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At least on the ethereum side they are moving to a Proof of Stake system which doesn't require the insane hardware and energy that Proof of Work consensus requi

At least on the ethereum side they are moving to a Proof of Stake system which doesn't require the insane hardware and energy that Proof of Work consensus requires. So there will be some relief on the horizon. Also, I expect over time that fewer cryptos will use Proof of Work. Unless you're Bitcoin/Ethereum, proof of work chains get attacked all the time. Look at Ethereum Classic.

ip26 5y ago
How many years has etherium been putting off proof of stake now? Two? Three?
- falcolas 5y ago
  At this point, it feels like the corporate perpetual “13 months out“. i.e. never coming, always on the horizon.
  - ikt 5y ago
    this is a major update to a system that handles trillions in transactions, i'm happy they're taking their time on it. tbh though very seriously likely this year, all the major infrastructure is in place
    - falcolas 5y ago
      And, as ever, the exact same thing was said early last year, too. And the year before, if my memory serves me. I’ll have more faith that it’s actually coming once Star Citizen comes out. Until it’s actually released, skepticism’s the safest bet.
      - drdeca 5y ago
        Speaking of betting, What do prediction markets say about whether it will be out by what times?
      - dcolkitt 5y ago
        That's not true. This time last year, the Beacon chain had only been running for a little more than a month. Also the code was not complete to merge Pow/PoS chains. The merge has already happened on Testnet, so literally the full merge could be done on Mainnet tomorrow if the Ethereum core team wanted to.
- kingo55 5y ago
  There are forks of Ethereum already running PoS consensus (e.g. Binance Smart Chain, Songbird and an upcoming fork called PulseChain to name a few). I hear the difficult part is getting the sharding to work.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    BSC isn't strictly a fork of Ethereum, though it is EVM compatible and uses the geth protocol. It also uses the Tendermint consensus protocol from Cosmos, which is different from the PoS implementation being worked on by Ethereum. Sharding is definitely proving to be challenging for Ethereum, but my understanding is that it's being worked on independently of the move to PoS now.
  - FranksTV 5y ago
    The difficult part is figuring out why anyone would ever want to use any of this stuff for anything other than money laundering.
- musha68k 5y ago
  I gave up on crypto because of the failed promise of proof of stake in ethereum especially. We are talking 2015 here. AFAIR it’s been minimum 6 years. Tezos has been looking interesting though I never looked in detail anymore. OCaml based, COQ checked code base and truly proof-of-stake last time I checked? Did anyone play with it in here? I know Ubisoft jumped on the lets-create-artificial-scarcity-where-we-can NFT hype train for some DLC. A terrible idea on the whole which should never find traction but interesting to me again because it’s apparently built on greater Tezos “stack”.
  - tzatziki 5y ago
    Tezos has the largest grass roots adoption after ethereum for nft art. It’s very under the radar so I’m glad you asked. It has a burgeoning ecosystem and many users on ethereum are aware and have used tezos. As tezos ecosystem evolves, I believe it’s going siphon off a large amount of users from ethereum.
- CryptoBanker 5y ago
  Ever since I quit my job in finance - that was 4 years ago now.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  First POS was in 2012. Ethereum mentioned it in 2015. So it's been 7 years since announcement.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Proof of stake has been running for a year already. https://beaconcha.in https://beaconcha.in They are currently working on merging the v1 and v2 chains.
toolz 5y ago
As someone deeply interested and invested in crypto I strongly disagree. Proof of work has it's place in the ecosystem and isn't going anywhere. Plenty of modern chains are utilizing proof of work for various reasons.
- kingo55 5y ago
  We're seeing evidence for a preference for PoS already [1]. Proof of Work only makes sense if you'll have majority hash rate. Would you trust PoW in the case of Ethereum Classic? 1: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/pos/ https://coinmarketcap.com/view/pos/ Edit: Also I should highlight I'm not arguing to shift away from PoW where it makes sense.
  - toolz 5y ago
    > We're seeing evidence for a preference for PoS already This isn't evidence of proof of work going away. I'm not sure why you think it is. More coins will be made with PoW and the ones that have PoW today likely will stay PoW. There's no reason to believe PoW is going to shrink, just because PoS is growing. > Would you trust PoW in the case of Ethereum Classic No, but I trust PoW with coins that have ASIC/FGPA resistant hashing algorithms. PoS isn't without trust issues either. What do you do if/when defi starts offering greater returns than staking? Obviously there will be a large exodus in staking making it more vulnerable to majority attacks as well.
    - Acrobatic_Road 5y ago
      Even if no existing coins switch to PoS (spoiler: many will), the PoS coins will suck up fee-paying users from the PoW coins, reducing the returns on mining, which will result in lower network hashpower. It may also bring a second-order effect of reducing the prices of PoW coins, which will reduce dollar-denominated block rewards on those networks, and that will bring hashpower down even farther.
      - toolz 5y ago
        ETH continues to grow its hashrate every day. Even in the face of growing competition, hashrate grows. It's an interesting theory, but there's no evidence of you being right. We already have many extremely high market-cap PoS coins, many with more features than ETH will have even after it's PoS transition, yet PoW hash continues to skyrocket.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Proof of Stake implementation has been as never-ending as COVID restrictions. Besides, it's not clear whether PoS won't create governance problems. PoW is a pretty smart solution of proving you spent some money and pays the miners so that people who have computing power won't attack the system. PoS is trusting rich people, hoping they won't bring down everything for who knows what profit - a government printing money to delay a market crisis, is not that far.

