Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

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

andrewla wrote: post #664

reedjosh wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doll…

Post by webinvest » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

sva_ wrote: post #350

djrhails wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, right now anyone who isn't already in the game isn't able to acquire Ether without paying for it. Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment, and is already out of reach for the average person. Setting your desktop computer to mine definitely won't pay for your small smart contract.

> Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment, I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.

Post by Siira » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

x4e wrote: post #738

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…

Post by meowkit » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

chrischattin wrote: post #742

vbuterin wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Ethereum, you need 32 ETH, which is around ~$120k. That's prohibitive a normal person. After EIP1559 goes into effect, it's not out of the question that the price could rise 7x given the power laws at play. What happens when the cost to stake a node is $1M+? What happens 50 years from only the very richest .00001% can afford to run a node? I'm concerned EIP1559 and PoS is a very short sighted implementation that w…

Post by exo762 » Tue, May 18, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #582

scsilver wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi. Binance has their own network thats growing similarly. Both do have a huge amount of speculators. There are other up and coming complements to the market aswell including Polkadot. Some like ethereum for its maturity and dev team.

Imo Polkadot is "obsolete" now with Ethereum moving forward with a rollup-centric roadmap since L2 rollups are pretty much the same as parachains.