62 ms·

Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge

• focom 5y ago
  So with PoS, we recreate a system where a few rich pool have decision over the network. Can someone enlighten me on how this is different from the current fiat system?
  • sergioisidoro 5y ago
    Current system is no different, as the hash power is related to how many computers you can afford to buy. This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental impact.
    • gruez 5y ago
      The difference is that with PoW you constantly have to do "stuff" (ie. buying equipment, running datacenters) or get left behind. PoS on the other hand you can just sit on your ass and wait for the $$$ to roll in.
      • yokem55 5y ago
        Except, using the same kind of pooling that POW depends on, you can still get in at just about any price level. .01 Eth can be staked just as easily as 10,000 eth. And running a validator with 32 isn't nothing - you still have to keep a machine on and online 24/7 with an uncapped connection or pay someone to host that machine.
      • nerdponx 5y ago
        Or you can pay someone a flat amount to do the "stuff" and experience your own unlimited percentage-based gains, like in pretty much any other market where "capital" is a thing.
      • sergioisidoro 5y ago
        Good point. But I still don't understand how it changes the premise presented by the comment, of "The one who has the money controls the network".
        • pinkybanana 5y ago
          There are lots of participants in the global economy who has money. The idea is that you have enough different people with competing incentives. PoW provides incentive model which separates different actors (pools, exchanges etc) and also at the same time doesn't seem to lead to monopolies.
      • meowkit 5y ago
        Can you explain what “sitting on your ass” means? I thought you had to maintain a validator?
        • sendbitcoins 5y ago
          Exchanges like CoinBase will stake for you. You as an individual don't have to do anything.
          • G3rn0ti 5y ago
            An earn interest, right? So I could lend Coinbase some of my ether for staking and they pay me interest in return. So PoS could give us an interesting investment possibility.
            • sendbitcoins 5y ago
              Well, its not called interest, its called 'staking rewards'. You can also earn interest lending out your ETH, but that's a different process and entails counterparty risk.
      • tux3 5y ago
        Yes and no. Keeping up with the day to day details is something you delegate at some point. PoW is also "just" an investment, with extra steps to set things up.
      • narush 5y ago
        This is not the case. In Ethereum's PoS model, you put value at risk when you sign up to be a validator. You have to lock funds up to play a part in consensus. This means that if you start acting maliciously, or even just not fulfilling your responsibilities (e.g. you let your computer go offline), then you are punished for it (depending on the severity of your offense, obviously). Aka, you can't just wait for the money to roll in. You have to run a node, you have to verify blocks, and you have to make sure you're acting in the best interest of the network + keeping things running smoothly.
        • secondcoming 5y ago
          Who gets these funds? This is beginning to sound suspicious.
          • thebean11 5y ago
            The other actors in the network running validators. Specifically you are punished for: - Being offline (the penalty is small, and roughly equal to the rewards earned by being online - Running the same validator twice (huge penalty, be careful!)
            • secondcoming 5y ago
              Are the funds paid in fiat or ETH?
              • bidirectional 5y ago
                ETH of course, this is an automated part of how the system works, not some behind-the-scenes deal based on reputation or whatever.
        • f38zf5vdt 5y ago
          This is something I don't understand. You lock the funds on a chain and you lose them on the chain. But what happens if two groups decide to split the chain, and both chains lock the opposing chains funds? It seems like there's no way to prevent social forks in the longer term, just a lot of hand-waving about that if the current social contract stays in place, some minority malicious group will be punished for secession. It would seem that if some participants on the network can't abide by their national laws while running some contracts, the outcome would be inevitable. And then you would just get multiple chains running under multiple governments. This seems like a reinvention of the international banking system?
      • Polygator 5y ago
        Yeah, but obviously the "stuff" has led to a Red Queen problem, with the outcome being incredible waste of electricity and computing resources (compared to PoS or having a less competitive eth mining industry)
      • shawnz 5y ago
        In PoS, you are still permanently burning the time value of the money you have staked. That's unrecoverable just like the electricity spent in PoW is unrecoverable.
      • serverholic 5y ago
        I find comments like yours hilarious. The idea that the ethereum foundation has spent years and years designing a PoS system, writing papers, doing tests, building proofs of correctness aaaaaand derp they just didn't think of people sitting on their asses.
        • arrow7000 5y ago
          Maybe answer the question instead of scoffing at how ridiculous it is?
          • serverholic 5y ago
            No, I refuse to put in effort to correct the level of confident ignorance the OP displayed.
        • AlexandrB 5y ago
          It's not that hilarious when you realize that this is the same kind of thinking some cryto-boosters apply to hundreds of years of financial regulation and history.
      • everfree 5y ago
        This isn't really true. You also have to buy equipment and run specialized software to participate in PoS. It requires keeping a node connected to the internet with high uptime, and maintaining its software and hardware. Plus, due to slashing, you are uniquely responsible for mistakes your validator makes. So, staking comes with both responsibilities and consequences for breaching them, just like any legal contract. The fact that you can rent a turnkey cloud solution to do all this work for you and split the profits isn't really relevant to the argument IMO (I consider staking with Coinbase "renting cloud computing" in a specialized way).
    • pinkybanana 5y ago
      No, it is very different because in practice the pools and exchanges are totally separate entities. With PoS the biggest holders will be exchanges and therefore exchanges will control the cryptocurrency. With PoS there will be clearly less decentralization compared to PoW.
      • fastball 5y ago
        In order to be a validator in PoS (at least Ethereum's implementation) you need to lock up the funds, so not sure how an exchange would be particularly well-suited for that – they need to keep most of the coins on their books liquid so that the customers who actually own them can quickly trade them.
        • pinkybanana 5y ago
          You don't seem to understand how exchanges work. Locking the funds won't be problem to exchanges. Most of the funds just sit dormant in cold storage for long periods of times. For withdrawals you always use most recent deposits and you minimize the transfers between hot and cold wallet.
          • fastball 5y ago
            I don't know anyone who keeps large amounts of ETH sitting unused on an exchange.
            • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
              Just take a look at any of the account tables. Most of it is in exchange cold wallets. These exchanges will be staking against your interests. It has happened before, it will happen again. Just say no to PoS.
              • fastball 5y ago
                But that's only because Ethereum is currently on PoW, so (naive) people don't care. But as soon the switch happens, people will want to be staking their ETH in pools that will earn them money.
    • ballofrubber 5y ago
      PoW is a lot different, as burning real world resources (energy) brings sell-pressure to miners, whereas PoS only has cost of locking the funds. This means that regardless of the size of your "operation" cost scales very flat. PoS also does not come with the property of innovation and disruption. In a PoW (especially ASIC-based) system you will find new ways to outperform your peers and disrupt old players. PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries more than anything before. It is the fix for environmental problems.
      • SR2Z 5y ago
        This is a spicy take, not least because the cheapest source of energy in the developing world (i.e. the one without environmental regulations) tends to be coal.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries more than anything before. It is the fix for environmental problems. That can only become true if and when governments decide to suddenly ban PoW, so that all that cheap energy services anything other than crypto. I don't think it works as an argument in favor of PoW, for the same reason "we're only spreading knowledge of chemistry and democratizing process engineering" doesn't work as an argument in favor of drug cartels. Also, 'SR2Z is right - "cheap energy in developing countries" == coal.
      • swiley 5y ago
        PoS burns capital in the sense that it could be invested in something else (I was looking at staking coins but it doesn't come near the yield I get from my 401k for example, which is effectively providing unsecured debt to finance innovation.) IMO: it's much better than PoW as long as it doesn't end up too centralized. I'm not too sure how I feel about the minimum amount required to stake though, that seems a bit odd.
        • gverrilla 5y ago
          from what I heard the minimum ammount might change, and it was decided in a time ETH value was lower
  • Jyaif 5y ago
    They have an incentive to not mess around.
  • sp332 5y ago
    Is it different from the current PoW system?
    • narush 5y ago
      Yep! It's a new chain as well - that will eventually consume the old Ethereum PoW chain :)
  • xiphias2 5y ago
    While I myself stay with Bitcoin, Ethereum still has lots of advantages compared to the fiat system: it's still open source, and people can still validate the rules (although that full validation is extremely hard). Also the current fiat system is debt based, which means that the vast majority of money is printed by banks and the money printing power is at the highest ranking sales person, and hidden.
    • secondcoming 5y ago
      Have you ever actually used an Ethereum in real life outside of price speculation?
      • xiphias2 5y ago
        Ethereum no, but Bitcoin sure, I'm travelling a lot, and I have a lot of payment problems (for example my bank disabled my credit card just because they said that it's not working with some types of contactless recievers, but they can't send a new one to my hotel, just to my home address). Bitcoin always works, although it's not real-time (still faster than sending money to my Revolut account, which takes days). If a person thinks that fiat payments work well, he hasn't really travelled yet to different cultures.
        • dmitriid 5y ago
          I have traveled to different countries. Fiat works, and works well. You're advised to keep some cash on hand, but it works multiple orders of ↑↑↑ [1] better than bitcoin [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number
        • cageface 5y ago
          I've been traveling all over the world for the last ten years. I've never had any serious problems paying for anything with good old fashioned credit/debit cards. Even getting cash in the local currency is trivial with ATMs.
