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> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of
by xur17 4y ago
> Instead of talking about these "gas fees" in terms of their monetary value, we should measure them in terms of tons of CO2, or perhaps its equivalent acres-of-the-Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire. I'm 100% serious.
That's.. not how this works. The miner receives a block reward which is a combination of a fixed reward (2 ETH right now) + tips from people trying to get their transaction (typically ~0.2 ETH) [0]. The rest of the transaction fees are burned by the network.
In effect this means that miners are motivated to mine (and hence use CO2) based upon the block rewards. During periods of high network usage, they aren't magically procurring more miners, and hence they aren't actually using more electricity. And since the vast majority of the reward is burnt anyways, during high periods of usage, the miner reward doesn't actually go up that much.
Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether).
[0] https://etherscan.io/block/14700751 https://etherscan.io/block/14700751
- mccorrinall 4y ago> And regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year I’ve been hearing this since 2017. I won’t believe it until I see it.
- delecti 4y agoYup. > The ultimate goal of the Ethereum Foundation for 2017 is to follow the vision of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and make a move from a proof of work to a proof of stake protocol https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexibility-pow-to-pos-improving-ecosystem https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereums-2017-roadmap-flexib...
- Entwickler 4y agoThere's a site made to track the details of what needs to happen before the merge. https://wenmerge.com/ https://wenmerge.com/ it still lacks specific date commitments. The focus is on "when it's ready" given that ~0.5 trillion dollars are in the system.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoI believe the date it currently counts down had been planned as the merge date/deadline but has explicitly been postponed already. ethmerge.com still says Q2 too, but a prediction market https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos sees only a 75% chance of it happening this year, and a 61% chance of it happening by the end of Q3.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoI don't think it'll ever happen because the miners don't want it. They've invested millions into GPUs and they'll all become worthless once Eth switches to PoS. Or they'll find another coin to mine.
- DennisP 4y ago$30 billion in ETH locked on the PoS network will be worthless if they don't switch. Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago>Meanwhile, there's no technical way for the miners to keep the switch from happening. Right, because it’s never happened that miners disagree with a change and split into a different chain…
- DennisP 4y agoThey can certainly do that, but that doesn't keep the merge from happening. It just means there might be a PoW chain on the side. It'll be up to the market to decide whether it's worth anything, and if it's not worth much, it won't support much mining activity. So far, the miners don't appear to be organizing a chain split. And it would take some organizing; they'd need to defuse the difficulty bomb, get exchange support, try to get support from the people running tokens backed by custodied assets, etc. Perhaps most critically, they'd need to get a large portion of the user community to believe that PoW is better and worth sticking with. That's not happening either, and Ethereum users are very much looking forward to PoS.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoRemind me how many existing splits there are?
- DennisP 4y ago
- DennisP 4y agoYes and in 2017 there hadn't been a proof of stake network running in parallel for a year and a half, with 10% of all ETH deposited and locked in place until after proof of work is killed off. Nor had there been multiple public testnets for the merge process.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jjulius 4y agoI'm just an outsider, but to OP's point, in 2017 they had none of what you just cited yet they were making the "within a year" claims, and continued to do so year after year. One can't help but draw a comparison to the boy who cried wolf. Edit: This isn't me taking a position, just observing.
- nicwolff 4y agoI'm also skeptical, but let's remember that the point of the fable is not "the boy's repeated claims lost credibility because the wolf never came", but rather "the people eventually learned to ignore the boy's claims and were caught by surprise when the wolf finally came" ツ
- lupire 4y agoBut if PoS comes after everyone stops caring about ETH (or PoS), it still fails. PoS isn't the hard part. Getting ETH successfully onto PoS is the hard part.
- DennisP 4y agoAccording to the people designing and building this stuff, PoS itself was a lot harder than merging it with the rest of the network. For PoS there was all sorts of complicated game theory, a whole new protocol, and trying to figure out every possible way to attack it. For the merge, it's basically just changing the fork choice rule of the existing network, so instead of going with the fork with the most work, it goes with the one being chosen by the PoS network.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y agoIs ETH actually going to be PoS within a year? It feels like ETH has been “about to be PoS within a year” for like five years now.
