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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

#521

Post by Scramblejams »

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?

This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I keep waiting for Google's Chrome team to add an energy rating icon to the browser that gives you a rough feel for how energy intensive a given page is.

At some point the shaming would begin, web devs would respond, and then I'd generally get what I'm really after -- much faster page load times!

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

#522

Post by Aunche »

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 difference is that Facebook is actually using electricity to provide services that somebody wants. It's just that you happen to disagree with the value of this service. Meanwhile, Bitcoin uses a country's worth of electricity just to provide a tiny amount of accounting.

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

#523

Post by NicoJuicy »

xiphias2 wrote: post #8
focom wrote: post #2

So with PoS, we recreate a system where a few rich pool have decision over the network. Can someone enlighten me on how this is different from the current fiat system?

While I myself stay with Bitcoin, Ethereum still has lots of advantages compared to the fiat system: it's still open source, and people can still validate the rules (although that full validation is extremely hard). Also the current fiat system is debt based, which means that the vast majority of money is printed by banks and the money printing power is at the highest ranking sales person, and hidden.

And the current crypto system seems to be meme based, while the fiat system is market based.

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

#525

Post by tylercubell »

Algorand has been Proof of Stake for years (2019 MainNet launch) and it's actually carbon-negative [1]. It's a shame more people don't know about it. Its founder is a Turing-award-winning MIT professor (Silvio Micali) who solved the blockchain trilemma [2] with the Pure Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. The tech is leaps and bounds ahead of other cryptos.

[1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...

[2]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-fr...

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

#526

Post by Skunkleton »

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?

Facebook used 5 TWhr in 2019 (citation: totally unverified top summary from google). Bitcoin alone is estimated to have used 110 TWhr in a year. To put that in perspective, that is sixfold the power output of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Produces power on the order of magnitude of detonating two small atomic bombs per day.

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

#527

Post by baby »

shanecoin wrote: post #341
kodah wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I don’t think PoS was a thing when Ethereum was invented.

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

#528

Post by XIVMagnus »

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…

I literally LOL'd. Thank you and never stop being this way

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

#529

Post by iabacu »

scotty79 wrote: post #358
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?

Crypto is currently the only viable reason to overbuild renewables so we can expand their capacity faster than the battery technology allows us. Just tax the carbon sources and ban building new coal power plants or reactivating defunct ones. Instead of downvoting please give me one other example why would rational market entity build more renewables than to satisfy demand when production peeks. Because to go full ren…

It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting downvoted.

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

#530

Post by goda90 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #512
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…

> Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy Videogames run GPUs at full capacity too, we should ban them too. No one NEEDS to pretend to be a cowboy for 100+ hours each across 36 million GPUs. Actually maybe there should be a ban on computing power above mobile CPUs available to non-government bodies, if this really is so devastating to the environment we n…

But gamers aren't buying up dozens of GPUs each to pretend to be a cowboy, and they don't pretend to be a cowboy 24/7.
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