[HN Gopher] Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
Author : vishnu_ks
Score : 1313 points
Date : 2021-05-18 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ethereum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ethereum.org)
| randomopining wrote:
| Crypto is dumb, although I will try to ride the wave.
|
| PoW -- wasteful electrical mining, only big entities can build
| efficient asic farms. And only in low cost of electricity spots.
|
| PoS -- will incentive oligarchal collusion. Basically same as our
| current financial system.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| PoW was of course a naive system but this this PoS should really
| be called the "Oligarchy" because it takes us back to the past
| and very visibly separates the plebs from the aristocracy.
|
| PoW had an implicit requirement for a global supply chain of
| hardware and energy which (kind of) made political and
| geopolitical games more difficult. With PoS, doing politics no
| longer requires work, which could lead to geopolicical wars. For
| example it might be possible to achieve wide enough consensus
| among stakers in Western countries to punish China (for some
| reason), e.g. willingly losing part of their stakes to empty
| major Chinese wallets. The fact that this doesn't really require
| physical effort but only persuasion is problematic.
|
| ETH will be a real test about whether PoS works, as the other PoS
| cryptos are much smaller and less intertwined in other crypto
| projects. Historically, oligarchies led to wars
| seph-reed wrote:
| I'm on the PoW side. But you should note that PoW is also
| oligarchic in the sense that individuals have no ability to
| compete in terms of mining. The rich get richer is still a
| thing here.
|
| That being said, PoS is very much a human centric valuation
| (rich peoples opinions being the value), so yes: politics and
| then war seem likely.
|
| Pretty much every fiat currency has the same issues as PoS,
| where eventually war becomes the cheapest way to retain value.
| jude- wrote:
| In PoW, the "rich" have to keep selling their coins to buy
| more dedicated mining equipment in order to stay competitive.
| And because PoW hasn't reached "optimum efficiency," there's
| still profits to be had by building better miners and cheaper
| power sources. Innovations here have positive downstream
| effects, since innovations in cheap renewable power and
| efficient chip fabs and designs have many applications beyond
| mining.
|
| PoS, on the other hand, requires minimal extra work from the
| already-rich. They just sit on their butts getting richer.
| Taek wrote:
| It's a well established result in PoW that a small constant
| improvement in efficiency (say, one mining farm is 5% more
| efficient than others) turns into an exponential advantage
| in hashrate over time if the profits are continually re-
| invested into building more hardware.
| jude- wrote:
| Yes, exactly. It's not a case of "rich get richer," so
| much as it's a case of "capital is continuously and
| irreversibly re-invested." In equilibrium, mining breaks
| even.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| mining is actually worse because of economies of scale.
| rich miners don't need pools so they don't pay fees, they
| get bulk deals and earlier access to the newest ASICs,
| they can pay personnel to optimize their operations, etc.
|
| so over time, the rich miners get richer at a faster rate
| than poor miners.
|
| whereas under PoS, everyone gets the same % return
| (unless you stake with a pool, but even then you don't
| have these economies of scale like with mining.)
| nscalf wrote:
| It still doesn't change the underlying issue you discussed.
| Just because there is some friction removed in PoS doesn't
| mean that PoW isn't weighted to favor people with large
| pools of capital to invest.
| jude- wrote:
| That "friction" is a feature, not a bug. The "friction"
| generates second-order benefits for society.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| benefits like killing the environment.
| everfree wrote:
| > it might be possible to achieve wide enough consensus among
| stakers in Western countries to punish China (for some reason),
| e.g. willingly losing part of their stakes to empty major
| Chinese wallets.
|
| According to Ethereum's PoS implementation, this would require
| more than 33% of all staked Ethereum coordinating with modified
| clients in order to pull off. Then, another percentage of the
| stake adding up to 66% would have to be complicit in the
| attack, rather than actively defending against it by refusing
| to finalize blocks.
|
| Compare this to PoW, where only 51% of hashrate needs to be
| participating/complicit to censor certain transactions, the
| other 49% have no way of fighting back, and the only tool the
| community has to fork away is to change the PoW algorithm.
|
| Because of this, I actually believe PoS is _more_ resistant
| than PoW to these kinds of attacks.
| Taek wrote:
| In practice a PoS network tends to have a participation rate
| of between 10% and 30%, and the 2-3 largest exchanges
| collectively tend to own between 10% and 50% of the total
| supply.
|
| And then also in practice most of the staking is performed by
| a small number of outsourced staking firms, which increases
| the power concentration even more.
|
| And it also makes hardforks more traumatic because your
| economy and your consensus builders are fundamentally
| intertwined. You can't fork an exchange off of the network
| without also disrupting every single user that parks funds on
| that exchange. The same concern doesn't exist with PoW
| mining.
| everfree wrote:
| >You can't fork an exchange off of the network without also
| disrupting every single user that parks funds on that
| exchange.
|
| Anyone who willingly opts into staking on a shady exchange,
| agreeing to a contract saying that they might be slashed,
| needs to be prepared to be slashed.
|
| On the other hand, any exchange that automatically opts
| user deposits into staking without notifying them should be
| criminally liable. That's a big breach of user trust.
| javitury wrote:
| > On the other hand, any exchange that automatically opts
| user deposits into staking without notifying them should
| be criminally liable.
|
| One of the selling points of cryptocurrencies is that
| they make financial transactions and contracts possible
| without depending on a central authority.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| > Compare this to PoW, where only 51% of hashrate needs to be
| participating/complicit to censor certain transactions, the
| other 49% have no way of fighting back, and the only tool the
| community has to fork away is to change the PoW algorithm.
|
| This is just such a small part of the whole equation.
|
| 1. They can't continuously attack with this, as you need to
| expend energy as long as you want to continue with the
| attack.
