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Have you looked at the data before making the claims? Ethereum far surpasses in use Bitcoin by pretty much any metric you look. For example, in the last 24h Et

• mechanical_bear 5y ago
  Of course they don’t actually consider facts when wielding their hate boners for cryptocurrencies. It’s become tired and predictable every time this topic is brought up. It’s as bad as Religion on Reddit. If they don’t like cryptocurrency, just move on, no one is going to win hearts and minds being the negative jerk about it every time it’s brought.
• camgunz 5y ago
  The metric that matters is price, for two reasons: - Gas fees are based on price - As price increases it's more attractive to mine. That means devs will increase the mining difficulty. That means more electricity use. > The transition to PoS cuts the energy consumption by 99.95%, btw. It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point?
  • pa7x1 5y ago
    > Gas fees are based on price This is not correct. Gas fees are essentially an auction for blockspace, the basefee is adjusted dynamically via EIP-1559 but the tip is essentially an auction (highest bidders go first). If demand outstrips blockspace gas fees go up, independently of ETH price. If supply of blockspace is greater than demand, then gas fees go down irrespectively of ETH price. EDIT: To clarify. What you say would be the case if gas fees were a set amount of ETH. Then, of course, gas fees denominated in $ would be totally correlated with ETH price. But this is not the case. Gas fees work as explained above and thus are, in principle, decoupled from ETH price. Although some correlation might occur due to market dynamics (bull markets bring network activity, bear markets take away network activity) but is not built-in into the gas price mechanism. > - As price increases it's more attractive to mine. This is correct. > That means devs will increase the mining difficulty. The mining difficulty adjusts itself, the devs do not need to modify. Same as in Bitcoin, it's designed to adjust to maintain an even block production. You might be thinking of the difficulty bomb that needs to be defused once in a while but it has nothing to do with this topic. > It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point? Not following.
    • sanderjd 5y ago
      Bitcoin maximalists believe that PoS is definitionally centralized and therefore pointless. This does not make much sense, especially since PoW has always devolved into a small number of large mining pools.
      • camgunz 5y ago
        I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, and I agree with your point about mining pools. I just think PoS is centralization with extra steps with fewer steps than PoW.
        • sanderjd 5y ago
          I didn't totally mean that you personally are a Bitcoin maximalist, just that this is one of their arguments. Did you mean extra steps or fewer? Either way, I think it mostly remains to be seen on the centralization question. The newer-fangled PoS chains are certainly more centralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum, but nobody has actually tried distributing tokens broadly through a bunch of years of PoW and only then switching to PoS. It could plausibly end up being quite a bit more decentralized than Bitcoin.
          • camgunz 5y ago
            > Did you mean extra steps or fewer? Eh I was trying to be extra clever but, that's practically a synonym for being opaque. To zoom out a little, I just think these systems have a kind of reverse entropy. Think about all the "decentralized" systems we started off with: email, newsgroups, payments, web apps, State government in the US. They kind of congeal into walled gardens, one and all, and that's probably because frog boiling is very easy (give up an imperceptible amount of control for a hugely perceptible amount of convenience) and the end goal is very profitable. Like, any company would love to be able to scan every Gmail user's email for ad leads. Holy shit. And we let that happen because of... idk search, anti-spam and storage so large you never have to think about it. Maybe a good deal, honestly, I don't know. And we're seeing this happen in crypto right? The pitch of literally every crypto service is "simple and you'll get rich". Well this is the same thing: people are giving up imperceptible levels of control for super perceptible levels of convenience. And sure, that's their choice. And we can laugh in people's faces when they get rug pulled saying "not your keys not your crypto" but that's not gonna win us any friends. And we'll be laughing while the blockchains centralize (as they are already doing, right now). So I think PoW is centralization with extra steps. I think PoS is also centralization with extra steps, but the huge buy-in bakes centralization in right at the beginning, so it's fewer steps than PoW. Crypto was supposed to democratize money and payments! Why is there a $130k entrance fee? And then for those who can't afford that, how many of them will really band together to buy stake shares? How much of