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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

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

#941

Post by tlamponi »

xtracto wrote: post #938
eloff wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paxos solves a different consensus problem than PoW or PoS. The former is for when you control and trust all nodes in your network. The latter is for the more difficult problem of consensus when you don't trust the nodes - otherwise known as the Byzantine Generals problem in distributed systems research.

Exactly. And paxos is not the best algorithm at it. There is Raft which is an alternative that is easier to understand.

Best in what metric?

raft and paxos are basically the same, besides leader election, which raft's take makes it simply easier and possible even more efficient[0]. I say "possible" because that depends very much on the consensus state over time, which in most actual workloads can be pretty stable, so at least in some practice, e.g., with hypervisor-cluster like we do, they perform almost the same. The simpler approach of raft can help if you create a library for it from scratch, or for easier understanding when coming into that space, otherwise the differences does not matter too much (in practice), IMO.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074

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

#942

Post by Vervious »

eloff wrote: post #930
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…

Paxos solves a different consensus problem than PoW or PoS. The former is for when you control and trust all nodes in your network. The latter is for the more difficult problem of consensus when you don't trust the nodes - otherwise known as the Byzantine Generals problem in distributed systems research.

Pretty sure Paxos is easily extended to the byzantine setting with digital signatures (i.e. Byzantine Paxos has also been around forever). Also PBFT has been around since the 1980s.

Only distinction is classical consensus is permissioned whereas blockchains are typically permissionless.

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

#943

Post by scrubs »

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…

It's not a currency. It doesn't even pass macro encon 101 definitional smell test of currency

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

#944

Post by leishman »

vbuterin wrote: post #886
leishman wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Miners have no power because ETH governance is deliberately centralized away from them.

1. Ethereum has a founder (you), who can effectively unilaterally change the protocol. You've been clear for a long time that ETH miners are temporary participants in this project.

2. Very few ETH owners run their own node or participate in actively validating and enforcing governance decisions, so you and the dev team effectively call the shots. Miners have no choice but to follow whatever protocol update Infura and the few other node-as-a-service companies decide to support.

> I don't see how that state of affairs would survive any attempt by governments to actually use their jurisdictional power

Since the largest holders will be regulated legal entities, it will be quite trivial for governments to do this. Also my understanding is that ETH staking is not delegated, so moving funds is not trivial for institutions since this is highly regulated activity.

> so once a single pool does anything disagreeable people can just move their ETH to other pools

Deposits at financial institutions are sticky. People and institutions generally aren't going to withdraw their ETH from Coinbase because of some governance debate.

> I've heard this argument many times, but.... why does that even matter?

Because it's a decentralizing force. To build and pay for a mining operation you need to sell off your Bitcoin to (often new) buyers. A larger mining operation has larger costs and is constantly at the mercy of the energy and hardware markets. In comparison, all stakers, regardless of size, have effectively the same small fixed cost. A big institutional staker will continue to grow their wealth with no increase in cost and no competitive pressures. They just sit on their $$ and keep collecting more in perpetuity.

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

#945

Post by leishman »

eyezick wrote: post #727
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'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.

Now replace "attacker" with "somebody the largest stakers don't like" and see how dangerous this becomes.

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

#946

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

jude- wrote: post #931
nootropicat wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS. It's maliciously created nonsense, which is most vis…

> By the logic of that article asymmetric cryptography doesn't, because the value equal to what's protected by the key is magically wasted somewhere. Of course, that isn't true, because it's not possible to break asymmetric cryptography by brute force with expenditure equal to whatever is protected. Same applies to PoS. Not quite. He's arguing that MC = MR implies that PoS is really PoW through obscure means. There's…

By the way, I believe that ETC is the 'true' Ethereum, and ETH was forever compromised by Buterik after that DAO fiasco. Code is Contract, but only until somebody decides otherwise.

(I fully understand that this belief of mine is not shared by the majority of Ethereum users.)

