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Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching ne

by Thaxll 6y ago

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that.

serverholic 6y ago
This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.
- striking 6y ago
  When?
  - lima 6y ago
    The beacon chain - the first step in the transition - has already launched: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/
  - jki275 6y ago
    Never. They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years. The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners. Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.
    - hobofan 6y ago
      I mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the transition, but they are clearly making progress towards it. They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.
      - bhaak 6y ago
        > They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. PoS has always been on the roadmap even before their ICO. But yes, with a MUCH more optimistic timeline.
        hobofan 6y ago
        Yes, but back then nothing more than the first few ideas towards their PoS existed IIRC. 2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it. The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.
      - jki275 6y ago
        You’re confused. They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so. And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends...
        DennisP 6y ago
        That's...exactly what I just said. It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.
        jki275 6y ago
        I think you are projecting your belief about ETH v3.0 or whatever it is onto a lot of people who don't agree with you. Vitalik et all have been talking about pos for years. Meanwhile a huge portion of the cryptocurrency space went there already (years ago) and left eth behind. POS isn't some new technology.
        derivagral 6y ago
        As a random user of ETH: I'm going to go to the PoS fork because of the (implied) fee difference. ~$50 for a wire is going to kill the chain (imho), and I don't see miners incentivized to handle that.
    - wyldfire 6y ago
      Peercoin introduced proof-of-stake in 2012, and Nano/XRB used it at its inception in 2015. So, yes, cryptocoins have had PoS in production for quite a while.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    It's a continuous process that is already in progress and aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022. For what is worth, ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in the mean time.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact plan has changed since then.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork alive.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        Which is fine. Given the massive community support for ETH2, the legacy chain is likely to have even less impact than ETC.
      - DSingularity 6y ago
        What will happen once the security guarantees of ETH2 eclipse ETH1?
        lostmsu 6y ago
        How would that be possible?
        boring_twenties 6y ago
        If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.) Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.
  - serverholic 6y ago
    Literally as we speak. It's in production, but the process of deprecating proof-of-work will still take a couple years.
- moonbug 6y ago
  yeah, next year in Jerusalem.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Wait, haven’t they been moving since 2018?
  - meowkit 6y ago
    Yeah it takes time to design, spec out, test, bugfix, and work on other features. Once you make changes to a chain its not easy to fix without making a huge mess. Hopefully the migration with be done by Q1 2022.
  - px43 6y ago
    The PoS network is actually up now, it'll still be a year or two until the old network is connected in, and the PoW can be shut off though. Real progress has been made in that area.
- scotty79 6y ago
  It doesn't matter. Gaming hardware will be used for mining as long as there is any single popular cryptocurrency that's POW and doesn't have dedicated ASICs.
  - travisporter 6y ago
    On this point, I don't get why "ASIC resistance" is a feature of cryptocurrencies (Not that it's impossible, just something people like to say). We're in the same boat because no one can get a GPU, and at least those can game/do ML.
    - wruza 6y ago
      It was introduced to reduce 51% attack possibility. Graphics cards are (were) abundant and not concentrated in e.g. China, which probably produces all asics in the world. Now it is just a nonsense, because crypto essentially = BTC and it doesn’t have this “feature”.
lima 6y ago
> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that. And they probably didn't factor in ASIC miners and large mining pools, either. Proof of Work is legacy technology at this point, it's a good thing Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake along with most of the ecosystem.
krsdcbl 6y ago
I don't quite get why everyone seems to get onto the environment train with crypto but seem to have had no issues with gold
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  That's a false dichotomy.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  Because we don't have any alternative to gold.
  - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    As far as I know (last time I googled it) if speculation was removed and hoarding, gold would be worth about $100 an ounce for the things we need it for. So yes we do have alternatives to gold. Things such as Bitcoin and crypto, which keep going up in value, while gold speculation has stagnated and is even going down. Weakening dollar and massive debts due to the pandemic should mean gold skyrockets, but people are buying the alternatives. It looks grim for gold. Tesla didn’t buy gold, they bought Bitcoin.
    - strangeattractr 6y ago
      What would be the price of BTC if speculation and hoarding was removed?
- bhaak 6y ago
  Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological devices. I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold mining.
pavlov 6y ago