|
| 2. Even if you have majority hash-rate, you can't change the
| rules of the system (this has already happened)
| everfree wrote:
| 1. Under PoW, a 51% attacker can continuously attack
| profitably. All the energy they expend gets returned as
| mining rewards just like normal, and they can potentially
| even (up to) double their rewards if they censor the other
| 49%. The only way to stop this aside from changing the PoW
| algorithm is to physically locate and seize the mining
| rigs.
|
| 2. Majority stakers can't change the rules of the system
| either.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| > All the energy they expend gets returned as mining
| rewards just like normal
|
| Is that because the mined blocks themselves are still
| valid (i.e. the hashes check out), regardless of the
| presence of an attacker? But then how does it help the
| attacker in an economical sense? Doesn't the rest of the
| network know that the new 51% blocks are tainted, so to
| speak?
| nashashmi wrote:
| I understand that proof of stake requires an incredible amount of
| storage. This will make it a steep buy in. It will also raise
| production of SSDs and drives. How will this shift technically
| drive technology?
| erjiang wrote:
| You may be thinking of proof-of-SPACE cryptocurrency, where the
| more hard drive space you dedicate, the more rewards you get.
|
| Proof of STAKE is where you dedicate your cryptocurrency and
| are rewarded based on that. Since owning cryptocurrency doesn't
| take any physical resource, the only expenditure is keeping
| your staking node (a computer) online so that it can
| participate in validation.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| The HN narrative engine is so biased towards ETH that some are
| even asking for advice on where to buy ETH. This is ridiculous,
| just think through the consequences of a PoS system, you all are
| smart folks, I presume.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It seems like you're insinuating that there are negative
| consequences to the PoS system, but leave it up to the reader
| to think really deep and understand what those consequences
| are.
|
| I'm not well versed into PoS systems, but just took a look at
| ethereum's explanation and it sounded reasonable, but I'm not
| familiar with the details and trade-offs that are being made.
|
| Care to enlighten me what you're referring to?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| The negative consequences were mentioned in another comment:
|
| You should first get "well versed into PoS systems", The
| stakers (and their adjoints) can collude and decide to reorg
| the chain for a different outcome. This can be done
| indefinitely at no additional cost.
|
| In a PoW system, you not only have to expend capex for mining
| equipment, you hare further discouraged by the huge CONTINUED
| opex (energy) cost. The energy required to change the state
| of the chain is similar (or greater) than the energy it took
| to make the first version.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Not to mention the cavalier attitude towards their
| tokenomics (quite literally monetary policy now), how often
| they can change it. It simply doesn't inspire confidence. A
| monetary layer should be immutable once a good set of rules
| have been found to be working well.
|
| Just think about it, if a protocol layer on the internet
| changes its protocol parameters based on some trends, is it
| a good idea? Bitcoin is like another protocol layer on the
| internet protocol stack, you build other layers on top of
| the base monetary layer. You reduce the possibility of bugs
| in a layer disrupting the whole ecosystem and make the
| layer more maintainable.
| exo762 wrote:
| > The stakers (and their adjoints) can collude and decide
| to reorg the chain for a different outcome. This can be
| done indefinitely at no additional cost.
|
| No, they can't. As a part of the attack they will have to
| produce a two different signatures for the same decision
| (block N has hash X). This is where slashing comes in -
| anyone can submit those signatures to the chain to slash
| signers.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Sir, this has been discussed extensively whenever it
| comes up. Who will slash the slashers??
|
| Just THINK about the complexity you're introducing,
| you're just obfuscating the system more and more to just
| avoid some loopholes, while not eliminating it either.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Who will slash the slashers??
|
| Anyone who can produce a block with the proof inside.
| Attack you are describing depends on attackers having not
| 51% of the stake, but 100% of the stake.
|
| > while not eliminating it either.
|
| You would have to show this, not just claim.
| stevebmark wrote:
| Given that the main use of cryptocurrency is to increase fiat,
| and the main reason it increases fiat is based on the
| fundamentally poor design of guessing at random numbers with
| increasing difficulty, I predict that if Etherium becomes more
| efficient, the price will drop and interest in the coin will
| implode. I'm genuinely curious if I'm wrong, why I'll be wrong.
| No one cares about BCH, for example, even though it's more
| efficient than BTC.
| hamolton wrote:
| I disagree. The initial investments in these big currencies
| were from people thinking that they could become a practical
| currency with real-world use due to its lack of regulation and
| name-attached government tracking. The bulk of fiat driving up
| the price since then has been somewhat blind speculation. None
| of these change with PoS; instead, holders are now rewarded for
| verifying transactions.
| kaliali wrote:
| Cardano already uses over 99% less energy than Ethereum and
| doesn't have Ethereum gas fees...
| dang wrote:
| All: this thread has over 1000 comments and is paginated, so to
| see all of it you need to click More at the bottom of the page,
| or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=4
|
| (Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)
| dalbasal wrote:
| Whether or not it remains successful, ethereum is moving the ball
| forward. Congratulations to contributors. Inspiring.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...
|
| https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/the-censorsh...
|
| ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC.
|
| Bitcoin is competing against gold.
|
| Different races. different goals.
|
| Different risks.
| zepto wrote:
| > ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC. Bitcoin is
| competing against gold.
|
| If true, this means that every argument comparing BTC to fiat
| is bullshit.
|
| Given that most arguments I see in favor of BTC compare it to
| fiat, this doesn't speak well to the understanding of those who
| hold it.
|
| Given that BTC's value is predicated purely on the beliefs of
| those who hold it, a systematic misunderstanding like this
| suggests problems in store.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co.
| ..
|
| Bitcoin will be fine.
| zepto wrote:
| I stopped reading after your linked piece compared Bitcoin
| to Jesus and Queen Victoria.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| To be clear, bitcoin is of course also competing against USD.
|
| But this is neither a fair nor an interesting competition.
|
| Life span of fiat currencies is usually decades.
| zepto wrote:
| > ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC. Bitcoin is
| competing against gold.
|
| > To be clear, bitcoin is of course also competing against
| USD
|
| These can't both be true.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| Yes they can.
