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The Ethereum merge is done

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#761

Post by marcosdumay »

apeace wrote: post #742
camjohnson26 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, with all the new hashers coming from ETH, ETHW still has an order of magnitude less activity than ETH had before the change. Evidently it didn't absorb all the hardware.

The question if it is visible in the electricity generation numbers is still very relevant. (If it is, we will probably only be able to see it in an year, when international organizations compile their numbers.)

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#762

Post by solumos »

hocuspocus wrote: post #241
solumos wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the easiest use case to grok (and one that's being used right now) is a near-instant global settlement layer e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear. Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for physical goods. e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2] [0] - http…

[0] "A network fee of 2.5% (with a cap of $500) will be deducted from your investment amount for settlement, custody, and trading costs associated with your payment in USDC". Very cheap indeed. [1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle problem. You need trusted third parties in supply chains, a cryptographic signature would essentially achiev…

Fair critique — AngelList is pretty aggressive with its fees. If you're willing to handle settlement + custody yourself, it's much cheaper.

The oracle problem is very real (and solvable). Even ignoring the ability to transact within the same system where provenance is maintained, I tend to think that trusted third-parties moving their supply chain operations into a public ledger which is verifiable across time is more advantageous than point-in-time cryptographic signatures.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#763

Post by shagie »

ajross wrote: post #666
matkoniecz wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is more diffuse. Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and should harm people using energy in this way. But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is not profitable for alternatives.

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…

> like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home

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

A blockchain compatible with old ETH is old ETH... the classic one.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#764

Post by mrb »

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…

«Shouldn't that be observable somehow?»

No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second, contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only 0.1%. Yes that can be a "country's worth of electricity" but in relative terms, 0.1% would be barely visible on charts you might examine.

Also, digiconomist, an often quoted source of Ethereum miner's energy consumption statistics, was grossly overestimating the figures. The actual consumption was probably around 20-30 TWh/year instead of the ~80 TWh/year figure they estimated. Just look at their chart: it made no sense, for example between Sep 2020 and May 2022 Ethereum hashrate grew 5-fold from 200 to 1000 TH/s, whereas in that same time-frame digiconomist estimated the consumption grew 15-fold from 6 TWh/year to 90 TWh/year. If anything, hardware has become (a bit) more efficient over time, it didn't become 3 times less efficient...

But that's not too surprising, given the author of digiconomist has a history of exaggerating his figures, like he did for Bitcoin see https://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ But nowadays his Bitcoin estimate is more in-line with more reputable estimates such as Cambridge's https://cbeci.org/ Last time I looked he was within ±30%

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#765

Post by ineedasername »

colordrops wrote: post #725
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…

You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed, indicating that you want a human layer of control that is currently missing. This is a conflating of layers and evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of of how it works. The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted to the top of HN that make…

>You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed

No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with the most money, and history has show as that transactions __can__ be reversed when those large players throw their weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way.

I'm also saying that I don't mind there being a human layer of judgment, but also that it goes very much against the trustless ethos of crypto. And also that the currently layer of human judgement is vastly less accessible to the average crypto hold than it is in traditional banking & finance.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#766

Post by squeaky-clean »

yoden wrote: post #637
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/

GPU prices are already down. "Sell the rumor, buy the news" and all that.

Down in the short-term. They're still up overall since the 3000 series release.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#767

Post by pshc »

hoosieree wrote: post #532
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...

I'm still flummoxed why people use blockchains for any kind of data or computation. Fundamentally isn't blockchain a tech stack built on a linked list with mandatory network calls in every operation? It seems purposefully inefficient. At least in theory it had a point (decentralized control). In practice, however...

People won't use it for traditional number crunching.

Way I see it, the idea is to get your data, code, and capital into the big global ball of state by consensus where it can coexist with other code. The point is being able to co-operate with others by writing arbitrary programmable incentive mechanisms.

The tech isn't there yet though. It still needs higher throughput (sharding, layer 2s), better visibility into the mechanics, and probably some kind of privacy layer.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#768

Post by DennisP »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #749
kenforthewin wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but Ethereum accounted for 94% of GPU hashpower. The other coins can't absorb all that and stay profitable.

ETH ASICs weren't much better than just getting the latest GPU.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#769

Post by squeaky-clean »

franga2000 wrote: post #80
Animats wrote: post #22

The bottom just fell out of the used GPU market. NVidia Tesla 80 24GB on sale for US$79 in quantity. [1] [1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...

The 79$ one I see has over 300$ in shipping, which is a standard scam on eBay.

Outside the USA maybe? I see free shipping from seller fifakingdom, estimated delivery Sep 20-22.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#770

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

pkulak wrote: post #759
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.

Maybe. What are they gonna move to though? If everyone moves to some other coin (not Bitcoin, because that's different hardware), it'll quickly become unprofitable to mine. They'll just sell their hardware, most likely. Hopefully.

Well, there are options. I do not want to point to obvious candidates, because I am biased and it could easily be misconstrued, but RVN just just saw a decent influx of those ETH miners based on recent spike.

Life hates vacuum. Short of outright ban, nothing will change in that space.

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