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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

#981

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 think it's hypocritical to call this fraud: this contract itself was exploited for a loophole; if you declare it valid as allowed by the protocol, then simply changing the protocol (which is what was done temporarily) is also valid and according to the working of the system. I think it was within the spirit of the system to work this way.

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

#982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism…

> In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. No, it means nothing unless users use, buy, and sell the coin. The miners' are subservient to them, assuming the miners are tryi…

> Miners do not decide or approve which set of consensus rules people decide to use, though they can, at a potentially quite significant loss, disrupt the functioning of the network somewhat.

Miners are users. If they don't mine the blocks, the system literally doesn't work. Suppose that a large majority of miners refuses to upgrade for some reason. One part of the users can upgrade and wait for new blocks for a long time, while the users that don't upgrade can actually use the system as if nothing happened. Who is going to throw in the towel first? Maybe it's the miners, maybe it's the ETH holders, you can't know.

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

#983

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What is ethically wrong with using electricity? Or have you skipped a few steps in your argument?

There are serious environmental concerns being raised about the amount of electricity being used to mine Bitcoin (see, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135776). My comment does assume that less electricity use is good, because that's the context in which Ethereum posted this.

I'm mining crypto (very small amounts) as I as I type this, so I'm definitely not going to make the case that all crypto mining is an immoral waste of electricity. But I remain very interested in transition to a PoS system, so as to reduce the strain of crypto on the environment.

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

#984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ethically wrong with using electricity? Or have you skipped a few steps in your argument?

There are serious environmental concerns being raised about the amount of electricity being used to mine Bitcoin (see, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135776 ). My comment does assume that less electricity use is good, because that's the context in which Ethereum posted this. I'm mining crypto (very small amounts) as I as I type this, so I'm definitely not going to make the case that all crypto mining is…

All human economic activity that uses electricity should be judged by the same standard then. I think the unstated premise of most of these arguments is that crypto provides no meaningful economic benefit to society, and thus the use of real resources (that sometimes produces pollution as a byproduct, depending on the source) is immoral.

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

#985
post #310
post #153

If there was a way to verify the power source is green I think PoW would be the ideal way to move forward. For example if electrons generated by photoelectric cells somehow were different than other electrons (quantum spin, parity, etc.) then maybe an algorithm could check for that and only accept blocks mined using these electrons and not others.

Any crypto system that has an energy problem also has an economic problem. When a transaction requires the same amount of electricity as an average household uses in a month, then each transaction will cost someone a full months electric bill. That will either have to be paid with extremely high transaction fees or "absorbed" by the value of the currency in ways that make it unsuitable as an actual currency. This is…

Currently transaction fees are so high because of bitcoin block subsidies once the subsidy asymptotically approaches zero there will be much lower transaction fees because miners only incentive will come from the fees.

There are far too many blocks being mined not because of volume of transactions that need to be included in them, but because of new block subsidies.

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

#986

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 0. https://shibatoken.com/

Plus millions of dollars worth of ETH

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

#987

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…

On the flip side, nearly 100% of PoW mining hardware is manufactured in China. They could easily play geopolitical games with the west in that regard.

There is also a very delicate game to play if you're trying to hack a crypto for your own benefit. If a crypto network gets hacked it is likely to lose a ton of value and reputation. That's why ETH fell by 60% after the Dao hack. So you're really shooting yourself in the foot by being a malicious actor.

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

#988

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 :)

But as soon as someone bought 51% of ETH and abused their influence, their investment would go to zero. I'm not sure I get the scenario where it's worthwhile for someone to invest the amount it would take to get that significant of an ownership percentage and then do something that would just cause everyone else to leave and it to be worthless. Maybe I'm missing something here.

It's more like, people who hold a large enough stake can collude on what rules the blockchain implements. Lets say an Ethereum 3.0 is proposed that benefits the blockchain at the slight expense of stakeholders, you think they'll approve that proposal?

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

#989

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 think it's hypocritical to call this fraud: this contract itself was exploited for a loophole; if you declare it valid as allowed by the protocol, then simply changing the protocol (which is what was done temporarily) is also valid and according to the working of the system. I think it was within the spirit of the system to work this way.

The same people who loudly proclaimed "Code is Law" also wrote The DAO. Therefore, any action the code takes is legitimate.

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

#990

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current system is no different, as the hash power is related to how many computers you can afford to buy. This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental impact.

No, it is very different because in practice the pools and exchanges are totally separate entities. With PoS the biggest holders will be exchanges and therefore exchanges will control the cryptocurrency. With PoS there will be clearly less decentralization compared to PoW.

what about DEX? ain't it possible that CEX get outdated?
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