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Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge &

Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. Sure it’s great that non-productive math problems no longer need to be solved & consume so much energy and hardware to make it all work. And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on. But no one should consider this a fundamental paradigm shift & democratization compare to traditional financial systems controlled by a a very small number of big players. Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Although I’ll clarify a bit: I’m actually a proponent of having a layer of human judgement that can fix a problem when things go off the rails. The issue is that in crypto this layer is even less accessible to smaller players than in traditional finance. The DAO was able to throw its weight around and get a hard fork, but how many other groups with much less influence have suffered from similar problems and exploits without that same benefit? Yes, even in traditional finance there are some types of irreversible fraud. But for every day transactions, for using money as a daily part of transactions necessary to live your life and not just as a speculative investment, crypto falls far short. If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. If my wallet is pick pocketed or I simply lose it by accident I have a similar recourse to mitigate the fallout. Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. But as a major change & liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments there seems to be nothing more that shouted rhetoric and wishful thinking.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.
- once_inc 4y ago
  Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative. Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions.
  - drtz 4y ago
    Genuinely curious: how does burning methane to generate electricity make an organization carbon negative? Do you have a reference for this? I understand that methane is orders of magnitude more significant from a greenhouse effect point of view than CO2, but I don't see how it would be economically viable to burn methane "in stranded gas reserves" to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining but somehow it's not viable for other electrical consumption purposes.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      The methane gas has already been burned for decades, adding bitcoin to the equation just made you look No other use case has been profitable for the gas by products so the sites pump it directly into the atmosphere Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected from the grid, these are the best use cases of this. others are connected to the grid which gets the most debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin mining’s absence and there was no political will to meet climate goals ever) So the solution solves itself simply because it is an environmental solution that is profitable
      - drtz 4y ago
seibelj 4y ago
- egypturnash 4y ago
  If you’re gonna make wild prophecies about how crypto is going to completely democratize control of the money supply - and crypto boosters love to rant about stuff like that - then yeah, people are going to keep on finding fault with it until someone comes up with a new replacement for “proof of turning a fuckton of energy into waste heat” that isn’t “proof of having a fuckton of money invested in the coin”. The number two crypto left Proof of Waste and that’s good, yay! But the whole scene is still in the shadow of Bitcoin’s Proof of Waste, and until that does the same, or shrinks to an irreverent shitcoin, people are gonna hate on all crypto for its energy usage.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  - burner000 4y ago
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  I think money satisfies nocoiners already.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  The transition on this site has been seamless, hasn't it? I have to say, I actually do think less of people for it.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I think it's hilarious that you call this moving the goalposts. As if the critiques about country-sized energy waste were the only issue raised until this moment. When that was actually a later-stage critique as "mining" grew and grew.
- ineedasername 4y ago
krzyk 4y ago
Well, currently it looks like it will be more centralized, because before one could mine with just a single GPU, now one has to have a bunch of ETH to start.
CodeShmode 4y ago
> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?
- once_inc 4y ago
  If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.
    - once_inc 4y ago
      Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a slow death.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        It is about what people were willing to spend money to buy. Not the miners
        lmm 4y ago
        Nah, it was about what the big name exchanges annointed, and that was decided by a cabal in which the big miners were significant players.
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      "Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance. With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum. Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets. So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders? True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going. [1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/ https://etherscan.io/accounts/
api 4y ago
At the very least it makes something that is the world's problem -- massive energy waste due to PoW -- into an economic problem that is self-contained to the Ethereum block chain.
chaseadam17 4y ago
You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.
- acdha 4y ago
  Why bother paying more for a slow database if you’re not going to rely on the one feature which can’t be done faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?
  - serverholic 4y ago
