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> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival t

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.

oblio 4y ago
Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of large players does not make it decentralized.
- gjs278 4y ago
- manquer 4y ago
  Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms of free market capitalism. You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today) This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
  - staringback 4y ago
    > This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few . Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - int_19h 4y ago
    How long do the Zapatistas have to be around before we consider them to be "proven successful"?
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Lol hardly anyone knows what the Zapatistas are. They're brown and 'marginalized' and occupy a small slice of Mexico. You and I may know about them because we probably monitor anarchist/leftist circles. I'm quite anti-socialist myself but I readily admit the Zapitistas have proven 'successful' about as well as they could hope for their situation. But few outside of a few circles wants to acknowledge it as it goes against the conventional thought that democratic or pseudodemocratic society can be trumped by a bunch of fucking 'backwater' community-focused brown people with guns and their own prerogative, who don't fit the mold of the typical example that when society 'breaks down' it must be taken over by savage worlords or drug barons. You can guarantee if there were a story of a bunch of American rednecks even trying to pull off anything similar it'd be downvoted to hell here and nearly universally hated by American society. Soccer moms everywhere would clap to their execution by the National Guard. Some ATF-esque character would stand over the rubble for photographs like they did over the char of the dead kids at Waco and the public would eat it up. Admitting the Zapatistas are a 'success' challenges a lot of people's philosophies and assumptions. Hell it even admits some of my own were wrong. This can be difficult to reconcile. It's not surprising that answers to your question are not exactly forthcoming.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? It may be obscure, but its success does disprove a very non-obscure claim. (Side note: my definition of "success" for socialism is fairly modest: to be sustainable long term economically, and to preserve personal freedoms at least to the same degree that modern capitalist liberal democracies have. That's the only way I see it as a meaningful alternative to the status quo.) There's also Rojava to consider, and it's perhaps somewhat more widely known because it was covered somewhat during the Western press' fascination with ISIS and war with them. These guys are perhaps more interesting than the Zapatistas long term because they're doing it in a somewhat more urbanized & industrialized area with 10x population, and they are explicitly designing a governance framework with intent to scale to nation-state size and beyond. But, well, it hasn't even been 10 years yet, so I don't think it counts as solid evidence of anything just yet.
  - jotm 4y ago
    I dunno, many European countries seem successful at socialism. Powered through high tax rates and foreigners who want to work instead of the people sitting on benefits, but it works.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  The lightning network is, yes.
- curlftpfs 4y ago
  Are zero-knowledge L2 blockchains decentralized?! By definition...
- jrm4 4y ago
  Using the words "centralized" or "decentralized" when describing crypto (and probably many other tech things) is perhaps frequently the worst oversimplifications one can engage in. I think what you want to discuss when using these words is the extent to which it is either likely or possible that a small number of players can unduly influence a thing, but there are frequently MANY MORE FACTORS at work here than "that number." You have to look at how the thing is set up, what governance looks like, what technical limitations there are, and -- perhaps most importantly -- what incentives are there in place for the players to do so. A lot of the "centralization" fears are bad because they're the sort of thing, that -- if executed -- would destroy the value of the thing to the centralizers themselves, and thus they would literally never do it.
- Breza 4y ago
  None of it is truly decentralized. Most Bitcoin mining comes from three corporations. You could replicate the whole network by setting up a cross-cloud system that's balanced between AWS, Azure, and GCP.
ithinkso 4y ago
> or Coinbase If the transfer was not done on a blockchain but only in the database of some company, are you really using any new technology?
- jknoepfler 4y ago
  No.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    It’s just an IOU with an extra step.
    - curlftpfs 4y ago
      Your mind will be blown when you learn what exercising stock options is.
- beaned 4y ago
  No, but you don't have to. The point of blockchains is to allow people to opt out when they want to. If you don't want to or need to, you have that option.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    The point of blockchain is to allow people to not use blockchain? I believe I have just now conceived of a more elegant way to achieve that.
    - beaned 4y ago
      I could have been clearer. The point is to be able to opt out of the traditional finance system when they want to.
    - curlftpfs 4y ago
      It's a point of a blockchain; it's opt-in. Much like your credit card's contract.
splintercell 4y ago
It's actually a worse situation that bitcoin synergy usage scales with its price. So same number of people could be using bitcoin but if the price jumps up by 10X, then over a period a few months it's energy usage would also go up by 10X.
- conductr 4y ago
  This is exactly what you’d expect to see with market manipulation. It’s the pump before the dump. Or less cynically, it’s just herd mentality seen through data.

