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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

blog.ethereum.org

191–200 of 1001 posts

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

#191
post #133

Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to l…

If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon. I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency, but the idea that regulators, already captured by banks, should aggressively ban new financial products that may one day threaten the incumbents makes me wary.

A carbon tax would filter down to the electricity consumer cost. I dont know about you, but I dont want to pay more for electricity so other people can burn electricity for virtual money.

Unless you are suggesting taxing crypto itself, in which case… sure!

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

#192

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…

Here are a few of the reasons that come to mind as to why this transition has been taking us so long:

* The design of the Beacon Chain is far more optimised than our initial designs for a PoS system

* There are far more crypto-economic edge cases in a PoS system when compared to PoW

* Software development is hard and time estimates are even harder

* The use of a hybrid fork choice to balance safety and liveness trade-offs

* There is a crazy amount of value being handles on Ethereum so it is necessary to be conservative with our changes (move fast and break things is not an option)

* There are 4 concurrent implementations being developed all of which need to be inter-compatible, and production ready

* As Ethereum governance is decentralised we need a shelling point for exactly what Ethereum PoS looks like, this takes time

* We have worked hard to create, encourage, and embrace standards with other chains so that the cryptocurrency community of tomorrow is more inter-compatible (eg. IETF BLS standard or libp2p networking)

* We have spent time designing around quantum-computing resistant backups for the majority of the cryptography (eg. validators all have a Lamport backup key though most don't realise it)

* New cryptography has been developed and previously abandoned schemes revitalised (eg. Verifiable Delay Functions or the Legendre PRF)

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

#193
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…

Just to put an anecdote to the question, I made a withdrawal from my mining pool to my wallet 2 days ago and for an nearly instant transaction it cost me ~$2USD. Higher than I'd want in any currency, but it definitely wasn't $20USD

It's cost per transaction. Transactions can have multiple endpoints, so the tx fee is split up between many different users.

If you check the incoming transaction ID I'm sure you'll see it contained many many endpoint wallets.

That's how mining pools offer free withdrawals periodically. If you split it up amongst 100s of users, per user tx cost is very low.

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

#194
post #133

Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to l…

What about ASIC resistant PoW? Should it be banned too?

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

#195

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…

I really hope they don't rush all this merging and forking.

And also "audit the auditors". So they don't end up on a future rekt.news leaderboard.

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

#196
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban beef because it uses too much energy. Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how t…

We have banned a ton of things because they are bad for the environment. It has worked and will continue to work. Things like building design and construction standards are set to a minimum environmental standard, why shouldn't cryptocurrencies.

Youtube alone uses 2x’s the amount of energy of the Bitcoin network. Ban Youtube?

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

#197
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall? I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.

Youtube alone uses 2x the amout of energy as the entire Bitcoin network, for perspective.

Source?

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The etherium developers and community have made relatively clear that if someone were to attempt such a thing, the non-malicious members of the community would just fork at the direction of the developers to a chain that is identical except that all of the etherium staked by the attacker is redistributed among the non-malicious verifying nodes, as it would be once the consensus process concluded that an attack was being carried out in a <51% attack scenario.

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

#199
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall? I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.

Youtube alone uses 2x the amout of energy as the entire Bitcoin network, for perspective.

Youtube provides entertainment for literally billions of people

Bitcoin provides... idk a way for some people to make a lot of money and some others to lose it?...

Even if we say that BTC provides some value by transferring money etc. the amount of value per Watt is so slanted its ridiculous to even make that argument.

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

#200
post #133

Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to l…

Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are in the process of banning themselves.

All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders, and proof-of-stake is just more financially attractive.

No government intervention is required IMO.

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