|
| Eth competing against USD. Bitcoin competing against USD
| and Gold.
|
| Bitcoin and Eth are also both competing against turkish
| lira, Tide pods, and zibwawean mortgage bonds.
|
| But only one competes with gold.
| zepto wrote:
| Sorry, no.
|
| You said:
|
| > ETH is competing against USD, _not against BTC_.
| Bitcoin is competing against gold
|
| You also said:
|
| > bitcoin is of course also competing against USD
|
| BTC and ETH can't both be competing with USD without
| competing with each other.
|
| If your statement that BTC is competing with USD is true,
| then your statement "ETH is competing against USD, _not
| against BTC_ " is false.
|
| ETH _is_ competing against BTC.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| Technically, my py pinky fingernail is competing with our
| latest nuclear powered aircraft carriers.
|
| Doesn't guarantee that my fingernail will win a shooting
| war.
| zepto wrote:
| Is this meant as an analogy for ETH and BTC?
|
| If so, it seems like it's just a circular reference to
| your personal belief in the strength of BTC over ETH,
| rather than a relevant argument.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| ITT: massive amounts of contradiction. This is just ridiculous:
| no one seems to know how this all works, or even agree on
| something that is happening right in front of us. This is a big
| red flag.
|
| EDIT: Instead of down-voting, maybe prove me wrong?
| fnord77 wrote:
| currently, one single bitcoin transaction "costs" 132 kg of CO2.
| DINKDINK wrote:
| Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more
| than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with
| distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's
| PoW<->Difficulty Adjustment<->Fixed Money Issuance novel art was
| published.
|
| Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now
| and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value,
| you incentivize ~<X units of energy to be expended) Summarized
| here: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
|
| If the curious reader is interested in reading more about the
| scope of fraud that the ethereum protocol has fueled read the
| post here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.re...
|
| Why link to the archive.org copy and not the original? Ethereum
| people got mod access to the subreddit and deleted everything
| pointing out the fraud.
| rossmohax wrote:
| Am I right that majority of video card miners are mining Eth?
| Does it mean that when merge happens, we ca expect video cards be
| available to buy again?
| roel_v wrote:
| Maybe this is a good time and place to ask - let's say I want to
| buy something using Ethereum. Is it correct that when I look at,
| say,
| https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... ,
| you have to pay USD 20 just as payment fees? I wrote off Bitcoin
| as a payment mechanism a long time ago because of this (although
| it seems BTC tx costs are now lower than ETH?), is this the
| direction tx costs for all crypto coins go?
| lhl wrote:
| For a basic transfer, it's probably best to use a gas tracker
| like: https://etherscan.io/gastracker to check on costs. It's
| about $6-8 at the moment. The average tx cost is going skew
| much higher because of DeFi transactions. Uniswap V3 is
| scheduled to deploy on Optimism potentially in a few weeks
| which may help alleviate fee pressure (although as you can see
| from the linked gas tracker, Uniswap V2 is still consuming a
| large portion of txs). The bet is that a combination of L1 and
| L2 improvements will bring transaction fees back to reasonable
| levels in the next year or so. If it doesn't, there are a host
| of new competitors like Algorand or Solana that are looking to
| supplant Ethereum (and do currently provide much higher
| transaction throughput and lower costs).
|
| In general, fees go up as the token price goes up since fees
| are usually charged as a function of transaction size or
| complexity, and also fees rise as a protocol hits its tx
| limits, but not always. Nano is an interesting cryptocurrency
| that is fee-less (although they just had to roll out an
| emergency update to improve spam resistance), so it's possible
| to design a fee-less system, but it's certainly even more
| experimental atm.
|
| There are, however a number of cryptos that currently (and by
| intent) have <$0.01 (sometimes significantly less) fees. This
| includes (just going down by market cap): Ripple, Bitcoin Cash,
| Stellar, or Dash. For transactions, even though fees are a bit
| higher (about $0.06), I like Monero since it's one of the most
| private and widely used cryptocurrencies out there, and it's
| fees have actually significantly decreased due to technical
| improvements in transaction efficiency, dynamic blocksize, and
| an algorithm that can actually reduce fees as volume increases.
| TheCapn wrote:
| Just to put an anecdote to the question, I made a withdrawal
| from my mining pool to my wallet 2 days ago and for an nearly
| instant transaction it cost me ~$2USD. Higher than I'd want in
| any currency, but it definitely wasn't $20USD
| 55555 wrote:
| Strange. I made ~5 ETH transactions a few days ago
| (interacting with a smart contract) and paid ~$90 each.
| Around the same time I made a few transfers, and spent about
| $25 each.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Yeah gas fees have been all over the place, and smart
| contract interaction can be really $$$
| Kirby64 wrote:
| It's cost per transaction. Transactions can have multiple
| endpoints, so the tx fee is split up between many different
| users.
|
| If you check the incoming transaction ID I'm sure you'll see
| it contained many many endpoint wallets.
|
| That's how mining pools offer free withdrawals periodically.
| If you split it up amongst 100s of users, per user tx cost is
| very low.
| lawn wrote:
| > I wrote off Bitcoin as a payment mechanism a long time ago
| because of this (although it seems BTC tx costs are now lower
| than ETH?), is this the direction tx costs for all crypto coins
| go?
|
| No. There are developers who actually prioritize on-chain
| scaling. For instance Bitcoin Cash and Monero have very cheap
| fees, and they will stay cheap for the foreseeable future.
| zionic wrote:
| That chart is highly misleading, as it includes all smart
| contracts. In ETH a basic transfer (like BTC) is often cheap
| (although it needs to be even less!), however interacting with
| a smart contract can be more expensive. If you want to interact
| with a highly complex smart contract that pulls a lot of state
| it can be 100x the cost of a basic transfer... just depends on
| the code.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yep. Not much, if anything, has improved since you wrote off
| Bitcoin. One of the problems is nobody really cares about
| having a new payment mechanism. You can explain fractional
| reserve banking to people, explain how the 2008 financial
| crisis happened, even give small scale advantages like sending
| money overseas, and the vast majority of people just don't
| care. Until people start caring, nothing will change, and
| crypto will remain a zero-sum pyramid scheme.
