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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

#151

Post by jzwinck »

dahdum wrote: post #113
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.

I imagine that means it's OK if my network connection goes offline 4% of every hour. But what if I'm offline for 4% of 90 days, all at once?

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

#152

Post by dlubarov »

village-idiot wrote: post #111
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…

In most PoS designs, registering a new validator account takes some fixed amount of time, just as a measure to prevent grinding attacks. If registration takes an hour, and I can't predict the random seed an hour in advance, then I can't predict how my account will be scored, so grinding would be futile.

Most PoS designs don't otherwise favor old accounts. I know Peercoin does, but that's a very small project, and I'm not aware of any others. Ethereum 2.0 definitely won't have any such mechanism. In the current spec [1], staking is binary; either you have an active validator account or you don't.

[1] https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/master/specs/c...

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

#153

Post by leppr »

marknadal wrote: post #150
zanny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked. A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust . That magical thing crypto users keep tryin…

You are spot on, until... The Goldilocks Zone. Or shall we call it The Goldiblocks Zone? Most projects will be by successful leaders and enthusiasts, until one of these experiments will hit the perfect combination of factors, and gain world traction. Think of the crypto industry as AI training, most is pure junk, until a regression is fit. Grandparent had a good point: TCP/IP were the right approach, and the internet…

> Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit.

Strawman. There is a time and place for strong security guarantees, nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with.

Maybe you'd be interested in EOS, Stellar and other transparent blockchain platforms? They make the same observation you do, not everyone needs to have complete control over everything they do online if that means every action has a cost, sometimes only having auditability is fine.

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

#154

Post by joakimbr »

opnitro wrote: post #78
zanny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked. A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust . That magical thing crypto users keep tryin…

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm This paper is ever important when trying to come up with technical solutions to societal organization.

Fascinating reading. Thank you for this article!

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

#155

Post by Zamicol »

anthonybsd wrote: post #6
RealityVoid wrote: post #4

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.

Blackcoin? That was years ago.

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

#156

Post by dlubarov »

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.

That's not an inherent limitation of PoS; PoS systems can be either AP or CP. Most PoS designs go with CP, but NXT and Ouroboros are examples of AP PoS systems. They use Nakamoto consensus, much like Bitcoin.

It's true that Ethereum 2.0 will require 2/3 availability in order to finalize transactions, but that's true of any BFT system; see [1] for a proof.

[1] https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs426/2017/bib/bracha85async...

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

#157

Post by dlubarov »

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.

Ethereum could use SNARKs to verify certain computations more efficiently, but the purpose of PoW miners isn't really to verify computations, it's to make a 51% attack expensive. CODA protocol uses SNARKs to verify the entire blockchain history, but they still need miners for consensus.

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

#158

Post by jacobush »

darawk wrote: post #138
bigiain wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like now, you can drum up support for your own new party.

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

#159

Post by rocqua »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #126
sincerely wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough people think the changes are a good idea that they switch versions.

Can you show when this has successfully happened? Can you show a popular coin that the devs went one direction with, a different group didn’t like, forked, and became more used than the original?

CryptoNote

It is the predecessor to Monero, development there stalled in politics, and some people forked Monero.

Admittedly, it wasn't very big when the split happened. I'm not sure of the capitalization.

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

#160

Post by rocqua »

profalseidol wrote: post #64
Zhyl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notably, there are rules that will block invalid commits, and tools that prevent git branches.
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