E-commerce doesn't require digital currency. I live in a country without digital payments infrastructure, and there's lots of e-commerce (primarily via Facebook). It's all cash-on-delivery. I've ordered food, furniture, baby supplies, medicine, etc. from businesses on Facebook and pay on delivery.

Very interesting perspective. Most people who live with bank money can't even imagine a world without it.

There is one thing a centralised digital currency makes far easier, though. It makes it easier to "print" new money and cream that off into bankers' pockets. Most of the richest people in the world are in finance.

If you don't trust your government or your personal safety, I can't imagine that it will be smart to use currencies like this that have ZERO privacy. I will stick with Monero. They have gone through all this complex redesign apparently without a single thought given to privacy; looks like a disaster.

Ethereum is getting anonymity very soon.

https://medium.com/aztec-protocol/aztec-zkrollup-layer-2-pri...

Monero doesn't have many users (the daily transaction count is also maximum daily user count), so achieving a larger anonymity set should happen very fast. It's also going to be much more scalable. Not to mention anonymous dollars are a unique value proposition in itself.

When you say “They” you must mean Ethereum.

This is still a good milestone, because you can implement privacy concious tokens on top of eth and PoS will apply to them.

I like monero, but these are complete different use cases. Ethereum wants to be a database, monero wants to be a currency.

I fail to see what eth2 would provide that other solutions and other cryptocurrencies don't already provide.

Real global-level scale. With PoW no cryptocurrency was really scalable to some meaningful transactions per second.

there already are cryptocurrencies claiming the same thing: iota, eos, tron and probably thousands more.

so what's different this time? to me it seems ETH is always overpromise, always underdeliver kind of project. they promised global scalable world computer since inception in 2015, now they say it was never possible with ETH1 and they need to hardfork to ETH2. why do you have any confidence in their statements?

Is one not allowed to learn ? I'm not familiar with eth foundation's statements but they have matured a lot since 2015 and i wouldn't say they underdeliver, there are 100s of real world applications that are using eth dapps already today. I believe it's different because i understand the tech. It's feasible. Assuming PoS works, it will scale.

Eth2 is also not hard fork. The old chain will be attached to the new chain

PoW has nothing to do with scaling and so PoS isn't a way to address it. if you're making this claim, i would suggest to reconsider your belief that "it's different because i understand the tech".

PoW and PoS are algorithms to order transactions, but how many transactions and how often to order them are just tunable parameters.

the real scalability "tech" that is being sneaked in while everybody is busy talking about PoS is sharding, which essentially means abandoning the idea of serializability of the underlying database, leading to vastly more complex failure modes, reliance on very tight clock synchronization and zero real world testing of such approach.

so yeah, good luck...

>PoW has nothing to do with scaling and so PoS isn't a way to address it.

You're wrong, PoW is a poisson process which means time to generate blocks must be a very small fraction of average block time. Block times in PoS have a normal distribution with tight std, which means block generation can take even 1/3 of block time, giving some leeway for propagation.

Block propagation time is only a part of the problem and it doesn't make sense to consider it separately from other parameters. By the way, why do you think block times in PoS have a normal distribution?

Because validators target their expected time slot and multiple random factors impact latency.

But it doesn't mean there should be a normal distribution there! Have you ever heard about log normal distribution?

Where do you see multiplication occurring? If a node spends 1% longer on making a block than expected and propagation takes 1% longer, this results in additive delay, not multiplicative. Ie. if every single separate step takes 1% longer the total delay is 1%.

You appeal to your intuition. However, it could be misleading. Log-normal distribution has been found in many real world processes. Could you explain where is multiplication in cases below?

1) The length of comments posted in Internet discussion forums

2) Users' dwell time on online articles

3) income of 97%–99% of the population

4) Milk production by cows

5) Amounts of rainfall

6) Size distributions of rainfall droplets

7) The size of cash payments and size of transactions in Bitcoin

Many other examples could be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution

>Could you explain where is multiplication in cases below?

There's some confusion in this question. A log normal distribution is proof enough that multiplication exists.

3 and 7 are trivial because there are clear compounding effects - they are most obvious in finance. 5 is easy too, more rainfall means more water evaporates, it's a simple multiplicative cycle. 1 because larger response is more likely to generate more larger responses.

There's no causal relation between multiple factors in block propagation. It snows and latency to starlink rises. There's congestion somewhere because a new tv series is being massively downloaded. A node has random clock skew of 1 s. These are all additive.

> There's some confusion in this question. A log normal distribution is proof enough that multiplication exists.

Ha-ha. Maybe it's a good reason to forge the evidence. However, it doesn't mean you can't forge an additive law here!

In 3 you can add value of house to the value of car instead of "multiplying" them. In 7 you can add values "cent by cent". "Multiplicative cycle" in 5 is a real conspiracy theory. Is there the same thing for "cow's milk"? Could you increase milk yield with the same "multiplicative cycle"?

According to this logic bank interests for credits with "simple interest" should have a normal distribution and those with "compound interest" should have a log-normal one!

I can give you more simple criteria for all cases above:

1) "The length of comments" can't be negative

2) "Users' dwell time" can't be negative

3) income can't be negative

4) cow's don't suck milk from farmers

5) Law of Gravity works for rainfalls

6) Size rainfall droplets can't be negative

7) Payer is the one who pays

8) "Latency" and "delay" for nodes can't be negative too. It's very likely that it has a log-normal distribution as many other sort of delay.

I assume you agree with my argument. It's reasonable to assume that block delay in PoW network has log-normal distribution too. Let's see what will happen if we add delay due to the block mining. If there is a Poisson point process, then time delay between two arrivals in it has exponential distribution. Then if we add to random variables, one with log-normal distribution and one with exponential distribution, then we will get a random variable with log-normal distribution. So in the case of PoW we have the same type of probability distribution as in PoS! So there is no any problem here. Your original argument is invalid.

I can well imagine for politically-unstable countries this is very good. Not really sure about the rest of the world!

Besides, one distant analogy: I remember reading how internet will revolutionise totalitarian governments, because it is an unstoppable river of information. Well, China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia are going strong regardless.

Bitcoin/eth are great, until some crony government introduces the death penalty for using it, or sth.

The technical infra vs the conceptual architecture enabled the one sided internet per china.