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They persist because there’s a lot of skeptics who only see the harms that crypto causes: making money laundering trivial with tumblers, making a safe haven for

They persist because there’s a lot of skeptics who only see the harms that crypto causes: making money laundering trivial with tumblers, making a safe haven for criminal activity by bypassing kYC laws, deriving much of its value from speculators who have no intention to actually use it as a currency, screwing over these customers with market manipulation that is illegal in most markets, making goods like graphics cards impossible to buy, putting a floor on the price of energy to be whatever can be mined, and contributing to global warming by spending the energy of a country on a silly number of transactions. But if you have a good article on why web3 is good For all parties involved, I will read that too.

DennisP 5y ago
Your last three points will be solved on Ethereum by proof of stake. It's been in the works for a long time, but now the proof of stake network has been running in production for over a year, with $30 billion in ETH deposited. It's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining, but the code to merge the networks is running on a public testnet. All their previous upgrades have gone live within a year of their public testnets.
- inlined 5y ago
  How many joules per transaction is the proof of stake network? How many tps can it perform?
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Based on observations, it looks like the proof of stake network will drop Ethereum's energy usage by about 99.95%. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ It can do this because it doesn't rely on any sort of "work." It's just another internet protocol. Proof of stake doesn't have anything to do with tps, so that won't change significantly. The solutions to that are rollups (second layers that inherit the full security of the main chain) and sharding (which multiplies the capacity of rollups). Some rollup systems are in production today, capable of a couple thousand tps. According to the most recent plan I saw, sharding would multiply that by twenty, initially.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    In terms of "tps", transactions per second, Proof of Work Ethereum can handle 30 transactions per second. Part of the development for "Proof of Stake" Ethereum includes scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum will reach 160,000 tps. Please note, the upcoming improvement to Proof of Stake Ethereum does not yet use sharding, but it is under development. As comparison 1,700 tps for the Visa network is a good benchmark. I recall Visa's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number though. This comparison isn't intended to claim "ETH beats Visa for currency stuff", but simply to give a sense of the potential impact of Ethereum as it improves. Thousands of transactions per second implies a powerful network, whatever it's used for.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      These claims for Ethereum doing 100k tps on the base layer are bogus. It might look nice, but completely out of reality from a fully distributed network. None of the core devs talk about these things anymore and everyone has accepted that the way to scale will involve layer-2 systems and some sacrifices in decentralization for performance. Anyone claiming to do 1k+ tps on a blockchain is either lying or just running things on a very limited or expensive network. Even then, take a look at Solana and see how many outages they are having lately.
      - magicjosh 5y ago
        Hmm source? Unless something has changed since January 3rd, 2022, sharding is intended as I stated. Here's an interview with Vitalik one of the core devs of ETH: https://youtu.be/b1m_PTVxD-s?t=1466 https://youtu.be/b1m_PTVxD-s?t=1466 Or perhaps you're saying Vitalik isn't relevant anymore? Perhaps he's only a figurehead now or something. Or perhaps I have something more to learn about how this all works. Again, sources would be great, I'm curious for what the future holds.
        rglullis 5y ago
        I am not questioning the roadmap, or that they want to have sharding. I am questioning the numbers. Getting 2400tps per shard is already a pipe-dream, but tps does not scale linearly with the number of shards. The more shards you have, the more transactions will require cross-shard communication, bringing total tps down. Also, the video you linked has Vitalik talking about roll-ups as the main way to scale. With roll-ups, sure, we can get to 100k tps, but like I said in this case we are not talking about base-layer anymore.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Ethereum plans to scale is not just on the switch to PoS. It will also include layer-2 systems. In any case, currently there are ~300000 validator nodes running the beacon chain, which does not require powerful hardware. For comparison, 13.4M units of the Playstation 5 were sold since 2020. 116.6M units of the PS4 were sold since 2013. I'd like to know the number of servers runnning Minecraft there are around, but you can unarguably say that people waste more energy playing videogames than with the ethereum network.