| znite wrote:
| Not sure how it all works, but I assume it's broken down for a
| purchase on something like Coinbase card - eg. they bundle a
| load of card transactions into a ETH to fiat conversion for
| Visa
|
| https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/ot...
| freeone3000 wrote:
| An entire month's worth, in fact! In practical terms, you pay
| for things in fiat and then cryptocurrency is sold to cover
| your credit card bill.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Nobody knows whether or not cryptocoins are currencies of the
| future but I'm certainly willing to let them innovate for the
| next few decades figuring out if there's a path forward.
|
| However, I cannot abide by a money speculation mechanism which
| uses as much electricity to mine worldwide as the Netherlands
| use in total. That's absolutely asinine to me.
| crazypython wrote:
| https://mempool.space/
|
| As of writing, a Bitcoin transaction costs $4.76.
|
| The last time I received a Bitcoin payment, it cost $0.36 in
| network fees. The network is currently more congested, so the
| fees are higher at the moment.
| surmoi wrote:
| Yes ETH gas price (transaction fee) have been very high, much
| higher than BTC lately...
|
| Not all cryptocurrency have such insane transaction fees
| though. NANO is a good example of a fee-less cryptocurrency
| (cf. https://nano.org/)
| mminer237 wrote:
| Currently Bitcoin is $13 to Ethereum's $20.
|
| Ironically, that's because the value of value of Bitcoin has
| plummeted compared to Ehtereum. A month ago today, an
| Ethereum transaction would have cost $21 while a Bitcoin
| transaction would have cost $45.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Ethereum transaction cost is independent of ETH price.
|
| Tx fee = gas * gas rate
| doomroot wrote:
| The important take away from this comment is that nano like
| other "fee-less" cryptocurrency have little use so they're
| _clever_ way to achieve these goals have not been really
| tested. For example nano was recently DoSd for multiple days
| because of their clever no fee solution.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| All the Nano was invented 100% the day it was made. So its
| really just a shell game to pass on the worthless day 0
| tokens for more than 0 after day 0 -- just like every other
| PoS coin ever. Contrast with PoW, where coins cost REAL money
| every block to produce.
|
| It costs very little to transfer something of little value.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Costing money to produce doesn't make something inherently
| valuable. It would be expensive to sell iPhones crushed by
| previously-undriven Lamborghinis, but the product would
| still be worthless. Neither NANO nor Bitcoin have any
| inherent value. It's entirely derived from other people
| willing to pay for it. If people want to use a
| cryptocurrency, using something that doesn't require 15 GW
| to power could quite rationally be more valued more highly.
| leppr wrote:
| I have been seeing Nano shills pop up on HN recently. This is
| not the place. Please restrict your operations to Reddit,
| 4chan and Facebook. Thank you.
| jniedrauer wrote:
| That is correct, to run an on-chain transaction is fairly
| expensive. There is a lot of ongoing work to address this:
| Layer 2 solutions like optimistic rollup, arbitrum, etc.
| EIP-1559 itself will address this problem on layer 1. But the
| ecosystem is not mature yet. If/when the scaling problem is
| finally solved, the legacy financial system will change
| rapidly.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > EIP-1559 itself will address this problem on layer 1.
|
| 1559 addresses fee stability and will help reduce fee spikes.
| It's purpose is not to reduce fees in general.
| zucker42 wrote:
| $20 is a little high. ETH transactions are variable cost; more
| complex transactions cost more. In order to get the price of a
| simple transfer you can take the current gas price (for
| example, from https://ethgasstation.info/index.php), which is
| 87 right now, multiply that by 21000 (cost in gas of a
| transfer) and divide that by 1 billion. So a transfer costs
| 0.001827 ETH or ~$6 if you want to happen within a few minutes.
|
| So yes, it's currently not practical for microtransactions.
| helen___keller wrote:
| To directly answer your question: currently, ethereum has the
| same fundamental scaling problems that bitcoin has (limited
| global throughput)
|
| Bitcoin's attempted solution on this front is off-chain scaling
| via lightning network. As far as I can ascertain, this has had
| highly limited adoption.
|
| Eth's attempted solution on this front is sharding. I can't
| claim to be an expert in this, but from my understanding after
| proof-of-stake is deployed, ethereum plans to deploy something
| like 64 separate "shards" which, from my understanding, are
| like extra blockchains for conducting transactions, and using
| some kind of complicated proof of stake system to keep it
| consistent. In this case, while the main-net still has limited
| global throughput, scaling up to add more side chains will
| allow scaling additional throughput. You can read more here
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
|
| As with lightning, we don't know how well this will actually
| end up going until it's deployed.
| everfree wrote:
| Ethereum has set aside sharding temporarily to focus on PoS.
| The plan to scale in the short-term is to use technology
| called "rollups" which put a transaction's signature data
| off-chain while keeping its data on-chain, effectively
| "batching" a bunch of transactions into one.
|
| https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-
| ethereum-r...
| cliftonk wrote:
| Eth has a sidechain called Polygon with orders of magnitude
| more usage than bitcoin's lightning network. There are a
| number of other promising "scaling solutions" launching in
| the coming weeks. Sharding is unlikely to happen in 2021.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > Eth's attempted solution on this front is sharding
|
| sharding + L2 rollups*
| [deleted]
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| No, there are coins like Bitcoin Cash that have ridiculously
| low fees and are accepted in tons of physical stores across the
| world.
|
| BTC refuses to scale, Lightning is permanently broken.
|
| Ethereum will reduce the fees with sharing, but that will take
| time.
| f6v wrote:
| > in tons of physical stores across the world.
