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

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

#171

Post by jerguismi » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

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?

I don't think "decentralization" is a good term to define cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum. There are lot of properties in these systems. For example limited supply, untamperability of history, irreversable transactions, permissionless use etc. You can compare to older systems offering similar features and how well these systems work compared to them.

Transaction capacity & speed is most often not the primary point of blockchain systems, somehow many seem to assume that. For example it is no possible to create truly irreversible transactions in centralized system, since centralized system is always prone to forceful intervention.

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

#172

Post by xorcist » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

ascendantlogic wrote: post #118

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…

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…

> There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network

Is the choice to run a less valuable network really a choice?

Remember that the foundation people gave themselves most of the coins that will ever exist before the network was even started, even if a lot was sold long before there was a word for ICOs. Only ~ 20% or so of the supply will ever be mined. It is not economically rational to differ in consensus rules from the foundation.

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

#173

Post by w1nt3rmu4e » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

aey wrote: post #131

murbard2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Delegation does not require sharing private keys. Nor does it require transferring XTZ to anywhere other than your own wallet. Ever. Period.

The only risk associated with delegation is that the baker will run off with the baking rewards instead of distributing them. Of course, the incentive is low since this can only be done once. The community is active is discussing the trustworthiness of bakers (which, to date, has been pretty much all of them).

The staking risk (risk of losing a bond) is entirely on the baker. This incentivizes them to make sure they're not double baking or otherwise running misbehaving nodes.

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

#174

Post by _robbywashere » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:46 AM UTC

The origin of money itself is deeply rooted in proof-of-work.

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

#175

Post by koliber » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

Coin miners use lots of electricity and release a lot of heat.

Electrical heaters use lots of electricity and release a lot of heat.

Would it be viable to start a company that sends attractive-looking coin miners to people who heat with electricity? Have the coin miner subsidize 25% of the electricity consumption as the icing on the cake.

Would the numbers work on that? Heating is mostly used in the winter. However, some people also heat water year-round with electric heaters. Miners get significantly cheaper energy and free co-location, at the expense of lower amount of total mining per year (as the miner would not be mining when no heating is needed) and increased logistic costs. An added bonus is that it completely nullifies the "wasted energy" argument.

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

#176

Post by xorcist » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:49 AM UTC

leppr wrote: post #148

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure mine is a minority opinion, but I don't think Ethereum has any credibility as something that I'd call decentralized in the sense crypto enthusiasts often mean. I think this is true of a lot of cryptocurrency tools as well. Centralization is okay. There is a lot of power that comes with it. In my view Ethereum has chosen to wield that power while wearing the backwards hat and skateboard of decentralization an…

It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists. An important ability required to understand Ethereum is to be able to separate the raw technology's properties with the development governance story. The Ethereum network derives trustlessness from PoW and its miners. The security guarantees these provide can be considered in isolation to politics. It's just numbers, and the git history…

> It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists

That's perhaps the least useful pejorative ever invented.

It's been a trivial observation from the start that if your problem is adequately solved by payment service backed with a traditional database then that will always have lower operating costs. (This does not mean blockchains are useless, but that there is a natural limit to their usefulness.)

Lately that's enough to get you branded as a "Bitcoin maximalist", which is more than a little bit silly.

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

#177

Post by zby » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

I don't care much if the waste is in energy or hardware or in any other resource. And the level of waste depends only on the block reward and the price of ETH, not the algorithm used, because as long as it is profitable people will burn resources to get the rewards. In free competition people will do that until it gets unprofitable and it gets unprofitable when they burn as much value as they get from the reward. This is MC=MR argument - first presented in: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ . I believe it is possible that PoS is still more efficient than PoW - by being more secure with the same block reward: https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-p... , but still the main point holds: the waste depends on the reward not the algo.

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

#178

Post by iSnow » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

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…

Fair point, but ETH is not just Mr. Buterin and some close friends deciding to postpone mining winter at will. There are currently 8 groups building ETH implementations (https://www.coindesk.com/next-gen-buidlers-the-8-teams-worki...), so you have /some/ level of decentralization since they all have some weight in decisions.

Ultimately, the consensus in any classical blockchain HAS to be uniform, and that introduces an element of centralization (via the consensus algorithm used). That has always been true, and the contentious forks of BTC (and lately BCH) with their fights about the ticker symbol, name, and who has the "true vision" have made this pretty clear. Differing minority opinions have to go the hard fork way and hope to build something better.

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

#179

Post by rbreve » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:00 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.

Sure but if they change it in a negative way they lose because they own the mayority. That's why to be able to change anything you have to have a huge stake, it's like having skin in the game.

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

#180

Post by amasad » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:00 AM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #164

dlubarov wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting Vitalik: > If someone puts a gun to my head & tells me to write a hardfork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download & install the update & switch to that chain? I see few raised hands. This is called decentralization. Sure, the Ethereum Foundation has substantial influence in the sense that their proposed changes tend to be adop…

This is a joke, not decentralisation.

Is it really a joke? Because if this is seen as a valid argument in the Ethereuem community then they've really gone off the deep end.