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

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

#211

Post by menzoic » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:43 AM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #196

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…

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."

TekMol, I don't get how your analogy relates?

A gun would have to be put to every individual miner's head to force the majority to upgrade. Even then, if it caused a fork, individual users have the freedom to continue using the old version, new miners can choose the old version. Miners can even switch back to the old version after the gun is gone. Everything will still work.

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

#212

Post by RexetBlell » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #182

mabbo wrote: post #18

I want to write a snarky or skeptical comment about how it's probably going to fail, but honestly I kind of love the way Proof of Stake works. Instead of mining, those who want in put down a stake of ether that they can mine it and get a better chance of winning based on the size of the stake. If they get caught cheating, they lose their stake. There probably going to be some fun when the first serious exploits happe…

> If they get caught cheating, they lose their stake in that chain . In any distributed blockchain there's going to be several chain(tips) at any given time.

You are talking about the nothing at stake problem. It's address here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs#wh...

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

#213

Post by wslh » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

josu wrote: post #203

wslh wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

PoS is not only a computing and cryptography problem, it's also a social science and game theory problem. There are not that many "scientists" that are knowledgeable on those areas. Nick Szabo (the authority figure you may be looking for) doesn't seem to like PoS: >Conjectured governance under proof-of-stake seems to involve programmers & other amateurs making legal & accounting decisions. Bitcoin governance does not…

Not saying that Tuur doesn't have the right to criticize. Saying that at the end this discussion has a strong academic side where you can formalize the problems involved, the adversarial attacks, and balance the solutions. Non academic fights on strongly academic topics, in general, cannot distill the signal from the noise.

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

#214

Post by RexetBlell » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:50 AM UTC

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.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs#so...

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

#215

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:54 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).

The needs if miners set the maximum bitcoin transaction rate.

The more miners that come, the less transactions it can sustain, and that algorithm can not change without the coin losing much of its value.

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

#216

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:55 AM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #196

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…

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."

[deleted]

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

#217

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 11:56 AM UTC

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

That's a problem for the original developers as well, and is precisely why the difficulty bomb exists. It causes the original project to gradually stop working, forcing the users to migrate to newer code.

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

#218

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:04 PM UTC

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…

That sounds like the "coin age" system of Peercoin. Ethereum's PoS ignores coin age, which probably couldn't be used anyway because Ethereum uses account balances instead of UTXOs.

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

#219

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:10 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #182

mabbo wrote: post #18

I want to write a snarky or skeptical comment about how it's probably going to fail, but honestly I kind of love the way Proof of Stake works. Instead of mining, those who want in put down a stake of ether that they can mine it and get a better chance of winning based on the size of the stake. If they get caught cheating, they lose their stake. There probably going to be some fun when the first serious exploits happe…

> If they get caught cheating, they lose their stake in that chain . In any distributed blockchain there's going to be several chain(tips) at any given time.

Issuing staking transactions on more than one chain is one of the defined slashing conditions. All the transactions are public so any other staker can see that you've done it, submit the evidence in a transaction of their own, and earn a reward while causing some or all of your stake to be destroyed.

("Some or all" because the devs recognize that you might get hacked, so the penalty depends on how much of the total stake misbehaves at once. If it's only a small portion, it's not damaging and presumed to be accidental.)

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

#220

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:10 PM UTC

I'm glad we switched away from Ethereum in favor of Stellar; it will take most of this year and probably next for the dust to settle on this.

Until then, Ethereum continues to be unusable for serious dapps (which are rare to begin with) that have expectations that exceed having reasonable transaction throughput (Until then, this is a toy platform for wannabe ICOs, misc gambling applications, and not much else that I would qualify as substantial in transaction volume or user base. I

f your use case is "nobody does anything that requires a transaction to happen more often than maybe once a day and you can justify the high tranaction cost", ethereum is for you. Otherwise if say, you expect to have users that do stuff in your platform, use something else that works right now instead of waiting for the next two years for Vitalik et. al to actually deliver on their promises with something that is usable, scalable, stable, secure, and available.

We switched to Stellar, which also implements proof of stake and provides a reasonable compromise between security and availability. It has its own challenges but transactions clear in <4s and there are dozens to hundreds of them per minute globablly. It also skips the convoluted smart contracts (which IMHO are severely expensive, hard to fix, exploitable bugs waiting to happen) in favor of simple but adequate financial constructs builtin to stellar for custom assets, transactions with multiple signees, transactions with limited time validity and many other features that you can combine to emulate many of the more things people attempt to do on top of solidity. E.g. you can do escrow transactions, payment channels, and many other things. It also scales down reasonably well for micro transactions with values measured in a percentage of a cent (though payment channels are probably the way to go for that).