Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

blog.ethereum.org

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current system is no different, as the hash power is related to how many computers you can afford to buy. This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental impact.

PoW is a lot different, as burning real world resources (energy) brings sell-pressure to miners, whereas PoS only has cost of locking the funds. This means that regardless of the size of your "operation" cost scales very flat. PoS also does not come with the property of innovation and disruption. In a PoW (especially ASIC-based) system you will find new ways to outperform your peers and disrupt old players. PoW incen…

This is a spicy take, not least because the cheapest source of energy in the developing world (i.e. the one without environmental regulations) tends to be coal.

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#62
post #2

So with PoS, we recreate a system where a few rich pool have decision over the network. Can someone enlighten me on how this is different from the current fiat system?

It's not that different. But the end goal isn't a revolutionary overhaul, but progress in a different direction.

The delusion that crypto is or can be the best thing humanity has ever created has to come to an end.

Let crypto just be another moderately useful system in society and let the speculation game die out.

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#64
post #42

What are the attack vectors on PoS. With PoW you need 51% of the mining power to take over the system, which is very labor intensive to set up. With PoS could you take over all coins by buying 51% of the existing coins? So if the market cap of ETH is 200BB spend 100BB to double your money?

Presumably, if someone took that kind of control over Ethereum, its value would rapidly become zero.

In practice, different people have utility in the network

In most double spent networks, people clamor for the coins so they can have the chance at double spending

In PoW networks that’s combined with renting/deploying hash power

In PoS networks its just taking over validators

Big ole party!

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#65

What are the attack vectors on PoS. With PoW you need 51% of the mining power to take over the system, which is very labor intensive to set up. With PoS could you take over all coins by buying 51% of the existing coins? So if the market cap of ETH is 200BB spend 100BB to double your money?

Once the attack goal is achieved the Ethereum value will go to zero. It does not make sense to do this by buying coins, but potentially hackers could get control of such big amount of coins by hacking exchanges, thus bringing whole system to collapse. Similar scenario as in Mr. Robot.

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current system is no different, as the hash power is related to how many computers you can afford to buy. This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental impact.

PoW is a lot different, as burning real world resources (energy) brings sell-pressure to miners, whereas PoS only has cost of locking the funds. This means that regardless of the size of your "operation" cost scales very flat. PoS also does not come with the property of innovation and disruption. In a PoW (especially ASIC-based) system you will find new ways to outperform your peers and disrupt old players. PoW incen…

> PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries more than anything before. It is the fix for environmental problems.

That can only become true if and when governments decide to suddenly ban PoW, so that all that cheap energy services anything other than crypto. I don't think it works as an argument in favor of PoW, for the same reason "we're only spreading knowledge of chemistry and democratizing process engineering" doesn't work as an argument in favor of drug cartels.

Also, 'SR2Z is right - "cheap energy in developing countries" == coal.

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#67
post #47

> Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and I hope that’s true for the rest of the industry too. Ethereum has been talking about PoS for a long time, so until they actually deliver we should be looking at existing decentralized PoS coins.

There is actual, visible progress, plus a built-in self-destruct that will make continuing on the current chain basically impossible.

They've moved the self-destruct deadline multiple times.

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#68

Its price will also tumble 99% . People motives to get into crypto are clear. They want to subtract themselves from government policy of constantly printing money. BTC takes care of that and it's a 14 years brand which is extremely politically expensive to make illegal On the other hand people are perfectly satisfied with their experience on Youtube, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Ebay, JPMorgan etc. which are the entitie…

>Its price will also tumble 99% From your lips to God's ears. If the price falls steeply there will be a glut of gpus flooding the market and I'll finally be able to build a pc.

Or you can do what the market is telling you to do and you’ll be able to afford a pc whenever you want

The market signals are right there

Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

#70

For the people who criticize as to why they've taken so long in shifting to a PoS model: consensus takes time, so does developing and testing something that definitively shouldn't go wrong. Also, there's the inherent issue with Proof-of-Stake that Proof-of-Work doesn't have: the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough before it could feasibly self-maintain a PoS shift without being immediately vulnerab…

Consensus may take time, but when you're pouring gas onto a fire, arguing that you need to dump out most of the can before you can be sure you know what you're doing isn't a defensible position.
Post reply on HN