    - inlined 5y ago
      PS5 uses a peak of 200W[0]. If they were used constantly, it would be 200Wh/h or 1.75MWh/yr. 13.4M PS5s would kick that up to 23TWhr/yr. The energy use of Eth is estimated at over 100TWHr/yr[1]. So no… even if every PS5, a chip that has climate scientists worried, that was ever created was left doing something horribly inefficient (say, computing PoW coin) 24x7 it would be using a quarter of this one coin’s energy consumption. [0]: https://www.gamesradar.com/why-climate-scientists-think-the-ps5-and-xbox-series-x-are-still-too-much-of-an-energy-drain/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20from%20the,energy%20usage%20of%20their%20predecessors https://www.gamesradar.com/why-climate-scientists-think-the-.... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265897/worldwide-ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265897/worldwide-ethere...
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Forget about PoW. I was talking about the 300k PoS validators on the Beacon chain ("ETH2.0"). You can run a validator on less than 10W. Any cheap celeron can do it.
  - landemva 5y ago
    I wonder if we should rate USPS by joules per envelope delivered.
rglullis 5y ago
80% of what the "skeptics" attack is based on issues that are not related to "web3" but to simple Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms. PoW is acknowledged to be a sub-optimal system, everyone serious working in the space wants to get rid of it. Most of any new projects are already based on some other consensus system and at least Ethereum is poised to make the switch this year. The other 20% of the issues are things that skeptics claim to be "causing harm", but either ignore to see that the harm already exists with the status quo (money laundering with crypto is actually really hard, and a lot more money gets laundered within the existing financial infrastructure) or ignore there are solutions to mitigate them being developed or in place. There is no system that will be "good for all parties involved". Ever. It's all about trade-offs. It's fine if you are okay with the status quo, but don't go around thinking that everyone working in the space is either malicious or an opportunist.
- Diggsey 5y ago
  > 80% of what the "skeptics" attack is based on issues that are not related to "web3" but to simple Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms. Not surprising when the vast majority of activity is on systems still using proof-of-work. Even the term "web3" is just a blatant attempt to profit off the success of the web as a technology. Not to mention, other systems that don't use proof-of-work have their own downsides. All of them are hugely inefficient compared to non-blockchain-based technology. > The other 20% of the issues are things that skeptics claim to be "causing harm", but either ignore to see that the harm already exists with the status quo (money laundering with crypto is actually really hard [Citation needed] > , and a lot more money gets laundered within the existing financial infrastructure) Again, what evidence do you have of this? And even it's true, it means nothing when the vast, vast majority of transactions happen on... existing financial infrastructure. Are you really going to argue that a smaller proportion of crypto transactions are laundering money? > There is no system that will be "good for all parties involved". Ever. It's all about trade-offs. It's fine if you are okay with the status quo, but don't go around thinking that everyone working in the space is either malicious or an opportunist. Blockchain as a technology is a solution looking for a problem. It always has been. In the early days, you could be justified in thinking that there must be a worthwhile problem out there to solve with it, and that we just need to find it, because it achieved something genuinely new and exciting. To this day, not a single problem has been solved with blockchain. It just doesn't work as a foundation for a digital currency, and for so many reasons! As for other uses of blockchain: ethereum is certainly interesting. Smart contracts are sufficiently powerful that it will be a while before I feel we've exhausted all possible uses for them, but at the end of the day, it's still in the "solution looking for a problem" phase. In short: if you think you've found that killer problem where blockchain is the solution, go for it! I'm not judging anyone for working on it, and seeing where it goes. The issue is with everyone already invested trying to force these magic beans onto people who don't know any better, making outlandish and unsupported claims about a (so far entirely useless) technology. There's a word for this: scamming people. It happens to be illegal. If you own crypto, then you don't have an unbiased opinion on this: more enthusiasm for crypto is directly profitable to you.