    Because it gives people options and increases competition in the financial system. It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Everything gives people options: the question of whether those options actually increase competition comes down to what a particular option does better than the alternatives. For example, if I'm not in the business of selling blockchain services I don't care about Visa's backend infrastructure. I care about things like how much overhead I'm paying on each transaction, how hard it is for my customers to use, how quickly transactions go through (especially in retail settings – I don't want someone blocking the line while they wait for a miner to approve a block), and the cost / risk of fraud. Currently, it's by far easier for everyone to use Visa: most people have access to that system, services are widely available for businesses of all sizes, etc. The primary drawbacks are transaction costs and businesses being on the hook for most fraudulent transactions. Switching to Ethereum would make things slower, but that could improve. Since it's not tied to a hard currency, however, there's a much bigger problem cost management: I know exactly how much a Visa transaction will cost but gas fees are unpredictable and volatile, and the exchange rates for ETH vary both independently and more than most currencies. Similarly, there's a real appeal to not automatically being on the hook for a disputed transaction but that's significantly undercut if you have to worry about being one mistake away from irrecoverably losing everything in your account and so far customers have not been jumping to take on more personal risk either. The big question here is also what competitive businesses do in response: for example, if at some point in the future Ethereum actually became cost-competitive what happens when Visa simply lowers their transaction fees until that's no longer the case again? They have a lot of margin to do that and the merchants don't need to change anything about how they do business. Similarly, Ethereum is nowhere near the speed of a traditional credit card transaction but even if it hit that speed it'd be playing catch-up with Apple/Google Pay – businesses care a lot about things like that since it's often highly visible to customers and can affect things like retail lines, so the question is whether that can be improved faster than companies like Apple/Google, Stripe, Square, etc. can improve their services.
seydor 4y ago
How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first. I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  Chia solves this pretty well with a one time POW then POS in the form of presolved hashes.
  - mratsim 4y ago
    Chia plotting managed to get banned from all cloud providers in a month. It's also wasting by actively destroying storage disks.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  >they needed to do some physical work Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? PoW is PoS, it just has some extra steps that have the minor side effect of using huge amount of resources for no reason.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? They can, but so can the rest of us. Unlike under PoS.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      So you can rent time in a mining farm with money but you can't buy ETH with money? Why not?
      - lmm 4y ago
acdha 4y ago
> And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on. The flip side is that it’s creating new opportunities for massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions like using shell companies but normal people won’t think to do that or realize that they’re making that level of trust by using a wallet, exchange, etc. There are some obvious big problems (“do voters know you paid for this porn site 15 years ago?”) but also more personal ones: imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk but I’d hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being effective and perfectly operated.
Jasper_ 4y ago
My view is that crypto's goals (e.g. decentralized, deflationary, no transaction reversals) are non-goals, but even if those non-goals were goals, both PoW and PoS fail to effectively solve them, especially the decentralized part. PoS sucks more than PoW on this axis: PoS encourages centralization within the system (those with more ETH control the chain), and PoW encourages centralization outside the system (those who command more assets to buy GPUs and energy controls the system), so it's really silly and funny and pathetic both fail at the same thing, with PoS moving the needle in the wrong direction, but also, it was a non-goal to begin with so who cares I'll just go with the one that doesn't set the planet on fire please.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- epolanski 4y ago
  While I am largely against crypto it should be noted that the more ETH you have the less financial incentives you have to attack it.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    Sure, but that also applies to "the more USD a bank has, the less incentive it has to want to crash the economy", with all the same flaws of logic.
- meowkit 4y ago
  How are the incentives described any different than any other system?
- wraptile 4y ago
  I think the keyword here is _stake_. As in with PoW I can migrate once the ecosystem is damaged (i.e. just mine something else, sell the hardware, w/e) with PoS I need that ecosystem to thrive to profit or to even exit it.
- MrMan 4y ago
  POW is suicide, POS is doomed to fail. So let's give up and try to edit humanity such that we cure our greed and stupidity.
bcrosby95 4y ago
> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. I'll take this one step further. My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One time they even had the card - they had stolen it that night and tried to use it at a local gas station. A fraud alert woke me up.
- colordrops 4y ago
  There can't be fraud of the sort that you get with credit cards on a blockchain unless you leak your private keys. The fact that security is built around a 16 digit number and 3 digit pin that you share with everyone and can be reused is embarrassing for credit card companies, not a win. Amazing.
  - progman32 4y ago
    Okay, then they leak their private key.
    - _xrp0 4y ago
      Good luck getting a private key out of a HSM.
      - lanstin 4y ago
        good luck building a good UX for a financial system where a small OpsSec error can wipe out your family's fortune. And you need the private keys to conduct business so obvi they can exit the HSM And if my 1M USD bitcoin is in some hardware wallet, won't that just incentivize someone to kidnap my kids until i send bitcoin, much like bitcoin breathed new life into ransonware economy after banks mostly shut it down? Perhaps, despite the examples of ICOs, EVM smart contracts, NFT rugs, and the general flood of fake discords and so on, people assume the central banks and retail banks are a bigger threat than the criminal minds attracted to untraceable and unreversable payment methods?
