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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

#761
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.

Then you're probably not from Iran because crypto miners have routinely sparked power outages there.

https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210203-in-ir...

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

#762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

32 ETH was set when it cost much less. That can always be changed if the number or validators is not sufficient to decentralize the network.

That's was my point. The ability to stake shouldn't be based on an arbitrary and temporary exchange rate. What happens if USD/ETH is $0.0001? $1B? It should still work regardless of the exchange rate.

Current implementation depends on the exchange rate and creates an incentive structure towards centralization.

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

#763

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…

With PoS one can just buy _governance_, that's all. All you need to have more influence on (PoS-based) Etherium is a huge amount of money. More power to money-bags!

So “fresh” idea :)

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

#764

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…

I'm mostly talking about governance. The biggest "users" and governance decision makers of any PoS protocol will be regulated financial institutions (e.g. Coinbase) operating on behalf of end users. In theory Joe Schmoe can be a staker from his garage, but in practice the only stakers that matter will be regulated custodians (full disclosure, I am the CEO of a regulated custodian) other than a handful of independent ETH whales (like yourself).

Yes there will be a number of custodians "competing" with each other, but they will all largely operate under the same regulatory jurisdiction (or at least cooperating jurisdictions). If a PoS currency becomes mainstream, the Federal Reserve (because regulated banks will be the largest custodians) and Dept. of Treasury will have significant influence on governance debates.

The big issue here is that governance decisions in PoW systems are split between miners (geographically distributed), custodians (largely US based) and other economic actors. In PoS systems only custodians will call the shots. That has very serious implications because custodians are regulated financial institutions with significant network effects, miners do not have this centralizing force.

Lastly, to actually become a miner in a PoS system requires you to find or create a cheap source of energy and hardware and maintain this advantage in perpetuity. This is external to the system and can be done without paying off any existing Bitcoin actor. In a PoS system you, by definition, need to pay to play - you must purchase a sufficient stake of the currency from an existing insider if you want to have a seat at the table. It's the perfect insider game. Some may argue it aligns incentives, but it also centralizes control.

These systems all have different tradeoffs. Maybe some people are ok with these tradeoffs for switching to PoS, but I'm not.

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

#765

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…

With PoS one can just buy _governance_, that's all. All you need to have more influence on (PoS-based) Etherium is a huge amount of money. More power to money-bags! So “fresh” idea :)

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account, ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of decentralization.

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

#766
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Is this really true? I buy stuff with crypto all the time.

It's how I learned about crypto in the first place- back ~2015, I ordered legitimate, had-a-prescription medication for my father from overseas using bitcoin, as it was the only way I could get it, as the even-with-insurance price in the states was beyond our means. Wound up doing so for several years, and it was much easier than dealing with the 'normal' ways of payment. A lot of the things I order from overseas in general I pay for in crypto, simply because it's cheaper & easier than doing regular currency conversions. I'm talking about regular things, like specialty foods, or everyday items I can't find in the states. Nothing even close to grey market or sketchy. Just regular financial transactions, using crypto.

I'm sure by numbers my <$100-equivalent purchases are small potatoes, but how is that not also true for regular money? There are billions of dollars of capital sloshing around in the markets, but that doesn't make my personal-level spending not useful.

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

#767
post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>You can't fork an exchange off of the network without also disrupting every single user that parks funds on that exchange.

Anyone who willingly opts into staking on a shady exchange, agreeing to a contract saying that they might be slashed, needs to be prepared to be slashed.

On the other hand, any exchange that automatically opts user deposits into staking without notifying them should be criminally liable. That's a big breach of user trust.

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

#768
Ethereum 2.0 isn’t expected to be released until 2022, 2023, or 2024*

If you’re looking for something that works now, you can take a look at the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase, Stellar Lumens (XLM). It sure is energy efficient.

More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...

Sources: *Coinbase, Stakewise

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

#769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

1. Under PoW, a 51% attacker can continuously attack profitably. All the energy they expend gets returned as mining rewards just like normal, and they can potentially even (up to) double their rewards if they censor the other 49%. The only way to stop this aside from changing the PoW algorithm is to physically locate and seize the mining rigs.

2. Majority stakers can't change the rules of the system either.

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

#770

Bitcoin layer-2 massively reduces the amount of energy used per transaction. For every on-chain Bitcoin transaction, potentially millions upon millions of Lightning transactions can occur.

It should always be clear that bitcoin doesn't have an energy use per transaction. The energy use of the network doesn't increase with the number of transactions conducted.

It's absolutely true that the layers built on top of bitcoin do and will continue to present scale, allowing for more and faster tx per second.

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