that will be a scam? How much of that will be big conglomerates who actually run the nodes, give you your 2% return, but meanwhile they've seized control of the Ethereum network, all while you funded it! So if we're taking crypto's values earnestly, I really do think we have to see PoS as an acceleration towards centralization and a big step backwards. ~~~ I can't even get excited about some potential positive outcomes (PoS happening, energy use declining, centralization also happening, crypto dying, switches to PoS causing schisms, crypto dying, nations banning crypto mining, crypto dying) because so many good, honest people have been hoodwinked into this bonkers scheme and they'll lose so, so much money. And honestly, for what? So banks can't stop you from making an ACH transfer for weed? Seriously, just get out there and vote already. ~~~ Broadly I think this a problem with the fundamental libertarian underpinnings of blockchain currencies. They sort of presuppose that everyone starts from the same place, and then you're rewarded in line with what you contribute to the network. But in the world we live in, there's huge inequality--we absolutely do not start from the same place. So unless your protocol has some mechanism to even things out, it'll just reproduce that inequality. And that inequality has a lot of second order effects. Rich people can buy a lot of mining or a lot of stake. They can afford to start businesses like exchanges or crypto news websites (or buy them after they get popular). They can afford to buy ads pumping their coin, or astroturf campaigns against changes they don't like. They can build services on the chain and collect rent. Same as it ever was. There's this whole conundrum in progressive politics about why some people so consistently vote against their own self interest. There's a lot of reasons, but one I thought was just absolutely wrong was "well, everyone thinks they'll be rich someday"--so they vote against taxes and regulation and such. But that is 100% the dynamic in crypto right now. I honestly don't see any positive outcome from any of this, I really don't.
  • rglullis 5y ago
    > It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point? If Visa could be shared by anyone (without restriction) that is willing to stake capital into it, if it took at least 66% of the shares to try to collude, if it managed to do it at a fraction of the cost of the existing financial infrastructure, if it were uncensorable by governments and if it continues to be permissionless... then Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
    • camgunz 5y ago
      If we could maybe keep our discussion to one thread that would be helpful. Meta aside, you described the stock market. You don't even need 66%, just a big percentage of shareholders (there are efforts to do this with big evil companies like Exxon). Uncensorable is a pipe dream, crypto isn't beyond the reach of governments, as China's mining ban has demonstrated. And you're wildly mischaracterizing the costs of the existing payment systems vs crypto; maybe you think there wouldn't be all the ancillary bureaucracies and services, but that's literally all the exchanges and such are so you'd already be wrong.
      • rglullis 5y ago
        > You don't even need 66%, just a big percentage of shareholders Unlike most companies in the stock market, the fact that Ethereum has a low point of entry leads to two things happening: - The sheer amount of people needed to be involved in collusion would make such an attack practically impossible. - The chance of such an attack being profitable is so low to make it economically unattractive. An attack of the network would lead to a loss of the value of Ethereum itself, so unless those in collusion have other assets on the chain that are more valuable than the staked Ethereum itself, it will end up being net negative. > Uncensorable is a pipe dream (...) China's mining ban has demonstrated. China may ban mining as much as they want, this is not the uncensorable part I am talking about. What I am talking about is that there is no single entity that can stop you from making transactions on the blockchain. Even if someone is deemed "subversive" in China and gets denied a service by the social credit system, they can still have access to the blockchain, buy, sell and use services. We don't need even need to talk about China. Just think of all the people who had problems with Paypal and had their funds frozen with no recourse. Think of all the people that live in countries with strict capital controls and can not move their money if they want to. This is what I mean by "uncensorable". > you're wildly mischaracterizing the costs of the existing payment systems vs crypto Currently, it costs more (a lot more) to make even simple transfers on the blockchain, but as the technology scales and new solutions come up, these will go down. There will also be insurance, fraud-detecting and even conflict-resolution [0] systems based on the blockchain, so at one point the UX will be just as good as swiping a credit card. [0]: https://kleros.io https://kleros.io