lettergram 4y ago
Prior to this merge at least theoretically you could have a consortium of people collaborate to combat centralization. Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms. My young son the other day said “I’ll get money from the store and buy what ever I want”. I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work for the store, then they give you money to buy things. Then I thought about how banks or large lenders just give people money. They magically create a loan, which people have to pay back with interest. The bank assesses the risk they won’t and profit they want and that’s the interest rate. The FED works the same way, just handing out money. Those people don’t work for their money. They just get free labor for controlling the money. Here it’s like the store printing money at 5-8% a year or what ever just for having money in the bank. They can then spend 4% or what ever of that and still always guarantee growth in their money supply. It’s the exact same. Theoretically, someone can make something the store finds valuable enough in the real world to trade their reserves. However, they’d have to find it more valuable than the static growth rate. The difference in POW is that anyone can enter the market. And large lenders won’t have an advantage. Sure they could PAY for more processing power, but they have no advantage of printing money over the next guy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bitcurious 4y ago
>Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. >With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. In the prior state, the folks with control were the ones willing to invest in it. In the after state, the folks with control are the ones willing to invest, OR the ones willing to get others to invest - i.e. coinbase.
colordrops 4y ago
You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed, indicating that you want a human layer of control that is currently missing. This is a conflating of layers and evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of of how it works. The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted to the top of HN that make me wonder if I'm on a ship of fools that is no longer the center of gravity of interesting and creative tech thought. Crypto has been around for over a decade and isn't going away, and it's an complex technology that has massive depth and a lot of interest. These sorts of negative superficial comments that get repeated ad infinitum are tiring and provide no value. If you prefer credit cards then use them. No one is taking that away from you. That isn't the main use case that Ethereum is going after.
- pbronez 4y ago
  I think the argument is: (1) in both traditional finance and crypto, a relatively small group of big players control the rules of the game (2) in traditional finance, there are established ways for small players (Eg consumers) to appeal to big players (eg retail bank) to make exceptions and provide redress (3) in crypto, there are not yet established pathways for small players to petition big players for redress in this way.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    This makes a false equivalency. Petition in traditional finance is with regards to individual transactions. In crypto, petition would be how the protocol works. The equivalent in traditional finance would be the credit card EULA, rules and conditions. Small players definitely have no redress here.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  >You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with the most money, and history has show as that transactions __can__ be reversed when those large players throw their weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way. I'm also saying that I don't mind there being a human layer of judgment, but also that it goes very much against the trustless ethos of crypto. And also that the currently layer of human judgement is vastly less accessible to the average crypto hold than it is in traditional banking & finance.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
> liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments The difference between business and governments is that in business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every adult has a vote. "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people should be liberated from government, people should be the government. Therefore I think the best situation is where government controls the money, and we the people control the government.
- oblio 4y ago
  To add to your comment, we want a *powerful* and accountable government. Weak governments make for failed states, because corporations and other interest groups such as gangs, warlords, control things instead.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    I want a weak government. I'd rather have warlords compete for my allegiance than be subject to one all powerful warlord who has no powerful enemies to worry about. A capitalism of polycentric governance, if you will.
    - vkou 4y ago
      Warlords typically 'compete' for your allegiance by conscripting you to fight for them, and killing you and your family when you refuse. Or, if you and nobody in your family is of 'military age', they 'compete' for it, by rolling into your town, and stealing half of what you own. The 'competing' warlord that rolls in next week will, of course, steal the other half. If you're lucky, they won't make an example out of your town for 'supporting' the first warlord. I'll take a strong, stable government over that horror-show any day of the week, but if you'd like to give it a try, much of Mexico has quite a bit of that sort of thing going on right now. Anyone who moves to the right parts of it can enjoy life amid 'competing' cartels.
      - 4y ago
_xrp0 4y ago