> "When people designed those currency they def did not think about that." They did think about it, and decided that libertarian fantasies outweigh environmental impact. Horrible waste is an explicit design choice in the Bitcoin school of cryptocurrencies.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I'm trying to imagine what you think went through the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you imagine he just woke up one day and said "You know what I like? Carbon emissions! For no reason but carbon emissions! Somehow, I benefit from carbon emissions!". I really just don't think that's how it panned out.
  - TLightful 6y ago
    Does it matter? The reality is the same.
    - ravi-delia 6y ago
      It matters to the extent that saying "environmental harm is a deliberate design choice of bitcoin" is false, rather than true.
      - TLightful 6y ago
        And, again, my point is - it doesn't matter if it was a deliberate design choice or not. Enviromental harm is the reality of bitcoin. And should be on the addressable agenda.
        ravi-delia 6y ago
        I do have to say that environmental harm from bitcoin vs any other dumb thing people use computers for seems somewhat odd, but I'm happy to admit that I definitely haven't looked into it enough to argue. That's not what I was arguing though, I only ever commented to specifically refute that any environmental damage was deliberate, because it struck me as an especially absurd statement. I can totally see how it may have come across as an argument that because the harm wasn't deliberate it isn't bad, that was my bad. I should have made that more clear.
tromp 6y ago
We did think about it but wanted both the simplest possible consensus model and the widest possible distribution of coins, which led us to Proof of Work (geared to lower-power ASICs) and fixed block reward. Proof of Stake is much more complicated, is subjective, and doesn't provide for coin distribution.
- jki275 6y ago
  Proof of stake is a solved problem, has a fixed block reward, has no ASICS or need for them, is no more complicated, is not in anyway subjective, and distributes coins just fine as both ADA and XTZ are doing right now.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    They are correct that proof-of-stake doesn't solve the initial wealth distribution problem. ADA and XTZ solve it by pre-mining the coins. Ethereum is instead solving it by having an initial proof-of-work period and then moving to proof-of-stake after some amount of mining and wealth distribution has already happened.
    - jki275 6y ago
      That's not what they said. They said POS can't distribute coins, which is not accurate. ADA and XTZ did pre-mine their initial distribution, and now they distribute coins through stake rewards.
      - tromp 6y ago
        That's not distribution. That's just letting every owner maintain their share of the pie by staking.
        jki275 6y ago
        You can argue whatever you want, it's distributing coins to the people who secure the network.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
I feel so lucky to buy RTX 2060 two years ago. It's still a good card if you're not doing 4K gaming, and right now it costs more than when I bought it.
- edem 6y ago
  Same here. I wanted to put together a computer for a friend and I just bumped into these *insane* prices.
- macNchz 6y ago
  When I started building a computer and realized these new cards were going to be unobtainium last fall, I bought a used 1080ti instead. Despite being older it still holds its own against newer cards. Lacking RT and DLSS features (which didn't matter much to me), it was reselling at a sizeable discount vs comparable used 20x0 cards. Five months later I still have my eBay searches saved, and the exact model I bought is now regularly selling for 40+% more than it cost me. There's one right now with a few hours left on the clock, currently going for 50% more than I paid, with 75 watchers and 51 bids. It's wild.
CraigJPerry 6y ago
Not to take a side in this fight but i find the counter argument about the environmental cost of regular currencies interesting. How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. I’m not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even military) protection under just the dollar column - if you steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage the legal system to pursue you.
- asah 6y ago
  not to mention the humans involved in clearing dollar transactions...
- namdnay 6y ago
  > How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin equivalent
  - patrickaljord 6y ago
    The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consumption is probably much bigger than bitcoin ever will be.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we haven't converted to Bitcoin. So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.
iexplainbtc 6y ago
The environmental impact of "Proof of Work" could have been a problem but the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources that would otherwise be untapped. As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself. In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper) renewables are going to be priced out, it just takes some time. That said other protocols much less computationally intensive, such as "Proof of Stake", are starting to be tested. Anyhow, good idea NVIDIA!
- hobofan 6y ago
  > the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources So where exactly did you read that in the Bitcoin whitepaper? Because everything else is just guessing.
  - iexplainbtc 6y ago
    Proof of work was not invented (or envisioned to be used with digital currencies) by Satoshi. It's been around since 1993. I can't really find a reference to prove what I claimed so I would agree I might have been misled to think that. But the truth is that it doesn't matter whether it was taken into account or not, what matters is that you can mine Bitcoin (or do any PoW) using untapped renewable resources (which is why big mining operations are based in places with abundant geothermal/hydropower and very little, if any, population) but you wouldn't be able to do much else in those places.
  - greyface- 6y ago