          • 5y ago
  • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    Unlike with fiat, you're not forced to use any particular crypto. If the rich stakeholders of ethereum decide to muck around with the network, nobody will want to use it anymore and the value will drop.
    • gspr 5y ago
      Demanding a single currency to settle debts is a feature, not a bug. I don't wanna spend each morning researching which currency to use today. And I'm sure the local store doesn't wanna figure out which set of ten optional currencies to sell milk for. This doesn't even begin to consider long term debt.
  • Polygator 5y ago
    The justification is that contrarily to PoW, where there are economies of scale on computing power, PoS power scales linearly with your stake. Mining has been concentrated in the hands of a few gigantic mining pools for a while, and PoS will actually make Ethereum more democratic. Again, this is based on documentation, there might be unforeseen consequences
    • iDisagreedEar 5y ago
      Anyone can mine Bitcoin, the rich are the only people in control of Ethereum transactions. Unforseen? This has been known before the miners eliminated the soft cap on EIP 669.
    • Geee 5y ago
      There are no economies of scale in PoW. At least for longer term. Cost of energy rises locally the more you use it. Cheap energy is somewhat equally distributed around the globe, which ensures geographical decentralization.
      • logimame 5y ago
        Energy prices aren't really distributed equally around the world: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
        • micropresident 5y ago
          That has nothing to do with economies of scale.
        • Geee 5y ago
          This has more to do with electricity demand. It's important to understand the relationship between energy price vs. population density and standard of living. Energy is always cheapest where population density and standard of living are the lowest. That's why bitcoin mining will find it's way to remote sources of natural energy.
  • loceng 5y ago
    Except with fiat system we can at least elect who the government is.
  • gspr 5y ago
    No, they can't enlighten you. They've bought into a cult, and if they started considering the fundamental question of how this is better than fiat currency, the cognitive dissonance would hurt.
    • mustafa_pasi 5y ago
      In truth nobody knows. People hypothesize that recreating financial products on top of Ethereum (or Polkadot or Cordano) will result in competitive offerings. But it is hard to predict what will actually happen.
  • meowface 5y ago
    Here's a comparison of PoS and PoW by Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum): https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html Obviously he's biased in favor of PoS for various reasons, but I think it's a worthy read.
  • contravariant 5y ago
    Governments don't typically own >50% of the current money supply.
  • purple_ferret 5y ago
    It's not that different. But the end goal isn't a revolutionary overhaul, but progress in a different direction. The delusion that crypto is or can be the best thing humanity has ever created has to come to an end. Let crypto just be another moderately useful system in society and let the speculation game die out.
  • Vanclief 5y ago
    It is a system where you have skin in the game, the more skin in the game you have, the more power you have. Think it like a democracy where you are voting with your wallet. The main difference with the fiat world is that with Ethereum you have transparency, and there is no corruption. You can't just bribe a politician to enact a rule you want. Everything that happens in the network is recorded permanently, and rules are not a suggestion, but a practical reality that can't be circumvented.
    • briefcomment 5y ago
      What exactly do Ether holders vote on in this scenario? Changes to the protocol? Is that process highly transparent and easily accessible?
      • DennisP 5y ago
        There's no on-chain governance like that. Some other blockchains do it but Ethereum devs are skeptical. The upgrade process will keep working like it does now.
    • jayd16 5y ago
      That's called a plutocracy not a democracy.
  • zionic 5y ago
    PoS is more equitable than endgame PoW. With PoS anyone with any amount of capital can secure the network. Even $10 can via decentralized stake pools. With endgame PoW only the rich can acquire mining ASICs and locate them in cheap/free (stolen) electricity zones. The vast majority of the world is entirely excluded from PoW mining BTC because the cost of electricity in their region makes mining unprofitable.
  • je_bailey 5y ago
    So I'm more familiar with how Cardano and Polkadot do their POS rather than Ethereums. In Cardano since the entry level requirement to operate a stake pool is much smaller than it is to do something like Bitcoin mining, it creates a larger number of stake pools. There's also a soft limit on the size of the stake pool that encourages people to spread out their commitment so no one pool gets to large.So at least in the existing POS systems it seems to be working quite well. I'm going to be interested to see how it shakes out in Ethereum because they have to commit their funds. Which is in a way a burden.The more you put into the system for staking the less that you can use.
    • spopejoy 5y ago
      How do they prevent impersonation? There's no way a cryptosystem can prove that two different people actually have two different keys. If I want to pwn Cardano/Polkadot, don't I just need to run a bunch of different staking keys?
      • je_bailey 5y ago
        Looking at Cardano. There are currently 2,497 staking pools which are staking 72% percent of all Ada that is out there. Which is about 23 billion coins staked. So if you owned 12 billion cardano and set up 188 pools to hold all of it, yes you would control the majority of the network.
      • Sargos 5y ago
        Binance runs about a dozen staking pools publicly so there are definitely problems with trying to keep pools decentralized.
  • ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Whenever you have a system where it costs several dollars to carry out a transaction, it will always be inferior to fiat. We could bring microtransactions to the web, and replace a lot of advertising, if transaction costs were zero.
  • TarasBob 5y ago
    Read the pros and cons of proof of stake compared to proof of work here (written by Vitalik): https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
  • RivieraKid 5y ago
    In our current system, decisions are made democratically - you vote politicians, who choose central bankers, who make the decisions.
    • seph-reed 5y ago
      On the scale between a full democracy and a full oligarchy, what you're describing would be a "representative democracy." Unfortunately, our representatives don't really represent us, so we're much closer to oligarchy than democracy. Also, a full democracy it terrible. It's basically the equivalent of facebook... having representatives who's full time job is to be knowledgable is much better than giving everyone an equal say on everything.
• thefourthchime 5y ago
  Wasn’t Casper going to do this like four years ago? They have been talking about moving to PoS forever now. It still hasn’t happened.
  • vmception 5y ago
    I like how these kinds of quips will evaporate I just wonder what the next criticism will be
    • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      "Ooops, maybe PoS was a bad idea, sorry about the billions!"
      • vmception 5y ago
        Have fun with Ethereum Classic or future PoW fork with the current state of Ethereum 1.x
        • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
          I wont be having fun, as I wouldn't touch ETH. But you acknowledge this situation is bad, and could be the cause of more drama (potentially economy breaking drama)?
          • dodobirdlord 5y ago
            Eventually switching to PoS has been the established plan for Etherium for years. Any drama about it is manufactured.
            • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
              Having an abstract plan to distract energy FUD warriors is not the same as having a technical plan to replace engines on moving vehicles. The drama is real, but it requires putting down the hopium pipe.
• AAA_Rating 5y ago
  Its price will also tumble 99% . People motives to get into crypto are clear. They want to subtract themselves from government policy of constantly printing money. BTC takes care of that and it's a 14 years brand which is extremely politically expensive to make illegal On the other hand people are perfectly satisfied with their experience on Youtube, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Ebay, JPMorgan etc. which are the entities which Ethereum aims to disrupt
  • h4kor 5y ago
    Let's hope this will happen. It's time this blockchain hype ends.
  • wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    >Its price will also tumble 99% From your lips to God's ears. If the price falls steeply there will be a glut of gpus flooding the market and I'll finally be able to build a pc.
    • vmception 5y ago
      Or you can do what the market is telling you to do and you’ll be able to afford a pc whenever you want The market signals are right there
  • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    I think you are correct. PoS coin is worthless coin. Imagine the tales in the future -- about the potential trillion dollar economy that was invented by some internet nerds who listened too much to people that have no idea what they are talking about, and drove it off a cliff with fancy talk of proof of stake (which was actually engineered by the existing powers to ensure their continued control of global economies).
    • kickopotomus 5y ago
      Why do you say that? What makes PoW so much more meritorious than PoS in your eyes?
• h4kor 5y ago
  > Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that The Merge arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety. Overworking your engineers will most definitely lead to compromises. But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are serious about reducing the environmental impact they have.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    PoS has been the goal of Ethereum for a long, long time. I don't know the technicals of why the migration has been gradual, but the destination has never really been in doubt.
  • NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    No it doesnt. Having hard time/budget/whatever constraints does. Otherwise, theoretically you can "overwork" i.e. (work more than standard 40 hour weeks or some standard of work hours) whatever without compromise
    • ysavir 5y ago
      On paper, sure. In practice, having people overworked leads to compromises you never intend to make, simply due to exhaustion and burden clouding judgement values.
      • NikolaeVarius 5y ago
        Thats a problem of process where errors are caught. It makes things more inefficient, but it doesn't compromise final quality assuming issues are found and addressed.
        • soperj 5y ago
          so the solution to overwork is more work?
          • NikolaeVarius 5y ago
• wyldfire 5y ago
  > Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and I hope that’s true for the rest of the industry too. Ethereum has been talking about PoS for a long time, so until they actually deliver we should be looking at existing decentralized PoS coins.
