Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
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Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#2What a joke.
VB is Ben Bernanke of crypto
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#3> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running.
"Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#4> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
> but by that over 2 magnitudes?
Why do you question the claim?
The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different.
I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative to each other. I suspect that ethereum's market cap would be lower and probably have lower mining rewards therefore less capital invested in its global mining pool. I suspect that ethereum's algorithm requires more energy per block than bitcoin's, but I have a hard time guessing how much. Especially since it's a little less mature, maybe fewer ASIC miners so even less efficient in practice.
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#5> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
I can't comment specifically on the details, but one consideration is that Ethereum's mining hash is designed to be ASIC resistant.
Bitcoin is entirely mined by dedicated hardware that's incapable of doing anything other than mining Bitcoin. Ethereum is mostly mined by GPUs that can obviously be repurposed for other applications if need be.
If the electricity cost for Ethereum mining gets too out of control, the miners can just point their GPUs at some other task. Whereas Bitcoin miners are stuck with sunk cost of rapidly depreciating capital, and pretty much will never turn even during electricity price spikes.
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#6> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
> but by that over 2 magnitudes? Why do you question the claim? The power consumption doesn't scale between the two by the quanta of miners, it scales differently because the algorithms are different and thus the power consumed is different. I have no idea how the algorithms differ nor how the difficulty differs among the two, so I don't have an intuition about how to guess whether or not they should scale relative t…
There’s also the fact that Ethereum has an almost completely different architecture including block times which affect the frequency of mining, different reward structures, etc.
As far as I know its not necessarily the difference between Bitcoin’s SHA-256 vs Ethereum’s Ethash as much as it is about the architecture itself.
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#7> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
The article actually has a good link to https://www.trinsicoin.com/?focus=ETH where if you scroll down it breaks down the math.
(You have to hover over Blockchain, Mining, and Energy to see the parameters.)
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#8Given that they keep postponing the transition to PoS, wouldn't it be smarter to remove the artificial difficulty increase and make the network more efficient?
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#9> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
I can't comment specifically on the details, but one consideration is that Ethereum's mining hash is designed to be ASIC resistant. Bitcoin is entirely mined by dedicated hardware that's incapable of doing anything other than mining Bitcoin. Ethereum is mostly mined by GPUs that can obviously be repurposed for other applications if need be. If the electricity cost for Ethereum mining gets too out of control, the mine…
But the ASICs are used because they are more efficient. Forcing miners to use less efficient hardware is going to drive up the average energy per hash calculated.
Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb
#10> [With PoS, Ethereum would lose] the baggage of wasting the electricity of a small city to keep itself running. "Small city" sounds suspiciously small. Last time I checked, Bitcoin had the same electricity consumption as the entire country of Austria. I can believe that Ethereum has less miners, but by that over 2 magnitudes?
According to https://ethernodes.org/ there are ~7.5k nodes & according to https://www.etherchain.org/charts/distinctMiners ~60 miners running ATM. Small city sounds a bit big in that context.