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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

#291

Post by jki275 »

Sargos wrote: post #286
jki275 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the community believed in the fork, that's what I meant if I wasn't clear. That belief is contra to the concept of an immutable decentralized ledger, which means ETH isn't canonically a cryptocurrency, an immutable ledger, or a decentralized ledger anymore. The upcoming (well, it's never going to happen) POS fork is going to centralize it further among the very small number of massive whales who contr…

PoS is actually more decentralized when PoW. PoW is controlled by a few mining pools but PoS will have tens of thousands or more validators. In PoW only a few people have the resources to build and run mining farms. Certainly not me. In PoS anyone can stake on a desktop or laptop. This greatly increases the amount of people who can participate in the network.

In some cryptocurrencies that is certainly the case. If you look at the ETH ecosystem, it is massively concentrated and thus will never be decentralized in any meaningful way. With POW, anyone could participate, with POS most people will never have any ability to realistically participate.

Just to clarify a bit in an edit here -- As a general comment about POS vx POW, you have to purchase a huge amount of the cryptocurrency to participate in POS in a meaningful way -- so there is a cost to that just as there is in mining. The recurring costs of electricity are not there in POS of course.

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

#292

Post by zrm »

logfromblammo wrote: post #282
Nursie wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility I think that's a little simplistic. Without reversibility you're not going to receive as much. People are far less likely to trust smaller or newer merchants without these sorts of features. You probably also want your customers to be able to rectify mistakes, such as sending money to the wrong place. I guess we could say when you are receiving you want i…

With old money, reversibility is handled by return policies, merchant account charge-backs, liens, and civil lawsuits. If you hand a bearer instrument like a bank note to someone, that transaction is technically irreversible. They put it in their pocket, and you can't recover it without a physical assault. You have to trust them to provide the goods or services that you just paid for. Or you have to trust the justice…

You can't have atomic transactions when one half of the transaction isn't electronic.

If I pay someone for a laptop and instead of a laptop I receive a box of rocks, I can claim they didn't send the laptop and they can claim they did. There is no way for a third party to know who is lying.

The recipient could be lying to get a refund when they received the laptop, the sender could be lying to get paid when they sent a box of rocks. Maybe neither of us is lying and the delivery driver swapped the package contents.

This is not a problem alternative payment methods solve, nor one they created. See Amazon. The solution is some kind of insurance, which can be layered on top of any payment method -- you buy through Amazon using whatever payment method you like, they take a cut in exchange for eating the returns when sellers send the wrong stuff. Then crappy traders are the intermediary's problem and whether they kick them out or eat the losses themselves is their own choice.

But you don't want that kind of system built into the payment method itself, because it has overhead, and not all transactions require it. Sometimes the thing you're paying for has already happened and you're just settling your account, in which case a proof of payment is all you need out of the transaction. Sometimes you are buying something in person or can otherwise verify the goods yourself before making payment. Sometimes the seller is known and trustworthy enough that you're willing to buy without insurance. In all of these cases mandatory insurance is costly dead weight overhead, and they represent a significant proportion of transactions.

Meanwhile if you're buying from someone you don't trust and can't verify, you have the option of using an intermediary or escrow service or buying insurance. But that doesn't mean it needs to be mandatory in all cases.

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

#293

Post by darawk »

jacobush wrote: post #158
darawk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in this case, if you think you have better ideas, you can code up your own fork, and try to drum up support for it. The open source ecosystem works far better than the political system, I find.

Like now, you can drum up support for your own new party.

Yes, but in the case of the US government at least, there are structural reasons why the two party system is a stable equilibrium. Those structural reasons do not exist for cryptocurrencies. The most important of which is that there can be only one president of the US government, only so many senators, judges, etc... There can be infinitely many concurrently competing forks of Ethereum.

You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.

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

#294

Post by stale2002 »

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."

Not really.

With cryptocurrencies, anyone at any time can fork for any reason.