  • sp332 5y ago
    There is actual, visible progress, plus a built-in self-destruct that will make continuing on the current chain basically impossible.
    • crazypython 5y ago
      They've moved the self-destruct deadline multiple times.
      • sp332 5y ago
        There will be a new PoW chain and a new PoS chain. The old chain will technically exist but mining on it will be impractical. There is no longer enough interest from miners to make the new PoW chain the majority, so the winners of this hard fork will be recognized as "Ethereum" and the other miners will be relegated to a less influential chain. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399
    • Vespasian 5y ago
      That's true but to be honest they pushed back the self destruct several times in the past and will do so again if needed. Still it's very likely that this time the switch to PoS might finally happen unless something unforseen happens. The development was speed up by a (most likely) failed attempt / pr-stunt of miners to block an unrelated change which will reduce their profitability considerably in July.
  • suikadayo 5y ago
    It already exists https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/
• silicon2401 5y ago
  Can someone give a brief summary of what Ethereum is? Is it a crypto that will be merging with some other crypto? How does it relate to Ethereum 2? Are they going to continue being separate cryptos?
  • pteraspidomorph 5y ago
    To quote wikipedia: > Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain. It's a blockchain whose token wasn't intended as a cryptocurrency but as a medium for paying for having a program ("smart contract") stored on it run on every node of the network. In practice this can be used for all sorts of things, including bootstrapping the vast majority of other cryptocurrencies currently in existence, but under the current system it can't process transactions effectively enough to be useful in that manner. As I understand it Ethereum 2, which is a really long term thing they've been doing for years, is meant to gobble up the original Ethereum completely once all stages of deployment are completed (any prior forks that may happen would remain independent, I guess).
    • silicon2401 5y ago
      thanks for the explanation. interesting read; don't really get it, but worth looking into more.
  • danlugo92 5y ago
    It's like Bitcoin except it has vulnerabilities so will be hacked (and it already has been) or taken over by the Zuckerbergs of the world when the incentives are high enough in the future (maybe 5 or 10 years) then it will implode.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Any easy to follow tutorials on how this Pos system will work?
• Croftengea 5y ago
  The title suggests PoS for ETH is 100x more efficient than PoW whereas the article actually estimates PoW to be 2000x more efficient.
  • lucideer 5y ago
    To clarify further: the HN title says 100x whereas the article title says 2000x Update: it's been fixed
• michael_vo 5y ago
  What are the attack vectors on PoS. With PoW you need 51% of the mining power to take over the system, which is very labor intensive to set up. With PoS could you take over all coins by buying 51% of the existing coins? So if the market cap of ETH is 200BB spend 100BB to double your money?
  • eventreduce1 5y ago
    Yes and no. If you spend 100BB to buy 51% and then take over the network, eth will have zero value and you loosed 100BB.
    • lasagnaphil 5y ago
      Worse, if the overall Ethereum community reaches a consensus that a malicious entity attempted to take over the network, then the devs will fork the blockchain to rollback the particular transactions with the malicious entity, and the new blockchain will keep chugging along as normal while the attacker has just lost a shitton of dollars to buy 100BB. (This is similar to what happened with the DAO previously, although the reason for it was bugs rather than a 51% attack)
      • hanniabu 5y ago
        This is not what happened with the DAO. This is well documented and I suggest you read up on. TLDR, the hacker tried to withdraw the funds and there was a 30 day lockup period so the contract was updated to stop this.
        • lasagnaphil 5y ago
          My understanding was that an illicit fund withdrawing was possible because of a bug in the contract code (more specifically a recursive call loophole), and the community executed a hard fork to return those funds to their original owners. I’m curious as to what I’m misunderstanding here.
    • X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
• kemonocode 5y ago
  For the people who criticize as to why they've taken so long in shifting to a PoS model: consensus takes time, so does developing and testing something that definitively shouldn't go wrong. Also, there's the inherent issue with Proof-of-Stake that Proof-of-Work doesn't have: the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough before it could feasibly self-maintain a PoS shift without being immediately vulnerable to consensus attacks. Ethereum is definitively mature enough by now, it wasn't a few years ago.
  • jerrycruncher 5y ago
    Consensus may take time, but when you're pouring gas onto a fire, arguing that you need to dump out most of the can before you can be sure you know what you're doing isn't a defensible position.
    • dboat 5y ago
      I don't understand what you're trying to say.
  • bsedlm 5y ago
    > the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough I don't understand how proof of stake works to the depth I understand proof of work. But this reassures me that it's feasable that they'll accomplish the same distributed consensus. So then, could I say that Ethereum proof of stake will allow the owners of the coins (ether) to be independent from the owners of the mining operations? or uhmm... is the independence between the computaional costs of the "mining" and actual minted ether?
    • kemonocode 5y ago
      Ethereum proof of work made it so the owners of the coins could be independent from the owners of the mining operations, even if in practice many miners end up keeping most of the block rewards themselves and only reinvesting what they need in new infrastructure and to maintain what they already have. Proof of stake makes it so the miners and holders are now the same (you stake the coins that you have, or you pool them up with others), however the cost to wreck the chain is much greater than it would have been 3-4 years ago. The whole idea is that Ether is so spread out now, it'd be unfeasible for someone to snatch up enough of it for an attack, in a similar way to how an ever-increasing difficulty makes it harder for a hostile actor to coordinate enough of it to make such attack.
• wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  I wonder how this will impact mining? Will GPUs suddenly flood the market as it becomes much less profitable to mine? God I hope so the GPU shortages have been crazy.
  • josefresco 5y ago
    I've be lurking heavily in the crypto-mining communities for a few weeks now. Most are saying they'll just "move to a new coin" which is basically all they CAN do, unless they cash out early and sell their hardware. Nvidia is releasing* "LHR" (low hash rate) cards to give gamers some relief (assuming they can't be jailbroken). *https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/
    • pteraspidomorph 5y ago
      Unfortunately mining is only a small part of why GPUs have been so expensive, but hopefully this will contribute to making them cheaper in the long term. If they don't mess up again.
      • josefresco 5y ago
        I get that (chip shortage, covid demand surge etc.), but there's a clear distinction of availability between GPUs that are suitable/unsuitable for mining.
    • ArkanExplorer 5y ago
      Its difficult to calculate exactly the % of GPU miners that are mining Ethereum, amongst all possible choices. My estimate is 50% - 90%. (Maybe someone can reply with better data?) When Ethereum can no longer be mined, the returns on mining the remaining 'altcoins' will fall equal to the level of new mining power that enters. Which might very well make GPU mining uneconomical across the board.
      • josefresco 5y ago
        > the returns on mining the remaining 'altcoins' will fall equal to the level of new mining power that enters. Can you expand on this?
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Whether or not it remains successful, ethereum is moving the ball forward. Congratulations to contributors. Inspiring.
• tphyahoo2 5y ago
  https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-Fallacy https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o... https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/the-censorship-resistance-argument-for-bitcoin-over-ethereum/ https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/the-censorsh... ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC. Bitcoin is competing against gold. Different races. different goals. Different risks.
  • zepto 5y ago
    > ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC. Bitcoin is competing against gold. If true, this means that every argument comparing BTC to fiat is bullshit. Given that most arguments I see in favor of BTC compare it to fiat, this doesn’t speak well to the understanding of those who hold it. Given that BTC’s value is predicated purely on the beliefs of those who hold it, a systematic misunderstanding like this suggests problems in store.
    • tphyahoo2 5y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co... Bitcoin will be fine.
      • zepto 5y ago
        I stopped reading after your linked piece compared Bitcoin to Jesus and Queen Victoria.
      • gverrilla 5y ago
        this is pretty good comedy I recommend everyone to read and enjoy some good laughters
    • tphyahoo2 5y ago
      To be clear, bitcoin is of course also competing against USD. But this is neither a fair nor an interesting competition. Life span of fiat currencies is usually decades.
• roel_v 5y ago
  Maybe this is a good time and place to ask - let's say I want to buy something using Ethereum. Is it correct that when I look at, say, https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... , you have to pay USD 20 just as payment fees? I wrote off Bitcoin as a payment mechanism a long time ago because of this (although it seems BTC tx costs are now lower than ETH?), is this the direction tx costs for all crypto coins go?
  • zionic 5y ago
    That chart is highly misleading, as it includes all smart contracts. In ETH a basic transfer (like BTC) is often cheap (although it needs to be even less!), however interacting with a smart contract can be more expensive. If you want to interact with a highly complex smart contract that pulls a lot of state it can be 100x the cost of a basic transfer... just depends on the code.
  • znite 5y ago
    Not sure how it all works, but I assume it's broken down for a purchase on something like Coinbase card - eg. they bundle a load of card transactions into a ETH to fiat conversion for Visa https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/other/coinbase-card-faq https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/ot...
    • freeone3000 5y ago
      An entire month's worth, in fact! In practical terms, you pay for things in fiat and then cryptocurrency is sold to cover your credit card bill.
