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

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

#191

Post by iSnow » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:37 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #86

marcosdumay wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are pivoting into something that may be more useful. Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness. ETH will have both different usage scenarios an one less bottleneck. (No idea if this is enough.)

Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness. Can you elaborate? If you want to use Bitcoin, just buy it. Mining seems more complex to me (and more expensive since I don't have a hydro dam in my backyard).

Every transaction in BTC is secured by miners - that's the whole reason mining exists in the first place. If you buy it and transfer it to your wallet, some miner mines that transaction into a block (and gets rewarded for that).

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

#192

Post by wslh » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:37 AM UTC

amasad wrote: post #17

Some good criticism of PoS in @TuurDemeester's thread from last week: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1078682801954799617.html And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780489

Nothing in Tuur Demeester resume [1] makes me think he is able to discuss PoS which is being developed by top scientists (including one Turing Prize) in projects like Cardano, DFINITY, Algorand, and Ethereum.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuurdemeester/

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

#193

Post by OliverJones » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:43 AM UTC

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...

Yes.

My electric grid provider buys power from Hydro Québec. I'm happy they're using a differential rate tariff for crytpo farms. Maybe it will slow the escalation in my bills, which outrun my attempts to conserve electricity.

That being said, crypto farms are an almost ideal workload for a smart grid, as long as they can shut off when other customers draw peak loads. They are a predictable base load, drawing power all the time. A grid with a smaller difference between peak design load and base load has a better return on capital.

That means a grid charging more to miners than other customers acts against its own narrow self-interest. But, grids do it anyway. My local grid pays to retrofit city street lights (another nice base load) from sodium vapor to LEDs to save power, for example.

If we (collectively) embrace crypto, we must also embrace nuclear power because it's great for base load and emits no carbon. Is that a bargain worth making?

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

#194

Post by pepesza » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

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…

They are doing beacon chain (a distributed unbiasable verifiable random number generator, constructed using commit-reveal scheme + VDF to fix commit-reveal biasability) to choose sets of validators for each of the shards. It is not your typical PoS design. I'm not sure how exactly validators for single shard will form a block, but even PBFT (tendermint style) solution would work in situation when you don't have to worry about membership of validator set.

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

#195

Post by dagaci » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #172

ascendantlogic wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

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

Well yes it is, although people take Ethereum quite seriously the code-base led Vitalik has quite a distance to go before it completes the roadmap delivered some years ago. So it is fair for the foundation to patch hacks as well as provide other upgrades.

It you want to continue to use the hackable version because you believe that code should never change and be immutable and never change then that is also a choice.

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

#196

Post by TekMol » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #146

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…

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…

You could say the same about a government backed currency.

"Sure, the government can send men with guns. But that's because they have the backing of the people. The police and the military. If they lose that, they can't."

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

#197

Post by decentralised » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:53 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…

There's a misunderstanding of what decentralisation means.

The difficulty bomb is in the code but the node operators (miners, etc) have to chose to upgrade their clients to work with the new fork rules. The decision of which code to run and which chain becomes canonical is in the hands of the community of users and not the developers, despite the Ethereum Foundation having full ownership of the protocol development process.

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

#198

Post by leppr » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #176

leppr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

That was a neutral remark on the parent's first sentence about his being a minority opinion, not a pejorative against doubting blockchains' intrinsic value or whatever you seem to have understood.

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

#199

Post by jerguismi » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:08 AM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #181

jerguismi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Most people, most use cases, don't want irreversibility. Reversible transactions are a huge positive.

Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility, when you are sending you prefer reversibility...

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

#200

Post by celticninja » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:11 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…

Ethereum is not decentralised. The hard fork after the DAO hack proved that. Combined with its limitless supply it's pretty much pointless in its current incarnation.