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

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

#261

Post by mathnmusic » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #238

leppr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit. Strawman. There is a time and place for strong security guarantees, nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with. Maybe you'd be interested in EOS, Stellar and other transparent blockchain platforms? T…

> nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with It's a strong consequence of the 0,1,N rule. The correct number of networks is clearly not "zero", and Metcalfe's Law ensures N networks are worse than N-1 networks with the same nodes in, so you get one network at the limit. Once upon a time I'd have called it "the Internet" but that's really redundant a…

Metcalfe's law is only one of the forces applicable. People also care about sovereignty, which is why N > 1 is most likely.

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

#262

Post by robertAngst » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

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.

This guy knows his byzantine general's problem.

If POS worked, great.

I wouldnt trust it for a half decade of use.

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

#263

Post by DennisP » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

keymone wrote: post #258

DennisP wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number isn't known until all m submit their signatures. I think n is a protocol parameter, so the community will decide by the software they agree to run. If you sign conflicting blocks you get penalized, but "conflicting" is tightly defined. E.g. signing two different blocks at the same block height is a conflict. That's not something you can do if you're on one side of a network split, and it's certainly someth…

> signing two different blocks at the same block height is a conflict i don't need to sign at same height to be a participant in an attack.

That's true. There are several specific slashing conditions, and I forget the exact details, but they're all similarly well-defined and limited. There are proofs that the network converges properly as long as most stake obeys those conditions, and that's why only violations of those conditions are penalized.

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

#264

Post by wuliwong » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

amasad wrote: post #180

StreamBright wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Decentralization is not my area of expertise but I am growing very interested. I've recently been learning a lot more about building decentralized apps using blockchains and distributed file storage. Could you expand a little upon why this is a joke?

I understand that it is not describing a good situation but my understanding was that the miners are a part of the decentralizing infrastructure in the way that was described in the quote.

Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you suggest some other reading for me on creating decentralized applications not using blockchain. I've wondered myself if it makes much sense that everything would be built on blockchains in the future.

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

#265

Post by keymone » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #263

keymone wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> signing two different blocks at the same block height is a conflict i don't need to sign at same height to be a participant in an attack.

That's true. There are several specific slashing conditions, and I forget the exact details, but they're all similarly well-defined and limited. There are proofs that the network converges properly as long as most stake obeys those conditions, and that's why only violations of those conditions are penalized.

> There are proofs that the network converges properly as long as people don't violate those conditions

do you have a link to those proofs? i've seen proofs already where underlying assumptions were something like "majority of nodes are honest" or "network is reliable", etc.

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

#266

Post by wuliwong » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

stanleydrew wrote: post #106

wpietri wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)

My belief is that the recent corporate censorship by large internet companies has created a growing interest in decentralization by some non-technical people. I don't think it is a slam dunk but I do think that currently there is a much greater chance for decentralized applications to gain traction. That being said, I think this new crop of potential users could also buy into new companies that have a centralized architecture but simply market themselves as having an ethos of non-censorship.

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

#267

Post by jpadkins » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #97

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…

It's the ironic twist at the heart of crypto: a centralized system built on implicit trust and community standards is actually required to build a functioning economy. Participating in any particular blockchain is only as valuable as the community around it. So while forking is always an option, a fork will only be worth following if comes with a functional community with agreed-upon standards. So you can (try to) de…

I think this was understood even in the earliest days of bitcoin. The centralized system of "playing fair" was the protocol, which as you point out, is a centralized community standard. Blockchain is independent actors following a common protocol. If the actors don't follow the centralized, common protocol then the economy disintegrates.

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

#268

Post by hanniabu » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

exo762 wrote: post #149

hanniabu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners can choose to fork fork away from those changes. The core team is merely starting the change and the miners are supporting and carrying out those changes by continuing to mine the chain with those updates.

Wrong. Economic majority decides which fork will live and which fork will die. Miners have no say. If they are unhappy, they may attempt to attack fork abiding to new rules. Whey have three venues of attack. 1. Producing blocks that abide to old rules will do nothing - client software will just reject them as incorrect. Fork choice rule (e.g. longest chain or most work done) applies when choosing between two valid bl…

All of the things you listed are in the miners control. Of course this requires economic means, but just having economic right is not enough, you still need to contribute to mining.

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

#269

Post by zrm » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

mathnmusic wrote: post #261

tialaramex wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with It's a strong consequence of the 0,1,N rule. The correct number of networks is clearly not "zero", and Metcalfe's Law ensures N networks are worse than N-1 networks with the same nodes in, so you get one network at the limit. Once upon a time I'd have called it "the Internet" but that's really redundant a…

Metcalfe's law is only one of the forces applicable. People also care about sovereignty, which is why N > 1 is most likely.

This is also why federation is a thing. You can have a single "network" with arbitrarily many "services" and not have smaller services destroyed by Metcalfe's law because they're part of the same network.

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

#270

Post by zanny » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 3:35 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…

Except without a proofing algorithm your decentralized social network or reddit or video platform doesn't need the proofing algorithms which was the whole innovation of cryptocurrencies and what blockchains are.

Otherwise you just use a torrent network or IPFS as your decentralization store.

I do think there is a lot of potential there, especially with how ipfs-js and webtorrent are getting to where you can have users transparently seeding and reinforcing the network in the browser. Its going to open up a lot of alternatives to big dumb data centers storing exabytes of cat videos.