Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by amasad » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #57

amasad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the miners agree to adding the "difficulty bomb" which is against their incentives? It's more likely they didn't have a say in it.

Because otherwise they end up mining the chain that nobody's using. You can own a lot of ETC and it doesn't do you much good if you can't sell them because nobody's interested in using or trading them.

However in Bitcoin the opposite happened -- the classic chain is the most valuable one despite being the least "scalable" or whatever pet feature the forks has. Also despite all the bitcoin celebrities being for the fork. That's behaving more like a decentralized technology that no single entity controls.

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

#62

Post by solveit » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:52 AM UTC

r32a_ wrote: post #58

nivexous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin

You can always buy them out. But honestly, a 51% attack seems like a much less likely way for ethereum to fail compared to it just not living up to the hype.

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

#63

Post by solveit » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #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…

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

Are there any candidates for this? I can't imagine a PoW problem where you can't get ahead by throwing more computers at it.

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

#64

Post by profalseidol » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:56 AM UTC

Zhyl wrote: post #36

r32a_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see it less of a computing platform and more like the spinning table from the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The goal isn't to compute faster or better than others, it's for parties with competing interests to trust the computations that have taken place.

It's a git with stored procedures that can push commits.

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

#65

Post by topmonk » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:56 AM UTC

lrvick wrote: post #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…

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

One party can hold >50% of all mining power and I find that far more likely.

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

#66

Post by bouncycastle » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:57 AM UTC

nivexous wrote: post #54

chrispeel wrote: post #2

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…

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

That tends to happen in PoW actually. Example: Last year, Monero forked and changed the protocol by changing the PoW algorithm. Effectively shutting off a significant section of the miners. Miners had no defence - it was a major blow to them. Same thing happened in Sia. There's been discussion with changing the PoW of Bitcoin as well.

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

#67

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

h1d wrote: post #34

I wonder but what had Ethereum achieved exactly to this day? Are they starting to optimize before reaching to some practical state? If the power consumption is out of hand when its usefulness is not, then investors are putting too much money in it.

They are pivoting into something that may be more useful. Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness.

ETH will have both different usage scenarios an one less bottleneck. (No idea if this is enough.)

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

#68

Post by sgarman » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

h1d wrote: post #34

I wonder but what had Ethereum achieved exactly to this day? Are they starting to optimize before reaching to some practical state? If the power consumption is out of hand when its usefulness is not, then investors are putting too much money in it.

My guess is these investors were investing in what it will become not what it is now. Isn't that the whole point in investing?

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

#69

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #46

amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

The miners can choose to fork fork away from those changes. The core team is merely starting the change and the miners are supporting and carrying out those changes by continuing to mine the chain with those updates.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by bouncycastle » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

r32a_ wrote: post #58

nivexous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin

> Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51%

You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.

> With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker

Not in the case of "selfish mining attack", where you may never know that an attack is happening until it's too late, you'll have little chance in defending with hashpower since the attackers will have a significant head start...