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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

blog.ethereum.org

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

#91

Post by rfd4sgmk8u »

ETH wont, and shouldn't migrate to PoS. PoS is a scam -- a trick, a reinvention of existing corrupt economic models. It throws out the greatest part of decentralized cryptocurrencies -- trustless, independently verifiable, auto-adjusting to external conditions, hard to fake proof of work. It replaces it with shell games and chicanery. I am very pro proof of work. The energy usage is a good thing. We can deal with the emissions from generation out of band, it is not the protocols problem.

Two primary concerns, technical feasibility and political strife:

I have my extreme doubts that you can move a chain like this without causing it to collapse. As yet all we have seen out of the eth camp is more broken proof of concepts -- not a viable model for a potentially trillion dollar economy. How to you replace a jet engine mid flight? (You don't. Unless you like not safely landing).

PoS coin is worthless coin. If you want to have your expensive-to-mine gas coin be worth something, you have to make it hard to acquire. My second concern is that if they do manage to 'migrate', enough folks will ignore this and keep mining. This is a problem today with more contentious PoW hard forks.

Ultimately this behavior will lead to more chain forks, which unlike in the ETC days actually is a big deal today. Whos USDT USDC etc is the real coin? The eth1 PoW 'legacy' network, or the eth2 'pos' chain, or what about the eth1-a/eth1-b fork when the first political staking challenges come up (see all world religion schisms). PoW solves this problem. One truth, enforced by universal energy usage. Not power players arguing over interpretations of religious text.

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

#92

Post by sp332 »

crazypython wrote: post #67
sp332 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There will be a new PoW chain and a new PoS chain. The old chain will technically exist but mining on it will be impractical. There is no longer enough interest from miners to make the new PoW chain the majority, so the winners of this hard fork will be recognized as "Ethereum" and the other miners will be relegated to a less influential chain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399

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

#94

Post by jniedrauer »

roel_v wrote: post #75

Maybe this is a good time and place to ask - let's say I want to buy something using Ethereum. Is it correct that when I look at, say, https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... , you have to pay USD 20 just as payment fees? I wrote off Bitcoin as a payment mechanism a long time ago because of this (although it seems BTC tx costs are now lower than ETH?), is this the direction tx costs for all cr…

That is correct, to run an on-chain transaction is fairly expensive. There is a lot of ongoing work to address this: Layer 2 solutions like optimistic rollup, arbitrum, etc. EIP-1559 itself will address this problem on layer 1. But the ecosystem is not mature yet. If/when the scaling problem is finally solved, the legacy financial system will change rapidly.

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

#95

Post by crazypython »

michael_vo wrote: post #32

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?

You can DDoS normal, non-validating nodes, and if they go offline, they can be unsure which chain is the true chain, because they were not around.. This means your laptop can never sleep, unlike in Bitcoin, where full nodes may go offline and catch up later.

People who control stake can refuse to include (censor) transactions, as there is no market competition for transaction inclusion like in PoW. In PoW, if 51% of network power is censoring transactions, then censored transactions can attach a higher fee, which competing miners will use to buy more equipment and mine the censored transactions.

These are the ones I know about, that I learned in an evening of research.

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

#96

Post by kemonocode »

bsedlm wrote: post #81
kemonocode wrote: post #43

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…

> the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough I don't understand how proof of stake works to the depth I understand proof of work. But this reassures me that it's feasable that they'll accomplish the same distributed consensus. So then, could I say that Ethereum proof of stake will allow the owners of the coins (ether) to be independent from the owners of the mining operations? or uhmm... is the indepe…

Ethereum proof of work made it so the owners of the coins could be independent from the owners of the mining operations, even if in practice many miners end up keeping most of the block rewards themselves and only reinvesting what they need in new infrastructure and to maintain what they already have. Proof of stake makes it so the miners and holders are now the same (you stake the coins that you have, or you pool them up with others), however the cost to wreck the chain is much greater than it would have been 3-4 years ago.

The whole idea is that Ether is so spread out now, it'd be unfeasible for someone to snatch up enough of it for an attack, in a similar way to how an ever-increasing difficulty makes it harder for a hostile actor to coordinate enough of it to make such attack.

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

#97

Post by throwkeep »

h4kor wrote: post #13

> Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that The Merge arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety. Overworking your engineers will most definitely lead to compromises. But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are serious about reducing the environmental impact they have.

Overtime != overwork. You've probably programmed something, at some point, where you were excited to work on it from morning to night? Where you lose track of hours, forget to eat meals and completely in the zone? That could easily be the case with these engineers, working on such a historical project and consequential update.

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

#98

Post by Geee »

Polygator wrote: post #15
focom wrote: 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?

The justification is that contrarily to PoW, where there are economies of scale on computing power, PoS power scales linearly with your stake. Mining has been concentrated in the hands of a few gigantic mining pools for a while, and PoS will actually make Ethereum more democratic. Again, this is based on documentation, there might be unforeseen consequences

There are no economies of scale in PoW. At least for longer term. Cost of energy rises locally the more you use it. Cheap energy is somewhat equally distributed around the globe, which ensures geographical decentralization.

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

#100

Post by michael_vo »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #40
michael_vo wrote: post #32

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?

You don't double your money - at that point the network is compromised and nobody wants your coins. It's a guaranteed way to destroy Ethereum's value, but the only incentive to do it is to troll. Not too many entities globally looking to spend that much for a laugh, even if they could get the necessary funds in liquid form AND manage not to drive up price with their buy orders.

Perhaps state actors who can print free money would be interested in performing these attacks. Say if a coin was owned predominantly by citizens of one country or if the countries' infrastructure was running on ETH technologies.

Like suppose the banking system was running on ETH. Or if Colonial Pipelines used ETH.

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