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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#871

Post by splintercell »

bitcoin_anon wrote: post #841
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is us…

It's actually a worse situation that bitcoin synergy usage scales with its price. So same number of people could be using bitcoin but if the price jumps up by 10X, then over a period a few months it's energy usage would also go up by 10X.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#872

Post by proto-n »

quantified wrote: post #671
latchkey wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a personal note, Ben is a really really nice and smart guy. I have a huge amount of respect for him.

We're all complex, multidimensional people. He's probably a really good parent. But "toxic environmental narrative"?

I think someone can be toxic and at the same time be right about what they say

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#873

Post by salawat »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #797
webinvest wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cra…

In case of Ethereum that wasn't true afaik, a lot of it was mined in the US for example. Since Ethereum wasn't all ASICs like Bitcoin, there was more decentralization in that sense with individuals running miners from home, not always at the highest efficiency. Your first paragraph is correct regarding profitability for most miners though, based on the numbers I've seen. One thing that I find interesting in the elect…

>One thing that I find interesting in the electricity debates is that if we took the gaming example and looked at the collective consumption of all people playing video games around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers of power usage and emissions.

Okay, this is the second time I've seen an argument of the form: If you're not okay with the energy consumption of PoW cryptocurrencies, you can't be okay with X.

The first time I called it out, was someone pointing at the energy consumption of making, transporting, and storing ice cream. You are bringing up gaming.

You are advocating for making our children's/descendants lives worse, our lives worse, and trying to throw a valuable industrial subsidizer of the state of the art in many sub-fields of computer science...

...to defend the least efficient, wasteful,least empowering form of computation we've ever discovered. You're taking and making hostages of something that has objectively wrought joy and innovation to millions of lives.

If you find yourself on one side of an argument, and ice cream/video games on the other... I'd recommend having a long hard think about how you managed to get there.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#875

Post by john_alan »

anonporridge wrote: post #804
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 entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year. Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year. An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change. News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to th…

But but crypto is bad right?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#876

Post by samatman »

qznc wrote: post #683
dcolkitt wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's virtually no other ASIC resistant (i.e. can use GPU) PoW coin left to mine. There's the proof-of-work ETH fork, but it only has a market cap less than 2% of than real ETH. So even though they juiced the block rewards, miner rewards are more than 90% lower, which isn't enough to pay for electricity of the previous hash rate.

ETH classic hash rate went from 50 to nearly 300 Th/s. https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate

Reality will set in eventually. It was just the lazy place to point the cards, the pools will get tired of wasting that money pretty fast.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#877

Post by samatman »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #862
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of Ethereum that wasn't true afaik, a lot of it was mined in the US for example. Since Ethereum wasn't all ASICs like Bitcoin, there was more decentralization in that sense with individuals running miners from home, not always at the highest efficiency. Your first paragraph is correct regarding profitability for most miners though, based on the numbers I've seen. One thing that I find interesting in the elect…

I think that pattern of tire slashing is rational. Old cars will die, and the thing you want to hurt most is the incentives for making more oversized vehicles. If it's a hybrid SUV then it's more complicated, but a gas SUV makes sense as a target even with an engine tuned for efficiency.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#878

Post by irusensei »

e1g wrote: post #824
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

“a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.

Comparing visa and Mastercard transactions with Bitcoin is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do people really think visa settles transactions between two different bank accounts? Those card transactions can take days to settle.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#879

Post by DennisP »

e1g wrote: post #824
oblio wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagi…

“a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.

Zkrollups on Ethereum can do a couple thousand tx/sec, without security compromises. The plan now is to use the base layer mainly to support rollups, and use data sharding on the base layer to multiply the capacity of rollups. That should get it to about 100,000 tx/sec. That will be a pretty big change, but not as big as what they just did, and they've already got the design mostly worked out.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#880

Post by phatfish »

webinvest wrote: post #777
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 cra…

I guess hydro/geo is better than them firing up a coal fired power station to do the job. But all the "mining" nonsense just sucks up clean power than could be used in the real world which hopefully pushes out more polluting sources.

All to supposedly create artificial scarcity for .jpg files.

At least that illness is over now somewhat. Hopefully all the miners go bankrupt.

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