Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by crazygringo » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #201

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…

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?

> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?

The legislature and the regulatory agencies it has created, obviously.

The exact same way literally every other environmental regulation has ever been passed.

There are entire divisions of agencies dedicated to drawing the line of "too much" in all sorts of areas, for pollution, poisons, contamination, energy usage, etc. In fact, pretty much everyone but extreme libertarians agrees this is one of the main functions of government.

So while you might not agree on the resulting policy or even the mechanisms that arrived at it, it is a solved problem. You don't need to wonder how we'd accomplish it -- that part is easy.

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

#422

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

satyrnein wrote: post #168

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…

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.

If anything the regulatory solution would be to find the ways in which demand for cryptocurrency exists because of failures in the existing financial system, and fix them so that the existing financial system can satisfy them. Allow bank accounts that work exactly like coin wallets, but rely on the banking system rather than PoW.

An obvious example is the existence of pseudonymous digital payments. Given that cryptocurrency already exists, and will continue to exist for all illicit activities even if you ban it, you might as well let people open numbered accounts at a bank.

Do this for any other advantage cryptocurrency has over the existing banking system and there is no more demand for cryptocurrency. And without demand, the price crashes and people stop burning coal to mine it.

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

#423

Post by je_bailey » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

spopejoy wrote: post #158

je_bailey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm more familiar with how Cardano and Polkadot do their POS rather than Ethereums. In Cardano since the entry level requirement to operate a stake pool is much smaller than it is to do something like Bitcoin mining, it creates a larger number of stake pools. There's also a soft limit on the size of the stake pool that encourages people to spread out their commitment so no one pool gets to large.So at least in the…

How do they prevent impersonation? There's no way a cryptosystem can prove that two different people actually have two different keys. If I want to pwn Cardano/Polkadot, don't I just need to run a bunch of different staking keys?

Looking at Cardano. There are currently 2,497 staking pools which are staking 72% percent of all Ada that is out there. Which is about 23 billion coins staked. So if you owned 12 billion cardano and set up 188 pools to hold all of it, yes you would control the majority of the network.

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

#424

Post by schmorptron » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #201

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…

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?

The arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case is the fact that proof of work systems are literally designed to waste resources / power.

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

#425

Post by cblconfederate » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

PoW was of course a naive system but this this PoS should really be called the "Oligarchy" because it takes us back to the past and very visibly separates the plebs from the aristocracy.

PoW had an implicit requirement for a global supply chain of hardware and energy which (kind of) made political and geopolitical games more difficult. With PoS, doing politics no longer requires work, which could lead to geopolicical wars. For example it might be possible to achieve wide enough consensus among stakers in Western countries to punish China (for some reason), e.g. willingly losing part of their stakes to empty major Chinese wallets. The fact that this doesn't really require physical effort but only persuasion is problematic.

ETH will be a real test about whether PoS works, as the other PoS cryptos are much smaller and less intertwined in other crypto projects. Historically, oligarchies led to wars

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

#426

Post by nashashmi » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

libertine wrote: post #80

I know this is a pressing matter, and that has relevance for itself, but after the whole Elon Musk thing it just turns this into a reply to his tweet, where so many cryptos folks were spamming "we use less energy then bitcoin! choose us! we're open to talk!" Which in the lights of the recent events sounds like: "pump us this time around!" Makes you question: when would be a good time to address this, if they can't ti…

It is a reply but it was also well known that they were looking to improve with a proof of scope concept. This will require 100x more storage space in place of compute power.

The market is wondering what will happen next. So ether published their progress. I just want to know how realistic are they with their schedule.

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

#427

Post by stevebmark » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

Given that the main use of cryptocurrency is to increase fiat, and the main reason it increases fiat is based on the fundamentally poor design of guessing at random numbers with increasing difficulty, I predict that if Etherium becomes more efficient, the price will drop and interest in the coin will implode. I'm genuinely curious if I'm wrong, why I'll be wrong. No one cares about BCH, for example, even though it's more efficient than BTC.

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

#428

Post by _jjkk » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

533474 wrote: post #386

de_keyboard wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start? Unless you are building a dark web market, why would you want to? It will be more convenient for the vast majority of users to pay with card or PayPal.

why does it have to be a dark-web market if blockchain payments are first class citizens? I suppose the general population isn't ready for decentralised payments yet or do you have another reason for such use-case generalization?

There are still many barriers to that "first class" status, taxes are mentioned most often.

Taxes are paid in fiat. Holding non-stablecoins would add even more of a tax headache because you'd have to track capital gain/loss as you enter/exit fiat for taxes / fees / vendors that don't accept crypto

Also the fact that general adoption has been slow so far may be a sign that there is not enough obvious value added for the average person to consider using crypto over fiat.

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

#429

Post by riskable » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #257

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?

IDK in Germany it's forbidden per § 30 StVO to drive around senselessly inside settlements. You are still allowed to drive around, even if the reasons are stupid. But if they are too stupid, police can fine you. There is a youtuber in Berlin who specializes in driving around for hours and he's been stopped by police already. The original video has been made private [0], but a raw version of it still exists [1]. [0]:…

Is the reason for the law to reduce the number of cars on the road or is it more to reduce emissions?

I'm curious if someone driving an electric would get ticketed as well.

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

#430

Post by mfDjB » Tue, May 18, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

It might be worth noting that not all Proof-of-Work is just finding hashes, newer cryptocurrencies make more economic and intelligent use of the work used for proof.