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The cryptocurrency mining industry is worth about 3 billion dollars per year. About sixty percent of that is from Ethereum mining. Ethereum switching to proof
by cchero 9y ago
The cryptocurrency mining industry is worth about 3 billion dollars per year. About sixty percent of that is from Ethereum mining.
Ethereum switching to proof of stake is a threat to billions of dollars in annual revenue. Miners should be rallying against this, and the budget they have for lobbying and pr could reasonably be nine figures.
Ethereum miners are not the only ones affected. If two million gpus suddenly flood the market, either the resale value of hardware will nosedive, or the difficulty of all other coins will skyrocket. Miners who do not even mine ethereum should still be actively opposed to ethereum switching to proof of stake.
- MichaelBurge 9y agoI've felt like writing a "Money is not a real thing" article for a while, and this would be a prime example of why you don't optimize for revenue but rather e.g. physical goods. The generalization of your argument is that rapidly increasing productivity of any good is bad, because it decreases the relative power of existing capital holders. If all the miners on all proof-of-work currencies lost all their revenue and the currency was equally secure, I would consider this a good thing since the electricity could be allocated elsewhere.
- cchero 9y agoIf disney lost the copyright on their older works and copyright law started expiring after 20 or 50 years instead of the 100 plus today, I would consider this a good thing. People who make billions of dollars from the status quo have great power to maintain the status quo.
- CaptainSwing 9y agoI guess schumpeters point with creative destruction was the rupture required to replace one paradigm with another (Incidentally, he got this straight from marx). Technology, and markets, move in fits and starts as conservative tendencies meet with more efficient, or qualitatively different, competion. For both schumpeter and marx this view was seen as opposed to equilibrium models of economics on which much of mainstream economics and game theory still relies
- crishoj 9y agoThis incentive to oppose the switch to a proof-of-stake consensus model is inherently self-centric. While it may be rational to lobby for the continued use of proof-of-work from a short-sighted and egocentric point of view, the switch to proof-of-stake seems absolutely appealing from a long-term or holistic perspective.
- hossbeast 9y agoWhat does any of that have to do with whether its better than proof of work?
- unlmtd1 9y agoMining is an expense. Reducing expenses is good.