jkilpatr

EV are explicitly treated differently.

Telsa insisted on it's direct sales model and it was more politically expedient for regulators in many states to carve out an exception to the dealership requirement only for car companies that sell EV's exclusively (only tesla at the time).

While I suppose this didn't seem like a huge threat to the car dealership lobby in each state at the time it's clearly come back to bite them and is the main reason Fords Electric vehicle production and distribution is a different 'car company' on paper, so that they can take advantage of legislation designed for tesla.

> A key tradeoff is that Bronze does not guarantee thread safety

Data races are currently prevented by the borrow checker. Any GC in order to provide equivalent correctness would need to do so as well.

While I strongly agree this doesn't seem to match the sentiment of the paper.

Which is prioritizing a lower barrier to entry for new programmers at the cost of safety checks that help prevent humans from making mistakes at runtime.

It seems to me if our conclusion is humans, no matter how skilled, are flawed, we should be willing to do absolutely anything to lower the barrier to entry except removing checks on correctness.

The power consumption is a fundamental part of how phased array antennas work.

You have hundreds of tiny antennas using constructive and destructive interference to steer the signal in software.

This digital aiming is awesome for targeting fast moving objects in low earth orbit. But you lose the huge amplification factor possible with a simple metal dish.

Combine this with the the desire to use higher attenuation frequencies in order to increase throughput and I don't really see Starlink's power consumption going down.

That power budget already represents a pretty big victory, and any gains will probably go to lower unit cost or higher data rates.

What defines cryptocurrency then?

Not saying your wrong, but I'm curious.

This is new since the last time I took a deep dive into things.

This does seem more straightforward, at the cost of essentially all of ETH2's advertised scalability and other features.

It still does not eliminate the challenge of actually performing such a delicate transition on a live economy. Which will be significant on a social front in addition to technical.

Not saying I don't believe these things can be done, or don't believe that they are good idea.

Proof of stake Ethereum is very similar to 5G, yes there is real technology, yes it's 'working' in some capacity now. But you really shouldn't plan on it reaching you any time soon.

The ETH2 'beacon chain' is a meta-chain that's supposed to checkpoint a bunch of 'sub chains' for scalability. They have launched this beacon chain. But it doesn't do anything other than mint ETH2 tokens and operate their proof of stake consensus system.

AKA it's another blockchain, different than ETH1 and it doesn't even move transactions yet. It's got a novel POS system to it's name, that's not nothing, but that is all it has at the moment.

What does a 'sub chain' actually look like to interact with? How do you coordinate with many of them? All these questions have answers in theory, but not answers in solid production ready interoperable code.

'Proof of stake Ethereum' only happens if these questions are figured out and then ETH1 is somehow brought under the beacon chain's governance. Which is a whole different kettle of fish than a greenfield subchain. Exactly how this is to happen... well I haven't even seen anything credible on this. As far as I can tell it's not even seriously being worked on yet.

So we may, if things go well, have another blockchain calling itself ETH2 that is proof of stake by the end of this year. But that won't cause ETH1 to stop wasting electricity or gracefully move it's economic activity to a proof of stake system.

Moving billions of dollars of economic activity out of the hands of miners (who have every incentive to screw it up) and into the hands of a proof of stake validator set while at the same time not significantly disrupting said system or opening up new vulnerabilities is not trivial.

tl;dr Proof of stake Ethereum is possible, but there definitely isn't a rush order on it. I would bet on Ethereum miners still being around 2-3 years from now.

It's not a matter of 'more' or 'less' rather than 'easier to deal with'.

LEO sats will probably produce more space junk by mass but junk in LEO will be gone in a few years, no matter how much or little of it their is.

On the other hand Geostationary satellites produce much less junk in terms of mass, but once it's up there it's not coming down for centuries.

There are bridges to and from Ethereum right now. I use them every day because I need a fast sidechain for my application.