This can't be done with the government. The government will prevent you from doing so.

A cryptocurrency can't prevent another cryptocurrency from existing, though.

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

#295

Post by vinniejames »

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…

Like TCP/IP or HTTP, Blockchains are a specification.

You can easily change How HTTP works on your own server, as can the core devs on a blockchain project.

None of that actually matters until clients begin using the new features/blockchain software en masse, that's where the decentralized piece fits in

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

#296

Post by stale2002 »

Nursie wrote: post #205
jerguismi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility I think that's a little simplistic. Without reversibility you're not going to receive as much. People are far less likely to trust smaller or newer merchants without these sorts of features. You probably also want your customers to be able to rectify mistakes, such as sending money to the wrong place. I guess we could say when you are receiving you want i…

People already have multiple choices of reversible currencies.

The point is that it is useful to both have reversible, and irreversible currencies existing in the world at the same time.

That way people who want to use reversible currencies can use that, and people who instead prefer irreversible ones can use those.

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

#297

Post by billmalarky »

jki275 wrote: post #236
Dylan16807 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of everyone with a stock exiting simultaneously is way too suspicious and hard to mentally model, so let's say a supermajority instead, because some event makes a big holder and some followers want to move out. Perhaps the stock was replaced in an index fund. And you made up "simultaneously", so I'm going to ignore that and say "a week or two" instead. There are thousands of major stocks that could support t…

Can you cite any stock that could actually support a super majority of owners dumping their stock on the market? I don't have any data on this, but it doesn't seem logical that could happen. Generally large amounts of stock hitting the market at once results in price depression.

Typically a premium is paid on top of the current stock price any time one company acquires another company, which is the scenario you describe.

>The target company's stock usually rises because the acquiring company has to pay a premium for the acquisition. The reason for the premium is that the shareholders of the target company, who need to approve the takeover, are unlikely to approve the acquisition unless the stock price is above the prevailing market price. If the takeover bid equates to a lower stock price than the current price of the target company, there's little incentive for the current owners of the target company to sell their shares to the acquiring company.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/203.asp

Granted, this isn't a scenario where majority of owners are "dumping" the stock on the open market, but rather a scenario where a buyer is snatching up a large share of the stock. So really it isn't about the amount of stock being transacted, but the reason for the transaction (sell pressure vs buy pressure).

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

#298

Post by splintercell »

Iv wrote: post #81
shittyadmin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mist…

And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

> And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

Your argument is like how left-liberals claim that poor Americans vote against their own self-interest by voting for Republican. No, they aren't voting against their own interest, they are voting for it, you just don't get what that is and in your mental model that's the case.

Specifically to your argument, can you pass an ideological Turing test of representing the opinion of people who supported the hard fork? In other words, sitting behind a computer, someone has to judge whether you are a true DAO hard fork supporter or not, and will they be able to correctly identify you.

The fact is, all software is mutable. All software (including Bitcoin) can go for changes (irrespective of the nature of those changes, which could even be, "hand over the write access of bitcoin network to federal govt").

So what is decentralization then if literally any piece of software can be changed if enough number of people go for it?

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

#299

Post by splintercell »

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…

> Decentralization doesn't mean it needs to be immutable.

It is also impossible to create immutable software.

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

#300

Post by stale2002 »

wmf wrote: post #125
dahdum wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stakers will lose their stake, and those shards affected will go offline, but the rest of the network will continue on until the interruption is over. Ethereum is designing the system specifically to accommodate that sort of problem, last I remember you needed 95%+ uptime to generate return, so if your internet goes out 5% of the time you should not stake.

Why would the minority side of the partition go offline? How would it even know that it's on the minority side of a partition?

> How would it even know that it's on the minority side of a partition?

Because it would be obvious?

The world does not exist in a state where a "true" network partition can ever happen.

A "true" network partition I would define as preventing all information, of any type, from going into and out of a country.

This is a ridiculous scenario that isn't even worth considering.

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