DennisP 5y ago

Your last three points will be solved on Ethereum by proof of stake. It's been in the works for a long time, but now the proof of stake network has been running in production for over a year, with $30 billion in ETH deposited. It's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining, but the code to merge the networks is running on a public testnet. All their previous upgrades have gone live within a year of their public testnets.

inlined 5y ago
How many joules per transaction is the proof of stake network? How many tps can it perform?
- DennisP 5y ago
  Based on observations, it looks like the proof of stake network will drop Ethereum's energy usage by about 99.95%. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ It can do this because it doesn't rely on any sort of "work." It's just another internet protocol. Proof of stake doesn't have anything to do with tps, so that won't change significantly. The solutions to that are rollups (second layers that inherit the full security of the main chain) and sharding (which multiplies the capacity of rollups). Some rollup systems are in production today, capable of a couple thousand tps. According to the most recent plan I saw, sharding would multiply that by twenty, initially.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  In terms of "tps", transactions per second, Proof of Work Ethereum can handle 30 transactions per second. Part of the development for "Proof of Stake" Ethereum includes scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum will reach 160,000 tps. Please note, the upcoming improvement to Proof of Stake Ethereum does not yet use sharding, but it is under development. As comparison 1,700 tps for the Visa network is a good benchmark. I recall Visa's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number though. This comparison isn't intended to claim "ETH beats Visa for currency stuff", but simply to give a sense of the potential impact of Ethereum as it improves. Thousands of transactions per second implies a powerful network, whatever it's used for.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    These claims for Ethereum doing 100k tps on the base layer are bogus. It might look nice, but completely out of reality from a fully distributed network. None of the core devs talk about these things anymore and everyone has accepted that the way to scale will involve layer-2 systems and some sacrifices in decentralization for performance. Anyone claiming to do 1k+ tps on a blockchain is either lying or just running things on a very limited or expensive network. Even then, take a look at Solana and see how many outages they are having lately.
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      Hmm source? Unless something has changed since January 3rd, 2022, sharding is intended as I stated. Here's an interview with Vitalik one of the core devs of ETH: https://youtu.be/b1m_PTVxD-s?t=1466 https://youtu.be/b1m_PTVxD-s?t=1466 Or perhaps you're saying Vitalik isn't relevant anymore? Perhaps he's only a figurehead now or something. Or perhaps I have something more to learn about how this all works. Again, sources would be great, I'm curious for what the future holds.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        I am not questioning the roadmap, or that they want to have sharding. I am questioning the numbers. Getting 2400tps per shard is already a pipe-dream, but tps does not scale linearly with the number of shards. The more shards you have, the more transactions will require cross-shard communication, bringing total tps down. Also, the video you linked has Vitalik talking about roll-ups as the main way to scale. With roll-ups, sure, we can get to 100k tps, but like I said in this case we are not talking about base-layer anymore.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Ethereum plans to scale is not just on the switch to PoS. It will also include layer-2 systems. In any case, currently there are ~300000 validator nodes running the beacon chain, which does not require powerful hardware. For comparison, 13.4M units of the Playstation 5 were sold since 2020. 116.6M units of the PS4 were sold since 2013. I'd like to know the number of servers runnning Minecraft there are around, but you can unarguably say that people waste more energy playing videogames than with the ethereum network.
  - inlined 5y ago
    PS5 uses a peak of 200W[0]. If they were used constantly, it would be 200Wh/h or 1.75MWh/yr. 13.4M PS5s would kick that up to 23TWhr/yr. The energy use of Eth is estimated at over 100TWHr/yr[1]. So no… even if every PS5, a chip that has climate scientists worried, that was ever created was left doing something horribly inefficient (say, computing PoW coin) 24x7 it would be using a quarter of this one coin’s energy consumption. [0]: https://www.gamesradar.com/why-climate-scientists-think-the-ps5-and-xbox-series-x-are-still-too-much-of-an-energy-drain/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20from%20the,energy%20usage%20of%20their%20predecessors https://www.gamesradar.com/why-climate-scientists-think-the-.... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265897/worldwide-ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265897/worldwide-ethere...
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Forget about PoW. I was talking about the 300k PoS validators on the Beacon chain ("ETH2.0"). You can run a validator on less than 10W. Any cheap celeron can do it.
- landemva 5y ago
  I wonder if we should rate USPS by joules per envelope delivered.

rglullis 5y ago

80% of what the "skeptics" attack is based on issues that are not related to "web3" but to simple Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms. PoW is acknowledged to be a sub-optimal system, everyone serious working in the space wants to get rid of it. Most of any new projects are already based on some other consensus system and at least Ethereum is poised to make the switch this year. The other 20% of the issues are things that skeptics claim to be "causing harm", but either ignore to see that the harm already exists with the status quo (money laundering with crypto is actually really hard, and a lot more money gets laundered within the existing financial infrastructure) or ignore there are solutions to mitigate them being developed or in place. There is no system that will be "good for all parties involved". Ever. It's all about trade-offs. It's fine if you are okay with the status quo, but don't go around thinking that everyone working in the space is either malicious or an opportunist.

Diggsey 5y ago
> 80% of what the "skeptics" attack is based on issues that are not related to "web3" but to simple Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms. Not surprising when the vast majority of activity is on systems still using proof-of-work. Even the term "web3" is just a blatant attempt to profit off the success of the web as a technology. Not to mention, other systems that don't use proof-of-work have their own downsides. All of them are hugely inefficient compared to non-blockchain-based technology. > The other 20% of the issues are things that skeptics claim to be "causing harm", but either ignore to see that the harm already exists with the status quo (money laundering with crypto is actually really hard [Citation needed] > , and a lot more money gets laundered within the existing financial infrastructure) Again, what evidence do you have of this? And even it's true, it means nothing when the vast, vast majority of transactions happen on... existing financial infrastructure. Are you really going to argue that a smaller proportion of crypto transactions are laundering money? > There is no system that will be "good for all parties involved". Ever. It's all about trade-offs. It's fine if you are okay with the status quo, but don't go around thinking that everyone working in the space is either malicious or an opportunist. Blockchain as a technology is a solution looking for a problem. It always has been. In the early days, you could be justified in thinking that there must be a worthwhile problem out there to solve with it, and that we just need to find it, because it achieved something genuinely new and exciting. To this day, not a single problem has been solved with blockchain. It just doesn't work as a foundation for a digital currency, and for so many reasons! As for other uses of blockchain: ethereum is certainly interesting. Smart contracts are sufficiently powerful that it will be a while before I feel we've exhausted all possible uses for them, but at the end of the day, it's still in the "solution looking for a problem" phase. In short: if you think you've found that killer problem where blockchain is the solution, go for it! I'm not judging anyone for working on it, and seeing where it goes. The issue is with everyone already invested trying to force these magic beans onto people who don't know any better, making outlandish and unsupported claims about a (so far entirely useless) technology. There's a word for this: scamming people. It happens to be illegal. If you own crypto, then you don't have an unbiased opinion on this: more enthusiasm for crypto is directly profitable to you.