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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

#111

Post by village-idiot »

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…

By the by, it’s not clear that proof of stake is good for crypto, although reducing the CO2 budget is unambiguously good for the rest of us.

Most PoS systems I’ve seen basically reward the oldest money holders with the right to stamp new transactions. This reduces the cost, but is extremely centralizing, bordering on neo-feudal.

The cynic in me also notes that developers of these chains are regularly the oldest money, making their motivations suspect at best.

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

#112

Post by AgentME »

WatchDog wrote: post #38
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #25

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?

Lower relative to what? If a mining reward was 1 eth instead of say 10 eth, then 1 eth would likely just be worth 10 times more.

If mining had always been 1/10 of what it is now, then that would probably be true since everyone would have 1/10 of what they would have had otherwise, but if the mining reward was suddenly axed now, then there's no reason for that to be true.

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

#113

Post by dahdum »

corv wrote: post #30

Proof of Stake is unable to deal with network partitions, the likes of which every so often happen to cut entire countries off the Internet PoS is a disaster waiting to happen for Ethereum.

The stakers will lose their stake, and those shards affected will go offline, but the rest of the network will continue on until the interruption is over.

Ethereum is designing the system specifically to accommodate that sort of problem, last I remember you needed 95%+ uptime to generate return, so if your internet goes out 5% of the time you should not stake.

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

#114

Post by make3 »

chowells wrote: post #60
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.

If the miners ever have a serious disagreement with the core developers, they can always remove the difficulty bomb in a fork. The purpose of the difficulty bomb is to force some update, not to force the core developers' preferred update.

the idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project

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

#115

Post by dahdum »

amasad wrote: post #49
hanniabu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The miners aren’t looked at the same way in Ethereum because you don’t have the large concentration of mining to a handful of companies like Bitcoin.

Also because from the very first whitepaper it’s been known Ethereum would move to PoS.

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

#116

Post by pureagave »

Iv wrote: post #81
shittyadmin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mist…

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

true. I think many more people cared about permission-less platforms with solid APIs than decentralization.

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

#117

Post by bouncycastle »

nivexous wrote: post #84
bouncycastle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

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

You should really be careful with how you play with definitions, as that will lead down to a slippery slope. Remember that time when someone managed to generate 184 billion bitcoin? With your reasoning, we can now say that the succeeding hard-fork to 'fix' the issue by slashing the bitcoins was theft.

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

#118

Post by ascendantlogic »

shittyadmin wrote: post #76
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…

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mist…

1. No one was forced to run the new client that backed out the DAO 2. The existing network with the stolen funds and the DAO lived on as Ethereum Classic

There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network. It was entirely up to miners and people running nodes to decide which network they supported. Further the decision to back out the DAO hack was done via vote so that's another important part of decentralization called consensus.

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

#119

Post by ascendantlogic »

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

As with most things the concept of "decentralization" is shades of gray. While there is no central controlling entity in the Ethereum network, there are people behind it and using it and people tend to congregate into groups with power structures.

If you want to force a transaction to be reverted you need to either create a cataclysmic event prior to the event you want changed, or you need to own billions of dollars in hardware and spend tens if not hundreds of millions on electricity currently to overpower the network via 51% attack.

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

#120

Post by ascendantlogic »

make3 wrote: post #114
chowells wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the miners ever have a serious disagreement with the core developers, they can always remove the difficulty bomb in a fork. The purpose of the difficulty bomb is to force some update, not to force the core developers' preferred update.

the idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project

Yes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"
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