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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

#81

Post by Iv »

shittyadmin wrote: post #76
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 time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mist…

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

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

#82

Post by nivexous »

bouncycastle wrote: post #66
nivexous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

That tends to happen in PoW actually. Example: Last year, Monero forked and changed the protocol by changing the PoW algorithm. Effectively shutting off a significant section of the miners. Miners had no defence - it was a major blow to them. Same thing happened in Sia. There's been discussion with changing the PoW of Bitcoin as well.

You're making a different point. Yeah miners can get screwed in a PoW change, but the chain's fundamental properties are not at risk. Users have assets on both chains in a fork and if one chain does something terrible (or even just different) the market will reflect. With PoS, the majority remain the majority ... unless you support mob theft, a bad precedent I would say.

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

#84

Post by nivexous »

bouncycastle wrote: post #70
r32a_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin

> Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this. > With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker Not in the case of "selfish mining attack", where you may never know that an attack is happening until it's too late, you'll have little chance in defending with hashpower since the attackers wi…

> You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.

So ... theft?

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

#85

Post by nivexous »

solveit wrote: post #62
r32a_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also once a majority of stakeholder hit 51% there is no way to take away the 51% With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin

You can always buy them out. But honestly, a 51% attack seems like a much less likely way for ethereum to fail compared to it just not living up to the hype.

A buyer requires a seller. Who's to say they would?

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

#86

Post by wmf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #67
h1d wrote: post #34

I wonder but what had Ethereum achieved exactly to this day? Are they starting to optimize before reaching to some practical state? If the power consumption is out of hand when its usefulness is not, then investors are putting too much money in it.

They are pivoting into something that may be more useful. Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness. ETH will have both different usage scenarios an one less bottleneck. (No idea if this is enough.)

Mining is the bottleneck on bitcoin usefulness.

Can you elaborate? If you want to use Bitcoin, just buy it. Mining seems more complex to me (and more expensive since I don't have a hydro dam in my backyard).

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

#87

Post by jasonzemos »

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.

It's called a zkSNARK. One proves they performed any computation with a constant size proof of the result.

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

#88

Post by bouncycastle »

nivexous wrote: post #82
bouncycastle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That tends to happen in PoW actually. Example: Last year, Monero forked and changed the protocol by changing the PoW algorithm. Effectively shutting off a significant section of the miners. Miners had no defence - it was a major blow to them. Same thing happened in Sia. There's been discussion with changing the PoW of Bitcoin as well.

You're making a different point. Yeah miners can get screwed in a PoW change, but the chain's fundamental properties are not at risk. Users have assets on both chains in a fork and if one chain does something terrible (or even just different) the market will reflect. With PoS, the majority remain the majority ... unless you support mob theft, a bad precedent I would say.

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 after the fork, indefinitely.

PoS is way more secure.

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

#89

Post by murbard2 »

wmf wrote: post #32
anthonybsd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tezos uses delegated PoS, so no, I don't think it qualifies. D-PoS is sort of antithetical to the idea of decentralized blockchain due to a small number of nodes and very questionable process of node (witness) selection.

Won't any pure PoS system naturally evolve stake pooling that looks like DPoS?

There are two attractors, it could push people to do it themselves but I think it's more likely that it evolves in stake pooling. Stake pooling in pure PoS involving trusting the pool operator to a great deal and I'm concerned it degenerates to a very centralized system. Adding optional delegation is a safety valve that takes this into consideration.

What Tezos does is merely let you lose a different key to custody funds and to create blocks. By itself this creates the possibility of delegation.

Last but not least, with trusted hardware the difference blurs even more.

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

#90

Post by nivexous »

darawk wrote: post #75
nivexous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense (without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.

And why is this a problem? Sure, they can change it arbitrarily to their benefit, but they only benefit if the value of their holdings is high. If they do something that people don't like, that value will fall. So they are strongly constrained by behaving in such a way that they do not make the users of Ethereum unhappy.

Network effects are too powerful. If they’re smart, they’ll make small changes over a long time, only ever upsetting a minority at once, and so the users stay. That’s Facebook to me, other things to other people.
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