Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

blog.ethereum.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 1001 posts

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

#881

Post by nomel »

jaggs wrote: post #177
tootie wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, you can't. Unless you want to be a very early adopter, no mainstream businesses are accepting payments in crypto. Techwise, Coinbase has a thing: https://commerce.coinbase.com/ But I've absolutely never seen it in the wild.

Um...that's not strictly the case though? https://blog.bitgo.com/24-major-businesses-accepting-bitcoin... (Tesla has recanted 'for now').

This list seems silly. For example:

> In a 2013 video, a man appears to be paying for his meal at Subway using Bitcoin in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

And, many are only at select locations, "will be", "unveils plans", and "testing".

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

#882

Post by throwawayForMe2 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #655
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 wish we could have proof of work but the work would be something like , doing an actual workout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

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

#883

Post by nomel »

zucker42 wrote: post #263
roel_v wrote: post #75

Maybe this is a good time and place to ask - let's say I want to buy something using Ethereum. Is it correct that when I look at, say, https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... , you have to pay USD 20 just as payment fees? I wrote off Bitcoin as a payment mechanism a long time ago because of this (although it seems BTC tx costs are now lower than ETH?), is this the direction tx costs for all cr…

$20 is a little high. ETH transactions are variable cost; more complex transactions cost more. In order to get the price of a simple transfer you can take the current gas price (for example, from https://ethgasstation.info/index.php ), which is 87 right now, multiply that by 21000 (cost in gas of a transfer) and divide that by 1 billion. So a transfer costs 0.001827 ETH or ~$6 if you want to happen within a few minut…

If I want to keep my fees less than 5%, I wouldn't call $100 a "micro-transaction". People don't like paying more, for fun.

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

#884

Post by Sargos »

spopejoy wrote: post #158
je_bailey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm more familiar with how Cardano and Polkadot do their POS rather than Ethereums. In Cardano since the entry level requirement to operate a stake pool is much smaller than it is to do something like Bitcoin mining, it creates a larger number of stake pools. There's also a soft limit on the size of the stake pool that encourages people to spread out their commitment so no one pool gets to large.So at least in the…

How do they prevent impersonation? There's no way a cryptosystem can prove that two different people actually have two different keys. If I want to pwn Cardano/Polkadot, don't I just need to run a bunch of different staking keys?

Binance runs about a dozen staking pools publicly so there are definitely problems with trying to keep pools decentralized.

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

#885

Post by crocodiletears »

kaba0 wrote: post #859
DickingAround wrote: post #726

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…

Why is illegal transactions a goal? You can hate on governments all you want, but that is the only way currently known where we can have a reasonable say into the laws made and uphold — and order is not a bad thing in my opinion. Why circumvent that, instead of voting someone in who will create reasonable laws to protect us all?

Why do you expect the government's laws to be forever reasonable, or reasonable for everyone all the time? Can you be guaranteed a vote if you've already been made a criminal? I'm skeptical of BTC as a currency, but divorcing the state from the capacity to control who can transact seems like a fantastic check on government power in a world where surveillance is becoming increasingly perfect. Think of Bitcoin in this context as digital cash, in relation to a a potentially centralized digital currency.

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

#886

Post by vbuterin »

leishman wrote: post #764
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…

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…

How does this view of PoS governance explain how Ethereum protocol governance has operated in reality for the past five years?

As far as I can tell, the power held by miners has been minimal; if miners had any significant power at all then the various issuance reductions and now EIP 1559 would not have been accepted nearly so smoothly. So when miners are replaced by PoS validators, the power that PoS validators will be inheriting is not that much...

> 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)

Even if this is true (given all the decentralized staking pools coming out, and the still really large number of solo stakers, I really doubt it!), I don't see how that state of affairs would survive any attempt by governments to actually use their jurisdictional power. It's very easy to move stake around (or at least it will be very easy post-merge), so once a single pool does anything disagreeable people can just move their ETH to other pools. And staking infrastructure can live in any country; there aren't even constraints around needing to have cheap electricity there.

> This is external to the system and can be done without paying off any existing Bitcoin actor

I've heard this argument many times, but.... why does that even matter? Making a PoW farm requires paying off a hardware provider. Hardware providers are far more centralized than cryptocurrency hodlers, of which there are millions and you just need to find one willing to sell to you. "I want to buy coins but the existing hodlers are all colluding to not let me" is not a problem that anyone in the cryptocurrency space actually worries about in real life. Specialized hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, are few enough that such a thing is at least actually plausible....

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

#887

Post by vbuterin »

jude- wrote: post #822
eyezick wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd further add on to say PoS has the benefit of being able to eliminate bad actors unilaterally. You can't stop anyone from attacking a PoW chain over and over again. Attacking a PoS chain is much riskier as the attacker's stakes are held on chain and are at the mercy of the community who uses the network.

Why does the attacker need to hold or buy any coins? All the attacker has to do to wreck havoc is prevent quorum from being reached. This can be done by knocking validators offline (which is a slashable penalty), or hacking validators and making them slash themselves, or hacking an exchange or two in order to amass control of 33% or more of the voting power.

If hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency was actually easy, plenty of people who are not rich right now would be very very rich. Alternatively, if PoS chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges and use their coins to attack, then PoW chains are vulnerable because you can hack exchanges, sell the proceeds to buy ASICs (or just buy the ASIC company), and use those ASICs to attack the PoW network.

Hacking billions of dollars of cryptocurrency is NOT easy, and it gets harder with every passing month, because validators and hodlers have billions of dollars of incentive to protect themselves.

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

#888

Post by politician »

suifbwish wrote: post #831
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 ?

Energy is not being exchanged for "virtual value", but rather "shared belief".

Wars have been fought to force shared beliefs. It's fairly common in history for "real world resources" to be permanently burned in order to create a shared belief system in order to facilitate trade. For example, the Roman Empire or any other empire.

I'd rather use electrons to create shared belief than bullets and bombs.

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

#889

Post by moralestapia »

DINKDINK wrote: post #874

Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's PoW Difficulty Adjustment Fixed Money Issuance novel art was published. Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value, you incentivize ~ https://www.truthco…

I went through that as it was happening.

Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity.

Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.

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

#890

Post by Matthias1 »

DINKDINK wrote: post #874

Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's PoW Difficulty Adjustment Fixed Money Issuance novel art was published. Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value, you incentivize ~ https://www.truthco…

> Without mining, less electricity is used in mining, and less silicon is used in mining chips. Are these resources available for extra production? Yes. However, these “non-wasted” resources are offset by other resources which are “wasted”.

This would seem to be the main argument of that second article you posted summarizing the economics around PoS. The idea is that if you’re backing your crypto with itself (like in a PoS), the value that is locked in the staking system could be doing something else. (This is a very real point in that it doesn’t help decentralization—the same people that would stake their coin could spend that money mining Bitcoin.)

But it doesn’t seem to address any points in the conversation around the ethics of using electricity as a basis for proof of work.

Post reply on HN