    Here are a couple of 2010 Satoshi forum posts on the topic: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/167/?view=satoshi https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...
    - Tepix 6y ago
      Satoshi writes: "Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste." I think we're long past this point and we have better alternatives to PoW now.
magna7 6y ago
Ethereum has been designed from the very start to switch from PoW (mining) to PoS (validating) and Phase 0 of that transition has already started.
- TomVDB 6y ago
  I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the last mining craze. Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    It's already running with $5 billion in ETH deposited. It'll take some more time before migrating the legacy chain, but the really hard part is live. There was nothing like that two years ago.
    - ppf 6y ago
      You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth 2.0.
      - DennisP 6y ago
        Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography. Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before. There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of multiple options, rather than figuring out how to do it at all. As I mentioned in another comment, someone built a running proof-of-concept in about a day.
        ppf 6y ago
sabalaba 6y ago
The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24 gigawatts. There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365246060) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu / (365246060) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person for the total food and primary energy consumption rate. 11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to be the same first post in every thread on crypto. Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect calculation, if so, please point it out. [1] https://www.cbeci.org https://www.cbeci.org [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employees-at-fdic-insured-commercial-banks-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employe... [3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/ [4] https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-production/ https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-pro... [5] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1
- jbob2000 6y ago
  So Bitcoin is a weight in addition to all the banking weight? We’re running two banking systems right now. It’s inefficient and stupid.
  - mam2 6y ago
    bitcoin fans will agree with you and say we should remove traditional banks ^^
- beefield 6y ago
  You miss the fact that what bitcoin does is a tiny fraction of what banks do. I mean, how do you do for example mortgages or corporate finance with bitcoin - without hiring all the people and using all the resources current financial system does? Frankly, more proper comparison would be the resource consumption of using gold in the financial system.
scotty79 6y ago
> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. I don't know how can you say that after volatility in banking systems crashed large parts of economies of at least a few developed countries leading to resurgence of nationalist leaders that fuel and use those sentiments in people damaged by banks gambling on stuff they can't be trusted to count properly. We'll see how well your wealth gets preserved when China stops buying US debt for whatever reason and oil is sold for euros or yuans. I think there will be proper mess in global economies and you might use a thing that can't be fudged by people.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
  What does this have to do with the environmental harms caused by crypto? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
  - kriops 6y ago
    But croptocurrencies have legitimate value propositions that needs to be recognized if you want to put the emission/energy-argument forward in good faith.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    Great demand usually does great things for the future of supply and since renewables are getting cheapest I think they will get the most development in the future. We may end up with way more resilient power grid and abundance of clean energy thanks to cryptocurrencies.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
      This is a very hot take! If you believe this, you should oppose all measures to conserve energy, and advocate for dumping as much energy into the atmosphere as heat waste as possible. There’s nothing about the argument that applies to crypto more than any other energy use.
127 6y ago
Yes, it's wrong for people to use energy to make a profit. When the environmental externality is not priced in. There really should be a carbon tax.
- cmdli 6y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1499/ https://xkcd.com/1499/
- soheil 6y ago
  Does this argument apply to anyone making a profit so long as they use energy? How can you make profit without energy? I'd think to lose money you will also need energy.
- philwelch 6y ago
  So are you also opposed to aluminum production?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
charcircuit 6y ago
Just buy from scalpers and mine for however long to make back what you overpayed.
soheil 6y ago
> it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption Because it makes so much sense to dedicate equal or if not vastly greater resources to playing games?
- account42 6y ago
  Gaming needs the same cards, but they are not running at max 24/7.
- snak 6y ago
  Gaming needs more resources to solve a problem whose difficulty is increased to produce better and more accurate images. Mining needs more resources to solve a brute force problem whose difficulty is increased just for the sake of making the problem even harder to solve.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  Not even equal. A GPU running games can coast on 100W-150W usage, whereas mining can and frequently stretches it to full power capacity, e.g. 320W on RTX 3080. Not to mention that mining is 24/7, gaming is not. So no, not equal, not greater, in fact lower. And I think the Graphics Processing Unit should process graphics, don't you?