Your concerns are valid. And you're free to commit to projects that align with your values. To me, the immutability of an actual blockchain is non-negotiable. I've given up on Ethereum after the DAO fork out of principle. But that's the beauty. Unlike our current financial system, you're not bound to use Ethereum. You have sovereignty and can make your own choices (and drive change). -- (I only discuss part of your comment, don't have time for the rest) Just FYI, the biggest problem for crypto fraud is phishing, not theft. A thief can't get your private keys from a hardware wallet. And there are many, many, MANY strategies you can use against phishing.
eric_cc 4y ago
It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin. If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really need to compare the “tokenomics” of the currencies. With bitcoin, you have complete predictability in terms of when new bitcoins are created (inflation). With USD it’s purely up to the government.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Who is going to run a bank without fractional reserve banking, and how can you do that with BTC?
  - nybble41 4y ago
    You do fractional reserve banking with BTC the same way you do it with any other currency: You only keep enough BTC on hand to cover the projected worst-case withdrawals, and take the risk of needing to shut down or possibly declare bankruptcy in the event of a bank run. There is no "lender of last resort" to bail you out, but banks were doing fractional reserve banking long before the creation of the FDIC. It wasn't quite so extreme in the Free Banking era, of course, compared to the state today where no bank holds much more than the legally-mandated bare minimum of reserves. Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, one which simply holds its customers money (for a fee) without lending it out, and perhaps offering separate investment products for those who are interested with full disclosure of the risk involved should the investments fail.
    - anticensor 4y ago
      > Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, Fractional reserve banks are very honest about the fact they reuse your money until you withdraw it. What you are describing is a full-reserve bank.
kromem 4y ago
"If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration." You just made a great case for why crypto as a backend for balance transfer that's abstracted by centralized payment options built on top of the transfer network for funding balances but directly interfaces with POS outside the crypto network will almost certainly continue to grow into a thing as crypto grows. Get rid of bank accounts, and then firewall balances behind 3rd party abstractions powered by your crypto wallet. By all means charge my vendors 3.25% of the transaction to firewall and insure my wallet against theft. Give me 1-2% cash back and I'll be even more excited about the prospect.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. However, if a much more powerful criminal spies on your credit card # as you send money to Wikileaks or a bunch of truckers who drive to Ottowa for a protest you can never fix it when your card is cancelled and your bank account is seized. Or when you face a variety of other sanctions and persecutions for spending or donating your own hard-earned money. >Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. These benefits have already been seen and realized by people targeted by authoritarian governments and banking cabals all over the globe.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  That argument could be made for anything if you are the one targeted. I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? It is all about motives. If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >It is all about motives. I disagree completely. Motive is completely irrelevant. Mass surveillance and government spying (among other things) on people who have done nothing to suggest they are engaged in criminal activity is absolutely wrong and a violation of human rights and human dignity no matter what the motive. >If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all. The issue is that people with morality and dignity believe that the government is doing something wrong by violating the privacy and human dignity of every citizen (by spying on their communications and tapping their phones), while those who don't see the value of privacy or human dignity don't believe the government is doing anything wrong. That is the crux of the issue. Trying to explain the importance of privacy and human dignity who people who don't believe that privacy and human dignity have any value is like trying to explain what blue looks like to someone who has been blind since birth. >I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? We have a Constitution that theoretically prevents the government from violating the rights of every person so that it may catch those few people who are committing crimes. Unfortunately the system of checks and balances that is supposed to be in place to stop the government from violating our privacy, rights and human dignity is entirely broken (if not non-existent) as abundantly chronicled for everyone who has paid attention. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searched-the-data-of-millions-of-americans-without-warrants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searc... https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/united-states-v-moalin-ninth-circuit-opinion https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/united-states-v-moalin-n... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief-history-of-the-cias-unpunished-spying-on-the-senate/384003/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-court-issues-rare-order-doj-fbi-scathing/story?id=67785661 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-court-issues-rare-order...
nathias 4y ago
the basic point of crypto is to protect us from human judgment yes, this means the individual is responsible for their own security, privacy etc. but when this responsibility is taken away for the sake of convenience we all lose
delaaxe 4y ago
Was mining really done in "data centers"?
mr_woozy 4y ago
Bellamy 4y ago
> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. No, you can't. It if someone hacks you mobile bank and transfers money to another country, all you can do is go to police, which can do fuck off.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Not using up a goat load of electricity is like 99% of why this change is great. Let people speculate on their funny money without harming everyone. A lateral move on the other details is rather unsurprising.

