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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

#341

Post by shanecoin »

kodah wrote: post #83
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.

> But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are serious about reducing the environmental impact they have. Is it not possible there's good reasons they didn't move to proof of stake sooner? "Came to their senses" seems to imply they had no good reasons.

It has been the goal since day one.

The Ethereum protocol was designed with PoS in mind and has a built-in difficulty bomb[1] to prove it. In short, this difficulty bomb makes it exponentially harder to mine ETH over time. The goal of this feature was to encourage all participants of the ecosystem to transition to PoS as quickly as possible.

Given that, the implementation has not worked out totally as expected, as the difficulty bomb has been pushed back a few times over the years. However, to answer your question, the reason they did not move faster is because this transition is hard and plays in some uncharted territory.

[1] https://medium.com/fullstacked/the-ice-age-is-coming-ee5ad5f...

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

#342

Post by SwagtimusPrime »

sva_ wrote: post #277

The minimum amount of Ether to be eligible to stake is 32 Coins, so it appears that last year in June, about 120k addresses would've met that criterion[0]. That probably changed by now, I'd assume the number to be higher as more people set up 'mining rigs'. That's at least a larger number than I would've guessed. I wonder how many people/entities are behind those addresses. On a side note, I have mixed feelings about…

>but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'.

PoW is just as much depending on fiat currencies. You can't get electricity without paying for it, you can't get a mining rig without paying for it, etc. This is one of the more common critiques against PoS and it just doesn't hold true at all. With the decentralized finance ecosystem, you can put any supported asset to work and earn ETH or stablecoins or anything else you want and accumulate that way.

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

#343

Post by declnz »

helmholtz wrote: post #313
selfhoster11 wrote: post #201

Earlier 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?

Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring . It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fuck…

Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3! Unless, err, that's already happened

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

#344

Post by hocuspocus »

sdenton4 wrote: post #290
disruptalot wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas. On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite. When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable organizations running these operations, that is their only choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage, because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption relative to the value…

The other choke point is conversion to and from USD. With a law, BTC loses any corporate 'investment' (eg, Tesla), and coinbase stops converting to/from USD, making it much more of a pain to work with.

I deleted my comment that was essentially saying the same. For once, USD's extra-territorial jurisdiction could definitely be put to good use. I don't understand why big political parties haven't thought of that. It's an easy win, and it would bother an insignificant portion of their voter base.

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

#345

Post by fredfoobar »

DCKing wrote: 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…

Holy shit, lol.

This is an insane take. Proof of Stake is NOT secure, the stakers can collude to reorganize the chain at almost no cost. This is like the exact system we tried to get away from, the USD system is also a Proof of Stake.

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

#346

Post by varispeed »

mckeed wrote: post #308
disruptalot wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas. On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite. When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable organizations running these operations, that is their only choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage, because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption relative to the value…

The idea was to ban trading, not mining. If Coinbase and all the other legitimate companies that facilitate crypto markets for U.S. citizens had to drop PoW coins it could tank the price significantly and set the coin mining industry back to when it wasn't such a huge problem for energy use and GPU supply. Speculation would move to PoS currencies and BTC would stay valuable, but would act more like an altcoin.

Currently the trade of illegal drugs is banned. Have a look how that goes.

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

#348

Post by nanidin »

DCKing wrote: 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…

I’ve thought through this over the last few days and I don’t think it’s viable unless all countries enact the ban at the same time. Imagine country A bans trade or mining of PoW coins - that puts the citizens of country A at a disadvantage to citizens of other countries, and encourages holders of PoW coins in country A to exfiltrate wealth and capital from country A.

You end up needing to solve the same type of problem that PoW solves in order to enact a PoW ban simultaneously across all countries - how can all parties trust that every other party is being honest and will follow through (Byzantine Generals problem)?

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

#349

Post by eeegnu »

CarlBeek wrote: post #227
fvdessen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes over / subverts / influences the limited number of stakeholders, then it is game over. With PoW the state can influence the existing miners, but cannot prevent new independent miners to pop up and counter act.

There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ ), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/13849380897480417…

Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.

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

#350

Post by sva_ »

djrhails wrote: post #329
sva_ wrote: post #277

The minimum amount of Ether to be eligible to stake is 32 Coins, so it appears that last year in June, about 120k addresses would've met that criterion[0]. That probably changed by now, I'd assume the number to be higher as more people set up 'mining rigs'. That's at least a larger number than I would've guessed. I wonder how many people/entities are behind those addresses. On a side note, I have mixed feelings about…

Frankly, right now anyone who isn't already in the game isn't able to acquire Ether without paying for it. Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment, and is already out of reach for the average person. Setting your desktop computer to mine definitely won't pay for your small smart contract.

> Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment,

I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.

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