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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

#371

Post by Teelo »

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…

Just can't escape this mentality.

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

#372

Post by woeirua »

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…

We don't need to ban PoW crypto entirely, just tax the carbon emissions associated with it. If miners can switch their entire operation to geothermal in Iceland, then why should I care?

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

#374

Post by nickpp »

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…

Because banning outright is stupid, and banning a technology is even stupider. Technologies have both benefits and drawbacks. TAX (not ban) the drawbacks.

In this case, tax carbon. Then people will decide what they want to spend their (expensive) energy on.

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

#375

Post by syndacks »

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…

Because HN is full of fucking leetcoders or other specially minded folk that sees things as black or white. If any part of a statement is falsifiable that statement is False (or so it goes) so that's why we get this kind of Malcolm Gladwell-level brain candy masquerading as rigor.

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

#376

Post by nootropicat »

fvdessen wrote: post #189
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…

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.

The exact opposite is true. It's always possible for a state to obtain enough mining hardware - PoW is hopelessly insecure. It also has infinite economies of scale inevitably leading to absolute centralization even absent state attack. Once majority of hashrate is achieved, profits nearly double as minority can be censored. That's the inevitable end state of PoW.

PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require buying up tokens on an impossible scale, and in the case an attack somehow succeeds a fork can be created that deletes the hostile stake. This can be repeated indefinitely. That's impossible in PoW more than once, once a gpu PoW gets attacked it's over.

PoS has no economies of scale, so contrary to PoW it can stay decentralized forever. There's no way to make existing stakers unprofitable by adding more nodes, like it's possible with mining hardware in PoW.

PoW is also vulnerable to takeover of existing miners because mining at scale requires big industrial warehouses with industrial power owned by registered companies. Impossible to hide. PoS can run on anonymous home nodes.

In every single security and decentralization aspect PoW is hopelessly inferior to PoS.

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

#377

Post by Vespasian »

sp332 wrote: post #47
wyldfire wrote: post #14

> 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.

That's true but to be honest they pushed back the self destruct several times in the past and will do so again if needed.

Still it's very likely that this time the switch to PoS might finally happen unless something unforseen happens.

The development was speed up by a (most likely) failed attempt / pr-stunt of miners to block an unrelated change which will reduce their profitability considerably in July.

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

#378

Post by lhorie »

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 can see that this idea comes from a place of good intentions, but I think this is a slippery slope. With this idea, PoW Ethereum is banned, but PoS Ethereum is ok; how does one even regulate that? And what of things like Chia (proof of space, i.e. "let's hog hard drives")? And what about L2 solutions? And how much is too much? Should Ethereum 2 be banned if Nano is shown to be more scalable? Where does one draw the line?

I think that at some point, PoW will become so economically unfeasible that it'll simply make more sense for miners to ditch those coins and whale up on PoS ones.

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

#379

Post by thepasswordis »

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…

Because this is a website full of engineers who write computer software for a living? And finding and solving for those edge cases is literally a core function of what most of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time doing?

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

#380

Post by SwagtimusPrime »

kojoru wrote: post #373

Question from someone relatively clueless: Does that mean that NFTs also will use negligible amount of electricity once that's completely gone through?

Yes. Any action performed in the network will consume 99.95% less energy after this change has gone through.
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