once_inc 4y ago
Using electricity isn't the problem. Anyone could use vast amounts of electricity as long as they are willing to pay the price for it. The problem is carbon emissions. The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative. Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions.
- drtz 4y ago
  Genuinely curious: how does burning methane to generate electricity make an organization carbon negative? Do you have a reference for this? I understand that methane is orders of magnitude more significant from a greenhouse effect point of view than CO2, but I don't see how it would be economically viable to burn methane "in stranded gas reserves" to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining but somehow it's not viable for other electrical consumption purposes.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    The methane gas has already been burned for decades, adding bitcoin to the equation just made you look No other use case has been profitable for the gas by products so the sites pump it directly into the atmosphere Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected from the grid, these are the best use cases of this. others are connected to the grid which gets the most debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin mining’s absence and there was no political will to meet climate goals ever) So the solution solves itself simply because it is an environmental solution that is profitable
    - drtz 4y ago

seibelj 4y ago

egypturnash 4y ago
If you’re gonna make wild prophecies about how crypto is going to completely democratize control of the money supply - and crypto boosters love to rant about stuff like that - then yeah, people are going to keep on finding fault with it until someone comes up with a new replacement for “proof of turning a fuckton of energy into waste heat” that isn’t “proof of having a fuckton of money invested in the coin”. The number two crypto left Proof of Waste and that’s good, yay! But the whole scene is still in the shadow of Bitcoin’s Proof of Waste, and until that does the same, or shrinks to an irreverent shitcoin, people are gonna hate on all crypto for its energy usage.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
- burner000 4y ago
EamonnMR 4y ago
I think money satisfies nocoiners already.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
The transition on this site has been seamless, hasn't it? I have to say, I actually do think less of people for it.
wpietri 4y ago
I think it's hilarious that you call this moving the goalposts. As if the critiques about country-sized energy waste were the only issue raised until this moment. When that was actually a later-stage critique as "mining" grew and grew.
ineedasername 4y ago

krzyk 4y ago

Well, currently it looks like it will be more centralized, because before one could mine with just a single GPU, now one has to have a bunch of ETH to start.

CodeShmode 4y ago

> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions. Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?

once_inc 4y ago
If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.
  - once_inc 4y ago
    Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a slow death.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      It is about what people were willing to spend money to buy. Not the miners
      - lmm 4y ago
        Nah, it was about what the big name exchanges annointed, and that was decided by a cabal in which the big miners were significant players.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    "Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance. With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum. Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets. So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders? True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going. [1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/ https://etherscan.io/accounts/

api 4y ago

At the very least it makes something that is the world's problem -- massive energy waste due to PoW -- into an economic problem that is self-contained to the Ethereum block chain.

chaseadam17 4y ago

You can build the visa / Mastercard layer with “human judgement” on top.

acdha 4y ago
Why bother paying more for a slow database if you’re not going to rely on the one feature which can’t be done faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the current financial system?
- serverholic 4y ago
  Because it gives people options and increases competition in the financial system. It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Everything gives people options: the question of whether those options actually increase competition comes down to what a particular option does better than the alternatives. For example, if I'm not in the business of selling blockchain services I don't care about Visa's backend infrastructure. I care about things like how much overhead I'm paying on each transaction, how hard it is for my customers to use, how quickly transactions go through (especially in retail settings – I don't want someone blocking the line while they wait for a miner to approve a block), and the cost / risk of fraud. Currently, it's by far easier for everyone to use Visa: most people have access to that system, services are widely available for businesses of all sizes, etc. The primary drawbacks are transaction costs and businesses being on the hook for most fraudulent transactions. Switching to Ethereum would make things slower, but that could improve. Since it's not tied to a hard currency, however, there's a much bigger problem cost management: I know exactly how much a Visa transaction will cost but gas fees are unpredictable and volatile, and the exchange rates for ETH vary both independently and more than most currencies. Similarly, there's a real appeal to not automatically being on the hook for a disputed transaction but that's significantly undercut if you have to worry about being one mistake away from irrecoverably losing everything in your account and so far customers have not been jumping to take on more personal risk either. The big question here is also what competitive businesses do in response: for example, if at some point in the future Ethereum actually became cost-competitive what happens when Visa simply lowers their transaction fees until that's no longer the case again? They have a lot of margin to do that and the merchants don't need to change anything about how they do business. Similarly, Ethereum is nowhere near the speed of a traditional credit card transaction but even if it hit that speed it'd be playing catch-up with Apple/Google Pay – businesses care a lot about things like that since it's often highly visible to customers and can affect things like retail lines, so the question is whether that can be improved faster than companies like Apple/Google, Stripe, Square, etc. can improve their services.