|
| Compared to other crypto, or on the scale of Visa and
| MasterCard?
| itsdsmurrell wrote:
| Is this really your question?
| f6v wrote:
| I mean, yeah. I've seen Bitcoin-accepting shops once or
| twice in my life. But the parent claimed "there's a ton",
| so I was wondering where I can find those.
| x4e wrote:
| People interested in POS should look at Nano [1].
|
| In Ethereum only "validators" validate transactions - those with
| more than 32 Eth in their own wallet.
|
| In Nano "representatives" validate transactions - but individual
| users vote a representative to represent them (with their wallet
| balance as a weighting).
|
| The difference is that you can have 0.00001 Nano and still have a
| say over the network. It also removes the need for "stake pools"
| where lots of people lend Eth to one person to make up 32 Eth
| together (with the hope you will get your money back).
|
| [1]: https://nano.org
| Siira wrote:
| > you can have 0.00001 Nano and still have a say over the
| network.
|
| Isn't that susceptible to sybil (flooding) attacks?
| x4e wrote:
| Your voting power is weighted by your balance, so those with
| higher balances have more voting power, and the
| representatives with the highest amount voted onto them have
| the highest amount of control over the network.
| soheil wrote:
| If there was a way to verify the power source is green I think
| PoW would be the ideal way to move forward. For example if
| electrons generated by photoelectric cells somehow were different
| than other electrons (quantum spin, parity, etc.) then maybe an
| algorithm could check for that and only accept blocks mined using
| these electrons and not others.
| pavon wrote:
| Any crypto system that has an energy problem also has an
| economic problem. When a transaction requires the same amount
| of electricity as an average household uses in a month, then
| each transaction will cost _someone_ a full months electric
| bill. That will either have to be paid with extremely high
| transaction fees or "absorbed" by the value of the currency in
| ways that make it unsuitable as an actual currency.
|
| This is true regardless of the environmental impacts of the
| specific energy source, and while solar and wind are decreasing
| in price, it is unlikely costs will drop so much to make this
| issue negligible.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Can someone give a brief summary of what Ethereum is? Is it a
| crypto that will be merging with some other crypto? How does it
| relate to Ethereum 2? Are they going to continue being separate
| cryptos?
| danlugo92 wrote:
| It's like Bitcoin except it has vulnerabilities so will be
| hacked (and it already has been) or taken over by the
| Zuckerbergs of the world when the incentives are high enough in
| the future (maybe 5 or 10 years) then it will implode.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| To quote wikipedia:
|
| > Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with
| smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native
| cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest
| cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.
| Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.
|
| It's a blockchain whose token wasn't intended as a
| cryptocurrency but as a medium for paying for having a program
| ("smart contract") stored on it run on every node of the
| network. In practice this can be used for all sorts of things,
| including bootstrapping the vast majority of other
| cryptocurrencies currently in existence, but under the current
| system it can't process transactions effectively enough to be
| useful in that manner.
|
| As I understand it Ethereum 2, which is a really long term
| thing they've been doing for years, is meant to gobble up the
| original Ethereum completely once all stages of deployment are
| completed (any prior forks that may happen would remain
| independent, I guess).
| silicon2401 wrote:
| thanks for the explanation. interesting read; don't really
| get it, but worth looking into more.
| merwanedr wrote:
| Ethereum is winning every crypto/blockchain narrative. This is
| super impressive and proves, once again, that real value is where
| devs are.
| saos wrote:
| A well timed article. Glad I invested early
| idlewords wrote:
| One neat trick reduces cryptocurrency energy usage by 100%
| oreally wrote:
| Will this reduce fees? I've heard it was a big problem with eth.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Ethereum will use at least 99% less energy post merge
|
| I realize that is the text from the article, but what they really
| meant is "will use at _most_ 99% less energy ". The reduction
| will be at least 99%. The future value will be at most 1% of the
| current value.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I think that depends on whether you think "at least" modifies
| the "99%" or "99% less energy"
| IncRnd wrote:
| Many engineers get into these language conundrums by poorly
| stapling phrases and modifiers together.
| luka-birsa wrote:
| Fully support this, as PoW protocols - from an efficient market
| perspective - consume as much as they are currently worth to
| mine, which would mean that if we believe that the value of BTC
| will go up (in line with past increases, for orders of magnitude)
| then also the consumption of power will go up just as much.
|
| When BTC hits 250K per coin next year, expect 5x as much energy
| consumption to what it does use today. At 1M per coin we can
| expect 20x as much power consumption.
|
| Highly unlikely that taxation can resolve this as global economy
| simply forces the miners to places where energy is cheap and
| abundant. And countries will view this as a competitive advantage
| as now there is a simple way to convert power directly into
| money. Many cases have shown that poor countries will use their
| environment to gain an upper hand and pull their country out of
| poverty. Sadly the impact to the environment is global.
| exo762 wrote:
| PoW also implies large inflation, which pays for the security
| of the network. With PoS you can reduce issuance greatly, while
| staying safe.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Consider not rabbitholing into a narrative and understanding
| reality:
|
| https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...
| aloer wrote:
| Bit of a weird argument they make there. Banking keeps the
| world spinning.
|
| What does bitcoin do, right now, to make this even remotely
| comparable?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Why is there such a strong status-quo bias among people I
| thought were technologists, and what do you guys defend?
| the banking system?? really?
|
| Do you all remember the energy FUD that the internet got
| back in the late 90s [1]?
|
| Please! lets not sleepwalk into another PoS system on the
| internet to replace the previous one.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?s
| h=3e2...
| aloer wrote:
| It wasn't my intention to defend the banking system. But
| since you posted an article where Bitcoin is compared to
| this banking system I'd say it's just fair to question
| whether they can actually be compared.
|
| So, can they?
