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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#511

Post by hwillis »

once_inc wrote: post #469
Waterluvian wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

> The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care.

Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.

Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the validators like that drives up costs massively.

> Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative.

No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#512

Post by seydor »

ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first.

I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#513

Post by serverholic »

acdha wrote: post #500
chaseadam17 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.

Why bother paying more for a slow database if you’re not going to rely on the one feature which can’t be done faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?

Because it gives people options and increases competition in the financial system.

It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#514

Post by ChadNauseam »

djhworld wrote: post #475

Does this mean GPU prices will go down? At least according to this article the validator nodes can be run on a Raspberry Pi [1] [1] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

GPUs are ridiculously cheap now, compared to how they used to be. You can buy a 3070 from newegg for $599 and they’ll throw in a free monitor to sweeten the deal for you

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#515

Post by acdha »

ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

> And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on.

The flip side is that it’s creating new opportunities for massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions like using shell companies but normal people won’t think to do that or realize that they’re making that level of trust by using a wallet, exchange, etc.

There are some obvious big problems (“do voters know you paid for this porn site 15 years ago?”) but also more personal ones: imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk but I’d hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being effective and perfectly operated.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#516

Post by yieldcrv »

drtz wrote: post #506
once_inc wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. H…

Genuinely curious: how does burning methane to generate electricity make an organization carbon negative? Do you have a reference for this? I understand that methane is orders of magnitude more significant from a greenhouse effect point of view than CO2, but I don't see how it would be economically viable to burn methane "in stranded gas reserves" to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining but somehow it's not viable…

The methane gas has already been burned for decades, adding bitcoin to the equation just made you look

No other use case has been profitable for the gas by products so the sites pump it directly into the atmosphere

Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected from the grid, these are the best use cases of this. others are connected to the grid which gets the most debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin mining’s absence and there was no political will to meet climate goals ever)

So the solution solves itself simply because it is an environmental solution that is profitable

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#517

Post by giarc »

kranke155 wrote: post #467
neprotivo wrote: post #457

It looks like the new Blockchain is quite centralized. 45% of blocks are mined by just two addresses: https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1570339602346684416...

Those could be exchanges ? Which would mean they represent very large numbers of users. Seems the most likely explanation. The idea that this isn’t true in BTC or PoW seems like a wild fiction to me.

Wasn't a public blockchain supposed to solve this? I always see this speculation and I thought the blockchain was supposed to show the public who was doing what... instead I always see these comments about big holders and speculation who it is. Shouldn't exchange addresses be known?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#519

Post by TigeriusKirk »

seibelj wrote: post #462
ineedasername wrote: post #444

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it m…

Quoted post unavailable.

The transition on this site has been seamless, hasn't it? I have to say, I actually do think less of people for it.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#520

Post by franky47 »

hwillis wrote: post #489
franky47 wrote: post #439

Quote from the article: > “I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week." -- Edgington There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Both are critically necessary and complementary, but I don't see how Edgington thinks that swi…

> There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. The phrase "removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week" is globally syntactically ambiguous. It can be read as "removing [a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere] every week" or as "removing [a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week]". The second interpretation…

Punctuation is key, as your second example emphasises.

In this case, a better wording would have been: "removing the source of a megaton a week of carbon emissions".

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