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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#771

Post by razemio »

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.

That is rude. I care about the environment, still I am mining.

How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid. If I would not do this, our new heating system wouldn't be financed yet.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#772

Post by _xrp0 »

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…

Your concerns are valid. And you're free to commit to projects that align with your values.

To me, the immutability of an actual blockchain is non-negotiable. I've given up on Ethereum after the DAO fork out of principle.

But that's the beauty. Unlike our current financial system, you're not bound to use Ethereum. You have sovereignty and can make your own choices (and drive change).

-- (I only discuss part of your comment, don't have time for the rest)

Just FYI, the biggest problem for crypto fraud is phishing, not theft. A thief can't get your private keys from a hardware wallet. And there are many, many, MANY strategies you can use against phishing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#773

Post by marcosdumay »

rkangel wrote: post #437
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.

I think that crypto-currencies as a fairly direct replacement for traditional currencies is probably not the future. I don't think it's a 'fad', but I think it'll settle into a niche position in the long term. The underlying problem that blockchains solve is 'distributed consensus'. This is a solution with a much broader range of applications. For example Maersk has a system for signing handover of shipping container…

I am still waiting for a compelling argument why distributed consensus about me buying some bread this morning is important. What does it gain that mere non-repudiation doesn't?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#774

Post by jstummbillig »

razemio wrote: post #771
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.

That is rude. I care about the environment, still I am mining. How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid. If I would not do th…

That's good on you. And yet, obviously, not what is happening on average with crypto mining.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#775

Post by nostrademons »

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.

They've actually forked Ethereum to keep the original mined version, ETHPoW ($ETHW). They'll keep mining on the original PoW chain as long as it remains profitable.

https://blockworks.co/proof-of-work-ethereum-fork-pow-rally-...

I'd expect the value of ETHW to crash fairly rapidly, though, because there are not many buyers interested in buying into a deprecated chain without official support or ecosystem buy-in, and lots of sellers who need to sell their mined ETHW to fund mining operations. Then we'll see miners shut off and leave the network, as the mining rewards can no longer support the electricity costs of mining. At some point it might get 51%'d, but at that point nobody will care.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#777

Post by webinvest »

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 miners were using GPUs. AMD, Nvidia, and others. They could switch their GPUs from mining ethereum which is about $1500 per coin to Ethereum classic but that is only about $40 per coin. I’d guess that wouldn’t be worth continuing with since it would be much less than than their electricity bill. They could sell their GPUs on EBay or other secondary markets, switch to protein folding, cloud-based password cracking, or SETI sky scanning. Maybe they use them to play high resolution video games like most people. Some smaller percent might notice next month when they eventually see that their ETH wallet hasn’t grown over the next month and Google why that’s the case.

Crypto mining occurs mainly where electricity is either cheap or free. Hydroelectric and Geothermal tends to produce the cheapest energy so many large mining outfits were relocated next to Hydroelectric and Geothermal plants. Many are in remote northern areas where computer cooling costs are less expensive too. $HIVE blockchain technologies was running enough ethereum miners to mine 7675 ethereum ($11.5 Million dollars worth) during the 3 month period ending in June 30, 2022 according to their quarterly earnings report. 100% of all of their miners used renewable energy sources.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#778

Post by eric_cc »

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…

It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin.

If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really need to compare the “tokenomics” of the currencies. With bitcoin, you have complete predictability in terms of when new bitcoins are created (inflation). With USD it’s purely up to the government.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#779

Post by root_axis »

usehackernews wrote: post #591
root_axis wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency jumped the shark long ago and this comment section is a reflection of that. Claiming that people aren't real hackers because they don't uncritically slurp up cryptocurrency hype isn't doing your cause any favors.

This isn’t crypto “hype.” It’s not going to impact the price of Ethereum. At least it’s not hype in my opinion. It’s just an impressive engineering feat. Given crypto isn’t going to die tomorrow, it’s good to see Ethereum has sunset the combustion engine for the EV (Proof of Work -> Proof of Stake). Even if you hate Ethereum, reducing electricity usage of the network by 90%+ is admirable.

It's hype - whether or not its also an example of impressive engineering is beside the point. Nobody is suggesting eth devs are bad programmers.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#780

Post by hot_gril »

max51 wrote: post #453
funklute wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this change also means that "Decentralisation" and "Power to the people" are fading away right? But it was always like this, also with proof of work. PoS and PoW are both just variations of "proof of resources", which in turn is a convenient substitution for likelihood that one's voting power is independent. If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, tha…

With proof of work, you have to spend your pile of money if you want to influence a vote. Whatever the cost of a 51% "attack" would be, the attacker has to actually spend that money to do it. With proof of stake, having that money is enough to vote and you don't need to spend or waste it. In fact, you get paid for having that money sitting in the account.

The catch is that people will notice 51% attacks. If you have enough voting money and fudge transactions, all that money becomes worthless pretty quickly. The more realistic issue is that the big voter gets to decide the direction of the protocol, but again sufficiently screwing things up only leads to their own demise.

It was worse with PoW in theory. Just because you have tons of mining equipment doesn't mean you have a stake in the future of the cryptocurrency.

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