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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

#561

Post by TearsInTheRain »

barrkel wrote: post #222
bko wrote: post #156

Earlier 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.

Government is made out of people. If the people don't want the economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes, they have the right to vote.

> Government is made out of people.

Maybe in theory but in actuality it is comprised of moneyed interests which is why it needs to be limited to preserve the freedom of the people.

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

#562

Post by jude- »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #516
jude- wrote: post #311

Your post advocates a (X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to solving the double-spend problem in a decentralized cryptocurrency. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) (X) Scammers can easily use it to d…

I love this! I know the original text, did you write this variant?

Ha, yeah, I based it on Cory Doctorow's anti-spam form: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

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

#563

Post by mmmmmbop »

Could somebody help me understand the valuation of Ether?

Let's assume for a second that future developments in the the Ethereum protocol really unlock the widespread use of distributed apps, and herald a new technological era. As far as I understand, Ethereum optimists are betting that then people will be forced to buy Ether to participate in this Internet of distributed apps, driving the price higher.

In this (optimistic) case, wouldn't someone just start a new blockchain with the Ethereum protocol? It's open source, right? To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every human a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for staking (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast majority of people than a blockchain where the early adopters are the new rubber barons of the Internet.

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

#564

Post by leppr »

surmoi wrote: post #90
roel_v wrote: post #75

Maybe this is a good time and place to ask - let's say I want to buy something using Ethereum. Is it correct that when I look at, say, https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... , you have to pay USD 20 just as payment fees? I wrote off Bitcoin as a payment mechanism a long time ago because of this (although it seems BTC tx costs are now lower than ETH?), is this the direction tx costs for all cr…

Yes ETH gas price (transaction fee) have been very high, much higher than BTC lately... Not all cryptocurrency have such insane transaction fees though. NANO is a good example of a fee-less cryptocurrency (cf. https://nano.org/ )

I have been seeing Nano shills pop up on HN recently. This is not the place. Please restrict your operations to Reddit, 4chan and Facebook. Thank you.

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

#565

Post by fredfoobar »

manx wrote: post #549
fredfoobar wrote: post #483

Everything in this universe is analogous to Proof of Work, it's the most natural system out there. If there is a base monetary layer for the internet, it should be Proof of Work based (and Bitcoin, because it's got the most work done to improve the technology + network effects).

Could you elaborate a bit? Why do you think that?

The crux of it is that you can't rewrite history trivially, you have to expend a lot energy to change history, and energy can't be created nor destroyed.

For something specific to bitcoin/blockchain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0

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

#566

Post by exo762 »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #478
exo762 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> enough folks will ignore this and keep mining Irrelevant. Well designed networks are pretty much isolated from whims of miners. Ethereum is one of them, Bitcoin is not. I'm speaking about 2 weeks difficulty re-targeting window vs single block window. > It replaces it with shell games and chicanery. Why do you perceive it like that? I would love to hear details. Ethereum will use hybrid PoS. Where random number gene…

Sounds like a shell game to me. You know what isn't? Burning energy, using a simple hash function to measure how much energy was burned. Simple, effective, safe. Energy usage is a good thing, actually.

There is nothing simple about hash functions :-) They rely on unproven mathematical conjecture that one-way functions exist. Their existence would imply that P!=NP :-)

Re: shell game. Are you implying that fraud or misdirection is involved? Some bitcoin scientist should be able to point where it is hidden. Or is it just a claim without evidence?

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

#567

Post by everfree »

cblconfederate wrote: post #425

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…

> 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.

According to Ethereum's PoS implementation, this would require more than 33% of all staked Ethereum coordinating with modified clients in order to pull off. Then, another percentage of the stake adding up to 66% would have to be complicit in the attack, rather than actively defending against it by refusing to finalize blocks.

Compare this to PoW, where only 51% of hashrate needs to be participating/complicit to censor certain transactions, the other 49% have no way of fighting back, and the only tool the community has to fork away is to change the PoW algorithm.

Because of this, I actually believe PoS is more resistant than PoW to these kinds of attacks.

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

#568

Post by scsilver »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #563

Could somebody help me understand the valuation of Ether? Let's assume for a second that future developments in the the Ethereum protocol really unlock the widespread use of distributed apps, and herald a new technological era. As far as I understand, Ethereum optimists are betting that then people will be forced to buy Ether to participate in this Internet of distributed apps, driving the price higher. In this (opti…

People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi. Binance has their own network thats growing similarly. Both do have a huge amount of speculators. There are other up and coming complements to the market aswell including Polkadot.

Some like ethereum for its maturity and dev team.

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

#569

Post by 0134340 »

jyu wrote: post #237
kemonocode wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum proof of work made it so the owners of the coins could be independent from the owners of the mining operations, even if in practice many miners end up keeping most of the block rewards themselves and only reinvesting what they need in new infrastructure and to maintain what they already have. Proof of stake makes it so the miners and holders are now the same (you stake the coins that you have, or you pool th…

Maybe it is spread out now, but won't there be centralized aggregators of eth so some point in the future a handful of POS nodes control a disproportionate amount of power? Is it so hard to imagine that coinbase or some other exchange accumulates enough eth to sway transaction validation? Seriously, please answer if this is wrong!

Yes, that's the problem with validation through concensus which is universal in currency. With enough power (nodes) you can delegitimize other stake holders.

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

#570

Post by lifty »

sktrdie wrote: post #560

Does someone have a deeper understanding into Proof Of Stake? For what I remember it never had the same security promises that Proof Of Work had. In other words if PoS is conceptually sound why don't all cryptocurrencies switch over to it?

They actually are. Most new projects have chosen PoS for sybil resistance, and once Ethereum switches as well, we should have a large enough honey pot in order to gain confidence regarding its security.
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