Comment by sickygnar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sickygnar | Hacker News Reader

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I'm the oppsite, and I'm not a btc maximalist. I'm not going to make any predicitons about the price direction of either coin, I'm mainly surprised by eth's huge rise. there's some risk with the eth2 / PoS migration, though it comes with a huge benefit. would someone mind explaining the technical risk? i'm not that well versed in it, maybe i'm overstating it (the market is obviously bullish about it). without it, smart contracts are borderline unusable.

eth also has a big target on its back, a lot of the top coins are going after the smart contract space, mainly the centralized bootleg garbage called binance chain, which unfortunately does fill a market need, at least to less discerning "investors." to my detriment, i haven't touched it.

in contrast to eth, i'm not surprised about btc's rise. it does one thing and it does it well. it seems to work well as a hedge against inflation. i don't think that many people care about the environmental impact. it's not immediately visible, at least not like cars and other polluters. it's out of sight and out of mind.

The proof of stake ETH2 chain is already live for Ethereum and has been since December. That chain is parallel to the existing proof of work chain. They now need to merge the POW chain into the ETH2 validator nodes so they can conduct consensus from there on. The merge has been simulated already and is being tested. Core devs seem to be confident it will be feasible with low risk. But of course, there's always a chance something goes wrong.

For more info check out this beautiful site: https://ethmerge.com/

It's one thing for it to be live, it's another thing for it to be stress tested in actual production/real world with people's actual money.

I have a vested interest in hoping it lands successfully, but being a software engineer, I know how many bugs I've had even in simple programs, I can only imagine the kinds of bugs that will be discovered in eth2 considering just how complex it is.

The proof of stake chain is running in production with $16B staked in it.

As someone else said, it's in production. Also, there are many, many forks of the EVM in production that run on proof of stake mechanics (Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Skale, Qtum, xDai, etc). The main thing you have to worry about with move to ETH2 is contentious forks of the main chain, like if POW miners revolt and start a fork or a blip at the merge point that takes the chain offline for a bit. The ongoing ETH2 consensus and validation mechanic is live already. ETH2 also has client diversity, with 4 different implementations written in four different programming languages (Rust, Go, etc). There is some world class talent on the ETH core team. I have full faith in them and their testing regiment. But of course there is no such thing as risk-free.

It's not really in production until the value of Ether tokens is protected by it. When that happens it will be potentially profitable to hack it. Right now only Ethereum supporters are testing the network, not Ethereum antagonists (black/gray hats).

Don't worry. If anything goes wrong (like a hacker stealing everybody's coins), they can just rollback the transaction. That's not a new thing for ethereum, to just rollback transactions. Lol.

For the uninitiated read about the dao hack and the debate that ensued. Basically, they just rolled back the transaction, just like a bank.

You're mixing up two different issues. One is a bug in the implementation of Ethereum, the other is a bug in a smart contract (that runs on Ethereum).

Undoing the former by rolling back the chain and fixing the bug is the only logical thing to do. Bitcoin devs have done the same a couple of times (e.g. [1]).

The DAO hack, however, was not caused by a bug in Ethereum. It was caused by a bug in the code of a smart contract. Ethereum executed this smart contract faithfully (there was no bug in Ethereum). Bitcoin has never done this.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

>hedge against inflation

If an asset is an inflation hedge and it goes up faster than inflation, there is a risk that it will go down eventually to match the inflation rate. This is true for gold. Pretty much nobody believes this for Bitcoin, everyone expects Bitcoin to exceed inflation over the long term.

Even if you ignore the above in general Bitcoin is a poor asset (downgrade from hedge) against inflation because it doesn't care about inflation. It's highly volatile which means it can go down while inflation is going up, which is the exact opposite of what you want from an inflation hedge.

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