by Thaxll 6y ago

serverholic 6y ago

This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.

striking 6y ago
When?
- lima 6y ago
  The beacon chain - the first step in the transition - has already launched: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/
- jki275 6y ago
  Never. They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years. The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners. Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    I mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the transition, but they are clearly making progress towards it. They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.
    - bhaak 6y ago
      > They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. PoS has always been on the roadmap even before their ICO. But yes, with a MUCH more optimistic timeline.
      - hobofan 6y ago
        Yes, but back then nothing more than the first few ideas towards their PoS existed IIRC. 2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it. The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.
    - jki275 6y ago
      You’re confused. They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so. And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends...
      - DennisP 6y ago
        That's...exactly what I just said. It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.
        jki275 6y ago
        I think you are projecting your belief about ETH v3.0 or whatever it is onto a lot of people who don't agree with you. Vitalik et all have been talking about pos for years. Meanwhile a huge portion of the cryptocurrency space went there already (years ago) and left eth behind. POS isn't some new technology.
      - derivagral 6y ago
        As a random user of ETH: I'm going to go to the PoS fork because of the (implied) fee difference. ~$50 for a wire is going to kill the chain (imho), and I don't see miners incentivized to handle that.
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    Peercoin introduced proof-of-stake in 2012, and Nano/XRB used it at its inception in 2015. So, yes, cryptocoins have had PoS in production for quite a while.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  It's a continuous process that is already in progress and aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022. For what is worth, ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in the mean time.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact plan has changed since then.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork alive.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Which is fine. Given the massive community support for ETH2, the legacy chain is likely to have even less impact than ETC.
    - DSingularity 6y ago
      What will happen once the security guarantees of ETH2 eclipse ETH1?
      - lostmsu 6y ago
        How would that be possible?
        boring_twenties 6y ago
        If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.) Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.
- serverholic 6y ago
  Literally as we speak. It's in production, but the process of deprecating proof-of-work will still take a couple years.
moonbug 6y ago
yeah, next year in Jerusalem.
jiofih 6y ago
Wait, haven’t they been moving since 2018?
- meowkit 6y ago
  Yeah it takes time to design, spec out, test, bugfix, and work on other features. Once you make changes to a chain its not easy to fix without making a huge mess. Hopefully the migration with be done by Q1 2022.
- px43 6y ago
  The PoS network is actually up now, it'll still be a year or two until the old network is connected in, and the PoW can be shut off though. Real progress has been made in that area.
scotty79 6y ago
It doesn't matter. Gaming hardware will be used for mining as long as there is any single popular cryptocurrency that's POW and doesn't have dedicated ASICs.
- travisporter 6y ago
  On this point, I don't get why "ASIC resistance" is a feature of cryptocurrencies (Not that it's impossible, just something people like to say). We're in the same boat because no one can get a GPU, and at least those can game/do ML.
  - wruza 6y ago
    It was introduced to reduce 51% attack possibility. Graphics cards are (were) abundant and not concentrated in e.g. China, which probably produces all asics in the world. Now it is just a nonsense, because crypto essentially = BTC and it doesn’t have this “feature”.

lima 6y ago

> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that. And they probably didn't factor in ASIC miners and large mining pools, either. Proof of Work is legacy technology at this point, it's a good thing Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake along with most of the ecosystem.

krsdcbl 6y ago

I don't quite get why everyone seems to get onto the environment train with crypto but seem to have had no issues with gold

rhn_mk1 6y ago
That's a false dichotomy.
thomastjeffery 6y ago
Because we don't have any alternative to gold.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  As far as I know (last time I googled it) if speculation was removed and hoarding, gold would be worth about $100 an ounce for the things we need it for. So yes we do have alternatives to gold. Things such as Bitcoin and crypto, which keep going up in value, while gold speculation has stagnated and is even going down. Weakening dollar and massive debts due to the pandemic should mean gold skyrockets, but people are buying the alternatives. It looks grim for gold. Tesla didn’t buy gold, they bought Bitcoin.
  - strangeattractr 6y ago
    What would be the price of BTC if speculation and hoarding was removed?
bhaak 6y ago
Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological devices. I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold mining.

pavlov 6y ago

> "When people designed those currency they def did not think about that." They did think about it, and decided that libertarian fantasies outweigh environmental impact. Horrible waste is an explicit design choice in the Bitcoin school of cryptocurrencies.

