Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by fredfoobar » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

everfree wrote: post #567

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 h…

> 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.

This is just such a small part of the whole equation.

1. They can't continuously attack with this, as you need to expend energy as long as you want to continue with the attack.

2. Even if you have majority hash-rate, you can't change the rules of the system (this has already happened)

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

#662

Post by Taek » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #610

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…

> almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol If the miners really wanted to change the protocol, they would have done that. The exchanges would have followed, as they had declared that the longest chain would win, and that would be game over. Instead the miners gave in to the perceived authority of the Core developers, who pinky promised to later raise the block size (which they backed…

The exchanges have no reason not to support both sides of a fork, for example the BTC/BCH split. Then the owners of the tokens ultimately decide which one is more valuable by selling their tokens on the chain they don't prefer and buying tokens on the chain they do prefer.

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

#663

Post by Judgmentality » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #655

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…

I wish we could have proof of work but the work would be something like , doing an actual workout.

Now this is my favorite new cryptocurrency idea!

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

#664

Post by andrewla » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

reedjosh wrote: post #637

andrewla wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 compl…

> 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. Largely funded by forging dollars.

If you are a miner and you get a block reward for mining a block in Ethereum, you are not forging currency; this is the structurally correct way for Ethereum to be created.

Similarly only the Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow sense. There's a lot of mummery around how the Fed goes about doing it, but that is the structurally correct way for dollars to be created. Calling it forgery or "theft by inflation" or whatever are political talking points.

Forgery is specifically when any other party in the world decides that they can mint coins or print bills.

Other parties can create dollars in other ways, like by committing fraud or by taking advantage of the fact that certain forms of IOUs are so liquid that they are considered cash equivalents. In the US this is a little locked down (although the overnight lending market is a particularly insidious form of shadow banking) but internationally the Eurodollar market is the wild west where anything goes. Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or bills.

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

#665

Post by mmmmmbop » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #573

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…

In the internet, the more websites and APIs exist, the greater the utility of the internet as a whole - the sum of its parts is worth more than each individually. With Ethereum, every time a new smart contract is added to Ethereum, the whole network becomes more useful, as each contract can communicate with each other. You can assemble new applications based on the building blocks of existing contracts.

Are the smart contracts not out in the open? Can you not just copy over the good/useful smart contracts as well?

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

#666

Post by pkdpic_y9k » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

cblconfederate wrote: post #655

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…

I wish we could have proof of work but the work would be something like , doing an actual workout.

I knew there was a reason I was still slogging through these comments. Well commented sir.

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

#667

Post by leishman » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

whyrusleeping wrote: post #609

leishman wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. The protocol dictates that the chain created by the majority of mining power is the canonical one. In the event that a censored party can create a heavier chain (has >50% of the mining power) then the argument that its more censorship resistant holds, but on the PoS side, you would be betting that not a single partici…

There are a few distinctions: 1. In PoS you actually never know who mined a given block with certainty. You can mine anonymously making censorship pretty difficult. This is not the case in PoS. 2. In PoW miners risk losing money by not building off the block found by a miner they're trying to censor. There is a cost to losing. This isn't the case in PoS (for the most part), as long as they don't double stake. 3. Additionally, the key distinguisher is that miners and custodians (almost all US based and controlled by VC funds) are two very distinct groups in Bitcoin. In a PoS currency they are the same group. That results in a power consolidation that effectively makes a PoS currency completely controlled by a few silicon valley insiders and eventually the US government.

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

#668

Post by leishman » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #650

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…

It's not like cryptocurrencies achieved any of their goals so far anyway. If it's about facilitating pyramid schemes and creating a worldwide casino we might as well do it efficiently and without wasting insane amounts of resources. I'm personally very happy for PoS and hope that it'll be successful, I would be a lot less annoyed with cryptocurrency bullshit if it wasn't so wasteful. With proof-of-stakes it basically…

Funny how everyone complains it's wasteful yet I see absolutely nobody complaining that they have some sort of electricity shortage because of Bitcoin miners.

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

#669

Post by randomopining » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #653

proof of work is a massive waste, it's true, but it does serve a one time valuable purpose: it bootstraps the value of the tokens by having people make real investments with existing currency and hardware in their creation. beyond that, it's literally insane, it only works when there's a very competitive race to burn as much energy as possible. however, once the value of those tokens is established (as is true for mo…

Doesn't POS incentivize oligarchal collusion?

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

#670

Post by dahfizz » Tue, May 18, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

fredfoobar wrote: post #638

aqme28 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or even resistant to it. The people with capital control the mining. At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS

There's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w... "Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...

Why wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.