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Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

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Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#141

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

wpietri wrote: post #95
Iv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Electronic tulip bulbs are much easier to manage.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#142

Post by dekz »

adrianN wrote: post #135
bouncycastle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, if an attacker does something bad (eg. a group forms a 51% cartel and starts censoring transactions), then they can be forked out and their stake slashed in the fork that doesn't censor the transactions. I really do not see a problem here? It's even better security than PoW, because once the attackers have their stake slashed, they can't attack anymore. With PoW, the miners can keep on doing a 51% attack even a…

...if you trust a minority to decide who is an attacker and who isn't.

It's pretty clear when you validate the transactions

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#144

Post by zby »

amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

This is about making credible commitments, decentralization is a mean to that. What we see here is that the commitments can never be absolutely credible - but maybe that is not too bad, maybe we can live with some relativity.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#146

Post by dlubarov »

amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

Quoting Vitalik:

> If someone puts a gun to my head & tells me to write a hardfork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download & install the update & switch to that chain? I see few raised hands. This is called decentralization.

Sure, the Ethereum Foundation has substantial influence in the sense that their proposed changes tend to be adopted, but that's because they tend to propose good changes. If they propose a bad change, chances are the community will reject it. If they propose a questionable/controversial change, chances are the community will fork, as with the DAO fork.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#147

Post by tartrate »

solveit wrote: post #63
lrvick wrote: post #21

Could also be 100% if their Proof-Of-Stake game theory does not work as well with real funds worth stealing as it does on testnet. Full disclosure I hold some ETH but I would not dare put all my eggs in that brazenly "do it live" basket. One party can hold >50% of all funds and we would have no way of knowing. I wish people would look at less energy consuming proofs of work that still allow us real world evidence of…

>I wish people would look at less energy consuming proofs of work that still allow us real world evidence of decentralization. Are there any candidates for this? I can't imagine a PoW problem where you can't get ahead by throwing more computers at it.

> Are there any candidates for this?

https://nano.org/en/about/

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#148

Post by leppr »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #71
amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

I'm sure mine is a minority opinion, but I don't think Ethereum has any credibility as something that I'd call decentralized in the sense crypto enthusiasts often mean. I think this is true of a lot of cryptocurrency tools as well. Centralization is okay. There is a lot of power that comes with it. In my view Ethereum has chosen to wield that power while wearing the backwards hat and skateboard of decentralization an…

It's not that much of a minority opinion, it's shared by all Bitcoin maximalists.

An important ability required to understand Ethereum is to be able to separate the raw technology's properties with the development governance story.

The Ethereum network derives trustlessness from PoW and its miners. The security guarantees these provide can be considered in isolation to politics. It's just numbers, and the git history of the various specs and implementations is public.

Any community can start a new chain, from any version of Ethereum. And they do, many altcoins are more or less 1:1 forks of Ethereum yet reach huge valuations. The Ethereum foundation has 0 power over these networks. That's what decentralization means in this case, even if the development is as centralized as any other FOSS project.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#149

Post by exo762 »

hanniabu wrote: post #46
amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

The miners can choose to fork fork away from those changes. The core team is merely starting the change and the miners are supporting and carrying out those changes by continuing to mine the chain with those updates.

Wrong. Economic majority decides which fork will live and which fork will die. Miners have no say. If they are unhappy, they may attempt to attack fork abiding to new rules. Whey have three venues of attack.

1. Producing blocks that abide to old rules will do nothing - client software will just reject them as incorrect. Fork choice rule (e.g. longest chain or most work done) applies when choosing between two valid blocks, not between valid block and invalid block.

2. Attempts to do a famous 51% attack is crazy expensive and have low impact. Why low impact? Because small events that are similar to rewriting history 51% attack does happen all the time. They are called block reorgs and all the software which uses blockchain as a data store have to handle it properly. Also, such attack will be perceived by users as attack on them, solidifying community around opposition to miners.

3. Targeting difficulty adjustment algorithm by mining on a fork and leaving it at the beginning of adjustment period. Lets imagine 80% of miners leaving. For Bitcoin it would create a situation when adjustment period would last 8 weeks instead of 2. Blocks would be produced every 40 minutes at average instead of 10. Ethereum is immune to this type of attack since difficulty adjustment is done every block, not every 2016 blocks.

Re: Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Energy Consumption by 99 Percent

#150

Post by marknadal »

zanny wrote: post #73
amasad wrote: post #41

> To make their intentions clear, Ethereum’s core developers reprogrammed their PoW code to create an exponential rise in mining difficulty. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began slowing the creation of new transaction blocks in late 2016 and was expected to bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few years thereafter. > This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In Octo…

> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked. A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust . That magical thing crypto users keep tryin…

You are spot on, until...

The Goldilocks Zone.

Or shall we call it The Goldiblocks Zone?

Most projects will be by successful leaders and enthusiasts, until one of these experiments will hit the perfect combination of factors, and gain world traction.

Think of the crypto industry as AI training, most is pure junk, until a regression is fit.

Grandparent had a good point:

TCP/IP were the right approach, and the internet grew rapidly in a big bang.

Personally, I think The Goldiblocks Zone won't be blockchain at all, it'll be decentralization.

We've seen sites like D.Tube grow 2,000,000% because there is NO pay-to-play scams, you just use it and it just works.

They, and other sites, including the Internet Archive (top 300 in world), use GUN for decentralization. Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit.

The best way to cut 99% of power out of Ethereum is to just make it a decentralized compute platform, not some pay-to-play blockchain. Then you can really scale up.

As a comparison, for instance, a P2P version of Reddit (notabug.io) can handle 1000X the throughput as Bitcoin on only $99 worth of networking hardware.

The efficiency gains here are economical, but also scalable. Neither PoS or PoW will ever be able to fine-tune for that.

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