seydor 4y ago

How i see it, when a group of powerful people wanted to control ETH to some direction or block a party, they needed to do some physical work , which acted as a time-delay lock. Now all they need to do is think about it. I m not sure why the second case has the same level of trust as the first. I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.

shiftpgdn 4y ago
Chia solves this pretty well with a one time POW then POS in the form of presolved hashes.
- mratsim 4y ago
  Chia plotting managed to get banned from all cloud providers in a month. It's also wasting by actively destroying storage disks.
idiotsecant 4y ago
>they needed to do some physical work Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? PoW is PoS, it just has some extra steps that have the minor side effect of using huge amount of resources for no reason.
- lmm 4y ago
  > Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm? They can, but so can the rest of us. Unlike under PoS.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    So you can rent time in a mining farm with money but you can't buy ETH with money? Why not?
    - lmm 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

> And it may be an incremental improvement over traditional global finance because there is a much greater ability to publicly scrutinize what goes on. The flip side is that it’s creating new opportunities for massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions like using shell companies but normal people won’t think to do that or realize that they’re making that level of trust by using a wallet, exchange, etc. There are some obvious big problems (“do voters know you paid for this porn site 15 years ago?”) but also more personal ones: imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk but I’d hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being effective and perfectly operated.

Jasper_ 4y ago

My view is that crypto's goals (e.g. decentralized, deflationary, no transaction reversals) are non-goals, but even if those non-goals were goals, both PoW and PoS fail to effectively solve them, especially the decentralized part. PoS sucks more than PoW on this axis: PoS encourages centralization within the system (those with more ETH control the chain), and PoW encourages centralization outside the system (those who command more assets to buy GPUs and energy controls the system), so it's really silly and funny and pathetic both fail at the same thing, with PoS moving the needle in the wrong direction, but also, it was a non-goal to begin with so who cares I'll just go with the one that doesn't set the planet on fire please.

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epolanski 4y ago
While I am largely against crypto it should be noted that the more ETH you have the less financial incentives you have to attack it.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  Sure, but that also applies to "the more USD a bank has, the less incentive it has to want to crash the economy", with all the same flaws of logic.
meowkit 4y ago
How are the incentives described any different than any other system?
wraptile 4y ago
I think the keyword here is _stake_. As in with PoW I can migrate once the ecosystem is damaged (i.e. just mine something else, sell the hardware, w/e) with PoS I need that ecosystem to thrive to profit or to even exit it.
MrMan 4y ago
POW is suicide, POS is doomed to fail. So let's give up and try to edit humanity such that we cure our greed and stupidity.

bcrosby95 4y ago

> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. I'll take this one step further. My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One time they even had the card - they had stolen it that night and tried to use it at a local gas station. A fraud alert woke me up.

colordrops 4y ago
There can't be fraud of the sort that you get with credit cards on a blockchain unless you leak your private keys. The fact that security is built around a 16 digit number and 3 digit pin that you share with everyone and can be reused is embarrassing for credit card companies, not a win. Amazing.
- progman32 4y ago
  Okay, then they leak their private key.
  - _xrp0 4y ago
    Good luck getting a private key out of a HSM.
    - lanstin 4y ago
      good luck building a good UX for a financial system where a small OpsSec error can wipe out your family's fortune. And you need the private keys to conduct business so obvi they can exit the HSM And if my 1M USD bitcoin is in some hardware wallet, won't that just incentivize someone to kidnap my kids until i send bitcoin, much like bitcoin breathed new life into ransonware economy after banks mostly shut it down? Perhaps, despite the examples of ICOs, EVM smart contracts, NFT rugs, and the general flood of fake discords and so on, people assume the central banks and retail banks are a bigger threat than the criminal minds attracted to untraceable and unreversable payment methods?

