like E2EE, are a way to secure XYZ activity (Which happens to be money transfer) from prying eyes.
Modern ones work, like you said, down to -20F. One important caveat however is that they don't not-work below -20F, they just fall back to "emergency heat" aka resistive coils. While of course emergency-heat uses far more power that power can still be green.
The biggest problem remaining is cost, $20k+ for a 24 SEER heat pump is just bonkers.
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.