ravi-delia 6y ago
I'm trying to imagine what you think went through the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you imagine he just woke up one day and said "You know what I like? Carbon emissions! For no reason but carbon emissions! Somehow, I benefit from carbon emissions!". I really just don't think that's how it panned out.
- TLightful 6y ago
  Does it matter? The reality is the same.
  - ravi-delia 6y ago
    It matters to the extent that saying "environmental harm is a deliberate design choice of bitcoin" is false, rather than true.
    - TLightful 6y ago
      And, again, my point is - it doesn't matter if it was a deliberate design choice or not. Enviromental harm is the reality of bitcoin. And should be on the addressable agenda.
      - ravi-delia 6y ago
        I do have to say that environmental harm from bitcoin vs any other dumb thing people use computers for seems somewhat odd, but I'm happy to admit that I definitely haven't looked into it enough to argue. That's not what I was arguing though, I only ever commented to specifically refute that any environmental damage was deliberate, because it struck me as an especially absurd statement. I can totally see how it may have come across as an argument that because the harm wasn't deliberate it isn't bad, that was my bad. I should have made that more clear.

tromp 6y ago

We did think about it but wanted both the simplest possible consensus model and the widest possible distribution of coins, which led us to Proof of Work (geared to lower-power ASICs) and fixed block reward. Proof of Stake is much more complicated, is subjective, and doesn't provide for coin distribution.

jki275 6y ago
Proof of stake is a solved problem, has a fixed block reward, has no ASICS or need for them, is no more complicated, is not in anyway subjective, and distributes coins just fine as both ADA and XTZ are doing right now.
- shawnz 6y ago
  They are correct that proof-of-stake doesn't solve the initial wealth distribution problem. ADA and XTZ solve it by pre-mining the coins. Ethereum is instead solving it by having an initial proof-of-work period and then moving to proof-of-stake after some amount of mining and wealth distribution has already happened.
  - jki275 6y ago
    That's not what they said. They said POS can't distribute coins, which is not accurate. ADA and XTZ did pre-mine their initial distribution, and now they distribute coins through stake rewards.
    - tromp 6y ago
      That's not distribution. That's just letting every owner maintain their share of the pie by staking.
      - jki275 6y ago
        You can argue whatever you want, it's distributing coins to the people who secure the network.

skocznymroczny 6y ago

I feel so lucky to buy RTX 2060 two years ago. It's still a good card if you're not doing 4K gaming, and right now it costs more than when I bought it.

edem 6y ago
Same here. I wanted to put together a computer for a friend and I just bumped into these *insane* prices.
macNchz 6y ago
When I started building a computer and realized these new cards were going to be unobtainium last fall, I bought a used 1080ti instead. Despite being older it still holds its own against newer cards. Lacking RT and DLSS features (which didn't matter much to me), it was reselling at a sizeable discount vs comparable used 20x0 cards. Five months later I still have my eBay searches saved, and the exact model I bought is now regularly selling for 40+% more than it cost me. There's one right now with a few hours left on the clock, currently going for 50% more than I paid, with 75 watchers and 51 bids. It's wild.

CraigJPerry 6y ago

Not to take a side in this fight but i find the counter argument about the environmental cost of regular currencies interesting. How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. I’m not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even military) protection under just the dollar column - if you steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage the legal system to pursue you.

asah 6y ago
not to mention the humans involved in clearing dollar transactions...
namdnay 6y ago
> How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin equivalent
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consumption is probably much bigger than bitcoin ever will be.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we haven't converted to Bitcoin. So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.

iexplainbtc 6y ago

The environmental impact of "Proof of Work" could have been a problem but the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources that would otherwise be untapped. As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself. In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper) renewables are going to be priced out, it just takes some time. That said other protocols much less computationally intensive, such as "Proof of Stake", are starting to be tested. Anyhow, good idea NVIDIA!

hobofan 6y ago
> the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources So where exactly did you read that in the Bitcoin whitepaper? Because everything else is just guessing.
- iexplainbtc 6y ago
  Proof of work was not invented (or envisioned to be used with digital currencies) by Satoshi. It's been around since 1993. I can't really find a reference to prove what I claimed so I would agree I might have been misled to think that. But the truth is that it doesn't matter whether it was taken into account or not, what matters is that you can mine Bitcoin (or do any PoW) using untapped renewable resources (which is why big mining operations are based in places with abundant geothermal/hydropower and very little, if any, population) but you wouldn't be able to do much else in those places.
- greyface- 6y ago
  Here are a couple of 2010 Satoshi forum posts on the topic: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/167/?view=satoshi https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...
  - Tepix 6y ago
    Satoshi writes: "Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste." I think we're long past this point and we have better alternatives to PoW now.

magna7 6y ago

Ethereum has been designed from the very start to switch from PoW (mining) to PoS (validating) and Phase 0 of that transition has already started.