|
| What's the current transactions per day? How low can
| bitcoin energy consumption realistically go compared to
| where it is now?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| No, that wasn't my gripe. Bitcoin is a decentralized
| technological solution that almost completely replaces
| the banking system, I'd prefer that over the current
| Banking system, and bitcoin is global to boot.
|
| Transaction per day -> it can do as many as you want. I
| run a lightning node and I've shown a lot of people how
| quick and cheap the transactions can be, and also how
| EASY it is to get setup to transact in bitcoin over
| lightning.
| xur17 wrote:
| This. Every single article and discussion about this
| "problem" always uses base chain transactions as the
| divisor for the energy cost per transaction. The average
| Bitcoin transaction [0] is ~$500k right now. The protocol
| made a conscious decision to make layer 1 a settlement
| layer, and secondary layers as transaction layers. I
| personally make an order of magnitude more transactions
| on layer 2 than I do on layer 1. The company I work for
| fits into the same boat, and the vast vast majority of
| funds we receive are on a layer 2.
|
| [0] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/average-
| transaction-am...
| nwah1 wrote:
| This article obscures the truth, which will be obvious soon, that
| Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less efficient
| than traditional banks.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less
| efficient than traditional banks.
|
| As a payment network? Layer 2 solutions will be in production
| by the end of this summer which will enable payments that costs
| 3 cents, regardless of demand or amount transferred. Working
| alongside with smart contracts. Lookup zkSync 2.0 / zkPorter.
| xutopia wrote:
| So... how much money will someone make from mining post merge?
| Will people be able to make money?
| micropresident wrote:
| People seem to forget that this energy use is a consequence of
| miners wanting coins because of the subjective _value of the
| reward._ Even stakers can expend more money for a better chance
| at receiving the eth2 staking rewards. This will result in just
| as much energy use for a given reward value as Bitcoin. The
| question is if you can account for it. Eth2 propagandists are
| being very -- unintentionally -- dishonest about this.
|
| Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true _even_
| in USD. Bitcoin is actually more efficient than existing
| financial systems. Bitcoin removes all the labor and expense that
| goes into running ATMs, Bank buildings, tellers, and so forth.
| Eth also does this.
|
| The real way to address energy use is to introduce seignorage
| into the system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage) in
| order to do this, you must give some of the new issuance to
| people who are not part of the system of validation.
|
| Eth2 might work for awhile, and it might make people rich as
| people put up more and more stake in order to obtain rewards.
| (The block reward is effectively a risk-free rate of return).
| However, long term, you end up with a larger and larger
| percentage of the economy controlled by very few people.
|
| Systems like this dis-incentivize the creation of real value
| through investment in real-world goods and services. Long term,
| people will opt out of this nonsense as it produce coins which
| are not useful in _real_ business transactions due to the
| deflationary nature of the tokens.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Even stakers can expend more money for a better chance at
| receiving the eth2 staking rewards. This will result in just as
| much energy use for a given reward value as Bitcoin.
|
| I think you are wrong. Staker pays in "time-cost of money",
| which is proportional to the stake size and in energy cost,
| which is pretty much constant (few watts). Your argument
| implies that there will be greater amount of stakers. That
| would be plausible if not for 32ETH minimal stake.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true
| even in USD. Bitcoin is actually more efficient than existing
| financial systems. Bitcoin removes all the labor and expense
| that goes into running ATMs, Bank buildings, tellers, and so
| forth. Eth also does this.
|
| How can you say this in good faith when BTC doesn't do the same
| things existing financial systems do?
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Your entire argument is base on the fact that more people mine
| because when the rewards are better, higher price.
|
| But in PoS there is no mining. More and more people will stake,
| but will do so with a small single VM, with no GPUs or ASICS
| mining and using power.
|
| So a PoS system will never ever use as much energy as BTC
| mining, by many many orders of magnitude.
| csomar wrote:
| I might be jumping the shark here, but I think the Ethereum
| "elite community" are probably going to get into a situation of
| "be careful what you wish for".
|
| There is a reason why most of mining is happening in China, Iran,
| Libya and other "poor" countries. These countries have big
| players in mining but not in trading/legislation (except for
| China).
|
| By creating a PoW crypto, you are able to do something really
| cool: You can move value (energy) out of a country, without
| having a connection with any institution either inside or
| outside. This happens in a permission-less, indirect manner.
| sigmar wrote:
| I feel like ETH is in very good footing to move to Proof of Space
| (decentralized network, good dev work, lots of distributed
| stake), especially in comparison to other projects that have gone
| with PoS. I'm sure it'll succeed in many ways, but I can't
| imagine moving away from Nakamoto consensus is going to be "the
| solution" generally for how to create a working, scalable, well
| distributed currency.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Any easy to follow tutorials on how this Pos system will work?
| stickac wrote:
| It will also make it 99.95% less resistant to censorship.
| everfree wrote:
| Ethereum's PoS design is censorship-proof up to 33% and
| censorship-resistant up to 66% of staked Ether. Compare to
| PoW's 51% and you'll see that they're somewhat comparable.
| lucasnortj wrote:
| who cares, cryptos have no use case except for cranks and
| criminals and noone has ever improved a solution by adding a
| blockchain to it.
| Croftengea wrote:
| The title suggests PoS for ETH is 100x more efficient than PoW
| whereas the article actually estimates PoW to be 2000x more
| efficient.
| lucideer wrote:
| To clarify further: the HN title says 100x whereas the article
| title says 2000x
|
| Update: it's been fixed
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have fond memories of Solidity. Not the prettiest language but
| I built some fun toy projects ("sports prediction" AKA gambling)
| with it circa 2017/18. However the whole energy thing discouraged
| me from building anything bigger. I may give it a shot after this
| merge.
| truth_seeker wrote:
| Can someone point out what exactly changed at low level code to
| achieve this optimization in energy consumption or they altered
| the algorithm altogether ?