ip26 5y ago

How many years has etherium been putting off proof of stake now? Two? Three?

falcolas 5y ago
At this point, it feels like the corporate perpetual “13 months out“. i.e. never coming, always on the horizon.
- ikt 5y ago
  this is a major update to a system that handles trillions in transactions, i'm happy they're taking their time on it. tbh though very seriously likely this year, all the major infrastructure is in place
  - falcolas 5y ago
    And, as ever, the exact same thing was said early last year, too. And the year before, if my memory serves me. I’ll have more faith that it’s actually coming once Star Citizen comes out. Until it’s actually released, skepticism’s the safest bet.
    - drdeca 5y ago
      Speaking of betting, What do prediction markets say about whether it will be out by what times?
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      That's not true. This time last year, the Beacon chain had only been running for a little more than a month. Also the code was not complete to merge Pow/PoS chains. The merge has already happened on Testnet, so literally the full merge could be done on Mainnet tomorrow if the Ethereum core team wanted to.
kingo55 5y ago
There are forks of Ethereum already running PoS consensus (e.g. Binance Smart Chain, Songbird and an upcoming fork called PulseChain to name a few). I hear the difficult part is getting the sharding to work.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  BSC isn't strictly a fork of Ethereum, though it is EVM compatible and uses the geth protocol. It also uses the Tendermint consensus protocol from Cosmos, which is different from the PoS implementation being worked on by Ethereum. Sharding is definitely proving to be challenging for Ethereum, but my understanding is that it's being worked on independently of the move to PoS now.
- FranksTV 5y ago
  The difficult part is figuring out why anyone would ever want to use any of this stuff for anything other than money laundering.
musha68k 5y ago
I gave up on crypto because of the failed promise of proof of stake in ethereum especially. We are talking 2015 here. AFAIR it’s been minimum 6 years. Tezos has been looking interesting though I never looked in detail anymore. OCaml based, COQ checked code base and truly proof-of-stake last time I checked? Did anyone play with it in here? I know Ubisoft jumped on the lets-create-artificial-scarcity-where-we-can NFT hype train for some DLC. A terrible idea on the whole which should never find traction but interesting to me again because it’s apparently built on greater Tezos “stack”.
- tzatziki 5y ago
  Tezos has the largest grass roots adoption after ethereum for nft art. It’s very under the radar so I’m glad you asked. It has a burgeoning ecosystem and many users on ethereum are aware and have used tezos. As tezos ecosystem evolves, I believe it’s going siphon off a large amount of users from ethereum.
CryptoBanker 5y ago
Ever since I quit my job in finance - that was 4 years ago now.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
First POS was in 2012. Ethereum mentioned it in 2015. So it's been 7 years since announcement.
zarzavat 5y ago
Proof of stake has been running for a year already. https://beaconcha.in https://beaconcha.in They are currently working on merging the v1 and v2 chains.

toolz 5y ago

As someone deeply interested and invested in crypto I strongly disagree. Proof of work has it's place in the ecosystem and isn't going anywhere. Plenty of modern chains are utilizing proof of work for various reasons.

kingo55 5y ago
We're seeing evidence for a preference for PoS already [1]. Proof of Work only makes sense if you'll have majority hash rate. Would you trust PoW in the case of Ethereum Classic? 1: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/pos/ https://coinmarketcap.com/view/pos/ Edit: Also I should highlight I'm not arguing to shift away from PoW where it makes sense.
- toolz 5y ago
  > We're seeing evidence for a preference for PoS already This isn't evidence of proof of work going away. I'm not sure why you think it is. More coins will be made with PoW and the ones that have PoW today likely will stay PoW. There's no reason to believe PoW is going to shrink, just because PoS is growing. > Would you trust PoW in the case of Ethereum Classic No, but I trust PoW with coins that have ASIC/FGPA resistant hashing algorithms. PoS isn't without trust issues either. What do you do if/when defi starts offering greater returns than staking? Obviously there will be a large exodus in staking making it more vulnerable to majority attacks as well.
  - Acrobatic_Road 5y ago
    Even if no existing coins switch to PoS (spoiler: many will), the PoS coins will suck up fee-paying users from the PoW coins, reducing the returns on mining, which will result in lower network hashpower. It may also bring a second-order effect of reducing the prices of PoW coins, which will reduce dollar-denominated block rewards on those networks, and that will bring hashpower down even farther.
    - toolz 5y ago
      ETH continues to grow its hashrate every day. Even in the face of growing competition, hashrate grows. It's an interesting theory, but there's no evidence of you being right. We already have many extremely high market-cap PoS coins, many with more features than ETH will have even after it's PoS transition, yet PoW hash continues to skyrocket.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Proof of Stake implementation has been as never-ending as COVID restrictions. Besides, it's not clear whether PoS won't create governance problems. PoW is a pretty smart solution of proving you spent some money and pays the miners so that people who have computing power won't attack the system. PoS is trusting rich people, hoping they won't bring down everything for who knows what profit - a government printing money to delay a market crisis, is not that far.