A big wave of (used) nVidia Cards are approaching
Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#962Earlier 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…
The level of delusion when it comes to cryptocurrencies - is unreal. As a market practitioner of many decades, I must say I have never witness this level of froth and delusion before. I'm studying it with great interest (and a touch of disdain about my fellow humans unbounded rationality/irrational exuberance about cryptos)
"As a market practitioner of many decades" -- I like that phrase.
In the first phase, it was purely retail speculation. However, we are now entering into a new phase. ETFs are being issued. This makes it easier for institutional money to buy. Also scary. I'm not concerned about "fast money" (hedge funds), but rather "slow money" like pension funds.
Final phase: I notice that investment banks are slowly beginning to open cryptocurrency trading desks. They may trade directly, but mostly they are interested in derivatives. That is my biggest fear. How is that any different than CDS on MBS/ABS/CDO? (Credit default swap on sub-prime mortgage bonds) In short: The underlying was junk loans. Derivs on crypto feels like the same wolf, but in a different skin!
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#963Earlier 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…
> If ETH were PoS at the time of the split, it would be a lot less obvious from the chainstate which one people would choose to use. Both chains' participants would try to make it look like their chains had more users by some other means. But the point in the article is that those "other means" are not only costly actions, but also the marginal cost each fork can afford for these actions is, in equilibrium, equal to their respective marginal revenues.
You forget that when the ETH/ETC split happened, the hashrate fluctuated immensely after the Poloniex listed ETC (and ETCs price skyrocketed) and many miners switched to mine ETC.
Now in hindsight it is obvious but during the chaotic days, it wasn't obvious which chain would be worth more in the future. That ETH had more POW done at that moment was unimportant. You had to use other means to decide which chain to use.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#964Earlier quoted context omitted.
So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?
Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring . It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fuck…
I am not being pedantic. I am simply bringing up two points:
- There are those who are OK with high carbon emissions for various things that are a proven net-negative to the society or the planet - examples being, as I mentioned, social media, user tracking and advertising server farms, plus anything directly related to that. If these things are not a net-negative, then at the very least they could operate at the fraction of their current emissions, were they built with externalities in mind. To be OK with that but not with Bitcoin where it objectively provides some value by directly helping human lives (it is a store of value and a way to transfer money for people whose home currency is unstable or restricted by hostile governments, for instance), is hypocritical.
- Literally all legislation surrounding cryptocurrency (well, anything else too, really) by necessity has to be based on someone's opinions. Whose, is my question. Because that will shape what's allowed and what's not allowed to a great extent. Badly chosen opinion-givers lead to clusterf*cks like Disney, Sony and a few other giants effectively being in charge of worldwide copyright durations, which causes untold damage to the cultural commons.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#965> If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed, that’s ~35Wh/tx The improved energy consumption is still a lot. For reference, a 2019 16" MacBook Pro has a 100 Wh battery. In other words, 3ish transactions would fully drain such a laptop's battery.
It's an average for the network, not an actual expense you pay to run a transaction. Stakers are the ones mainly using that energy. If you're just a regular user and send a transaction, you just spend the tiny bit of energy needed to make a cryptographic signature and transmit it.
I think the issue here is that 35Wh per transaction is still a million times less efficient than traditional databases. The MacBook example is just meant to give a frame of reference for how much 35Wh is.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#966Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy Videogames run GPUs at full capacity too, we should ban them too. No one NEEDS to pretend to be a cowboy for 100+ hours each across 36 million GPUs. Actually maybe there should be a ban on computing power above mobile CPUs available to non-government bodies, if this really is so devastating to the environment we n…
But gamers aren't buying up dozens of GPUs each to pretend to be a cowboy, and they don't pretend to be a cowboy 24/7.
They might only have one GPU each but there are a lot more of them, if even half of all people who bought RDR2 complete it that would be similar to 1.5 billion GPU hours of crypto mining (Eth for example).
32 million bought it, takes about 100 hours to complete runs GPU full capacity.
If we're going to say using GPU computing power is bad for the environment then we can't just stop at crypto because it's convenient. We have to look at all computing and videogames isn't something that should be considered essential either.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#967Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an average for the network, not an actual expense you pay to run a transaction. Stakers are the ones mainly using that energy. If you're just a regular user and send a transaction, you just spend the tiny bit of energy needed to make a cryptographic signature and transmit it.
I think the issue here is that 35Wh per transaction is still a million times less efficient than traditional databases. The MacBook example is just meant to give a frame of reference for how much 35Wh is.
Sure, no argument there. I'm really glad proof-of-stake is close. It's just that GP made it sound like issuing three transactions would actually drain your battery, so I wanted to clarify that.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Didn’t he just donate a billion to India?
He donated a billion dollar worth of an illiquid shitcoin[0] sent to him by the scammers who created.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#969Earlier 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.
To add my experience. I looked at rolling out Coinbase commerce a couple of years ago and then again a couple of months ago. I found their current integrations lacked support or were seemingly abandoned. Contacting general or merchant support often took over 2 weeks to get a response, which was a deal-breaker for any service that would inevitably impact customers on our end.
I'm not even really talking about technical limitations. More that 90% of consumers don't own any crypto. And (more controversially) it has completely morphed into an investment asset class. One that is possibly in a deflationary spiral where no one wants to spend any of it. IMHO it has really failed in it's mission of actually being a currency.
Re: Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
#970Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity is the best form of energy to use as the basis for Proof of Work, because there is no pre-requisite on how to generate the required electricity. compare: electric cars vs ice cars, electric cars can also end up consuming "dirty" electricity from coal fired plants, but that's an option vs. ice cars.
Could the concept of proof-of-work be extended to prove that work was done cleanly, ie: using only renewable electricity rather than that produced from fossil fuels? Perhaps renewable electricity producers could issue some sort of signed token which is then incorporated into the blockchain as proof that renewable electricity was purchased?
If we had a way to do this, why would we just limit it to crypto?