  • surmoi 5y ago
    Yes ETH gas price (transaction fee) have been very high, much higher than BTC lately... Not all cryptocurrency have such insane transaction fees though. NANO is a good example of a fee-less cryptocurrency (cf. https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/)
    • 5y ago
• sigmar 5y ago
  I feel like ETH is in very good footing to move to Proof of Space (decentralized network, good dev work, lots of distributed stake), especially in comparison to other projects that have gone with PoS. I'm sure it'll succeed in many ways, but I can't imagine moving away from Nakamoto consensus is going to be "the solution" generally for how to create a working, scalable, well distributed currency.
• libertine 5y ago
  I know this is a pressing matter, and that has relevance for itself, but after the whole Elon Musk thing it just turns this into a reply to his tweet, where so many cryptos folks were spamming "we use less energy then bitcoin! choose us! we're open to talk!" Which in the lights of the recent events sounds like: "pump us this time around!" Makes you question: when would be a good time to address this, if they can't time travel to the day before Elon posted the tweet? And I don't know the answer to that. Was this too soon? Well if they want to take the ride of Elon controversy, I don't think so. Is that a good thing? Who knows.
  • nashashmi 5y ago
    It is a reply but it was also well known that they were looking to improve with a proof of scope concept. This will require 100x more storage space in place of compute power. The market is wondering what will happen next. So ether published their progress. I just want to know how realistic are they with their schedule.
• TechBro8615 5y ago
  I was fairly into the space in 2014-2016 but stopped paying attention the last few years. It seems like lots of theorized applications actually exist and have a proof-of-concept now. If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start? The marketplace sells access to resources with an off-chain ACL system. It facilitates trades between resource sellers and buyers. I assume I want a smart contract between buyer/seller to record resource grants on chain, which the access layer checks as a source of truth. But if I were to do this on Ethereum, the gas fees would be really expensive. I’ve heard about Polygon and “optimistic roll-up.” Is this a viable solution?
  • wbc 5y ago
    Check out Solana if you want lower fees
    • throwaway-8c93 5y ago
      Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem. If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole purpose.
  • de_keyboard 5y ago
    > If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start? Unless you are building a dark web market, why would you want to? It will be more convenient for the vast majority of users to pay with card or PayPal.
    • notsureaboutpg 5y ago
      I believe there are some use cases. Think of a government which does not allow currency conversion to more stable currencies in a place where volatility or inflation is very high. In that situation, it might be worth adopting a crypto-first approach, no?
• GongOfFour 5y ago
  Will this lower the Gas fees at all?
  • exo762 5y ago
    No, it wont. Look for L2 solutions.
• rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  ETH wont, and shouldn't migrate to PoS. PoS is a scam -- a trick, a reinvention of existing corrupt economic models. It throws out the greatest part of decentralized cryptocurrencies -- trustless, independently verifiable, auto-adjusting to external conditions, hard to fake proof of work. It replaces it with shell games and chicanery. I am very pro proof of work. The energy usage is a good thing. We can deal with the emissions from generation out of band, it is not the protocols problem. Two primary concerns, technical feasibility and political strife: I have my extreme doubts that you can move a chain like this without causing it to collapse. As yet all we have seen out of the eth camp is more broken proof of concepts -- not a viable model for a potentially trillion dollar economy. How to you replace a jet engine mid flight? (You don't. Unless you like not safely landing). PoS coin is worthless coin. If you want to have your expensive-to-mine gas coin be worth something, you have to make it hard to acquire. My second concern is that if they do manage to 'migrate', enough folks will ignore this and keep mining. This is a problem today with more contentious PoW hard forks. Ultimately this behavior will lead to more chain forks, which unlike in the ETC days actually is a big deal today. Whos USDT USDC etc is the real coin? The eth1 PoW 'legacy' network, or the eth2 'pos' chain, or what about the eth1-a/eth1-b fork when the first political staking challenges come up (see all world religion schisms). PoW solves this problem. One truth, enforced by universal energy usage. Not power players arguing over interpretations of religious text.
  • hoka-one-one 5y ago
    rothschilds
  • r32rf43g 5y ago
    What are your thoughts on PoET systems?
    • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Proof of elapsed time? The intel thing? Only works with trusted nodes and/or permissioned blockchains; not suitable for trustless/permissionless public chains. The only trustless consensus system we have today is proof of work. And it works well, at scale, for 14 years.
• jonplackett 5y ago
  Is it possible/likely that exchanges are going to abuse their position and secretly use everyone else's ETH for proof of stake while they're holding it?
  • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Like they do on all other PoS (worthless) coins? Yes. This is the fundamental problem. We have seen chain takeovers from this exact scenario. See Steem / Hive for an example of how this can go very wrong.
• knowuh 5y ago
  I hope this means i will be able to buy a graphics card soon.
  • knicholes 5y ago
    You can buy them right now. In fact, two months ago I bought six 3090s and 15 3080s with a two phone calls and maybe twenty clicks. The part you're missing is the price. It's my secret, but I'll share it here. You can buy a Dell R12 with one of those cards and, upon receiving it, sell the components for more than the purchase price.
• ThomPete 5y ago
  Ethereum doesn't have an energy problem, energy have an Ethereum problem. Don't get me wrong, it's great that they are working on becoming more effective but the idea that we should judge new technology purely on it's environmental impact as we see these days is counterproductive to progress. Progress from 0 to 1 will always be less effective than the optimization that follows. We should be much more focused on how to make sure that any technologies energy usage doesn't become an issue by creating clean technologies with high energy density, which are reliable, plentiful and scaleable and doesn't require backup sources.
• turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I hope I'm not being lazy, but does POS not just mean the more you have, the more you get? Wouldn't it converge to 1 wallet controlling everything? Or to rephrase the question: where can I find the "POS for dummies" page?
  • tromp 5y ago
    Every staker preserves their fraction of the (increasing) pie by staking. Those who don't stake slightly lose in their fraction of the pie, benefitting all stakers by the same percentage.
  • rawtxapp 5y ago
    Yep, it literally codefies "rich gets richer" down to the core of the protocol.
    • turbinerneiter 5y ago
      Just saw that you need 32 ethereums to be able to stake. That's more than 60k. Whatever, I'm out.
      • rauljordan2020 5y ago
        There are staking pools that allow you to stake with less than 32 ETH and pool those together to participate. We understand the requirement of 32 is high but that doesn't mean it is impossible to participate in staking with less. Rocketpool or Lido finance are examples.
        • rawtxapp 5y ago
          It's not just about that limit though and it's not even a complaint to be clear. If eth pays me 5-10% per year for a simple cryptographic signature, great, not gonna say no. But it inherently makes the system unfair, I have 0 pressure to sell that eth since it didn't really take me any effort to make it and I don't need it to cover life expenses, whereas for someone who has much less money, well that return on their eth (say from pools), they'll probably need to sell it to cover some other costs (rents for example). So for the wealthy, their shares grows while everyone has pressure to sell. There's also a cycle where if you're a staker and few other people sell, price will skyrocket, make it even more unaccessible. I really hope that we avoid these scenarios in real world, but I'm a bit skeptical.
• DCKing 5y ago
  Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy [1] to make financial products. Especially because proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have cryptocurrency. Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins. I don't think there's any precedent for banning classes of financial products for environmental reasons, but it's time to create one. [1]: In addition to environmental reasons, there's probably also economic ones. Mining burns through other scarce resources such as chip production capacity, although the true impact there is unclear.
  • asmos7 5y ago
    way to devise a very specific way to kill the gravy train cryptobros have been riding on for so long
  • gradys 5y ago
    Would Ethereum be able to make the switch to PoS if it had never used PoW originally? How would they ensure a good distribution of ownership?
    • mckeed 5y ago
      It's a difficult problem, but there are coins that have managed it. Stellar has piggybacked on other services to distribute – Facebook, Keybase, and Coinbase. There's an energy-efficient memecoin that distributes based on Folding@Home contributions that has become the #1 monthly F@H team.
  • dboat 5y ago
    Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall? I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.
• kaliali 5y ago
  Cardano already uses over 99% less energy than Ethereum and doesn't have Ethereum gas fees...
• rossmohax 5y ago
  Am I right that majority of video card miners are mining Eth? Does it mean that when merge happens, we ca expect video cards be available to buy again?
• soheil 5y ago
  If there was a way to verify the power source is green I think PoW would be the ideal way to move forward. For example if electrons generated by photoelectric cells somehow were different than other electrons (quantum spin, parity, etc.) then maybe an algorithm could check for that and only accept blocks mined using these electrons and not others.
  • pavon 5y ago
    Any crypto system that has an energy problem also has an economic problem. When a transaction requires the same amount of electricity as an average household uses in a month, then each transaction will cost someone a full months electric bill. That will either have to be paid with extremely high transaction fees or "absorbed" by the value of the currency in ways that make it unsuitable as an actual currency. This is true regardless of the environmental impacts of the specific energy source, and while solar and wind are decreasing in price, it is unlikely costs will drop so much to make this issue negligible.
