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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

#671

Post by cwkoss »

Graffur wrote: post #514
LeftTriangle wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You people obsessed with reducing humanity’s energy usage are so tiresome. Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of humanity should be focused on increasing the amount of energy available. I want to climb the kardashev scale, not live in an eco-pod and eat bug burgers so I can scrounge every last joule.

Who is working on this problem today?

Arguably, all of the Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin mining creates a price floor for energy. It is a buyer of last resort with infinite appetite. By pushing up the value of energy in the market, it encourages expansion of energy production.

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

#672

Post by Dylan16807 »

leishman wrote: post #594
fabioyy wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people with money can buy mining factories and make decisions anyway.

See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers can prevent new people from staking. Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system

> Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system

Sure they can. It's easy to only mine on top of blocks from certain sources, and if most of the network does this then those are the only blocks that matter.

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

#673

Post by randomopining »

Crypto is dumb, although I will try to ride the wave.

PoW -- wasteful electrical mining, only big entities can build efficient asic farms. And only in low cost of electricity spots.

PoS -- will incentive oligarchal collusion. Basically same as our current financial system.

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

#674

Post by Taek »

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…

In practice a PoS network tends to have a participation rate of between 10% and 30%, and the 2-3 largest exchanges collectively tend to own between 10% and 50% of the total supply.

And then also in practice most of the staking is performed by a small number of outsourced staking firms, which increases the power concentration even more.

And it also makes hardforks more traumatic because your economy and your consensus builders are fundamentally intertwined. You can't fork an exchange off of the network without also disrupting every single user that parks funds on that exchange. The same concern doesn't exist with PoW mining.

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

#675

Post by pkdpic_y9k »

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…

But like, what were cryptocurrency's goals again?

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

#676

Post by leishman »

incrudible wrote: post #630
leishman wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it's very different. Bitcoin consensus is achieved through a combination of mining actors and economic actors. PoS collapses this into a single group: custodians.

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

#678

Post by acid__ »

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.

That's how you end up with crypto-mining sweatshops...

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

#679

Post by Taek »

jude- wrote: post #555
seph-reed wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the PoW side. But you should note that PoW is also oligarchic in the sense that individuals have no ability to compete in terms of mining. The rich get richer is still a thing here. That being said, PoS is very much a human centric valuation (rich peoples opinions being the value), so yes: politics and then war seem likely. Pretty much every fiat currency has the same issues as PoS, where eventually war become…

In PoW, the "rich" have to keep selling their coins to buy more dedicated mining equipment in order to stay competitive. And because PoW hasn't reached "optimum efficiency," there's still profits to be had by building better miners and cheaper power sources. Innovations here have positive downstream effects, since innovations in cheap renewable power and efficient chip fabs and designs have many applications beyond m…

It's a well established result in PoW that a small constant improvement in efficiency (say, one mining farm is 5% more efficient than others) turns into an exponential advantage in hashrate over time if the profits are continually re-invested into building more hardware.

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

#680

Post by leishman »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #672
leishman wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers can prevent new people from staking. Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system

> Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system Sure they can. It's easy to only mine on top of blocks from certain sources, and if most of the network does this then those are the only blocks that matter.

You can mine anonymously, you can't stake anonymously.
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