| jude- wrote:
| Your post advocates a
|
| (X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
|
| approach to solving the double-spend problem in a decentralized
| cryptocurrency. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't
| work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
| idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state
| to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
|
| (X) Scammers can easily use it to defraud users
|
| (X) Smart contracts and other legitimate cryptocurrency uses
| would be affected
|
| ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
|
| (X) It is defenseless against network-level attacks
|
| ( ) It will stop scams for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with
| it
|
| ( ) Users of cryptocurrencies will not put up with it
|
| ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
|
| (X) The police will not put up with it
|
| (X) Requires too much cooperation from exchanges
|
| ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
|
| ( ) Many cryptocurrency users cannot afford to lose business or
| alienate potential employers
|
| ( ) Scammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
|
| (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or
| business
|
| (X) Replicated state machines do not scale
|
| Specifically, your plan fails to account for
|
| ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
|
| ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for cryptocurrencies
|
| ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
|
| ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all
| private keys
|
| (X) Asshats
|
| ( ) Jurisdictional problems
|
| (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
|
| (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
|
| (X) Huge existing software investment in PoW
|
| (X) Huge existing software investment in composable smart
| contracts
|
| (X) Susceptibility of protocols other than PoW to cheap fork
| creation
|
| (X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
|
| (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
|
| (X) Eternal arms race involved in all network-healing approaches
|
| (X) Extreme profitability of scams
|
| ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
|
| (X) Technically illiterate politicians
|
| (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with
| scammers
|
| ( ) Dishonesty on the part of scammers themselves
|
| (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
|
| (X) Bitcoin already exists
|
| (X) Error states that require manual intervention to fix
|
| and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
|
| (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none
| have ever been shown practical
|
| ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
|
| ( ) Block headers should not be the subject of legislation
|
| ( ) Blacklists suck
|
| ( ) Whitelists suck
|
| ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card
| fraud
|
| (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public
| networks
|
| (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
|
| ( ) Sending transactions should be free
|
| (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
|
| ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
|
| (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
|
| ( ) Temporary/one-time addresses are cumbersome
|
| ( ) I don't want the government reading my cryptocurrency
| transactions
|
| ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
|
| (X) The rich should not get richer
|
| (X) Money and finance are legal constructs, and should not be
| replaced by undemocratic systems
|
| Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
|
| (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
|
| ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for
| suggesting it.
|
| ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and
| burn your house down!
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I love this! I know the original text, did you write this
| variant?
| jude- wrote:
| Ha, yeah, I based it on Cory Doctorow's anti-spam form:
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
| [deleted]
| michael_vo wrote:
| What are the attack vectors on PoS. With PoW you need 51% of the
| mining power to take over the system, which is very labor
| intensive to set up.
|
| With PoS could you take over all coins by buying 51% of the
| existing coins? So if the market cap of ETH is 200BB spend 100BB
| to double your money?
| caballeto wrote:
| Once the attack goal is achieved the Ethereum value will go to
| zero. It does not make sense to do this by buying coins, but
| potentially hackers could get control of such big amount of
| coins by hacking exchanges, thus bringing whole system to
| collapse. Similar scenario as in Mr. Robot.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| ETC has been 51% attacked 4 times and it's still the 17th
| largest cryptocurrency.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-51-attacks-etc
|
| Furthermore it's become pretty clear from the many attacks on
| value tokens in Etherum & BSC DeFi that the attacker can move
| faster that the market and drain any liquidity
| pools/exchanges that have open offers into something that
| isn't going to collapse.
|
| The theory early on was that the coin cratering b/c of an
| attack would be an extra deterrent, but the price of coins
| that have been successfully 51% attacked says otherwise.
|
| Here's another cryptocurrency in the top 100 that has
| suffered many 51% attacks.
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-gold-blockchain-
| hit-b...
| hanniabu wrote:
| ETC is PoW, it's a different dynamic than PoS which was the
| topic of discussion
| andrewla wrote:
| If I understand the post you are replying to correctly,
| the point is that being successfully attacked does not
| necessarily destroy the value of the coin.
|
| Sometimes people argue that a nation state could "shut
| down" bitcoin for some amount of money -- say $10B. With
| that, they could buy enough mining equipment to publish
| empty blocks and throttle the ability to send
| transactions.
|
| Part of my skepticism of this idea is that the bitcoin
| network is already so throttled but it does not seem to
| affect the value of the coin negatively. What would be
| hilarious would be if France decided to shut down
| Bitcoin, and succeeded, but the value of bitcoin then
| proceeded to increase 100x.
| [deleted]
| seph-reed wrote:
| The attack vectors on PoS are less logical than those of PoW.
|
| With PoW, it's all just physics, energy, and math. With PoS
| it's rich peoples opinions and validation. An attack on PoS
| will likely be political... and politics tend to slip into war
| if there's not enough adults in the room.
| derivagral wrote:
| Tail risk as I understand it is going to be fun. If your staked
| nodes lose connectivity (or your pool's) the network can
| penalize them by slashing the ETH and the stake, right? So
| after everyone centralizes on a few nodes in the main
| providers, aren't bad actors heavily incentivized to attack
| common infra to remove $/power/currency/voting from others and
| thus shrink the chain?
|
| I don't think the network can figure out an "oops, AWS or
| Comcast went out; my nodes at home or in the cloud shouldn't
| get slashed" vs "lets sabotage an ISP or network for enough
| time to trigger penalties and repeat it".
| exo762 wrote:
| You are on point. The solution is (and people do it today)
| don't run backup nodes, or you will risk getting slashed.
| Your penalty for missing your vote is very mild - basically
| not earning the reward for the round.
| eyezick wrote:
| Yup and accordingly PoS devs have explicitly stated this
| incentivizes stakers to be spread out, and not only on
| infrastructure but software, as there are multiple client
| implementations.
| jerf wrote:
| In addition to the replies, bear in mind that market cap is a
| bit of a fiction. If you go on a crazy buying spree to take
| over the network, you'll raise the price of each token in the
| price due to your own rising demand. It would be a lot more
| than $100B.
