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The Ethereum merge is done

coindesk.com

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Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#831

Post by consp »

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 Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data!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.

On the busiest day of the year at peak hour here in the Netherlands the debit card transactions (creditcards are uncommon) reach just over 700/s. [Search for 'pin transacties per seconde' for news items covering this]

Maybe around Christmas it will be in the 10k+

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#832

Post by xtracto »

Slartie wrote: post #458
franky47 wrote: post #439

Quote from the article: > “I feel very proud, you know, that I'll be able to look back and say I've had a role to play in removing a megaton of carbon from the atmosphere every week." -- Edgington There's a very important difference in not emitting carbon into the atmosphere and actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Both are critically necessary and complementary, but I don't see how Edgington thinks that swi…

Especially since the carbon emissions of Ethereum were a product of Ethereum's existence in the first place, hence an entirely self-made problem, produced by the very people developing and pushing the platform. It's a lot like someone being an active part of a group of gangsters taking hostages, then turning around and helping the police freeing them, only to then brag about how proud he/she is of having a role in fr…

I love Ethereum and am a strong believer in Blockchain technology, but everytime I hear the "Ethereum PoS is a win for the environment" reminds me of the Simpons episode when Bart says something like: "I'm going to smoke and then quit smoking" to what Homer replies congratulating him because quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things to do... It is very misleading, and naive.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#833

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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 there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand?

No, because ETH mining is/was quite distributed globally, let's say across thousands and thousands of power grids. A single grid or power station shouldn't be able to notice the difference.

Think about it this way: all of a sudden, domestic fridges consume 1/100th of electricity, compared to before.

Fridges are 0.1% of average power consumption. Thousands of fridges in a given area are powered by the same power station. The power station barely notices the ~0.1% reduction in power consumption, compared to the day before. Shrugs.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#834

Post by killerstorm »

mratsim wrote: post #599
killerstorm wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked with blockchains & crypto for 10+ years, I'd actually recommend against reading "serious references". "What is going on now" is largely the same thing as before: * consensus / Sybil resistance / game-theory / "crypto-economics" * cryptography - signatures, data structures (e.g. Merkle tree) * p2p networking * deterministic computation / virtual machines If you have a solid CS/software engineerin…

consensus is strongly related to distributed computing fault tolerance and database or file systems' atomicity and integrity in case of crash. Basically problems that involve multiple readers and multiple writers.

Distributed computing research is focused mostly on increasing throughout, reducing latency and enabling parallelism and concurrency.

OTOH cryptocurrency consensus is mostly about answering a question: "How do we prevent bad guys from stealing money or doing other nasty things?"

While a concept of Byzantine Fault Tolerance was known before Bitcoin, it was never really applied in practice AFAIK - people thought it's overkill. Also I'd say doing it within a private network is one thing, and doing it with random weirdos on internet is completely different.

Distributed computing researchers like Lamport were considering models where e.g. up to 30% of nodes are compromised, that won't work on internet where an attacker can potentially simulate billions of fake nodes. Nakamoto consensus is really elegant as it combines Sybil protection, incentivization and consensus into one thing.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#835

Post by notch656a »

oblio wrote: post #820
galaxyLogic wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments The difference between business and governments is that in business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every adult has a vote. "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people should be liberated from go…

To add to your comment, we want a *powerful* and accountable government. Weak governments make for failed states, because corporations and other interest groups such as gangs, warlords, control things instead.

I want a weak government. I'd rather have warlords compete for my allegiance than be subject to one all powerful warlord who has no powerful enemies to worry about. A capitalism of polycentric governance, if you will.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#836

Post by whiplash451 »

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…

Apparently the global reduction was 0.2%. That is not negligible, but not nearly enough to see power plants shutting down.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#837

Post by cantSpellSober »

oblio wrote: post #817
anonporridge wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks

Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips".

Let's try nuanced criticism please, crypto needs it.

> Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine

Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#838

Post by elil17 »

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…

0.3% is a rounding error if you look at the electricity generation of a region, but it's huge if you look at the impact it will have over many years. That's 0.3% less of the global energy supply that needs to be replaced with nuclear or renewables+storage. It's like getting ten free nuclear plants.

Re: The Ethereum merge is done

#839

Post by seydor »

pedro_hab wrote: post #480

I think this is nice, it forces people that want to participate to have skin in the game. With proof of work there is incentive for people not invested in crypto to mine as much as possible and sell everything. If a big enough computer is created, someone not interested in crypto can take money away from it, or if the computer is big enough even destroy it, a quantum computer for instance, should make a 51% attack on…

Imagine if people voted or staked dollars to decide how many dollars the Fed or ECB should print. It looks like it had been suboptimal for most of history that s why the previous monetary systems successively failed. Maybe there is some kind of game-theoretic gradient that leads to monetary failure by default, which needs to be fixed by central banking . But there is no place in the world where people vote their central bankers, they are among the most opaque world leaders out there.
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