TomVDB 6y ago
I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the last mining craze. Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
- DennisP 6y ago
  It's already running with $5 billion in ETH deposited. It'll take some more time before migrating the legacy chain, but the really hard part is live. There was nothing like that two years ago.
  - ppf 6y ago
    You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth 2.0.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography. Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before. There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of multiple options, rather than figuring out how to do it at all. As I mentioned in another comment, someone built a running proof-of-concept in about a day.
      - ppf 6y ago

sabalaba 6y ago

The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24 gigawatts. There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365246060) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu / (365246060) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person for the total food and primary energy consumption rate. 11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to be the same first post in every thread on crypto. Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect calculation, if so, please point it out. [1] https://www.cbeci.org https://www.cbeci.org [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employees-at-fdic-insured-commercial-banks-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employe... [3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/ [4] https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-production/ https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-pro... [5] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1

jbob2000 6y ago
So Bitcoin is a weight in addition to all the banking weight? We’re running two banking systems right now. It’s inefficient and stupid.
- mam2 6y ago
  bitcoin fans will agree with you and say we should remove traditional banks ^^
beefield 6y ago
You miss the fact that what bitcoin does is a tiny fraction of what banks do. I mean, how do you do for example mortgages or corporate finance with bitcoin - without hiring all the people and using all the resources current financial system does? Frankly, more proper comparison would be the resource consumption of using gold in the financial system.

scotty79 6y ago

> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. I don't know how can you say that after volatility in banking systems crashed large parts of economies of at least a few developed countries leading to resurgence of nationalist leaders that fuel and use those sentiments in people damaged by banks gambling on stuff they can't be trusted to count properly. We'll see how well your wealth gets preserved when China stops buying US debt for whatever reason and oil is sold for euros or yuans. I think there will be proper mess in global economies and you might use a thing that can't be fudged by people.

fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
What does this have to do with the environmental harms caused by crypto? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
- kriops 6y ago
  But croptocurrencies have legitimate value propositions that needs to be recognized if you want to put the emission/energy-argument forward in good faith.
- scotty79 6y ago
  Great demand usually does great things for the future of supply and since renewables are getting cheapest I think they will get the most development in the future. We may end up with way more resilient power grid and abundance of clean energy thanks to cryptocurrencies.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
    This is a very hot take! If you believe this, you should oppose all measures to conserve energy, and advocate for dumping as much energy into the atmosphere as heat waste as possible. There’s nothing about the argument that applies to crypto more than any other energy use.

127 6y ago

Yes, it's wrong for people to use energy to make a profit. When the environmental externality is not priced in. There really should be a carbon tax.

cmdli 6y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1499/ https://xkcd.com/1499/
soheil 6y ago
Does this argument apply to anyone making a profit so long as they use energy? How can you make profit without energy? I'd think to lose money you will also need energy.
philwelch 6y ago
So are you also opposed to aluminum production?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

charcircuit 6y ago

Just buy from scalpers and mine for however long to make back what you overpayed.

soheil 6y ago

> it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption Because it makes so much sense to dedicate equal or if not vastly greater resources to playing games?

account42 6y ago
Gaming needs the same cards, but they are not running at max 24/7.
snak 6y ago
Gaming needs more resources to solve a problem whose difficulty is increased to produce better and more accurate images. Mining needs more resources to solve a brute force problem whose difficulty is increased just for the sake of making the problem even harder to solve.
smileybarry 6y ago
Not even equal. A GPU running games can coast on 100W-150W usage, whereas mining can and frequently stretches it to full power capacity, e.g. 320W on RTX 3080. Not to mention that mining is 24/7, gaming is not. So no, not equal, not greater, in fact lower. And I think the Graphics Processing Unit should process graphics, don't you?