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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#801

Post by piyh »

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…

>even though an immutable public ledger like Bitcoin arguably has more utility for society than playing games

Video games' secondary impacts to simulation, film making, and modeling have and will provide more benefit per energy used than any proof of work system ever will.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#803

Post by anhner »

svantana wrote: post #235
chx wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is going on. You are on the right track. There's an incredible amount of word salad piled on the fact that people are playing a negative sum game when getting involved with any cryptocurrency that has transaction fees.

Not true! Cryptocurrencies have real-world productive use cases such as money-laundering, ransomware, drug and weapons trade, terrorist financing etc. As well as some less-morally-wrong stuff like hiding from oppressive regimes. A bet on crypto is a bet on the future of these activities.

I think you forgot "contributing to climate change by using as much energy as a small country" which may not apply to ethereum anymore, but it sure still applies to bitcoin

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#804

Post by anonporridge »

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 the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.

And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#805

Post by synu »

teawrecks wrote: post #722
ajross wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is) will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy devoted to it will drop in tandem. It's also true that there…

> The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.

Wouldn’t you have better luck speculating if you just used your money to buy the coins directly, instead of buying GPUs and then paying more than the cost of the coin in electricity to mine it?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#806

Post by matkoniecz »

ajross wrote: post #666
matkoniecz wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is more diffuse. Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and should harm people using energy in this way. But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is not profitable for alternatives.

In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is) will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy devoted to it will drop in tandem. It's also true that there…

> The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined

This is a bit trickier. If they have equipment already then it changes situation.

Cost of computing hashes includes mostly energy and hardware.

As long as it can pay for operating costs, they will continue to do this, even if buying electronics for that is no longer profitable

(unless selling equipment is more profitable)

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#807

Post by anonporridge »

mrb wrote: post #764
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…

« Shouldn't that be observable somehow? » No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second, contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only…

> First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h.

We'll see if this is maintainable.

Miners can't mine if the reward doesn't cover their costs. So, the only way the mining remains sustainable is if these tokens rise drastically in value.

It is possible that many miners are huge holders of ETH, in which case we may see them massively dump ETH and buy ETC to try to invert the price and keep their business going.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#808

Post by dang »

seibelj wrote: post #462
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

If you keep posting this sort of low-value flamewar comment we are going to have to ban you. We have cut you miles of slack for years, but the slack is not infinite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I know this sounds harsh, but there's a ton of history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687129.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#809

Post by Zamicol »

cowtools wrote: post #81
lmarcos wrote: post #28

> The Merge is one of the largest technological events in the industry to date. I feel kinda ashamed. I work in the IT industry and I claim to have knowledge about ("good") software engineering practices, distributed systems, compilers, algorithms, etc. Nevertheless, I didn't understand a word of what the article is saying. Could you recommend serious references (preferably books and not random blogs) I could read to…

Here is a good video that basically explains everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can have a "currency" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users simply sign "transactions". The problem is that you need a central authority to confirm the order of transactions, otherwise the recipient of a "transaction" will not know if the funds associated…

As a cryptocurrency veteran, I consider this to be the most concise (1:12 long) explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4APcgsRdW6w

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#810

Post by snail_brain »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #792
pa7x1 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First one is Lido and second one is Coinbase both of them are pools. Lido is more decentralized than Coinbase as the stake is spread across many different staking providers. In any case the situation is not ideal and a bigger uptake of solo staking and truly decentralized staking solutions like RocketPool would be beneficial. https://etherscan.io/address/0x388c818ca8b9251b393131c08a736... https://etherscan.io/address…

wait, so why does Coinbase "own" a wallet with all its users ETH in it? Who really "owns" the coins held on Coinbase?

Coinbase
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