lettergram 4y ago

Prior to this merge at least theoretically you could have a consortium of people collaborate to combat centralization. Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms. My young son the other day said “I’ll get money from the store and buy what ever I want”. I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work for the store, then they give you money to buy things. Then I thought about how banks or large lenders just give people money. They magically create a loan, which people have to pay back with interest. The bank assesses the risk they won’t and profit they want and that’s the interest rate. The FED works the same way, just handing out money. Those people don’t work for their money. They just get free labor for controlling the money. Here it’s like the store printing money at 5-8% a year or what ever just for having money in the bank. They can then spend 4% or what ever of that and still always guarantee growth in their money supply. It’s the exact same. Theoretically, someone can make something the store finds valuable enough in the real world to trade their reserves. However, they’d have to find it more valuable than the static growth rate. The difference in POW is that anyone can enter the market. And large lenders won’t have an advantage. Sure they could PAY for more processing power, but they have no advantage of printing money over the next guy.

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bitcurious 4y ago

>Prior to the merge ethereum’s trust was controlled by the organizations with the most money who bought/built massive data centers to mine it. >With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it. In the prior state, the folks with control were the ones willing to invest in it. In the after state, the folks with control are the ones willing to invest, OR the ones willing to get others to invest - i.e. coinbase.

colordrops 4y ago

You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed, indicating that you want a human layer of control that is currently missing. This is a conflating of layers and evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of of how it works. The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted to the top of HN that make me wonder if I'm on a ship of fools that is no longer the center of gravity of interesting and creative tech thought. Crypto has been around for over a decade and isn't going away, and it's an complex technology that has massive depth and a lot of interest. These sorts of negative superficial comments that get repeated ad infinitum are tiring and provide no value. If you prefer credit cards then use them. No one is taking that away from you. That isn't the main use case that Ethereum is going after.

pbronez 4y ago
I think the argument is: (1) in both traditional finance and crypto, a relatively small group of big players control the rules of the game (2) in traditional finance, there are established ways for small players (Eg consumers) to appeal to big players (eg retail bank) to make exceptions and provide redress (3) in crypto, there are not yet established pathways for small players to petition big players for redress in this way.
- colordrops 4y ago
  This makes a false equivalency. Petition in traditional finance is with regards to individual transactions. In crypto, petition would be how the protocol works. The equivalent in traditional finance would be the credit card EULA, rules and conditions. Small players definitely have no redress here.
ineedasername 4y ago
>You are saying two contradictory things. First that those with the most money control Ethereum, and then that transactions can't be controls be reversed No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with the most money, and history has show as that transactions __can__ be reversed when those large players throw their weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way. I'm also saying that I don't mind there being a human layer of judgment, but also that it goes very much against the trustless ethos of crypto. And also that the currently layer of human judgement is vastly less accessible to the average crypto hold than it is in traditional banking & finance.

galaxyLogic 4y ago

> liberation of people from massively powerful banks and governments The difference between business and governments is that in business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every adult has a vote. "liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people should be liberated from government, people should be the government. Therefore I think the best situation is where government controls the money, and we the people control the government.

oblio 4y ago
To add to your comment, we want a *powerful* and accountable government. Weak governments make for failed states, because corporations and other interest groups such as gangs, warlords, control things instead.
- notch656a 4y ago
  I want a weak government. I'd rather have warlords compete for my allegiance than be subject to one all powerful warlord who has no powerful enemies to worry about. A capitalism of polycentric governance, if you will.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Warlords typically 'compete' for your allegiance by conscripting you to fight for them, and killing you and your family when you refuse. Or, if you and nobody in your family is of 'military age', they 'compete' for it, by rolling into your town, and stealing half of what you own. The 'competing' warlord that rolls in next week will, of course, steal the other half. If you're lucky, they won't make an example out of your town for 'supporting' the first warlord. I'll take a strong, stable government over that horror-show any day of the week, but if you'd like to give it a try, much of Mexico has quite a bit of that sort of thing going on right now. Anyone who moves to the right parts of it can enjoy life amid 'competing' cartels.
    - 4y ago

_xrp0 4y ago

Your concerns are valid. And you're free to commit to projects that align with your values. To me, the immutability of an actual blockchain is non-negotiable. I've given up on Ethereum after the DAO fork out of principle. But that's the beauty. Unlike our current financial system, you're not bound to use Ethereum. You have sovereignty and can make your own choices (and drive change). -- (I only discuss part of your comment, don't have time for the rest) Just FYI, the biggest problem for crypto fraud is phishing, not theft. A thief can't get your private keys from a hardware wallet. And there are many, many, MANY strategies you can use against phishing.