Choosing ETH2 is predicated on the assumption that ETH1 will be bridged more cheaply and easily than existing bridges can provide and that the opportunity cost of waiting is worth it.

I had to make that decision personally, decided I can't wait for ETH2, so we're using a bridge that's available today and building an ecosystem elsewhere.

Several other product leads that I know are making the same decisions, they can't just put their lives on hold and trust that ETH2 will solve problems for which there's no public timeline or even a public solution.

> and choosing to use ETH2 as their mainnet substrate chain instead.

But why exactly? Until ETH1 is in the ETH2 chain ecosystem ETH2 is just another blockchain platform, providing no network effects.

ETH2's big selling point was higher throughput but bridges are already starting to commoditize access to more throughput from ETH1. ETH2 could provide smoother access than the bridge interfaces provided by other chains. (I'm speaking of bridges both to and from ETH1 and within the bridge blockchain's ecosystem like IBC)

It's not that I don't think ETH2 could win this. There's a clear path to victory.

- ETH1 integrated ASAP, going all in on expanding ETH1 capacity and bringing it under ETH2

- Provide a subchain interface that's better than IBC or any other cross-chain interface on the market

- Fullnode tooling that really works well (partial syncing for block availability, seamlessly syncs multiple chains etc)

Once you have these you can keep ETH1 users via network effect and provide access to more capacity more easily than other potential platforms.

But I don't see a clear plan from ETH2 to do either of those things. Cross chain communication is a theory-only problem devoid of the extremely polished tooling it will need to win and ETH1 under the beacon chain doesn't even seem to have a plan.

The ETH2 'beacon chain' is a meta-chain that's supposed to checkpoint a bunch of 'sub chains' for scalability. But they have launched it with many big questions unanswered.

What does a 'sub chain' actually look like to interact with? How do you coordinate with many of them? All these questions have answers in theory, but not answers in solid production ready interoperable code.

Furthermore some of these problems like 'how do you store a bunch of sub-chains' are questions not even properly answered in ETH1 nodes for the much simpler one chain case.

By launching the beacon chain early the organizations developing ETH2 can validate and make money while all these questions are figured out. This is where the money goes instead of the improvement of ETH1 since that's a tragedy of the commons as this point.

ETH2 is only worth money if these questions are figured out and ETH1 is somehow brought under the beacon chain's governance. Exactly how this is to happen... well I haven't even seen anything credible on this. Greenfield addition of chains under the ETH2 beacon chain is generously described as 'incomplete' moving ETH1 under ETH2 is much more challenging and I have not seen a plan with any level of detail.

Given that everyone is making bridges to ETH1 now and typical development timelines. I would give a medium to high chance that ETH2 will miss it's window by a couple of years and activity will move to other faster chains that are available now and capable of siphoning off traffic from Ethereum using bridges until they reach their own critical mass.

If I had to put money on it I would place 'proof of stake Ethereum' (defined as ETH1 under the POS beacon chain) more than 2 years out.

I could see the sub-chains (greenfield) working by EOY, although I wouldn't grant it a high probability.

Also if I had to put money on it I will bet on a halt of the Ethereum 1 chain for a time greater than 24 hours within that period, due to lack of maintenance on ETH1 nodes and increased stress from DeFi activity.

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ETH2 is kinda like 5G, yes there is a very real 5G network protocol, but in terms of pubic messaging, everything is 5G and communicating anything about how it works or when it will be available is filled with pitfalls and nuances that are difficult for the highly technical, much less the general public, to understand.

don't forget peer to peer viruses! with access to microphones, smart power sockets, smart water meters, and smart sprinklers!

This has been announced very quietly today via email and it's the most stunningly ambitious IoT project I've ever seen. Considering the existing scale of Amazon smart device deployment and the number of devices supported here we're talking about nearly instant coverage of every US city.

The security model is frightening to think about, a peer to peer echo virus could take over smart speakers, water meters, power sockets, lights, spreading peer to peer across an entire metro area.