One neat trick reduces cryptocurrency energy usage by 100%
Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#462Good. 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…
Even if banning PoW were agreeable on logical grounds (ie, overcoming the arguments of the sibling comments to this one), is there any reason to believe that such a law will:
* Reduce trade * Reduce value * Reduce carbon use?
Is there a case ever where an illicit market found a price equilibrium which was lower than the licit one? And, if such a ban does cause the price go up, won't the same incentives cause continued mining competition?
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#463Earlier 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…
It violates principle of equality to target only one
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#464This article obscures the truth, which will be obvious soon, that Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional banks.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#465Earlier 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.
PoW is different because it's energy use for its own sake. If carbon taxes go up, some things will no longer be worth spending energy on, but crypto mining is just competitive, so the value of mining will go up with the cost of energy and keep using as much energy as ever. The only thing that can stop it is reducing demand for the coins, which the government is not even trying to do yet.
If carbon taxes go up, miners will be incentivized to pursue low/no-carbon alternative energy sources, thereby accelerating the shift to cleaner energy. Mining can either be viewed as creating a profit incentive where none existed before, or at least enhancing the profit incentive even further. Clean energy needs more profit incentives to really scale adoption.
I am all for carbon taxes, to shape the market towards cleaner energy. And I do think it will successfully push miners even faster towards adoption of other energy sources.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#466Earlier 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.
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 req…
Are there any proven PoS coins out there yet that have demonstrated resiliency under an attack? Honest question.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#467Their graphs show a huge increase in energy consumption for both Bitcoin and Ethereum since January 2021. Why? What happened recently?
Price increase.
The Bitcoin hash rate graph didn't go up like that in 2021.[1] The Etherium hash rate did.[2] Where are they getting their data?
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3...
[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#468Good. 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.
There is no place for a PoS protocol layer on the internet, I'm willing to die on this hill.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#469Good. 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?
We gotta optimize the bottleneck (and future bottlenecks).
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#470Good. 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 may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
Unless you want to also ban servers or services that are using deep learning training, decoding massive videos and livestreams on storage systems that are also burning up the planet.
It's not fine to allow PoW cryptocurrencies to continue to burn the planet but collecting mass amounts of user data and using wasteful deep learning training continuously is fine to burn up the planet on GCP, AWS and Azure?