eric_cc 4y ago

It sounds like your chief concerns are around transacting on and storing all your money on a layer 1. It would be very similar to walking around with your life savings in cash in a briefcase. But just like cash has banks, custodians, and settlement layers so can (for example) bitcoin. If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really need to compare the “tokenomics” of the currencies. With bitcoin, you have complete predictability in terms of when new bitcoins are created (inflation). With USD it’s purely up to the government.

lanstin 4y ago
Who is going to run a bank without fractional reserve banking, and how can you do that with BTC?
- nybble41 4y ago
  You do fractional reserve banking with BTC the same way you do it with any other currency: You only keep enough BTC on hand to cover the projected worst-case withdrawals, and take the risk of needing to shut down or possibly declare bankruptcy in the event of a bank run. There is no "lender of last resort" to bail you out, but banks were doing fractional reserve banking long before the creation of the FDIC. It wasn't quite so extreme in the Free Banking era, of course, compared to the state today where no bank holds much more than the legally-mandated bare minimum of reserves. Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, one which simply holds its customers money (for a fee) without lending it out, and perhaps offering separate investment products for those who are interested with full disclosure of the risk involved should the investments fail.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    > Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, Fractional reserve banks are very honest about the fact they reuse your money until you withdraw it. What you are describing is a full-reserve bank.

kromem 4y ago

"If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration." You just made a great case for why crypto as a backend for balance transfer that's abstracted by centralized payment options built on top of the transfer network for funding balances but directly interfaces with POS outside the crypto network will almost certainly continue to grow into a thing as crypto grows. Get rid of bank accounts, and then firewall balances behind 3rd party abstractions powered by your crypto wallet. By all means charge my vendors 3.25% of the transaction to firewall and insure my wallet against theft. Give me 1-2% cash back and I'll be even more excited about the prospect.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. However, if a much more powerful criminal spies on your credit card # as you send money to Wikileaks or a bunch of truckers who drive to Ottowa for a protest you can never fix it when your card is cancelled and your bank account is seized. Or when you face a variety of other sanctions and persecutions for spending or donating your own hard-earned money. >Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen. These benefits have already been seen and realized by people targeted by authoritarian governments and banking cabals all over the globe.

Eisenstein 4y ago
That argument could be made for anything if you are the one targeted. I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? It is all about motives. If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >It is all about motives. I disagree completely. Motive is completely irrelevant. Mass surveillance and government spying (among other things) on people who have done nothing to suggest they are engaged in criminal activity is absolutely wrong and a violation of human rights and human dignity no matter what the motive. >If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all. The issue is that people with morality and dignity believe that the government is doing something wrong by violating the privacy and human dignity of every citizen (by spying on their communications and tapping their phones), while those who don't see the value of privacy or human dignity don't believe the government is doing anything wrong. That is the crux of the issue. Trying to explain the importance of privacy and human dignity who people who don't believe that privacy and human dignity have any value is like trying to explain what blue looks like to someone who has been blind since birth. >I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison? We have a Constitution that theoretically prevents the government from violating the rights of every person so that it may catch those few people who are committing crimes. Unfortunately the system of checks and balances that is supposed to be in place to stop the government from violating our privacy, rights and human dignity is entirely broken (if not non-existent) as abundantly chronicled for everyone who has paid attention. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searched-the-data-of-millions-of-americans-without-warrants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searc... https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/united-states-v-moalin-ninth-circuit-opinion https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/united-states-v-moalin-n... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief-history-of-the-cias-unpunished-spying-on-the-senate/384003/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-court-issues-rare-order-doj-fbi-scathing/story?id=67785661 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-court-issues-rare-order...

nathias 4y ago

the basic point of crypto is to protect us from human judgment yes, this means the individual is responsible for their own security, privacy etc. but when this responsibility is taken away for the sake of convenience we all lose

delaaxe 4y ago

Was mining really done in "data centers"?

mr_woozy 4y ago

Bellamy 4y ago

> If a criminal spies on my credit card # as I make a purchase and uses that to go on a spending spree I can fix it with the credit card company with little cost but a few hours of time and frustration. No, you can't. It if someone hacks you mobile bank and transfers money to another country, all you can do is go to police, which can do fuck off.