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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

#11

Post by samatman »

majewsky wrote: post #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?

Ethereum mines 2 ETH (exactly) per 10 seconds (approximately).

Bitcoin mines 12.5 BTC (exactly) per 10 minutes (approximately). Normalizing the ETH rate against the BTC, we get 2 ETH * 6 * 10 = 120 ETH.

So at current market rates, 120 ETH * $132 vs. 12.5 BTC * $7,341, $15,840 ETH for $91,792.5 BTC.

This suggests that the BTC network should use roughly 5.8 times as much energy as ETH, to derive an equivalent profit per unit energy.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#13

Post by wyldfire »

0xname wrote: post #6
wyldfire wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's so many inputs that it's difficult to casually come up with an intuition-guided estimate. So it makes some sense to have faith in the empirically guided value. We hope that they took the time to validate their algorithm for extrapolating the energy consumption.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#15

Post by arcticbull »

> A vibrant ecosystem of banking functions, asset management, trading exchanges, and more have sprung from this, requiring Ethereum to quickly respond to external events and triggers.

That's a bit of a stretch isn't it? Other than speculation and money laundering, I don't think any dapps have gained any traction at all, let alone a vibrant ecosystem.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#16

Post by flarex »

some1else wrote: post #8

Given 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?

The reasoning is that somewhere down the line introducing an ice age may lead to a contentious hard fork. Better to include it upfront so that expectations are set that PoW on Ethereum is not a long term thing.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#17

Post by arcticbull »

sp332 wrote: post #9
dcolkitt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The system is meant to balance itself out one way or the other. You throw more efficient resources at it, and it becomes less efficient to maintain its 10-20 second block times. It's actively anti-efficient.

The idea behind ASIC resistance is not efficiency, but rather to limit centralization. If you can use generic hardware that anyone can access it is intended to reduce capex required to become a cost-effective miner. Now of course, I don't think that makes sense, but that's the idea.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#18

Post by flarex »

arcticbull wrote: post #15

> A vibrant ecosystem of banking functions, asset management, trading exchanges, and more have sprung from this, requiring Ethereum to quickly respond to external events and triggers. That's a bit of a stretch isn't it? Other than speculation and money laundering, I don't think any dapps have gained any traction at all, let alone a vibrant ecosystem.

Decentralised Finance (Defi) apps are starting to gain traction on Ethereum. Theres about half a billion in funds currently making use of them. https://defipulse.com

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#19

Post by arcticbull »

flarex wrote: post #18
arcticbull wrote: post #15

> A vibrant ecosystem of banking functions, asset management, trading exchanges, and more have sprung from this, requiring Ethereum to quickly respond to external events and triggers. That's a bit of a stretch isn't it? Other than speculation and money laundering, I don't think any dapps have gained any traction at all, let alone a vibrant ecosystem.

Decentralised Finance (Defi) apps are starting to gain traction on Ethereum. Theres about half a billion in funds currently making use of them. https://defipulse.com

Even those are mostly exchanges (speculation), derivatives (extra speculation) and stable coins (to enable speculation on exchanges which want to avoid AML and KYC in the facilitation of money laundering).

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#20

Post by flarex »

arcticbull wrote: post #19
flarex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralised Finance (Defi) apps are starting to gain traction on Ethereum. Theres about half a billion in funds currently making use of them. https://defipulse.com

Even those are mostly exchanges (speculation), derivatives (extra speculation) and stable coins (to enable speculation on exchanges which want to avoid AML and KYC in the facilitation of money laundering).

Whether you agree with the use cases or traction they're gaining doesn't negate that there's a lot of others that do find them useful.
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