    • soheil 5y ago
      Currently transaction fees are so high because of bitcoin block subsidies once the subsidy asymptotically approaches zero there will be much lower transaction fees because miners only incentive will come from the fees. There are far too many blocks being mined not because of volume of transactions that need to be included in them, but because of new block subsidies.
• merwanedr 5y ago
  Ethereum is winning every crypto/blockchain narrative. This is super impressive and proves, once again, that real value is where devs are.
• oreally 5y ago
  Will this reduce fees? I've heard it was a big problem with eth.
• skizm 5y ago
  Dumb question: if all popular cryptocurrencies shifted to proof of stake, would GPU prices come back down to earth?
  • Havoc 5y ago
    There are a ton of currencies so no. There will be pow ones left for at least a couple years I think
  • Sargos 5y ago
    Yes
• colincooke 5y ago
  Honestly this change might actually be the one that makes me finally buy some crypto. The energy burden and overall wastefullness of these coins has vastly outweighed any potential benefit they may provide. A big coin making such a good (at least in my books) change should be rewarded. Since crypto for better or worse seems here to stay, I hope that energy concious decisions continue to be made, and that the market responds positively.
• nashashmi 5y ago
  I understand that proof of stake requires an incredible amount of storage. This will make it a steep buy in. It will also raise production of SSDs and drives. How will this shift technically drive technology?
  • erjiang 5y ago
    You may be thinking of proof-of-SPACE cryptocurrency, where the more hard drive space you dedicate, the more rewards you get. Proof of STAKE is where you dedicate your cryptocurrency and are rewarded based on that. Since owning cryptocurrency doesn't take any physical resource, the only expenditure is keeping your staking node (a computer) online so that it can participate in validation.
• saos 5y ago
  A well timed article. Glad I invested early
• IncRnd 5y ago
  > Ethereum will use at least 99% less energy post merge I realize that is the text from the article, but what they really meant is "will use at most 99% less energy". The reduction will be at least 99%. The future value will be at most 1% of the current value.
  • bagacrap 5y ago
    I think that depends on whether you think "at least" modifies the "99%" or "99% less energy"
    • IncRnd 5y ago
      Many engineers get into these language conundrums by poorly stapling phrases and modifiers together.
• micropresident 5y ago
  People seem to forget that this energy use is a consequence of miners wanting coins because of the subjective value of the reward. Even stakers can expend more money for a better chance at receiving the eth2 staking rewards. This will result in just as much energy use for a given reward value as Bitcoin. The question is if you can account for it. Eth2 propagandists are being very -- unintentionally -- dishonest about this. Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true even in USD. Bitcoin is actually more efficient than existing financial systems. Bitcoin removes all the labor and expense that goes into running ATMs, Bank buildings, tellers, and so forth. Eth also does this. The real way to address energy use is to introduce seignorage into the system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage) in order to do this, you must give some of the new issuance to people who are not part of the system of validation. Eth2 might work for awhile, and it might make people rich as people put up more and more stake in order to obtain rewards. (The block reward is effectively a risk-free rate of return). However, long term, you end up with a larger and larger percentage of the economy controlled by very few people. Systems like this dis-incentivize the creation of real value through investment in real-world goods and services. Long term, people will opt out of this nonsense as it produce coins which are not useful in real business transactions due to the deflationary nature of the tokens.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    > Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true even in USD. Bitcoin is actually more efficient than existing financial systems. Bitcoin removes all the labor and expense that goes into running ATMs, Bank buildings, tellers, and so forth. Eth also does this. How can you say this in good faith when BTC doesn't do the same things existing financial systems do?
  • ChrisClark 5y ago
    Your entire argument is base on the fact that more people mine because when the rewards are better, higher price. But in PoS there is no mining. More and more people will stake, but will do so with a small single VM, with no GPUs or ASICS mining and using power. So a PoS system will never ever use as much energy as BTC mining, by many many orders of magnitude.
• mkl95 5y ago
  I have fond memories of Solidity. Not the prettiest language but I built some fun toy projects ("sports prediction" AKA gambling) with it circa 2017/18. However the whole energy thing discouraged me from building anything bigger. I may give it a shot after this merge.
• throwitaway1235 5y ago
  Carbon phobia is a mental disorder.
• HugoDaniel 5y ago
  Oh, I fear that this might be on the route to Ethereum-Classic-V2. Vitalik and core team wake up sulked and there we go..
• LeftTriangle 5y ago
  > Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network does too This does not follow. Security level is independent of miner reward value under PoS.
  • suikadayo 5y ago
    As price of Ether rises, it becomes even more difficult to acquire the 32 ETH required to become a validator.
• seph-reed 5y ago
  The "Cantillion Effect" https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect Ethereum is already a system where those who are closest to the money printers benefit the most. At first it was oligarchic just because of its pre-mine and air drops, but PoS just takes that to a new level. You get paid to be rich. The reason this uses so much less energy is because it's so much closer to a centralized fiat currency. The only value implied by PoS is that some rich people are backing it... a lot like the dollar.
• Animats 5y ago
  Their graphs show a huge increase in energy consumption for both Bitcoin and Ethereum since January 2021. Why? What happened recently?
  • X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Price increase.
    • Animats 5y ago
      The Bitcoin hash rate graph didn't go up like that in 2021.[1] The Etherium hash rate did.[2] Where are they getting their data? [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3... [2] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html
  • necovek 5y ago
    I think price went waaay up for both, thus mining increased substantially. That was about a time I started looking for a graphics card to potentially drive an 8k display under Linux with open-source drivers (so, AMD), and the price for RX5700XT locally has gone from 600€ (I wasn't going to "overpay", ha) to 1000€: not that 5700XT would have done the work I need it for, but GPU prices locally mirror the ethereum demand and likely electricity usage too.
• DickingAround 5y ago
  This reduces security considerably. Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that was done historically. If there is just one honest node out there you will be able to tell the difference between the honest one and a majority of fakes. With proof of stake there is nothing beyond the will of the current majority to lock in what is right. If you feel the majority is always right, and you'd be comfortable with the majority being able to re-write all of the history of the ownership of your currency, that is fine. I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever.
  • exo762 5y ago
    > Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that was done historically. VDFs used in Ethereum's hybrid PoS replicate this property to large-enough extent. In case of PoW the resource you MUST spent to replicate the chain is electric energy, lots of it. In case of VDF it's mostly time. So one can imagine launching multiple "fake" chains using stolen/bought private keys, but such chain will get banned via software upgrade immediately after detection. Very hard to pull off, impossible to pull of multiple times. EDIT: my bad, stolen keys will get banned by the network immediately and automatically. They break "equivocation" rule.
  • everfree 5y ago
    This property is called Weak Subjectivity and is indeed a compromise that PoS makes over PoW. However, in practice, the trust assumptions aren't much higher than when you, say, download node software from a source that you trust. > I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever. With weak subjectivity, you only have to trust them to be correct on a timeframe of every few months. If consensus is actually broken somehow over such a long period of time, there will be big headlines about it and you'll be able to configure your node accordingly. Further reading: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
    • DickingAround 5y ago
• sollewitt 5y ago
  As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 encouraging folks to state their stake in the comments.
• sva_ 5y ago
  The minimum amount of Ether to be eligible to stake is 32 Coins, so it appears that last year in June, about 120k addresses would've met that criterion[0]. That probably changed by now, I'd assume the number to be higher as more people set up 'mining rigs'. That's at least a larger number than I would've guessed. I wonder how many people/entities are behind those addresses. On a side note, I have mixed feelings about PoS. The idea behind Ethereum - that is, as I understand it, being able to deploy smart contracts using a Turing complete language -, is pretty intriguing; but the costs associated with doing so put me off. I tried to estimate how much it'd cost to deploy a fairly small smart contract a couple days ago (admittedly when 'gas costs' were high), and it would've been several hundred dollars, perhaps even surpassing a thousand. It seems like PoS would lower that, which is good, but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'. (And yeah, there might be other means, but none of them are really practical for the average person.) If there hadn't already been cryptocurrencies, nobody would've thought PoS to be a good idea. A bunch of people who hold some digital certificates that predictably multiply themselves want people to give them money to 'acquire' those? That would've sounded like a scam to me... [0] https://decrypt.co/31646/nearly-120000-ethereum-wallets-primed-eth-2-staking https://decrypt.co/31646/nearly-120000-ethereum-wallets-prim...
  • X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    I too have been skeptical of PoS, but IMO the thinking behind it has gotten better and better and there are pretty large chains that have been running without compromise. Thankfully with ETH 2.0 the cost of publishing data on the chain will drop dramatically (there will be ~63x increase in throughput of publishing data, not transactions) so contract creation should be cheaper. But really if you are interested in the space it might make sense to just publish on an L2 like polygon.
  • djrhails 5y ago
    Frankly, right now anyone who isn't already in the game isn't able to acquire Ether without paying for it. Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment, and is already out of reach for the average person. Setting your desktop computer to mine definitely won't pay for your small smart contract.
