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

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

#731

Post by themagician » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

conradev wrote: post #649

themagician wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that actually the case? Couldn't a new player with the money to spend become a stakeholder overnight by purchasing large amounts of ETH on the open market and staking it? Versus taking that money and taking months to invest it into mining. Purchasing compute power is harder than purchasing ETH no matter how you slice it

In theory. Which is what the current stakeholders want. That was the value offer to do this in the first place.

Either way, you end up with a currency that is far more centralized than most stable paper currencies. The number of large stakeholders in Etherum is probably measured in the thousands. PoS will just further consolidate the stakeholders over time.

Ethereum isn't even reasonably transactable anymore. A single transaction costs like $40. As an actual currency, it died the same fate that Bitcoin did.

Too few people hold too many coins, and then they make rules that only benefit increasing the price.

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

#732

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

jereees wrote: post #718

matheusmoreira wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero is closest to the original cryptocurrency dream: decentralized and private currency. It's most definitely not "bullshit".

How is that different from how Shiba Inu token works? Genuinely curious

Shiba Inu is just a token on the Etherum chain.

There is no privacy and they've done some weird stuff to play the numbers.

E.g. they sent half of all SHIB to the creator of Etherum, why? Because that doubles the "circulating supply" and therefore market cap while not increasing the available supply at all.

This is a scheme to artificially increase the market cap, which mostly worked because VB burned 95% of all the SHIB he got & it got a lot of press.

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

#733

Post by WanderPanda » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #571

swensel wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly, the devil is in the details, just like how all current "scalable" blockchains are only able to do so because they sacrificed decentralization. Ethereum is dealing with growing pains right now because it's solving scalability with an approach that doesn't sacrifice decentralization or security.

AFAIK they are already at 6-8tb for their blockchain. Seems to be not very helpful with a high diversity of staking nodes. I am in doubt that their turing complete global computer can scale AND stay decentralized

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

#734

Post by danhak » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

DickingAround wrote: post #726

simias wrote: 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…

What do you mean? We totally got what we wanted; we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services. I'm 100% serious here; it's been working fine for quite a number of years. The fiat conversion is pretty noisy but BTC on average goes up in value in fiat terms at a fast pace. BTC is easy to turn it into stuff. No one has ever censored my transactions or asked for ID. Even if you buy something really exp…

> we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services.

Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency activity is actually used for trade (as opposed to speculation) that it is a novelty and newsworthy when it actually happens.

E.g. We all know about that guy who bought a pizza with BTC. And when Tesla decided to allow purchases via BTC (which they have since backtracked) it was a media sensation and market-moving. This is not normal.

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

#735

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

randomopining wrote: post #654

TarasBob wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great solution called zk-rollup (zero knowledge rollup) https://zksync.io/ It is just as secure as the base chain (unlike polygon) and has low fees and has been live for the past few months. This is a perfect solution to simple payments. The difference between optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups is that you can’t deploy arbitrary smart contracts to zk rollup, it only supports a limited set of use…

What coin does zk-rollup use? or just base Ethereum?

the current solutions do 'native fees' which means you pay the fee in whatever you are sending. This can't really last because I could create SPAM coin with 1B marketcap and overload the network with it.

IIRC they'll eventually create their own native token when their EVM compatible rollup is out.

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

#736

Post by o_p » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

I think the final outcome of this is that people will go to the next hot PoW coin and the eth "elites" will be left alone playing oligarch

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

#737

Post by vbuterin » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:44 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...

That was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks; that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.

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

#738

Post by x4e » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

People interested in POS should look at Nano [1].

In Ethereum only "validators" validate transactions - those with more than 32 Eth in their own wallet.

In Nano "representatives" validate transactions - but individual users vote a representative to represent them (with their wallet balance as a weighting).

The difference is that you can have 0.00001 Nano and still have a say over the network. It also removes the need for "stake pools" where lots of people lend Eth to one person to make up 32 Eth together (with the hope you will get your money back).

[1]: https://nano.org

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

#739

Post by grubles » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

vbuterin wrote: post #719

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 think you're conflating _consensus_ and _governance_; the two are quite different. It's not PoW vs PoS that allows a chain to resist a coordinated attempt by elites to force a protocol change, it's users personally verifying the chain (and so automatically rejecting chains that violate the rules even if >51% of PoW/PoS nodes support those chains). So no, PoS is not "how our current financial system works". Our curr…

Important to note that Vitalik massively gains from Ethereum transitioning to Proof-of-Stake since he controls a large percentage of total ETH due to premining it before the project launched.

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

#740

Post by lawn » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #662

lawn wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is a very clear bias if one chain keeps the ticker, and therefore the price, so much that in practice exchanges exchanges can decide which chain "is the original one".