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Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

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

#101

Post by wpietri »

wmf wrote: post #35
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #9

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...

incredible amounts of energy compared to the value this gives us Note that the value of ETH is higher than the value of the energy needed to mine it; that's why people mine. So is your complaint really about mispricing of energy (externalities) or about other people having different values than you?

Well, the price of ETH is higher than the price of the energy needed to mine it. The energy consumed has demonstrable value, but that's yet not true for ETH. As many people have said here, it's experimental. And of course, there's a fair bit of financial speculation going on. But as far as I know, it's generating no significant value on its own.

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

#102

Post by bigiain »

banachtarski wrote: post #77
vvillena wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as one, single "world computer" and it will be much closer to reality. Everyone can access that computer for free, and use it for a price.

> ... for free ... for a price

"access" vs "use".

Everybody can see the code/transactions that are run for free. Everybody can have their code run and execute transactions for a price.

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

#103

Post by bigiain »

r32a_ wrote: post #43
outside1234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we get real for a second? Ethereum has no chance of taking on AWS or Microsoft. Those are multi billion dollar business with billion dollar requirements in infrastructure investment on a yearly basis. Not going to happen.

I agree! But that's what Ethereum was pitched as.

Seems to me you're making invalid assumptions about what "world computer" means.

There's not a lot to go in in those two words, but claiming they mean Etherium is out to capture all (or any) of AWS's customers is a _very_ long stretch.

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

#104

Post by wpietri »

NickM wrote: post #100
dnautics wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Growth in the economy is not necessarily predicated on growth in consumption of natural resources. Those two things tend to be correlated in modern society, but they're not inextricably linked; we don't necessarily have to give up on the idea of economic growth in order to preserve the environment.

Definitely. A few years back Jesse Ausubel gave a great talk in SF on this: http://blog.longnow.org/02015/02/06/jesse-ausubel-seminar-me...

A core point was that economic growth has now decoupled from many resources. Computers are an obvious aid here; look at how much time we spend in front of one screen or another. My laptop is hugely valuable to me, but it took something like 1g of materials per hour of use to build it, and uses way less power than the lightbulb I previously would have read a book by.

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

#105

Post by bigiain »

darawk wrote: post #75
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.

And why is this a problem? Sure, they can change it arbitrarily to their benefit, but they only benefit if the value of their holdings is high. If they do something that people don't like, that value will fall. So they are strongly constrained by behaving in such a way that they do not make the users of Ethereum unhappy.

One only needs to look at modern democratic politics to have _serious serious_ doubts about that argument...

It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...

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

#106

Post by stanleydrew »

wpietri wrote: post #95
Iv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)

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

#107

Post by klyrs »

jasonzemos wrote: post #87
solveit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's called a zkSNARK. One proves they performed any computation with a constant size proof of the result.

Constant size or constant time?

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

#108

Post by Barrin92 »

wpietri wrote: post #95
Iv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

There is none. It's dumb money and hype. Even if you slash ethereum's energy consumption hundred fold, how much more energy expensive is it than a paypal transaction? Still a factor of a hundred or a thousand?

It's meaningless as a store of value, it's too volatile because there's no government backing it or mature monetary policy, and pretty much everyone will take a lawyer and the legal office over a 'smart contract'.

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

#109

Post by randaouser »

mulmen wrote: post #48
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'm confused as to the purpose of ETH. On one hand it sounds like an investment that you can "hold" as you say. On the other it is a computing platform. So what is it you "hold"? Compute resources? Why is it valuable to allow speculation on compute resources? Can a person ever really reason about the cost of a system running on ETH? How do you plan for those costs? Is is a compute platform? A cryptocurrency? Somethin…

It is a computation platform first and foremost. You can pay gas in ETH. Every opcode has a set gas price, so executing a compiled contract on the network costs you some ETH. Why would you want to run code on ETH?

Most notably, it requires no 3rd party trust to execute the code whereas traditional cloud architectures require you to trust that the execution environment is kosher e.g. amazon vm is not compromised, amazon hardware does not have side channel attack.

It is ideal to write a token or currency on ETH platform as state changes like balances are better left completed on trustless architectures

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

#110

Post by dnautics »

wpietri wrote: post #104
NickM wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth in the economy is not necessarily predicated on growth in consumption of natural resources. Those two things tend to be correlated in modern society, but they're not inextricably linked; we don't necessarily have to give up on the idea of economic growth in order to preserve the environment.

Definitely. A few years back Jesse Ausubel gave a great talk in SF on this: http://blog.longnow.org/02015/02/06/jesse-ausubel-seminar-me... A core point was that economic growth has now decoupled from many resources. Computers are an obvious aid here; look at how much time we spend in front of one screen or another. My laptop is hugely valuable to me, but it took something like 1g of materials per hour of use to buil…

I'm sympathetic to the idea that technology decreases the per unit cost of productivity output, but the whole point of stimulating economic growth (via factors like inflation) doesn't work if the stimulus doesn't outpace the improvement in efficiency.

Technology is fundamentally deflationary. So if you believe that inflation (and growth) is necessary for social stability, you must incentivise consumption beyond technology's capacity to improve efficiency.

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