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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

#131

Post by aey »

murbard2 wrote: post #89
wmf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't any pure PoS system naturally evolve stake pooling that looks like DPoS?

There are two attractors, it could push people to do it themselves but I think it's more likely that it evolves in stake pooling. Stake pooling in pure PoS involving trusting the pool operator to a great deal and I'm concerned it degenerates to a very centralized system. Adding optional delegation is a safety valve that takes this into consideration. What Tezos does is merely let you lose a different key to custody f…

Just my personal opinion, but designing a system that doesn’t allow for secure pooling will only enable insecure pooling. So making the choice to force people to share private keys as the only way to delegate capital will make the overall system a lot less secure, and just seems really irresponsible.

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

#132

Post by FollowSteph3 »

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?

It's about the price of generating the electricity in terms of the damage it does to the environment (rather than dollar amount) compared to the value the cryptocurrencies generate. Most people look just at electricity costs and not electricity costs AND environmental costs.

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

#134

Post by Dylan16807 »

samatman wrote: post #124
NoblePublius wrote: post #122

I’m skeptical of any reporting that refers to a crypto asset’s “market cap,” as if there was enough liquidiy somewhere in the system for all HODLrs to exit at anywhere near that price.

This is special pleading; there is no stock, no matter how blue chip, for which the market cap reflects the price at which all 'hodlers' could simultaneously sell their position. That's just... not how markets work, at all.

The idea of everyone with a stock exiting simultaneously is way too suspicious and hard to mentally model, so let's say a supermajority instead, because some event makes a big holder and some followers want to move out. Perhaps the stock was replaced in an index fund.

And you made up "simultaneously", so I'm going to ignore that and say "a week or two" instead.

There are thousands of major stocks that could support this with a small price movement.

If any big crypto coin had supermajority (or even 10%) of the owners try to cash out, the money would dry up right away.

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

#135

Post by adrianN »

bouncycastle wrote: post #88
nivexous wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a different point. Yeah miners can get screwed in a PoW change, but the chain's fundamental properties are not at risk. Users have assets on both chains in a fork and if one chain does something terrible (or even just different) the market will reflect. With PoS, the majority remain the majority ... unless you support mob theft, a bad precedent I would say.

Nope, if an attacker does something bad (eg. a group forms a 51% cartel and starts censoring transactions), then they can be forked out and their stake slashed in the fork that doesn't censor the transactions. I really do not see a problem here? It's even better security than PoW, because once the attackers have their stake slashed, they can't attack anymore. With PoW, the miners can keep on doing a 51% attack even a…

...if you trust a minority to decide who is an attacker and who isn't.

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

#138

Post by darawk »

bigiain wrote: post #105
darawk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Except that in this case, if you think you have better ideas, you can code up your own fork, and try to drum up support for it. The open source ecosystem works far better than the political system, I find.

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

#139

Post by samatman »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #134
samatman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is special pleading; there is no stock, no matter how blue chip, for which the market cap reflects the price at which all 'hodlers' could simultaneously sell their position. That's just... not how markets work, at all.

The idea of everyone with a stock exiting simultaneously is way too suspicious and hard to mentally model, so let's say a supermajority instead, because some event makes a big holder and some followers want to move out. Perhaps the stock was replaced in an index fund. And you made up "simultaneously", so I'm going to ignore that and say "a week or two" instead. There are thousands of major stocks that could support t…

I suppose this could be settle empirically, though I don't know how to get the data.

Can you point to examples of large stocks having a supermajority (let's call it 66%) of all stocks move in one business week, without a corresponding crash in price? Call it dropping by half.

If, as I suspect, this sort of movement is both extremely uncommon and unfailingly accompanied by a deep discounting, then perhaps this balance of supply (people willing to sell) and demand (people wanting to buy) is part and parcel of what makes a commodity valuable, and valuable at a certain price?

Because GP was saying that market cap should be based on a counterfactual; s/he wants it to mean something it doesn't.

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

#140

Post by Nursie »

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

> But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies?

HODL. Lambo. Moon!

That's about it.

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