• jude- 5y ago
  Your post advocates a (X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to solving the double-spend problem in a decentralized cryptocurrency. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) (X) Scammers can easily use it to defraud users (X) Smart contracts and other legitimate cryptocurrency uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (X) It is defenseless against network-level attacks ( ) It will stop scams for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of cryptocurrencies will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from exchanges ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many cryptocurrency users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Scammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business (X) Replicated state machines do not scale Specifically, your plan fails to account for ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for cryptocurrencies ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all private keys (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in PoW (X) Huge existing software investment in composable smart contracts (X) Susceptibility of protocols other than PoW to cheap fork creation (X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all network-healing approaches (X) Extreme profitability of scams ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with scammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of scammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (X) Bitcoin already exists (X) Error states that require manual intervention to fix and the following philosophical objections may also apply: (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) Block headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending transactions should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my cryptocurrency transactions ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough (X) The rich should not get richer (X) Money and finance are legal constructs, and should not be replaced by undemocratic systems Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
• mgh2 5y ago
  This article comes from the Ethereum blog, can anyone verify the numbers or provide an unbiased view?
  • erjiang 5y ago
    The numbers that they are providing are pretty reasonable and nobody is really disputing that removing the mining requirement and just staking your Ethereum is enormously more efficient. Even if you assume each staker is running 1 server, then 140k computers NOT running at full tilt all the time is still a tiny consumer of electricity compared to the current situation. A lot of the debate seems to be around whether or not it's as secure or viable, or whether the existing Ethereum miners will try to stage a coup or something. Disclaimer: I don't hold cryptocurrency and I think proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are a tragic waste.
• milansuk 5y ago
  Reading the discussion here, I think most people don't have a problem with PoS, but the transition from PoW to PoS. If you compare PoS with the dominant client-server model, it's significantly better! In the worst case, PoS can become a "client-server". PoS is transparent and you know that your smart contract will run exactly how it suppose to be executed. No FAANG types of problems.
• fredfoobar 5y ago
  The HN narrative engine is so biased towards ETH that some are even asking for advice on where to buy ETH. This is ridiculous, just think through the consequences of a PoS system, you all are smart folks, I presume.
  • stingraycharles 5y ago
    It seems like you’re insinuating that there are negative consequences to the PoS system, but leave it up to the reader to think really deep and understand what those consequences are. I’m not well versed into PoS systems, but just took a look at ethereum’s explanation and it sounded reasonable, but I’m not familiar with the details and trade-offs that are being made. Care to enlighten me what you’re referring to?
    • fredfoobar 5y ago
      The negative consequences were mentioned in another comment: You should first get "well versed into PoS systems", The stakers (and their adjoints) can collude and decide to reorg the chain for a different outcome. This can be done indefinitely at no additional cost. In a PoW system, you not only have to expend capex for mining equipment, you hare further discouraged by the huge CONTINUED opex (energy) cost. The energy required to change the state of the chain is similar (or greater) than the energy it took to make the first version.
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        Not to mention the cavalier attitude towards their tokenomics (quite literally monetary policy now), how often they can change it. It simply doesn't inspire confidence. A monetary layer should be immutable once a good set of rules have been found to be working well. Just think about it, if a protocol layer on the internet changes its protocol parameters based on some trends, is it a good idea? Bitcoin is like another protocol layer on the internet protocol stack, you build other layers on top of the base monetary layer. You reduce the possibility of bugs in a layer disrupting the whole ecosystem and make the layer more maintainable.
      • 5y ago
• mrfusion 5y ago
  How do existing Pow coins get transferred to this?
  • exo762 5y ago
    Whole chain is changing the rules. For block N-1 and earlier blocks - fork choice rule inspects amount of work. For block N and later, fork choice rule is one of https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/
• kojoru 5y ago
  Question from someone relatively clueless: Does that mean that NFTs also will use negligible amount of electricity once that's completely gone through?
  • SwagtimusPrime 5y ago
    Yes. Any action performed in the network will consume 99.95% less energy after this change has gone through.
  • suikadayo 5y ago
    Basically. Also, it's already possible to do NFTs with negligible amount using Immutable X layer 2 scaling solution on Ethereum - it's just that they seem to be doing it only for Gods Unchained right now. There will be even more other NFT scaling solutions.
• lucasnortj 5y ago
  who cares, cryptos have no use case except for cranks and criminals and noone has ever improved a solution by adding a blockchain to it.
• bigphishy 5y ago
  IF it merges. That's a big "if" The ethereum Miners will rebel, "The Merge" will introduce catastrophic bugs, 0-days will appear. However, if it does successfully transfer to proof of stake, we're in for a long and exciting ride. Trust is a valuable commodity these days.
  • exo762 5y ago
    > The ethereum Miners will rebel I don't think miners can do anything about this. In the worst case, they coordinate to stop mining on N-1 block. But this requires an amazing level of coordination, plus network can directly bribe/reward next block producer by paying to `coinbase` address (real `coinbase`, not Armstrong's coinbase). > "The Merge" will introduce catastrophic bugs, 0-days will appear. This is why you have testnets. > we're in for a long and exciting ride. Definitely!
    • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      testnets are great, but cannot approximate the economic impact of technical decisions as they have zero value. Just because it works on a testnet is not a good justification that it would work at scale on a chain worth billions.
      • exo762 5y ago
        I agree. Ropsten is the proof. Still, I'm fine with Ethereum moving fast and breaking things.
        • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
          Ropsten coins are worthless, and cannot approximate or prove anything cryptoecomically. Moving fast and breaking things is great for things of no consequence, but for decentralized money -- I'm not a fan of this philosophy! I like slow, methodical, well tested, well reasoned code from the best minds in the space -- aka Bitcoin.
          • 5y ago
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  PoW was of course a naive system but this this PoS should really be called the "Oligarchy" because it takes us back to the past and very visibly separates the plebs from the aristocracy. PoW had an implicit requirement for a global supply chain of hardware and energy which (kind of) made political and geopolitical games more difficult. With PoS, doing politics no longer requires work, which could lead to geopolicical wars. For example it might be possible to achieve wide enough consensus among stakers in Western countries to punish China (for some reason), e.g. willingly losing part of their stakes to empty major Chinese wallets. The fact that this doesn't really require physical effort but only persuasion is problematic. ETH will be a real test about whether PoS works, as the other PoS cryptos are much smaller and less intertwined in other crypto projects. Historically, oligarchies led to wars
  • seph-reed 5y ago
    I'm on the PoW side. But you should note that PoW is also oligarchic in the sense that individuals have no ability to compete in terms of mining. The rich get richer is still a thing here. That being said, PoS is very much a human centric valuation (rich peoples opinions being the value), so yes: politics and then war seem likely. Pretty much every fiat currency has the same issues as PoS, where eventually war becomes the cheapest way to retain value.
    • jude- 5y ago
      In PoW, the "rich" have to keep selling their coins to buy more dedicated mining equipment in order to stay competitive. And because PoW hasn't reached "optimum efficiency," there's still profits to be had by building better miners and cheaper power sources. Innovations here have positive downstream effects, since innovations in cheap renewable power and efficient chip fabs and designs have many applications beyond mining. PoS, on the other hand, requires minimal extra work from the already-rich. They just sit on their butts getting richer.
      • nscalf 5y ago
        It still doesn't change the underlying issue you discussed. Just because there is some friction removed in PoS doesn't mean that PoW isn't weighted to favor people with large pools of capital to invest.
• stevebmark 5y ago
  Given that the main use of cryptocurrency is to increase fiat, and the main reason it increases fiat is based on the fundamentally poor design of guessing at random numbers with increasing difficulty, I predict that if Etherium becomes more efficient, the price will drop and interest in the coin will implode. I'm genuinely curious if I'm wrong, why I'll be wrong. No one cares about BCH, for example, even though it's more efficient than BTC.
  • hamolton 5y ago
    I disagree. The initial investments in these big currencies were from people thinking that they could become a practical currency with real-world use due to its lack of regulation and name-attached government tracking. The bulk of fiat driving up the price since then has been somewhat blind speculation. None of these change with PoS; instead, holders are now rewarded for verifying transactions.
• luka-birsa 5y ago
  Fully support this, as PoW protocols - from an efficient market perspective - consume as much as they are currently worth to mine, which would mean that if we believe that the value of BTC will go up (in line with past increases, for orders of magnitude) then also the consumption of power will go up just as much. When BTC hits 250K per coin next year, expect 5x as much energy consumption to what it does use today. At 1M per coin we can expect 20x as much power consumption. Highly unlikely that taxation can resolve this as global economy simply forces the miners to places where energy is cheap and abundant. And countries will view this as a competitive advantage as now there is a simple way to convert power directly into money. Many cases have shown that poor countries will use their environment to gain an upper hand and pull their country out of poverty. Sadly the impact to the environment is global.
  • exo762 5y ago
    PoW also implies large inflation, which pays for the security of the network. With PoS you can reduce issuance greatly, while staying safe.
  • fredfoobar 5y ago
    Consider not rabbitholing into a narrative and understanding reality: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-50-banking-energy https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...
    • aloer 5y ago
      Bit of a weird argument they make there. Banking keeps the world spinning. What does bitcoin do, right now, to make this even remotely comparable?
