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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

#691

For the people who criticize as to why they've taken so long in shifting to a PoS model: consensus takes time, so does developing and testing something that definitively shouldn't go wrong. Also, there's the inherent issue with Proof-of-Stake that Proof-of-Work doesn't have: the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough before it could feasibly self-maintain a PoS shift without being immediately vulnerab…

This is one thing I've been wondering about new projects that start with PoS. How do they have enough distribution of the coins in order for them to be resilient against attacks?

This is a good point and I think only ethereum has sufficient distribution. The sole advantage of PoW over PoS is distribution - miners sell, dumping the price, which is also likely to make other people to sell. Even many ethereum founders sold very low - Vlad Zamfir in particular sold ~100% below $20 (he tweeted about it, can't find it now).

Ethereum had 6 years of PoW now - most likely nothing else can repeat its distribution, ever. The time of PoW is visibly over.

Another point is that ethereum was icoed when crypto was tiny, few people believed smart contracts could have value and VC stayed away. Normal people are much more likely to sell just to buy a house. Now new coins start with coins distributed to VC and they are prepared to hold for years hoping for eth-tier returns. There's an argument that not that many people even knew about the ico - but the same is true for bitcoin mining early. It's very hard to quantify precisely but I think both have almost identical coin concentration.

Be wary of manipulative statistics that ignore the inherent differences between the utxo vs account model - like percentage of coins held by top x%. The assumed practice in an account-based model is for one user to use one address, while the current practice for utxo coins is to use one address per received transaction. Same is true for value sent per timeframe - because utxo relies on change addresses the actual transferred value is much smaller.

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

#692
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Originally? Freedom.

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

#693
Many people are talking about PoW vs PoS here.

Nobody tends to mention that in PoS a hostile takeover by a majority stake can just have its staked coins 'forked' out by the community. The goal of PoS is to have actors held responsible for their actions.

In my mind this is much more powerful than PoW because surely hostile majority mining power can't simply be forked away (sure you could change the hashing algorithm but even then the attacker could just move on to a different chain with no real consequences of their actions no?).

Interested to hear what other people think.

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

#694
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?

no more than PoW. they're both essentially lotteries that hand out share/influence based on capital investment.

PoS, done right, simply emulates PoW.

what does PoS done right look like?

"miners" lock up funds for 1-2 years. the amount of funds they lock up determines how likely they are to win the block lottery. the block lottery, and locking up funds for entries within it, remain decentralized.

the challenge is running a decentralized lottery with distributed consensus. this is hard, but i don't think impossible.

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

#695
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't find it right now, but I saw this infographic the other day showing how the ideology/goals of cryptocurrency have shifted over time. Something along going from a literal currency to replace the dollar to going toward its present definition as some mix of speculative asset and inflation hedge.

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

#696
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Originally anarchist anti-government folks needed some medium of exchange for their future plans and bitcoins could theoretically fill that niche, being trustless. We could argue that anarchy ideology is not good, but at least it was some ideology and tool fit the purpose. Now crypto is 99.99% occupied by get-rich-quick folks with zero principles.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is not scarcity, it's pollution.

In a sense, we could say “lack of CO2 in the atmosphere” is the scarce resource which is being depleted.

( Maybe kind of like how you can think of something which can burn by absorbing oxygen, as releasing phlogiston (which is just a lack of oxygen, in a certain sense)? )

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

#698
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cruise ships are hideously wasteful, but I don't see anybody complaining that they have some sort of gas shortage because of cruise ships specifically. Gas prices are what they are, and consumers complain in very general terms because they don't have good visibility into the global oil markets.

For all I know off the top of my head (where this comment is coming from), cruise ships aren't a significant driver of oil prices. I'd expect the scale of the shipping market to dwarf their effect, and I'd expect production to rise to meet their relatively steady demand, though I could be wrong about either or both. None of that (whatever the answers may be) means they aren't hideously wasteful in absolute and very meaningful terms.

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

#699
post #292

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?

Yes. The latter has value whereas the former is just dumb as green cryptocurrencies exist.

Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every way -- be it be providing a captive audience for authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for surveillance states to collect and build models to control humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.

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

#700
post #650

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…

I agree with most everything you just wrote. But, note that the problem with Proof of Stake, in this thinking, is that you won't be able to buy tokens from your local energy company, when the regulators shut your blockchain down.
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