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

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

#221

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:21 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #32

anthonybsd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tezos uses delegated PoS, so no, I don't think it qualifies. D-PoS is sort of antithetical to the idea of decentralized blockchain due to a small number of nodes and very questionable process of node (witness) selection.

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

In Ethereum there's one disincentive to stake pooling: if a staker misbehaves, perhaps because it got hacked, the penalty depends on how much stake misbehaves at once. A large amount of misbehaving stake could be completely destroyed, while a small amount will lose only a small portion.

This is mainly because a small amount does no damage and is presumed to be accidental, but also helps decentralize since you're safest not using a large staking pool, the most popular client, the most popular hosting service, etc.

Running as a small staker is feasible because the minimum stake is only 32 ETH, you're profitable if you're online at least 2/3 of the time, and the load on an individual node is feasible for a laptop. The computational load increases fairly linearly with the amount of stake, so there's little economy of scale for a large staker.

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

#222

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:26 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #48

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…

I'm confused as to the purpose of ETH. On one hand it sounds like an investment that you can "hold" as you say. On the other it is a computing platform. So what is it you "hold"? Compute resources? Why is it valuable to allow speculation on compute resources? Can a person ever really reason about the cost of a system running on ETH? How do you plan for those costs? Is is a compute platform? A cryptocurrency? Somethin…

Ethereum is the platform and ETH its native currency. It's much like Bitcoin but with better scripting and the ability to store arbitrary state.

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

#223

Post by hasa » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:30 PM UTC

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…

>Think of the crypto industry as AI training, most is pure junk, until a regression is fit.

This is perfect description. Best sentence I've read today.

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

#224

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:30 PM UTC

zby wrote: post #177

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. Thi…

Yes but the waste in PoS is just the opportunity cost of locking up capital, not anything physical.

Your first link argues that the cost is still physical because of stake grinding, but there are solutions to stake grinding.

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

#225

Post by wslh » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #220

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…

The Stellar protocol has not been yet peer reviewed. Not saying that is wrong but I would say that when you start relaxing consensus assumptions you can come up with even simpler protocols. For example, using trusted third parties to timestamp your transactions. In this way you solve the ordering issue in consensus (assuming no timestamp can give the same time). For example, imagine if Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and companies from other countries provides this (Microsoft has a timestamp server for creating code certificates).

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

#226

Post by arisAlexis » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:46 PM 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…

One word. Consensus.

Ethereum is not ready yet. When it is ready it will be decentralised. Still, miners need to agree for the hard fork and if they don't just like Ethereum Classic they can split. Protocol changes in blockchain projects are about consensus.

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

#227

Post by akerro » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #225

jillesvangurp wrote: post #220

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…

The Stellar protocol has not been yet peer reviewed. Not saying that is wrong but I would say that when you start relaxing consensus assumptions you can come up with even simpler protocols. For example, using trusted third parties to timestamp your transactions. In this way you solve the ordering issue in consensus (assuming no timestamp can give the same time). For example, imagine if Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and…

>For example, imagine if Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and companies from other countries provides this (Microsoft has a timestamp server for creating code certificates).

Sooo... paypal on blockchain?

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

#228

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

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…

Is there anything worth looking at on d.tube? They've done a good job of cloning the interface but what kind of content do you get? Do they have music on there and do they circumvent copyright takedowns by being decentralised?

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

#229

Post by Nasrudith » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 12:58 PM 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

I think to most decentralization doesn't matter as an end to itself except to what may be crudely put "fans" of decentralization. If they can get music better and easier through torrents they'll do it. If they can get it better from iTunes or YouTube they'll do that.

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

#230

Post by keymone » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #117

nivexous wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this. So ... theft?

You should really be careful with how you play with definitions, as that will lead down to a slippery slope. Remember that time when someone managed to generate 184 billion bitcoin? With your reasoning, we can now say that the succeeding hard-fork to 'fix' the issue by slashing the bitcoins was theft.

> Remember that time when someone managed to generate 184 billion bitcoin?

you're being intellectually dishonest or even outright manipulative here.

there were never 184 billion coins created on bitcoin chain, there was a bug in validation logic of bitcoin client that made it follow the chain that was invalid.

are you seriously trying to compare that to stealing coins from somebody on a valid chain?

really?