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The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of ~2000 or 99.95%. You can lit

by pa7x1 4y ago

The merge and with it the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by a factor of ~2000 or 99.95%. You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

rglullis 4y ago
To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by them while running is less than the energy consumed by videogame consoles around the world while idling. Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.
- belltaco 4y ago
  >"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
    - belltaco 4y ago
      Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
        rcxdude 4y ago
        The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks. IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
        petmon 4y ago
        The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.
        4y ago
  - baby 4y ago
    Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce their computations, or users will be required to pay a pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you have bitcoin, that’s my advice
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to scrutinize Bitcoin.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
22c 4y ago
> You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. I know one of the stated goals is for people to be able to run validators on commodity hardware, and as you've pointed out, builds exist for ARM devices and have been shown to run on a Raspberry Pi, but it remains to be seen if you can "in practice" run a mainnet validator on a Raspberry Pi. That would be ideal, though!
- yokem55 4y ago
  There is a decent group of folks in the rocketpool community that are doing this right now, running their nodes with 8gb pi 4's, running mainnet validators. The main dev of the rocketpool node stack has put a lot of work into making it viable, including pushing the client teams to ship better optimised arm docker builds. It is somewhat risky in my opinion as you don't have the resources to track multiple chain heads in the event of a split, but it does work under nominal chain circumstances.
latchkey 4y ago
The irony here is that long term, ETH will use ASICs for zk-snarks. Vitalik just published a document where he said that is his preference [1]. "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs. ... Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-friendly." They will need to financially incentivize people to run this hardware and will create an arms race around it. Just like Bitcoin. [1] https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
- yokem55 4y ago
  The demand for zk-prover hardware will be no where near the same extent as for pow miners. Those zk proofs only need to be generated once, by a single party, and then they can be verified, easily and cheaply by anyone with minimal hardware. There isn't anywhere near the competitive rat race to accumulate as much hardware as possible.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    We will see. zk is becoming more and more of a 'thing' every day.
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  The more people mining in proof of work, the more random hashes needed to secure a block. This is what makes it demand so much energy. This isn’t the case with ZK provers. Each computation yields a solution, like regular fixed arithmetic math. Using more powerful FPGAs and adding more parallel provers, you can prove the same circuits in less time and less energy.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    The more people using ETH, the more computation that will need to be done. The more hardware that will be needed to support everything. The end goal is scalability, right?

by pa7x1 4y ago

rglullis 4y ago

To put this in perspective, there are hundreds of thousands of validators already online and the amount of energy consumed by them while running is less than the energy consumed by videogame consoles around the world while idling. Every gamer (PC or console) that has used the "look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto will have to eat their GPUs after the merge.

belltaco 4y ago
>"look at how much energy is being wasted" argument to be anti-crypto Bitcoin will be still wasting a crap load of energy, proportional to its value and has no plans to stop doing that.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Then it is an issue of bitcoin and all the PoW blockchains, not of crypto in general. You can be pro-crypto without being in favor of Bitcoin, you know? In fact, those who oppose crypto due to environmental concerns would help immensely if they stopped generalizing and became more specific about their arguments.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    Bitcoin is the largest and most popular crypto by far and was also the first successful one.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point? Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices. It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.
      - rcxdude 4y ago
        The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks. IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.
        petmon 4y ago
        The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.
        4y ago
- baby 4y ago
  Regulations will take care of that. I expect that bitcoin will either be banned, or miners will be forced to reduce their computations, or users will be required to pay a pollution tax at exchanges. Move to greener chain if you have bitcoin, that’s my advice
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    If the Merge works (and PoS chains remain secure), then it'll be proof in practice that PoW is unnecessarily wasteful, so regulators have extra incentive to scrutinize Bitcoin.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

22c 4y ago

> You can literally run an Ethereum PoS node in a Raspberry Pi. I know one of the stated goals is for people to be able to run validators on commodity hardware, and as you've pointed out, builds exist for ARM devices and have been shown to run on a Raspberry Pi, but it remains to be seen if you can "in practice" run a mainnet validator on a Raspberry Pi. That would be ideal, though!

yokem55 4y ago
There is a decent group of folks in the rocketpool community that are doing this right now, running their nodes with 8gb pi 4's, running mainnet validators. The main dev of the rocketpool node stack has put a lot of work into making it viable, including pushing the client teams to ship better optimised arm docker builds. It is somewhat risky in my opinion as you don't have the resources to track multiple chain heads in the event of a split, but it does work under nominal chain circumstances.

latchkey 4y ago

The irony here is that long term, ETH will use ASICs for zk-snarks. Vitalik just published a document where he said that is his preference [1]. "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present, proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK ASICs. ... Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-friendly." They will need to financially incentivize people to run this hardware and will create an arms race around it. Just like Bitcoin. [1] https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html

yokem55 4y ago
The demand for zk-prover hardware will be no where near the same extent as for pow miners. Those zk proofs only need to be generated once, by a single party, and then they can be verified, easily and cheaply by anyone with minimal hardware. There isn't anywhere near the competitive rat race to accumulate as much hardware as possible.
- latchkey 4y ago
  We will see. zk is becoming more and more of a 'thing' every day.
whatisweb3 4y ago
The more people mining in proof of work, the more random hashes needed to secure a block. This is what makes it demand so much energy. This isn’t the case with ZK provers. Each computation yields a solution, like regular fixed arithmetic math. Using more powerful FPGAs and adding more parallel provers, you can prove the same circuits in less time and less energy.
- latchkey 4y ago
  The more people using ETH, the more computation that will need to be done. The more hardware that will be needed to support everything. The end goal is scalability, right?