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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

#241

Post by rcxdude »

menzoic wrote: post #206
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…

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable. It just means that power and responsibility is distriubted to many. > I'm a total dilettante in crypto but if something is decentralized you can't make large-scale changes to it at the drop of a hat. Exactly, you're correct. It's not easy for these changes to actually take effect. It tak…

The power of the miners is overblown: the mining power follows the price/value of the coin, not the other way around, and the price is determined by the users transacting on it, not the miners (though the miners can of course try to interfere with the users ability to transact, but this generally pushes the price down).

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

#242

Post by justtopost »

akerro wrote: post #227
wslh wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Please no. Keep paypal on ebay, and away from the rest of us.

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

#243

Post by DJBunnies »

keymone wrote: post #231
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…

PoS was known way before PoW. It simply doesn't solve the problem at hand - decentralized consensus between mutually distrusting parties.

Bingo.

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

#244

Post by jzymbaluk »

ramoz wrote: post #237

Is there a public blockchain that can be used solely as a ledger, vs having to integrate with the currency model?

Hyperledger is a series of projects sponsored by the Linux foundation, Hyperledger Fabric [1] is an example of a blockchain project that is solely a ledger and smart contract platform, that isn't focused on the currency use case.

AFAIK there isn't a canonical public Fabric blockchain, it's mostly focused on companies that want to roll their own private/permissioned blockchain, but I'm sure there are projects that are what you're looking for.

[1]https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric

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

#245

Post by ceejayoz »

menzoic wrote: post #211
TekMol wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A gun would have to be put to every individual miner's head to force the majority to upgrade.

The analogy applies to this, too. Governments have long shown that you don't have to put a gun to each individual's head - murder a small amount of dissidents in a nasty manner and it quite effectively squashes dissent in a lot of cases.

A lot of miners are in China, which has lots of practice doing this.

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

#246

Post by DennisP »

keymone wrote: post #234
DennisP wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> opportunity cost of locking up capital that's one part and it is also paid by PoW miners by buying the hardware. then there is another part - block rewards. where's MC=MR int hat for PoS? > solutions to stake grinding only ones that involve trusted third parties.

So the basic idea of stake grinding is that by trying lots of different things, the staker can increase his odds of being the one to create a new block.

This can be prevented without trusted third parties if you have a collaborative way to generate random numbers, which cannot be manipulated by the stakers. For example, in Dfinity they use threshold signatures. If any m of n stakers submit their part of the signature, a random number is created; no smaller subset of stakers can predict what that number will be, and the number is the same regardless of which stakers submit. (The number is used to choose the staker who produces the block.)

A similar attack is to sign multiple histories, so regardless of which is accepted, you get some reward. In Ethereum, if you do this then you're penalized, losing some or all of your stake (depending on size of the attack). Any staker can see the evidence that you signed conflicting histories, and submit the evidence to the winning chain, receiving a small reward for doing so and destroying your stake.

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

#247

Post by pbhjpbhj »

menzoic wrote: post #211
TekMol wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he's saying that without the support of the demos (voting public) the police/army won't move to support the government's position so their power is curtailed; in the same way that a centralised coin administration has their power curtailed if the community don't support their "army" (system changes to force a particular new regime).

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

#248

Post by wslh »

akerro wrote: post #227
wslh wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, saying that you can rely on third parties just for the timestamp but not for the whole blockchain

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

#249

Post by Tor3 »

keymone wrote: post #235
koliber wrote: post #175

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,…

flipping a bit takes energy. if you flip a bit and also release heat - your bit-flipping hardware is inefficient.

The only way to make it more efficient is to use less energy to flip that bit. Energy use always end up as heat.

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

#250

Post by keymone »

DennisP wrote: post #246
keymone wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> opportunity cost of locking up capital that's one part and it is also paid by PoW miners by buying the hardware. then there is another part - block rewards. where's MC=MR int hat for PoS? > solutions to stake grinding only ones that involve trusted third parties.

So the basic idea of stake grinding is that by trying lots of different things, the staker can increase his odds of being the one to create a new block. This can be prevented without trusted third parties if you have a collaborative way to generate random numbers, which cannot be manipulated by the stakers. For example, in Dfinity they use threshold signatures. If any m of n stakers submit their part of the signature…

> If any m of n stakers submit their part of the signature, a random number is created; no smaller subset of stakers can predict what that number will be, and the number is the same regardless of which stakers submit.

so the number is known just from who is participating in the scheme? who controls the `n`?

> Any staker can see the evidence that you signed conflicting histories

what if there is a temporary network split? everybody who signed on chain A is now malicious actor if they sign on chain B and vice versa.

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