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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

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.
exo762 5y ago
> 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. I think you are wrong. Staker pays in "time-cost of money", which is proportional to the stake size and in energy cost, which is pretty much constant (few watts). Your argument implies that there will be greater amount of stakers. That would be plausible if not for 32ETH minimal stake.

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.

exo762 5y ago

> 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. I think you are wrong. Staker pays in "time-cost of money", which is proportional to the stake size and in energy cost, which is pretty much constant (few watts). Your argument implies that there will be greater amount of stakers. That would be plausible if not for 32ETH minimal stake.