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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

#831

Post by suifbwish »

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…

Proof of work consumes a real world resource. Proof of stake does not, therefore proof of work exchanges REAL value for virtual value. It literally takes actual value in the world and deletes it. What’s the difference with the US financial institutions buying up all the big mining rigs and then buying up all the stakable tokens ?

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

#832

Post by owens99 »

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...

You're smart, I like your comments.

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

#833

Post by andy_ppp »

leishman wrote: post #789
andy_ppp wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t the people with most money buy the most computer power?

Yes, but they then need to maintain that edge by selling their Bitcoin and buying more computer power. They have constantly growing operating expenses and there is no force that centralizes control. PoS playbook is 1) get a stake, 2) set it and forget it.

Well I guess we’ll see if you’re right...

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

#834

Post by owens99 »

leishman wrote: post #592
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

The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.

Thank you for bringing this up.

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

#835

Post by leishman »

eloff wrote: post #830
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 don't think your example proves proof of work isn't vulnerable to the same effect. At best it proves it's not always vulnerable to that - but the same could technically happen with proof of stake. Like it or not the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule may well be the most powerful law of the universe. It applies to everything from physical systems like stars and galaxies to social systems and individual human achievemen…

There is a very big difference. PoS collapses governance into a single group: custodians. With PoW governance is a push and pull between miners and custodians. Additionally, PoW miners need to constantly sell Bitcoin to cover operating costs, whereas stakers in a PoS system have a small fixed cost and large stakers will always stay large. Miners on the other hand need to constantly invest and expand to stay competitive.

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

#836

Post by SwagtimusPrime »

fredfoobar wrote: post #760
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…

> Our current financial system doesn't give people the ability to independently verify anything at all; it's even worse than the most centralized chains in that regard. I'm sorry, that sounds incorrect, many people have been "verifying" things independently and sounding the alarm, but nothing happens.

Lol. Can you personally verify what your bank is doing? No you can't. If it was on the blockchain, you could.

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

#837

Post by fredfoobar »

SwagtimusPrime wrote: post #836
fredfoobar wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our current financial system doesn't give people the ability to independently verify anything at all; it's even worse than the most centralized chains in that regard. I'm sorry, that sounds incorrect, many people have been "verifying" things independently and sounding the alarm, but nothing happens.

Lol. Can you personally verify what your bank is doing? No you can't. If it was on the blockchain, you could.

He's talking about the Financial System, not the Bank (akin to a node)

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

#838

Post by SwagtimusPrime »

grubles wrote: post #765
EugeneOZ wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.

Bitcoin is the illusion of decentralization.

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

#839

Post by Sargos »

WanderPanda wrote: post #733
hanniabu wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's only for an archive node which isn't that useful to the network and is generally only used by specialist. A full Ethereum node easily fits on a 1TB drive and with research ongoing into statelessness the problem of state growth won't be a problem long term.

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

#840

Post by randomhodler84 »

throw1234000 wrote: post #778
leishman wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very different: The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.

Anybody can be a miner the same way anybody can participate in the race for Mars. But that doesn't mean your bottle rocket will beat SpaceX there.

Sure. And analogous to PoS is some kind of galactic requirement that you pay some kind of space bond in order to go to space. Mess around and your space bond is slashed. I like the bottlerocket model better.
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