Crypto's Ethereum Blockchain Completes Its Key Shanghai Software Upgrade (bloomberg.com) 17
The Ethereum blockchain, the most important commercial highway in the digital-asset sector, successfully implemented a widely anticipated software upgrade. From a report: The so-called Shanghai update enables investors to queue up to withdraw Ether coins that they had pledged to help operate the network in return for rewards, a process called staking. Tim Beiko, who helps to co-ordinate the development of Ethereum, posted on Twitter on Wednesday that the upgrade is now "official." The network revamp -- also known as Shapella -- is designed to let people exit an Ether staking investment and has stirred debate on whether the appeal of the largest token after Bitcoin will increase over time.
"Ethereum is updating and navigating with great skill -- so far anyway -- and cementing its position as the No. 2 crypto," said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. He added that the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin." About 1.2 million of Ether tokens -- worth approximately $2.3 billion at current prices -- are expected to be withdrawn over the next five days, according to researcher Coin Metrics. Some $36.7 billion of Ether is locked up for staking, data from Staking Rewards shows.
"Ethereum is updating and navigating with great skill -- so far anyway -- and cementing its position as the No. 2 crypto," said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. He added that the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin." About 1.2 million of Ether tokens -- worth approximately $2.3 billion at current prices -- are expected to be withdrawn over the next five days, according to researcher Coin Metrics. Some $36.7 billion of Ether is locked up for staking, data from Staking Rewards shows.
"the digital asset sector" aka "web 3.0" (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning, NFTs. Those very totes completely secure NFTs, honests and totes legits, not. [moxie.org]
They do think of cutesy names for everything, carefully picked for their buzzwordyness and their "in-crowd" bellyfeel (starting with talking about "crypto" as if that's unambiguous), but they're not really big on explaining what it, any of it, means nevermind what the implications in turn are.
But that's alright, since the implications are always the same. "We've been 'hacked', thus you lose all your coins." Never you mind that it was a direct implication of the code or the "DAO" or the "smart contract" or whatever. "They've been hacked" so it wasn't their fault and you can't do a thing about it.
Playing this game at all makes you the sucker. That is the essence of "web 3.0".
why does Slashdot allow presskits? (Score:1)
Crypto specialists trying to be Elon (Score:2)
trying to hype their coin and cash in later.
https://makeameme.org/meme/cry... [makeameme.org]
Ethereum isn't the most important (Score:1, Troll)
Opinion (Score:3)
I'm not thrilled with the move from proof of work to staking. I understand why they did it, and it's the right thing to do. Still, I don't love it.
The whole idea behind cryptocurrency was to decentralize away so a few big money players couldn't control it. With the advent of special purpose high-dollar mining kit, that kind of fell apart. Moving to proof of stake is a reasonable response to that. It defuses the arms race side of mining and removes the huge energy consumption cost. Instead of sticking up money to fund and run a mining farm, now you just stake the money directly.
It's an improvement, but it doesn't get away from the problem that big money now has a sizeable amount of control in the network. It's a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless the system makes it prohibitively expensive to hold more tokens, people are going to want to hold tokens.
If your system depends on circulation of tokens, see the first point.
Re: (Score:2)
Proof of Stake was introduced by Peercoin in the early 2010s and then adopted by a number of other cryptocurrencies. The original idea was full decentralized in the sense that any small amount could be used for staking. Your minting income would be proportional to the stake, so the system has a fixed inflation rate.
It's only later that some coins decided to bastardize this idea with minimum staking limits. See also: masternodes [iki.fi]
Decentralized (Score:1)
Bitcoin has marketing plans? (Score:2)
the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin."
Bitcoin has no CEO, no plans to market itself to everybody. It's just a ledger with it's transactions being processed by people who get Bitcoin in return. That's it.
Saying that you are moving faster than a boring automated accounting ledger doesn't make sense.
"the most important commercial highway in the digi (Score:3)