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

#947

Post by everfree »

DickingAround wrote: post #849
everfree wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This property is called Weak Subjectivity and is indeed a compromise that PoS makes over PoW. However, in practice, the trust assumptions aren't much higher than when you, say, download node software from a source that you trust. > I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever. With weak subjectivity, you only have to trust them to be correct on a timeframe of every few months…

How do you know who to trust under Weak Subjectivity? It amounts to saying "I'm pretty sure we'll be able to google it and figure it out". But that then relies on these 3rd party systems to be able to identify who to trust. How can you really know who to trust for a protocol that's supposed to be distributed and ownerless. If the US turned into Russia-level of corruption, we essentially have to trust the owners of ET…

I think you're jumping to the "risky" conclusion a bit prematurely.

> What if they die or go bankrupt and no one agrees on who owns ETH?

By "owner", do you mean the core developers who own the protocol repositories on github, or do you mean the client software teams who own the software repositories, or the individuals and exchanges who run the nodes and economic services, or the stakers producing blocks, or someone else?

If two reputable factions have a simultaneous claim to be the protocol stewards of the "real ETH", the ETH currency will fork and market forces will decide who the "true" owners are by valuing each side of the fork properly. We've already seen something similar to this with Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, and with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash.

So we don't need to trust any majority of users like you said, you get to personally choose what fork of the software you want to transact on, based on what version of the client software you personally see as legitimate, and download and run.

> So I know who has ETH based on what software I download and I download software based on who has ETH? And I know I'm in the right cycle of that form because I googled it and found an 'authority'? Risky.

Every cryptocurrency has a cycle of that form, even PoW cryptocurrencies. You could take "the chain with the most accumulated work", but that's not enough, because what you really need is the chain with the most accumulated work that also follows the protocol rules, with the protocol rules being based on which software you choose to download. You always need to trust someone to give you the software, unless you download the source code, personally audit every line of it to understand how it affects the behavior of the protocol's consensus, and compile it yourself.

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

#948

Post by lmm »

kelnos wrote: post #707
beambot wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POW is permissionless, in that you don't need anyone's permission to setup a mining rig and contribute significant work. POS isn't permissionless -- you literally have to buy a stake from existing holders in order to participate.

The money to build a mining rig and consume the electricity needed to run it is not even remotely permissionless. To add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities of that electricity use.

> The money to build a mining rig and consume the electricity needed to run it is not even remotely permissionless.

Yes it is. You can manufacture your own mining rig, with no-one else's permission, without ever needing to so much as communicate with anyone who currently holds any bitcoin.

> To add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities of that electricity use.

Most cryptocurrency developers ignore the externalities of all the crime they're enabling, so it's not like the miners are any worse.

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

#949

Post by quickthrower2 »

whiskyant wrote: post #914
cblconfederate wrote: post #425

PoW was of course a naive system but this this PoS should really be called the "Oligarchy" because it takes us back to the past and very visibly separates the plebs from the aristocracy. PoW had an implicit requirement for a global supply chain of hardware and energy which (kind of) made political and geopolitical games more difficult. With PoS, doing politics no longer requires work, which could lead to geopolicical…

What if a government required Ethereum traders to pay taxes in Ethereum, then kept and staked it, thus increasing their Ethereum even more. Wouldn't that government eventually gain complete control of governance in Ethereum?

Then they'd quickly have a hard time collecting taxes in the future, as they would run the economy into the ground.

Also the government doesn't want to gain control of Ethereum. If the government wants to use a crypto it will roll it's own and make it law, thereby having complete control of it from the get go, with no pesky premine for the foreign developers.

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

#950

Post by kolinko »

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…

Paxos requires multiple parties to vote on what’s the correct result. The killer issue there is that it doesn’t solve a sybil attack - you either need a central authority in Paxos that chooses which machines run it, or you will end up with an attacker setting up a million machines in a cloud and overvoting everyone.
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