Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

blog.ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

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

#621

Post by acituan »

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…

> must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so.

Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to just fix things.

Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will need to work with every input and minimize some class of error, be it precision or coverage or some other system level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the difficulty of building such a system to begin with.

It is like saying "why don't we build a system that punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive convictions rather than maximize conviction rates.

> It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring

Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and boring themselves than anything else. Many find intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining and thus those comments enjoyable.

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

#622

Post by hanniabu »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #259
throwkeep wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overtime != overwork. You've probably programmed something, at some point, where you were excited to work on it from morning to night? Where you lose track of hours, forget to eat meals and completely in the zone? That could easily be the case with these engineers, working on such a historical project and consequential update.

I have. My whole team at once? Not really. Unless management is really vigilant, when people are working overtime everyone on the team feels pressure to do the same.

This is a different dynamic than traditional organization. It's decentralized with contributors around the world. You have no idea how much others are working and many are contributing because it's something they're passionate about.

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

#623

Post by hanniabu »

helen___keller wrote: post #106
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…

To directly answer your question: currently, ethereum has the same fundamental scaling problems that bitcoin has (limited global throughput) Bitcoin's attempted solution on this front is off-chain scaling via lightning network. As far as I can ascertain, this has had highly limited adoption. Eth's attempted solution on this front is sharding. I can't claim to be an expert in this, but from my understanding after proo…

> Eth's attempted solution on this front is sharding

sharding + L2 rollups*

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

#624

Post by themagician »

x4e wrote: post #608
leishman wrote: post #574

Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work is provably resistant to this, as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots efforts. A PoS currency will be controlled by a cabal of US financial institutions, and indire…

POW just gives the power to whoever can purchase the most computing power. It also gives control of the network to those directly benefiting from high fees. At least POS gives the power to those that actually have an interest and stake in the currency itself.

Those who got that stake by purchasing massive compute power.

PoS just solidifies current stakeholders so that they no longer have to worry about competition from new players.

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

#625

Post by andrewla »

leishman wrote: post #574

Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work is provably resistant to this, as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots efforts. A PoS currency will be controlled by a cabal of US financial institutions, and indire…

> Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works.

This is a naive viewpoint. Ethereum (as a currency) is an "M0" token, like cash or Fed deposits. There's a lot of handwaving about bonds and whatnot, but essentially the Fed can create new money simply by changing numbers on a balance sheet, and they can make that money into folding money and change which they can issue.

The banking system is a complex system that creates IOUs on top of that base. Some of those IOUs are even better than the cash layer -- you can't buy stock, for example, for cash, you need bank IOUs to do that.

That said, then, what is PoW and PoS used for? They're essentially distributed methods of ensuring that nobody can forge money. So the equivalent in the world of dollars is not a bunch of bankers chuckling to themselves about how they're fleecing the plebes. The equivalent in the real world is a bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live.

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

#626

Post by hanniabu »

jniedrauer wrote: post #94
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…

That is correct, to run an on-chain transaction is fairly expensive. There is a lot of ongoing work to address this: Layer 2 solutions like optimistic rollup, arbitrum, etc. EIP-1559 itself will address this problem on layer 1. But the ecosystem is not mature yet. If/when the scaling problem is finally solved, the legacy financial system will change rapidly.

> EIP-1559 itself will address this problem on layer 1.

1559 addresses fee stability and will help reduce fee spikes. It's purpose is not to reduce fees in general.

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

#627

Post by aeternum »

sdenton4 wrote: post #290
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…

The other choke point is conversion to and from USD. With a law, BTC loses any corporate 'investment' (eg, Tesla), and coinbase stops converting to/from USD, making it much more of a pain to work with.

This would be like playing whack-a-mole. Other PoW cryptocurrencies are out there and it does not make sense to just shut down the mining hardware. Miners will just mine something else.

The only answer that works is a carbon tax.

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

#628

Post by vmception »

leishman wrote: post #574

Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work is provably resistant to this, as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots efforts. A PoS currency will be controlled by a cabal of US financial institutions, and indire…

Correct, the US Federal Reserve is a Proof of Stake system. Members earn 6% dividends for the last 100 years, and this was to entice them to join the system at all. Just pointing out that the idea of an omnipotent US government is a fairly new concept, and it must incentivize and entice people to join its payment network as opposed to other private ones.

The private networks for final settlement are becoming more interesting to market participants. And they are also aiming for distributed (sharded) proof of stake.

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

#629

Post by zionic »

leishman wrote: post #600
roelb wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work is no different in this regard: more capital, more mining power, more control. Miners interests don't always align with the network's users interests (see gas fees). Proof of work isn't more decentralized either (a few mining pool delegators control bitcoin), eth2 proof of stake is more secure because of the pseudorandom validator selection.

It is very different: The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.

> Anybody can be a miner

This is patently false, endgame PoW centralizes mining around 3rd world coal/cheapest possible (stolen?) electricity. The overwhelming majority of the world has been priced out of BTC mining, not that they could get ahold of an ASIC anyways.

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

#630

Post by incrudible »

leishman wrote: post #618
x4e wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POW just gives the power to whoever can purchase the most computing power. It also gives control of the network to those directly benefiting from high fees. At least POS gives the power to those that actually have an interest and stake in the currency itself.

PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians, which certainly have a tremendous incentive to siphon as much value from the currency as possible. PoW has a much more diversified set of actors with competing interests, which makes it much more difficult to change the rules. This is a feature not a bug.

> PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians...

You might as well claim that the Chinese Communist Party controls Bitcoin. Not entirely wrong, but misleading.

Post reply on HN