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        Why is there such a strong status-quo bias among people I thought were technologists, and what do you guys defend? the banking system?? really? Do you all remember the energy FUD that the internet got back in the late 90s [1]? Please! lets not sleepwalk into another PoS system on the internet to replace the previous one. [1] https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=3e2d1e12580b https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=3e2...
• wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  I really wish the UN could get together and implement a global treaty on a revenue neutral carbon tax. The only reason energy is as cheap as it is right now is because we're not properly pricing in the externalities of environmental damage. This would immediately make unproductive energy use (cough POW crypto cough) a lot less profitable, without the government having to come in and set prices and regs for every little thing.
  • fredfoobar 5y ago
    Yeah, nope. Consider the amount of energy wasted right now and also in similar "industries". https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-50-banking-energy https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...
    • tenacious_tuna 5y ago
      To me, this says those other "similar 'industries'" should *also* be regulated in this way. We shouldn't excuse bitcoin just because there's other worse offenders, we should address the entire sector. I'll phrase it this way: do high-frequency-trading and coin-mining contribute positively to the world as a whole? Are they producing goods that improve the standard of living on a global scale, tangible or otherwise? Are those good worth the negative environment and social impact their production causes? Assuming HFT/coin mining do indeed contribute in these ways, are there less energy-intensive solutions that could produce the same or a similar effect? I think it's completely reasonable for there to be regulations that limit the global impact of activities (e.g. emissions, global warming, chip shortage) for the good of the general population, especially in relation to how much tangible good they produce. That's the whole point of governments and regulations to begin with; see also, things like leaded fuels, or asbestos, or trust-busting.
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        Sorry, it was more for your "opinion" on PoW, not the carbon tax. > This would immediately make unproductive energy use (cough POW crypto cough) a lot less profitable, You seem to have just one target in mind that would get hit. Clearly you haven't analyzed the full extent of a "carbon tax" and your following statement seemed very naive. That said, I'm all FOR carbon taxes, it is actually good for Bitcoin and the world. I don't think there will be a LOT of PoW cryptos, there will be one (or two at most) winner and the others will use a variation of Proof of Proof (by saving state on a PoW chain). I also think that the energy usage curve will plateau soon-ish and energy usage will be somewhat constant or start trending down gradually (as the rewards are tapering off too).
• oskarth 5y ago
  Also see Ethereum is green: https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/ https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/
• idlewords 5y ago
  One neat trick reduces cryptocurrency energy usage by 100%
• nwah1 5y ago
  This article obscures the truth, which will be obvious soon, that Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional banks.
  • exo762 5y ago
    > Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional banks. As a payment network? Layer 2 solutions will be in production by the end of this summer which will enable payments that costs 3 cents, regardless of demand or amount transferred. Working alongside with smart contracts. Lookup zkSync 2.0 / zkPorter.
• fredfoobar 5y ago
  Everything in this universe is analogous to Proof of Work, it's the most natural system out there. If there is a base monetary layer for the internet, it should be Proof of Work based (and Bitcoin, because it's got the most work done to improve the technology + network effects).
  • manx 5y ago
    Could you elaborate a bit? Why do you think that?
    • fredfoobar 5y ago
      The crux of it is that you can't rewrite history trivially, you have to expend a lot energy to change history, and energy can't be created nor destroyed. For something specific to bitcoin/blockchain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0
  • 0134340 5y ago
    And Stake is derived from Work. Some of you assume PoS exists within its own ecosystem. Even in PoW, the work is derived from previous works, ie, the work required to buy and build the hardware and pay for electricity, etc.
    • fredfoobar 5y ago
      Yeah, now you are proposing a system that is going to be secured purely on that stake everyone acquired, THAT's the issue.
      • 0134340 5y ago
        It doesn't exist within its own ecosystem, as I mentioned. Stake is derived from work and work itself is a security, ie, your work is secured by prior works. Everything that built it needed prior work and everything to secure it needs prior security, up the ladder you'd have yourself to secure and work for the currency, your community along with its own governance to state level and on and on up the ladder. PoW and PoS both exist within the same ecosystem.
• kevindong 5y ago
  > If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed, that’s ~35Wh/tx The improved energy consumption is still a lot. For reference, a 2019 16" MacBook Pro has a 100 Wh battery. In other words, 3ish transactions would fully drain such a laptop's battery.
  • DennisP 5y ago
    It's an average for the network, not an actual expense you pay to run a transaction. Stakers are the ones mainly using that energy. If you're just a regular user and send a transaction, you just spend the tiny bit of energy needed to make a cryptographic signature and transmit it.
    • johndough 5y ago
      I think the issue here is that 35Wh per transaction is still a million times less efficient than traditional databases. The MacBook example is just meant to give a frame of reference for how much 35Wh is.
      • DennisP 5y ago
        Sure, no argument there. I'm really glad proof-of-stake is close. It's just that GP made it sound like issuing three transactions would actually drain your battery, so I wanted to clarify that.
• musesum 5y ago
  Ironically, lowering the cost of mining may also lower the value of the asset.
  • RealityVoid 5y ago
    I struggle to understand how you came to this conclusion.
    • musesum 5y ago
      Dunno. The cost of mining approaches market price. The hypothesis is: will the inverse be true?
• themagician 5y ago
  Does anyone know of an estimate of how many individuals actually hold ETH? The transaction fees are absolutely ludicrous. I can’t imagine the dispersion is actually as high as some people seem to think it is.
• csomar 5y ago
  I might be jumping the shark here, but I think the Ethereum "elite community" are probably going to get into a situation of "be careful what you wish for". There is a reason why most of mining is happening in China, Iran, Libya and other "poor" countries. These countries have big players in mining but not in trading/legislation (except for China). By creating a PoW crypto, you are able to do something really cool: You can move value (energy) out of a country, without having a connection with any institution either inside or outside. This happens in a permission-less, indirect manner.
• tylercubell 5y ago
  Algorand has been Proof of Stake for years (2019 MainNet launch) and it's actually carbon-negative [1]. It's a shame more people don't know about it. Its founder is a Turing-award-winning MIT professor (Silvio Micali) who solved the blockchain trilemma [2] with the Pure Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. The tech is leaps and bounds ahead of other cryptos. [1]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_announcement https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno... [2]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-fridman-algorand-and-the-blockchain-trilemma https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-fr...
  • mtlynch 5y ago
    That sounded interesting but I couldn't understand from the links how a blockchain can be carbon negative: >To achieve a carbon-negative network, Algorand and ClimateTrade will implement a sustainability oracle which will notarize Algorand’s carbon footprint on-chain for each epoch (a set amount of blocks). With its advanced smart contracts, Algorand will then lock the equivalent amount of carbon credit as an ASA (Algorand Standard Asset) into a green treasury so that its protocol keeps running as carbon-negative. I'm pretty familiar with the basics of cryptocurrency and blockchains, but the above paragraph makes almost no sense to me.
    • fumblebee 5y ago
      It's times like this I ask myself whether I'm slow, or whether the text in question is needlessly complex. My pessimistic side suggests this could be purposeful obfuscation of implementation by using complex language. No one will question their solution if no one can understand it. On the other hand, I'm a big proponent of the Algorand project and based on the general quality of their work (the tech, docs, tutorials, etc.), I'd be surprised if there were anything malignant going on.
    • nscalf 5y ago
      They're going to buy carbon credits to offset the carbon emissions derived from using the network, then lock them away so they can't trade them off at a later time. That is definitely some marketing lingo tied around "we buy carbon credits".
• xutopia 5y ago
  So... how much money will someone make from mining post merge? Will people be able to make money?
• stickac 5y ago
  It will also make it 99.95% less resistant to censorship.
  • everfree 5y ago
    Ethereum's PoS design is censorship-proof up to 33% and censorship-resistant up to 66% of staked Ether. Compare to PoW's 51% and you'll see that they're somewhat comparable.
• truth_seeker 5y ago
  Can someone point out what exactly changed at low level code to achieve this optimization in energy consumption or they altered the algorithm altogether ?
• sktrdie 5y ago
  Does someone have a deeper understanding into Proof Of Stake? For what I remember it never had the same security promises that Proof Of Work had. In other words if PoS is conceptually sound why don't all cryptocurrencies switch over to it?
  • lifty 5y ago
    They actually are. Most new projects have chosen PoS for sybil resistance, and once Ethereum switches as well, we should have a large enough honey pot in order to gain confidence regarding its security.
• mmmmmbop 5y ago
  Could somebody help me understand the valuation of Ether? Let's assume for a second that future developments in the the Ethereum protocol really unlock the widespread use of distributed apps, and herald a new technological era. As far as I understand, Ethereum optimists are betting that then people will be forced to buy Ether to participate in this Internet of distributed apps, driving the price higher. In this (optimistic) case, wouldn't someone just start a new blockchain with the Ethereum protocol? It's open source, right? To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every human a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for staking (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast majority of people than a blockchain where the early adopters are the new rubber barons of the Internet.
