Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb • Hacker News Board

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#71

Post by saurik » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:36 AM UTC

grubles wrote: post #68

derefr wrote: post #52

> Why? Because Ethereum isn’t just a store-of-value. The Ethereum network also contains smart contracts that execute native code on the blockchain. It's funny when things are presented this way. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value. It's a distributed computer that needs its own token economy in order to charge "hosting costs" to the computational agents running on it, and to allow those agents to trade…

The other funny thing is the common misconception that Bitcoin does not have smart contracts. Bitcoin transactions are actually pretty programmable. You can have a coin be unspendable until a certain date, or have it require n cosigners to be spent, or have it become spendable only once a secret is revealed which matches a hash. Bitcoin most definitely has smart contracts.

This is true in the same sense that grep is extremely programmable, but comparing grep to C would be strange indeed. Ethereum is a Turing complete VM, allowing you to build extremely complex systems (we, for example, are trying to build a more transparent and distributed directory for a Tor-like service), while Bitcoin lets you sort of control transactions a bit with what amount to something closer to "rules" than "programs" (due to the explicit lack of looping control structure).

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#72

Post by ddrdrck_ » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #50

leppr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permissioned networks are a very much easier setting to design a consensus protocol for than public ones. Describing a consensus algorithm as "Proof of Stake" simply means it uses some kind of stake to secure its decisions, this doesn't say anything about the assumptions it starts from. Existing "PoS" blockchains don't have the same decentralization goals as Ethereum.

> Existing "PoS" blockchains don't have the same decentralization goals as Ethereum. What about Cardano and Tezos? aren't they decentralized PoS blockchains?

And Cosmos

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#73

Post by nybble41 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #70

nybble41 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically correct, except that it isn't the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum that matters, per se, but rather the value of the reward for each block relative to the amount of time required to mine it. For Bitcoin, ignoring transaction fees, the rate is 12.5 bitcoins per 10 minutes; for Ethereum it's 3 ETH per 15 seconds. If the price of 1 BTC is 70x the price of 1 ETH then you would break even expending about 7.3x over a…

So energy usage should drop quite a bit after some difficulty increases?

The difficulty increases or decreases to maintain the target block interval. The only way that impacts mining revenue is if the actual block interval deviates significantly from the target—for example, if the hash rate suddenly increased such that blocks were being solved in five minutes instead of ten, that would double the revenue rate (and thus the economical power consumption) temporarily until a difficulty increase brought the interval back to ten minutes per block.

What does cause significant changes in revenue is the periodic halving of the block reward. Absent an opposing increase in price and/or transaction fees, when the reward drops from 12.5 BTC/block to 6.25 BTC/block in May of this year the energy budget for profitable mining should be cut roughly in half.

Re: Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

#74

Post by im3w1l » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

nybble41 wrote: post #73

im3w1l wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So energy usage should drop quite a bit after some difficulty increases?

The difficulty increases or decreases to maintain the target block interval. The only way that impacts mining revenue is if the actual block interval deviates significantly from the target—for example, if the hash rate suddenly increased such that blocks were being solved in five minutes instead of ten, that would double the revenue rate (and thus the economical power consumption) temporarily until a difficulty incre…

Sorry yeah I was mixing those up. But is it going to use not-obscene amounts of electricity eventually?