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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

#311

Post by wpietri »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #162
wpietri wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the price of ETH is higher than the price of the energy needed to mine it. The energy consumed has demonstrable value, but that's yet not true for ETH. As many people have said here, it's experimental. And of course, there's a fair bit of financial speculation going on. But as far as I know, it's generating no significant value on its own.

What does it even mean "demonstrable value"? If a person is willing to spend money (for energy, or for buying crypto on an exchange), we can say crypto has "demonstrable value" for that person, no matter what they want to do with that crypto.

By your theory, every Ponzi scheme and pigeon drop has demonstrable value.

I agree that spending money and receiving value are correlated. I just don't think they're identical.

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

#312

Post by exo762 »

hanniabu wrote: post #268
exo762 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> All of the things you listed are in the miners control.

May I ask you to elaborate? My point is - miners' power over the network is extremely limited. They are just a paid work force, working on a very small margin. They have almost no say where network will go in terms of evolution.

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

#313

Post by wpietri »

Nursie wrote: post #181
jerguismi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? I don't think "decentralization" is a good term to define cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum. There are lot of properties in these systems. For example limited supply, untamperability of history, irreversable transactions, permissionless use etc. You can compare to older systems offering similar features and how well these s…

Most people, most use cases, don't want irreversibility. Reversible transactions are a huge positive.

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. I often use a charge card because I want the protection of being able to reverse a transaction. And merchants like this too. By reducing shopper risk, people are more willing to spend money and try new things.

We want it at the systemic level, too. I used to work for financial traders. One day one of our traders made a quick profit by buying something at an absurdly low price. It turned out that a major market participant had fat-fingered a trade offer; they lost enough that the company could well go out of business.

Eventually the exchange stepped in, reversed all the transactions, and put things back the way they were. I thought our trader would be mad, but he just shrugged. And why not? The rules protected them all.

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

#314

Post by wpietri »

dnautics wrote: post #278
wpietri wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're talking about two different things: economic value and the price of currency. I agree that you don't want currency deflation. But over decades, I don't think that has much to do with the value to users of goods. I can think of a few obvious places where they split. One is where we increase quality. A well-trained chef doesn't use significantly more resources than a bad cook, but the result is much bette…

> I agree that you don't want currency deflation https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... > Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis. Just to be clear that we understand the policy…

I think of it more as a workaround for a cognitive bias. Rational actors would be ok with wage cuts as their comparative advantage declines. But humans aren't rational actors, so we instead allow for a little inflation to make adjustment easier. Then people stay employed and productive.

I don't think the ruling class gives a shit about employment metrics. As we saw with the fashion for "austerity" in Europe, they were positively gleeful about other people's suffering. And no wonder; high unemployment reduces labor's bargaining advantage over capital, thereby increasing their relative power.

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

#315

Post by wpietri »

softawre wrote: post #302
tudorconstantin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it even mean "demonstrable value"? If a person is willing to spend money (for energy, or for buying crypto on an exchange), we can say crypto has "demonstrable value" for that person, no matter what they want to do with that crypto.

Does it have value to society? That is the question. Of course it has value to people if they are willing to pay for it.

I think something only has value to people if they purchase it repeatedly and end up satisfied with the outcome over the relevant time scale. People pay for speeding tickets, but nobody's very excited about them. You can ask many ex-smokers (and any emphysema patient) about the value of cigarettes. And as a kid I had to learn a lesson about ordering stuff advertised in comic books; I was willing to pay, but often didn't receive value.

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

#316

Post by hanniabu »

collincusce wrote: post #304
hanniabu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect. There are plenty of chains with pure PoS, and the reason it's taking Ethereum so long is because they have an established PoW chain that they are trying to seamlessly transition to PoS. At the same time they are also working on taking into consideration more aspects like how it works with their platform/smart contracts and sharding. I'm sure there's many other considerations I'm not aware of as well…

I haven't seen a pure PoS chain and I'm pretty heavy in the space. I HAVE seen a LOT of dPoS chains, which isn't the same.

Off the top of my head there's PIVX and Blocknet.

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

#317

Post by logfromblammo »

zrm wrote: post #292
logfromblammo wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

You either need to replicate the trust system that greases cash transactions, or make the "get stuff" half of the trade as easily verified as the "move money" half. The latter is the easier part of the problem, because part of the reason that money is money is the fungibility factor.

Solving the former would eliminate counterfeiting, provide record of provenance, track supply chain, simplify customs clearance, and trivialize recalls in one stroke. But it is a truly massive undertaking. Solutions like insurance and charge-backs are several orders of magnitude cheaper to implement, and don't require an unbroken chain of cooperation from everyone in a supply chain from manufacturer to consumer.

It doesn't exist. It won't exist without a lot of work. But that's what everyone wants. Right now, protecting yourself from scams in a caveat emptor marketplace is an externality that can be diffused away, such that it can be paid a little bit at a time, by everyone. If you eliminate the possibility of scamming, that's removing a cost, such that no one has to pay it any more. A payments system that cannot be scammed by anyone but a giant conspiracy of renegades, or a state-level actor, would likely be preferred by everyone.

But a weak link like Amazon prevents this. They do not themselves know whether the goods in their warehouse are counterfeit, so if you buy something, receive genuine goods, and return a counterfeit to them for a refund, they don't even know that you were the one that scammed them instead of one of their "fulfilled by Amazon" sellers. If they eliminated the common binning, and were able to show that the goods shipped to you were verified as genuine, with a record of provenance going straight back to the factory, you wouldn't be able to do that. But Amazon would rather pay the scammers than pay someone to build a scam-resistant system. That's a reasonable business decision for one company to make. Society as a whole might prefer that the scammers get a smackdown instead of a payoff.

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

#318

Post by nil_pointer »

StreamBright wrote: post #164
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…

This is a joke, not decentralisation.

It's valid. The distributed consensus ultimately decides which chain will be used.

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

#319

Post by bouncycastle »

keymone wrote: post #230
bouncycastle wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Now you've really tangled yourself in a big web.

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

#320

Post by solveit »

rocqua wrote: post #161
nivexous wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A buyer requires a seller. Who's to say they would?

Buisness plan: Get a 51% stake in Ether, and hold big users hostage?

That works until the big users hard fork and take away your ether on their fork. It's pretty much a failsafe that always works at the cost of possibly destroying all trust in the network.
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