- teachrdan 4y agoThey're waiting on Tesla to deliver on FSD first. But that's going to be within the next two years.
- rhacker 4y agoI think the FSD requires PoS first.
- nicbou 4y agoAfter the Year of the Linux Desktop
- kennywinker 4y agoJust in time for the tenth anniversary of the year of luigi
- robbiep 4y agoThat’s about when fusion is going to be commercially viable I think?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoAt this point, it could be possible to get Duke Nukem Forever to run on the Hurd, so never say never.
- latchkey 4y agoThe heartbeat PoS network is running today and has been running for over a year now. The next step is to merge the PoW consensus model onto the PoS network. The last date was supposed to be around June, but seems like that will get pushed to August (or later) now. Yes, it is comical that the dates keep slipping. That said, changing the consensus model for a network with multi billion $'s worth of value stored in it, isn't something you just do with a lot of thoughts and prayers. I don't blame them for taking their time with this transition.
- thebigman433 4y agoWhat makes you think the POS change will happen within a year at this point? Its been continually delayed, and the last word is that it will be "a few months after June"
- ChrisClark 4y agoBecause of the constant consistent progress, the second "shadow merge" completing successfully (testing the change to POS), the little to no bugs found in the various POS clients during these tests, etc. The slowness is a feature, an upgrade like this has to go perfectly, too much money is at stake.
- jjulius 4y ago>Regardless of all of that, Ethereum will be on proof of stake within a year (wouldn't be surprised if it's 3 or 4 months at this point), at which point the CO2 argument will go away altogether). Quoting for posterity.
- quickthrower2 4y agoDo you think this is too optimistic? https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-ethereum-switch-to-proof-of-st https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-ethereum-switch-to-...
- jjulius 4y agoI have no position.
- xur17 4y agoIt looks like it changed pretty dramatically since you posted (it's now at a 24% chance of occurring before the end of the year). This site [0] uses actual money, and more closely lines up with what I expect (although still more pessimistic than I am). [0] https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos
- xur17 4y agoI'd be happy to make a bet based upon this statement.
- quickthrower2 4y agoSee my sister comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241852 you can bet there, using free paper money and if you win donate (via conversion) to charity which is cool.
- rhacker 4y agoThanks for this explanation. It helps to hear that about ETH.
- kennywinker 4y agoYour position seems to be that CO2 isn't linked to computing specific transactions, it's just the amount of mining on the network at any given time. But that could still very easily be expressed in terms of CO2. I.e. "during the time these transactions were monopolizing the network, the carbon equivalent of n acres of rainforest were burnt". Proof of stake doesn't actually eliminate the carbon impact of these systems, it just improves the efficiency. There are still many computers running for the express purpose of buying autographed drawings of monkeys.
- rglullis 4y agoIt improves the efficiency 10000-fold. You can run a Ethereum validator node on a 10W celeron, underclock it, and still be fine. There are ~380k validators on the beacon chain now. There are 20M PS5 + Xbox sold already. A video game console consumes as much as 300W during usage, and even on idle can consume as much as a validator.
- kennywinker 4y agoSeems like someone should go update the wikipedia article then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake > In 2021 a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the Proof-of Work based Bitcoin was about 1,000 times higher than that of the highest consuming proof of stake system that was studied 1,000x is not 10,000x > They also couldn't find the energy consumption of a proof of stake system on a large scale as such a system does not exist at the time of the report.[16][17] Big systems have big side effects. As others have said, I'll believe it when I see it.
- rglullis 4y agoYou can see it already [0]. Eth PoS network already exists, what is missing is for the transition to be completed (aka, the "Merge") [0]: https://beaconscan.com/statistics https://beaconscan.com/statistics
- 4y ago
- quickthrower2 4y agoThat is a bit like saying Amazon shareholders are only going to buy for the AWS revenue and not the Amazon.com sales. Miners of all people do detailed calculations to the nth degree. “Gas war”s will make more incentive for people to start buying up more cards and heating their basements.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tao332 4y ago