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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

#431

Post by oefrha »

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?

Last time I checked, Facebook isn’t designed to adjust its computational difficulty in order to suck up any amount of energy thrown at it to do the same (pitiful) amount of work.

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

#432

Post by fvdessen »

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…

Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and can make laws that affect many people.

With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.

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

#433

Post by luka-birsa »

Fully support this, as PoW protocols - from an efficient market perspective - consume as much as they are currently worth to mine, which would mean that if we believe that the value of BTC will go up (in line with past increases, for orders of magnitude) then also the consumption of power will go up just as much.

When BTC hits 250K per coin next year, expect 5x as much energy consumption to what it does use today. At 1M per coin we can expect 20x as much power consumption.

Highly unlikely that taxation can resolve this as global economy simply forces the miners to places where energy is cheap and abundant. And countries will view this as a competitive advantage as now there is a simple way to convert power directly into money. Many cases have shown that poor countries will use their environment to gain an upper hand and pull their country out of poverty. Sadly the impact to the environment is global.

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

#434

Post by kodah »

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…

Moral arguments (ones that offer only should and should not with some supporting evidence but no actual solution) are going to be dismissed more regularly because while they may offer perspective, they offer very little value beyond that. That makes them fairly non-actionable.

Choose an argument which requires you to offer a viable and compatible alternative and you'll probably get a lot more ears.

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

#435

Post by wing-_-nuts »

I really wish the UN could get together and implement a global treaty on a revenue neutral carbon tax. The only reason energy is as cheap as it is right now is because we're not properly pricing in the externalities of environmental damage.

This would immediately make unproductive energy use (cough POW crypto cough) a lot less profitable, without the government having to come in and set prices and regs for every little thing.

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

#437

Post by cactus2093 »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #312
cactus2093 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was…

>people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway Did you mean "the rich"?

"The Big Scary Scare Quotes Rich That We Should Be Eating"? No, that's not exclusively who I mean.

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

#438

Post by malka »

foerbert wrote: post #300
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…

That's assuming PoW cryptos would remain attractive to smaller operations and hobbyists. I'm not sure that's a given. If no business can change your coins to fiat, and no business could accept your coins in the first place (not that they really do now, but whatever), your options for getting anything out of your coins is... what? Posting on craigslist to find people to meet up for illicit localcoin transactions? And…

Organized crime is as big as a country.

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

#439

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

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 difference is that Facebook’s energy use potential is limited and gets better with improved computer tech.

There is a limit to how much analysis you can do. As you get more efficient hardware, the energy use would go down. Facebook also invests a lot of effort in optimizing their code to run more efficiently.

With proof of work crypto, the only limit is the price of crypto. Despite any efficiency gains, you can always expect the energy use to scale with the price of crypto. For example, a 10x more efficient miner, won’t cause 10x less energy use, it may actually increase energy use as more people mine with higher rate electricity.

There is a chance that we develop a situation that the most monetarily efficient thing you could do with electricity is to mine proof of work crypto. If that becomes the case, then even a carbon tax won’t help because proof-of-work crypto can easily pay the tax compared to all the other uses of electricity.

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

#440

Post by sschueller »

sva_ wrote: post #350
djrhails wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same goes for staking in ETH2 as you don't need 32 ETH. You can join a stake pool.
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