oblio 4y ago

Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of large players does not make it decentralized.

gjs278 4y ago
manquer 4y ago
Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms of free market capitalism. You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today) This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
- staringback 4y ago
  > This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few . Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- int_19h 4y ago
  How long do the Zapatistas have to be around before we consider them to be "proven successful"?
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Lol hardly anyone knows what the Zapatistas are. They're brown and 'marginalized' and occupy a small slice of Mexico. You and I may know about them because we probably monitor anarchist/leftist circles. I'm quite anti-socialist myself but I readily admit the Zapitistas have proven 'successful' about as well as they could hope for their situation. But few outside of a few circles wants to acknowledge it as it goes against the conventional thought that democratic or pseudodemocratic society can be trumped by a bunch of fucking 'backwater' community-focused brown people with guns and their own prerogative, who don't fit the mold of the typical example that when society 'breaks down' it must be taken over by savage worlords or drug barons. You can guarantee if there were a story of a bunch of American rednecks even trying to pull off anything similar it'd be downvoted to hell here and nearly universally hated by American society. Soccer moms everywhere would clap to their execution by the National Guard. Some ATF-esque character would stand over the rubble for photographs like they did over the char of the dead kids at Waco and the public would eat it up. Admitting the Zapatistas are a 'success' challenges a lot of people's philosophies and assumptions. Hell it even admits some of my own were wrong. This can be difficult to reconcile. It's not surprising that answers to your question are not exactly forthcoming.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? It may be obscure, but its success does disprove a very non-obscure claim. (Side note: my definition of "success" for socialism is fairly modest: to be sustainable long term economically, and to preserve personal freedoms at least to the same degree that modern capitalist liberal democracies have. That's the only way I see it as a meaningful alternative to the status quo.) There's also Rojava to consider, and it's perhaps somewhat more widely known because it was covered somewhat during the Western press' fascination with ISIS and war with them. These guys are perhaps more interesting than the Zapatistas long term because they're doing it in a somewhat more urbanized & industrialized area with 10x population, and they are explicitly designing a governance framework with intent to scale to nation-state size and beyond. But, well, it hasn't even been 10 years yet, so I don't think it counts as solid evidence of anything just yet.
- jotm 4y ago
  I dunno, many European countries seem successful at socialism. Powered through high tax rates and foreigners who want to work instead of the people sitting on benefits, but it works.
MarkPNeyer 4y ago
The lightning network is, yes.
curlftpfs 4y ago
Are zero-knowledge L2 blockchains decentralized?! By definition...
jrm4 4y ago
Using the words "centralized" or "decentralized" when describing crypto (and probably many other tech things) is perhaps frequently the worst oversimplifications one can engage in. I think what you want to discuss when using these words is the extent to which it is either likely or possible that a small number of players can unduly influence a thing, but there are frequently MANY MORE FACTORS at work here than "that number." You have to look at how the thing is set up, what governance looks like, what technical limitations there are, and -- perhaps most importantly -- what incentives are there in place for the players to do so. A lot of the "centralization" fears are bad because they're the sort of thing, that -- if executed -- would destroy the value of the thing to the centralizers themselves, and thus they would literally never do it.
Breza 4y ago
None of it is truly decentralized. Most Bitcoin mining comes from three corporations. You could replicate the whole network by setting up a cross-cloud system that's balanced between AWS, Azure, and GCP.

ithinkso 4y ago

> or Coinbase If the transfer was not done on a blockchain but only in the database of some company, are you really using any new technology?

jknoepfler 4y ago
No.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  It’s just an IOU with an extra step.
  - curlftpfs 4y ago
    Your mind will be blown when you learn what exercising stock options is.
beaned 4y ago
No, but you don't have to. The point of blockchains is to allow people to opt out when they want to. If you don't want to or need to, you have that option.
- thfuran 4y ago
  The point of blockchain is to allow people to not use blockchain? I believe I have just now conceived of a more elegant way to achieve that.
  - beaned 4y ago
    I could have been clearer. The point is to be able to opt out of the traditional finance system when they want to.
  - curlftpfs 4y ago
    It's a point of a blockchain; it's opt-in. Much like your credit card's contract.

splintercell 4y ago

It's actually a worse situation that bitcoin synergy usage scales with its price. So same number of people could be using bitcoin but if the price jumps up by 10X, then over a period a few months it's energy usage would also go up by 10X.

conductr 4y ago
This is exactly what you’d expect to see with market manipulation. It’s the pump before the dump. Or less cynically, it’s just herd mentality seen through data.