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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#741

Post by fallat »

stiltzkin wrote: post #676
silisili wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat. However, I'm holding strong in being ignorant, as I believe crypto is a fad with no inherent value. I'm an avid reader and learner, but only if the topic is interesting or makes sense. Cryptocoins meet neither of those criteria -to me-. That can be difficult if you read tech news like us, but it will give me a small twinge of joy if I live longer than crypto. Guess we'll see.

Quoted post unavailable.

100% this. They're basically saying "I know nothing about it, but from afar it looks disgusting."

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#742

Post by apeace »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #715
apeace wrote: post #634

> It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland? Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand? Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible? I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised…

Ethereum Classic’s hash rate has gone up by about 25% of Ethereum’s hashrate, so at least for now it looks like a lot of the energy use is just moving as miners point their GPU rigs at alt coins. Very curious to see if ETHW, ie Ethereum without the merge, maintains a significant amount of hashing power. Another thing to watch will be if those alt coins are profitable to keep mining or if miners will start selling the…

Aha, thank you! I felt like this change should be visible in some kind of graph somewhere, and you're right, the ETC hashrate has roughly quadrupled in the span of two days:

https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate

And here is the ETHW hashrate:

https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate

EDIT: Better links

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#743

Post by ineedasername »

whimsicalism wrote: post #657
once_inc wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".

If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.

"Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance.

With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum.

Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets.

So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders?

True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going.

[1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#744

Post by ajross »

teawrecks wrote: post #722
ajross wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is) will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy devoted to it will drop in tandem. It's also true that there…

> The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.

I don't understand your point. If you want to speculate on crypto you can hand a credit card to Coinbase at near-zero cost, you don't need to buy mining hardware to do it. If miners are buying electricity to speculate, they're making stupendously bad decisions. They should sell that hardware and buy crypto; their leverage will be much higher and their costs will be vastly lower.

No, mining is economic activity, not investment. You pay stuff to get stuff. Whether you then invest your profits in crypto has nothing to do with where you got them.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#745

Post by kenforthewin »

oliwarner wrote: post #727
apeace wrote: post #634

> It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland? Shouldn't that be observable somehow? Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand? Anyone know how this would be visible, and on what kind of time frame we expect it to become visible? I'm not claiming it hasn't happened. I just feel surprised…

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#746

Post by zeroclip »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #684
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…

> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. I'll take this one step further. My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One ti…

This is not a shining example of the security of credit cards, but an example of how insecure they are. We regularly carry passwords into our bank accounts in our pockets, and punch them into random ATM machines on the street in a foreign country, say them over the phone, or type them in while using the coffee shop WiFi. It is no wonder our cards are frequently compromised and the total cost of card fraud is many dozens of billions of dollars per year.

Usually, the credit card company is the one absorbing the cost of this fraud - the food or physical goods that the fraudster purchased doesn't just magically leave their possession.

It is entirely possible to build a company that holds custody of your crypto, extracts rent on transactions or borrows with your deposits, and uses their profits to give you some financial protection up to a certain limit. Most likely within 10+ years your local bank will have some account that will custodially hold some limited amount of funds in crypto that are FDIC insured. But not everybody in the world wants this system, and not everybody wants all of their assets to be held in this way.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#747

Post by bravetraveler »

kenforthewin wrote: post #745
oliwarner wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

Depends on the hashing algo -- some make sense for GPUs, others not so much.

I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still relatively viable for example.

Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to CPUs, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#748

Post by muttled »

le-mark wrote: post #528
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/

That’s what I’m wondering. There are a few gpu mineable coins, will miners switch to those, and keep gpu prices high?

Most of the rewards in GPU mining were from Ethereum. There won't be enough money to go around to make it worth the electricity once ETH is no longer mineable. Lots of mining businesses are going to go out of business or switch to Bitcoin/ASICs, and they're going to dump those used graphics cards on the market as they do.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#749

Post by throw1234651234 »

kenforthewin wrote: post #745
oliwarner wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

There are a 1000 other coins using GPUs for mining. E.g. "Ethereum Classic". Miners will switch to these. There are ETH ASICs btw, they just aren't as dominant as BTC AntMiner ASICs.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#750

Post by ajhurliman »

kenforthewin wrote: post #745
oliwarner wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

There are lots of other coins that still use GPUs to mine, though. I imagine most people who are running profitable operations will switch coins. Hopefully the popular coins will switch to PoS and the mining operations cease their profitability and shut down.
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