  • scsilver 5y ago
    People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi. Binance has their own network thats growing similarly. Both do have a huge amount of speculators. There are other up and coming complements to the market aswell including Polkadot. Some like ethereum for its maturity and dev team.
    • hanniabu 5y ago
      Imo Polkadot is "obsolete" now with Ethereum moving forward with a rollup-centric roadmap since L2 rollups are pretty much the same as parachains.
      • exo762 5y ago
        What is your take on Near?
    • SmellTheGlove 5y ago
      > People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi. Serious question - what does this actually mean? What defi apps are people running to make money besides minting other coins?
      • 5y ago
• leishman 5y ago
  Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work is provably resistant to this, as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots efforts. A PoS currency will be controlled by a cabal of US financial institutions, and indirectly by the US regulatory system. Be careful what you wish for.
  • aqme28 5y ago
    I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or even resistant to it. The people with capital control the mining. At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS
    • fredfoobar 5y ago
      There's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-war https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w... "Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/1394006548876308485?s=20 https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...
      • dahfizz 5y ago
        Why wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.
        • fredfoobar 5y ago
          [responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users. more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k
• gpsx 5y ago
  Wouldn’t it be nice if energy were free, and caused no environmental damage? Well, how about cheaper and cleaner. Whether you think spending energy on coin mining is worthwhile or not, energy is required to do any work (by definition), so to feed our innovations, easy energy is important (and not evil). We will need to work on that.
• aaroninsf 5y ago
  "Supermarket Monopoly scratchers now printed on 80% post-consumer recycled paper using organic soy ink." Details at 11.
• fnord77 5y ago
  currently, one single bitcoin transaction "costs" 132 kg of CO2.
• a-dub 5y ago
  proof of work is a massive waste, it's true, but it does serve a one time valuable purpose: it bootstraps the value of the tokens by having people make real investments with existing currency and hardware in their creation. beyond that, it's literally insane, it only works when there's a very competitive race to burn as much energy as possible. however, once the value of those tokens is established (as is true for most of the big cryptocurrencies today), there is really no compelling reason not to emulate the proof of work block lottery with a proof of stake block lottery. there is absolutely no reason why people can't lock up digital currency funds long term in exchange for share in a 10 minute lottery rather than lock up funds in hardware mining investments and associated power supplies for them. i've been watching ethereum's progress on this with interest, and fully expect with time that bitcoin will follow.
  • randomopining 5y ago
    Doesn't POS incentivize oligarchal collusion?
    • a-dub 5y ago
      no more than PoW. they're both essentially lotteries that hand out share/influence based on capital investment. PoS, done right, simply emulates PoW. what does PoS done right look like? "miners" lock up funds for 1-2 years. the amount of funds they lock up determines how likely they are to win the block lottery. the block lottery, and locking up funds for entries within it, remain decentralized. the challenge is running a decentralized lottery with distributed consensus. this is hard, but i don't think impossible.
    • jtsiskin 5y ago
      According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b..., 65% of BTC mining already happens within one country.
• randomopining 5y ago
  Crypto is dumb, although I will try to ride the wave. PoW -- wasteful electrical mining, only big entities can build efficient asic farms. And only in low cost of electricity spots. PoS -- will incentive oligarchal collusion. Basically same as our current financial system.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  ITT: massive amounts of contradiction. This is just ridiculous: no one seems to know how this all works, or even agree on something that is happening right in front of us. This is a big red flag. EDIT: Instead of down-voting, maybe prove me wrong?
• amarant 5y ago
  I'm not saying 99.95% of energy was completely wasted... I'm saying the last 0.05% was too
• web3nix 5y ago
  Many people are talking about PoW vs PoS here. Nobody tends to mention that in PoS a hostile takeover by a majority stake can just have its staked coins 'forked' out by the community. The goal of PoS is to have actors held responsible for their actions. In my mind this is much more powerful than PoW because surely hostile majority mining power can't simply be forked away (sure you could change the hashing algorithm but even then the attacker could just move on to a different chain with no real consequences of their actions no?). Interested to hear what other people think.
• o_p 5y ago
  I think the final outcome of this is that people will go to the next hot PoW coin and the eth "elites" will be left alone playing oligarch
• x4e 5y ago
  People interested in POS should look at Nano [1]. In Ethereum only "validators" validate transactions - those with more than 32 Eth in their own wallet. In Nano "representatives" validate transactions - but individual users vote a representative to represent them (with their wallet balance as a weighting). The difference is that you can have 0.00001 Nano and still have a say over the network. It also removes the need for "stake pools" where lots of people lend Eth to one person to make up 32 Eth together (with the hope you will get your money back). [1]: https://nano.org https://nano.org
  • Siira 5y ago
    > you can have 0.00001 Nano and still have a say over the network. Isn’t that susceptible to sybil (flooding) attacks?
    • x4e 5y ago
      Your voting power is weighted by your balance, so those with higher balances have more voting power, and the representatives with the highest amount voted onto them have the highest amount of control over the network.
• grubles 5y ago
  Bitcoin layer-2 massively reduces the amount of energy used per transaction. For every on-chain Bitcoin transaction, potentially millions upon millions of Lightning transactions can occur.
  • roskelld 5y ago
    It should always be clear that bitcoin doesn't have an energy use per transaction. The energy use of the network doesn't increase with the number of transactions conducted. It's absolutely true that the layers built on top of bitcoin do and will continue to present scale, allowing for more and faster tx per second.
• webinvest 5y ago
  Ethereum 2.0 isn’t expected to be released until 2022, 2023, or 2024* If you’re looking for something that works now, you can take a look at the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase, Stellar Lumens (XLM). It sure is energy efficient. More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_emissions_are_on_peoples_minds_right/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e... Sources: *Coinbase, Stakewise
  • suikadayo 5y ago
    False. PoS Beaconchain is already running, since December 2020, and the merge is expected to happen Q3 2021 or Q1 2022. Sharding is not immediately necessary for Eth2 to scale - we have rollups in the meantime for that.
    • webinvest 5y ago
      “Ethereum 2.0 is an upcoming set of upgrades to Ethereum that's intended to make it significantly faster, less expensive, and more scalable. As part of the upgrade, participants may stake ETH tokens to help secure the network. In exchange for staking, participants then receive rewards on their staked ETH. Staked ETH (and rewards) can't be unstaked until Ethereum 2.0 fully launches, which most experts estimate will happen between 2022 and 2024.” -Coinbase
      • suikadayo 5y ago
        The merge is expected to happen Q3 2021 or Q1 2022, and the withdrawal/unstake functionality will be implemented afterwards, so most likely 2022.
• dang 5y ago
  All: this thread has over 1500 comments. To see all of it you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=5 (Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)
• CynicusRex 5y ago
  A more energy efficient pyramid Ponzi scheme. Congratulations.
• DINKDINK 5y ago
  Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's PoW<->Difficulty Adjustment<->Fixed Money Issuance novel art was published. Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value, you incentivize ~<X units of energy to be expended) Summarized here: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ If the curious reader is interested in reading more about the scope of fraud that the ethereum protocol has fueled read the post here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_what_exactly_is_the_fraud_in_ethereum/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.re... Why link to the archive.org copy and not the original? Ethereum people got mod access to the subreddit and deleted everything pointing out the fraud.
  • moralestapia 5y ago
    I went through that as it was happening. Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity. Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • vvillena 5y ago
      In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism that gives legitimacy to the rest of the blockchain. The original Bitcoin paper explains this perfectly, so I won't replicate it here.
      • 5y ago
• Havoc 5y ago
  The fact that this has 1000+ comments should give pause to anyone thinking crypto is a gimmick
• skrowl 5y ago
  Too little, too late. Cardano (ADA) is going to beat them to it and eat their lunch.
  • suikadayo 5y ago
    Cardano doesn't have the 8x developer mindshare, teams working on projects, nor the institutional interest as Ethereum.
• martindale 5y ago
  Sure, and become permanently controlled by the founders, who control 60% of the outstanding supply. Proof of Stake enables any party who at any point controls more than ⅓ of funds to rewrite the chain from that point forward, so this is an objectively terrible idea from an engineering perspective.
• the2ndfloorguy 5y ago
  Good one.
• Black101 5y ago
  So if you have more ETH, you will get more ETH?
• leric 5y ago
  A big wave of (used) nVidia Cards are approaching
• ddrdrck_ 5y ago
  I did not read through every posts but I have seen a lot of ignorant comments regarding PoS and dPoS. Also I am very surprised that Tendermint (dPoS consensus), Cosmos (decentralized network using Tendermint) and Cosmos SDK (used by many projects, e.g. BNB) do not seem to be mentioned anywhere. I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to have a look at it.
• Black101 5y ago
  Dang keeps saying that he doesn't like obvious comments but he keeps posting comments like this: https://i.imgur.com/jdNHIy0.png https://i.imgur.com/jdNHIy0.png ... and pagination has been an issue for a long time.... not sure what it brings. Just search for "(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)" is you want to find other occurrences. Just put the pagination link at the top too if you think that it is an issue instead of sticking your post to the top every time pagination is used? Or just fix the website... how expensive can it be to display 1000 comments with no images.