Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

spectrum.ieee.org

21–30 of 347 posts

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#21
Could also be 100% if their Proof-Of-Stake game theory does not work as well with real funds worth stealing as it does on testnet. Full disclosure I hold some ETH but I would not dare put all my eggs in that brazenly "do it live" basket.

One party can hold >50% of all funds and we would have no way of knowing.

I wish people would look at less energy consuming proofs of work that still allow us real world evidence of decentralization.

We need more experiments like Chia with proof of wasted disk space instead of proof of wasted electricity.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just goes to show how short sighted some people can be. Make money now, or give up that chance so future me or my possible future kids might have a slightly better world to live in. Now multiply that by a lot and- it's hard.

You assume that the people that use cryptocurrencies also tend to be the people that want kids.

I mined NiceHash for a bit. Made a couple of grand doing it (I also pay for 100% wind power), but I didn't really consider the impact it would have. I saw the $10 to $15 a day for little to no work and took it.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#23

We’re cobstantly dealing with environmental issues and global warming yet burn incredible amounts of energy and carbon compared to the value this gives us. It would probably be more environmentally friendly to not use crypto currencies then to stop using all the electricity you do each day...

I feel as if the digital world is half drug and that cutting off will lead to a weird period of time until we can enjoy non electronics based good times. Still it may feel weird that such modern and sophisticated tech led to more problems than bonuses.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#24

Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article. From the article we read " the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform. " Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to descr…

Ethereum claims to be the "World Computer" that lets you build "Unstoppable Applications". If that doesn't sound like an AWS competitor then I don't know.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#26

We’re cobstantly dealing with environmental issues and global warming yet burn incredible amounts of energy and carbon compared to the value this gives us. It would probably be more environmentally friendly to not use crypto currencies then to stop using all the electricity you do each day...

If we're going that way how about not having an economic system that predicates social stability on growth? The very essence of how our society is structured is antithetical to environmental stewardship, forget a few people playing around on computers.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#27
post #24

Proof-of-Stake is indeed a good thing, and a worthy focus of the article. From the article we read " the long-term hope is that apps built from them will eventually make Ethereum the ultimate cloud-computing platform. " Ethereum does not claim to be a computing platform in the same way that AWS is; it's for low-complexity business logic only. I think it's misleading to use "ultimate cloud-computing platform" to descr…

Ethereum claims to be the "World Computer" that lets you build "Unstoppable Applications". If that doesn't sound like an AWS competitor then I don't know.

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#28

Serious question: why was the reward for mining ever so high? Wouldn't most of the energy consumption problems not be a thing if the reward for mining was drastically lower?

Because block rewards are in a fixed amount of cryptocurrency, not a fixed amount of USD or similar. As prices increased on cryptocurrencies, block rewards became more valuable - but not because the miner was issued more crypto.

These energy consumptions concerns wouldn't be as relevant if ETH was worth 0.01 USD, for example.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, and exactly these kind of experiments are what crypto cryptocurrencies should be about.

That's not true. Pure, non hybrid PoS has never been deployed on any crypto at scale. The fact that Ethereum is on their 3rd iteration and still can't figure out how to make it work years after promised delivery should be alarming at least.

I think the point is that all cryptocurrencies that we have currently are experimental in that sense, and so it's a good time to experiment with unproven concepts. Maybe that means ETH will crash and burn, but so what? It's a minuscule part of overall economy, so aside from people who decided to seriously invest into it (i.e. alpha testers), it's not a big deal. But, on the other hand, we do want to figure out what works before we start using these things at scale, when it's much harder to change.
Post reply on HN