This reduces security considerably. Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that was done historically. If there is just one honest node out there you will be able to tell the difference between the honest one and a majority of fakes. With proof of stake there is nothing beyond the will of the current majority to lock in what is right. If you feel the majority is always right, and you'd be comfortable with the majority being able to re-write all of the history of the ownership of your currency, that is fine. I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever.
Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#262For 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…
* Its a technically flawed solution that now has so much hype, abandoning the idea would lead to further FUD, tarnishing the project's future direction. So we must go through the motions to appease the energy FUD warriors.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#263Maybe 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…
$20 is a little high. ETH transactions are variable cost; more complex transactions cost more. In order to get the price of a simple transfer you can take the current gas price (for example, from https://ethgasstation.info/index.php), which is 87 right now, multiply that by 21000 (cost in gas of a transfer) and divide that by 1 billion. So a transfer costs 0.001827 ETH or ~$6 if you want to happen within a few minutes.
So yes, it's currently not practical for microtransactions.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#264Good. 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…
This certainly seems like an unnecessarily oppressive stance to take, all effectively at the whim of your own personal aesthetics.
There are tons of things that people do that I might deem not worth the environmental impact, like flying a hundred thousand miles a year for business, or eating beef, or driving to work every day, or having bigger houses and lawns than they need. Seems kind of arbitrary to allow most wasteful things that people do but draw a line at being able to participate in a certain kind of blockchain. The per-person impact of holding and transacting with bitcoin is not egregiously high compared to all the other things people do in their day to day life.
And based on ethereum's move here, perhaps people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway and such dramatic limiting measures aren't needed?
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the government wants to put a higher price on energy or carbon, it should do so. But it should not be the arbiter of what's a worthy use of energy expenditure. I could see a lot of people make the argument the production of a lot of energy intensive goods is not worth-while.
Government is made out of people. If the people don't want the economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes, they have the right to vote.
So there's no bounds as to what government should be able to do, ethically or legally?
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#266Good. 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…
The economic and monetary risks of deflationary coins are potentially much greater than the environmental risks imo (Even Douglas Adams tried to warn us: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html ).
You don't necessarily need to ban the coins to fix this aspect however, just make sure they don't get integrated in the financial system too much. They're basically digital gold. Gold was ok until central banks tried to anchor to it which caused the Great Depression and maybe even WWII.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#267People seem to forget that this energy use is a consequence of miners wanting coins because of the subjective value of the reward. Even stakers can expend more money for a better chance at receiving the eth2 staking rewards. This will result in just as much energy use for a given reward value as Bitcoin. The question is if you can account for it. Eth2 propagandists are being very -- unintentionally -- dishonest about…
Your entire argument is base on the fact that more people mine because when the rewards are better, higher price.
But in PoS there is no mining. More and more people will stake, but will do so with a small single VM, with no GPUs or ASICS mining and using power.
So a PoS system will never ever use as much energy as BTC mining, by many many orders of magnitude.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again with this same tired nonsense on Hacker News. Famous for censoring worthwhile comments to death while leaving up misinformed "curious" posts that mislead everyone. Bitcoin is using half of the power as banking systems. Bitcoin is using half of the power, of the gold industry. Might I suggest, if you think you can suggest banning things for using too much carbon, that you first quit working, quit driving your ve…
The amount of energy used is only one aspect of the matter. The other is value derived from that energy. I think it is safe to say that regular banking provides not just twice the value of Bitcoin, but in fact probably two orders of magnitude more. Pretty much everyone uses regular banking, while pretty much nobody uses Bitcoin, and not only they use banking more, they use it many times a week or even a day. The comp…
And when the comparison is not even close, why are you the one making it? All you've stated was an old opinion and not a fact about what is more useful, or how they are used. It's totally fine for you to have just said "I don't understand either banking or Bitcoin whatsoever." Bitcoin is going to get a lot more global over the next several years in it's use cases and for savings. I hope to see you commenting later on after becoming more informed about our current times of inflation and what the people want, vs what is forced on everyone so that they have no way to save hard money. The revolution isn't going to wait for everyone who chooses to be truly ignorant about Bitcoin. And there is only Bitcoin.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?
I think the proposal here is very simple. Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law about it. Don't address of any the things that you are proposing need addressing, because they don't need to be addressed in the same law, or really addressed right now at all. The law doesn't need to try an…
You answered literally nothing that the person you're responding to asked.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#270So 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?
In our current system, decisions are made democratically - you vote politicians, who choose central bankers, who make the decisions.