| eventreduce1 wrote:
| Yes and no. If you spend 100BB to buy 51% and then take over
| the network, eth will have zero value and you loosed 100BB.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Worse, if the overall Ethereum community reaches a consensus
| that a malicious entity attempted to take over the network,
| then the devs will fork the blockchain to rollback the
| particular transactions with the malicious entity, and the
| new blockchain will keep chugging along as normal while the
| attacker has just lost a shitton of dollars to buy 100BB.
| (This is similar to what happened with the DAO previously,
| although the reason for it was bugs rather than a 51% attack)
| hanniabu wrote:
| This is not what happened with the DAO. This is well
| documented and I suggest you read up on. TLDR, the hacker
| tried to withdraw the funds and there was a 30 day lockup
| period so the contract was updated to stop this.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| There have been multiple examples of 51% attacks happening
| and the cryptocurrency it happened to not going to zero.
|
| Etherum classic and Bitcoin gold come to mind. They are both
| in the top 100 still, and both have been 51% attack multiple
| times.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| You don't double your money - at that point the network is
| compromised and nobody wants your coins. It's a guaranteed way
| to destroy Ethereum's value, but the only incentive to do it is
| to troll. Not too many entities globally looking to spend that
| much for a laugh, even if they could get the necessary funds in
| liquid form AND manage not to drive up price with their buy
| orders.
| michael_vo wrote:
| Perhaps state actors who can print free money would be
| interested in performing these attacks. Say if a coin was
| owned predominantly by citizens of one country or if the
| countries' infrastructure was running on ETH technologies.
|
| Like suppose the banking system was running on ETH. Or if
| Colonial Pipelines used ETH.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I can elaborate on any point if interested, but this is
| covered in the parent.
|
| 1. They would drive the price up way past market price in
| an attempt to make such a large purchase. The cost of a
| large, rapid purchase is far, far from market price. Only a
| fraction of the market is willing to sell at current price.
|
| 2. If a country wanted to run on Ethereum, they could clone
| it, since they are giving up the benefits of a GLOBAL
| system when they take it over.
|
| Lmk if you have any questions. Pretty interesting topic
| given the insane ETH valuation atm, in contrast to, say,
| Algorand. Network and first move effects, I guess.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| The etherium developers and community have made relatively
| clear that if someone were to attempt such a thing, the
| non-malicious members of the community would just fork at
| the direction of the developers to a chain that is
| identical except that all of the etherium staked by the
| attacker is redistributed among the non-malicious verifying
| nodes, as it would be once the consensus process concluded
| that an attack was being carried out in a <51% attack
| scenario.
| unique_username wrote:
| Most of these PoS protocols use pBFT consensus (instead of
| nakamoto consensus) which means it would only require 1/3
| instead of 1/2
| andrewla wrote:
| It's even easier than that -- all you have to do is get a stake
| and then brute force mine for an alternate reality where your
| stake is the sole decision maker for the DAG.
|
| You can't really double-spend that way, but you can get a
| disproportionate amount of the shard rewards. In order to
| defend against this, other participants will also have to mine
| for a "more fair" alternate reality, so you end up getting a
| standstill where nobody can get economic advantage as long as
| the total power being devoted to preventing chain-shopping is
| greater than the amount spent on chain-shopping.
|
| In the end the energy expenditure would likely be unchanged
| from the status quo, it would just be hidden behind a facade of
| inexpensive proof-of-stake validations that conceal the actual
| work being done to ensure that this is not abused. This way
| everyone can feel warm and fuzzy because there's no actual way
| to measure how much work is being done to keep the validation
| from being monopolized.
| Athas wrote:
| Presumably, if someone took that kind of control over Ethereum,
| its value would rapidly become zero.
| vmception wrote:
| In practice, different people have utility in the network
|
| In most double spent networks, people clamor for the coins so
| they can have the chance at double spending
|
| In PoW networks that's combined with renting/deploying hash
| power
|
| In PoS networks its just taking over validators
|
| Big ole party!
| [deleted]
| crazypython wrote:
| You can DDoS normal, non-validating nodes, and if they go
| offline, they can be unsure which chain is the true chain,
| because they were not around.. This means your laptop can never
| sleep, unlike in Bitcoin, where full nodes may go offline and
| catch up later.
|
| People who control stake can refuse to include (censor)
| transactions, as there is no market competition for transaction
| inclusion like in PoW. In PoW, if 51% of network power is
| censoring transactions, then censored transactions can attach a
| higher fee, which competing miners will use to buy more
| equipment and mine the censored transactions.
|
| These are the ones I know about, that I learned in an evening
| of research.
| exo762 wrote:
| This is false. At least false for Ethereum's hybrid PoS.
|
| It uses Verifiable Delay Function as an element of random
| number generation process. One can look into number of rounds
| of VDF and treat them just the way they treat proof of work
| today. It can be compared to determine which chain is the
| longer one.
| jude- wrote:
| How long till we have a VDF ASIC that lets block producers
| fuck with this?
| crazypython wrote:
| Chia Coin is working on a VDF ASIC so that they can
| correct for it in advance (essentially selling it at a
| loss so everyone can own the best VDF) but I'm not sure
| it's the same VDF as Ether.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >So if the market cap of ETH is 200BB spend 100BB to double
| your money?
|
| No one would buy those from you, so at best you can burn money
| to burn other people's money at a premium.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film) strategy,
| way less efficiently.
| rmhsilva wrote:
| Zack (of https://amoveo.io) has a good write up of some attacks
| here: https://github.com/zack-bitcoin/amoveo-
| docs/blob/master//oth....
| kipchak wrote:
| The market cap will also increase as you buy loads of coins.
| For example if I went on coinbase pro, there are people willing
| to sell up to 50,000 ETH at a maximum price of $6,000, or a
| total cost of $220,000 million. Of course Coinbase isn't the
| only market, but if it was and I bought that 220,000 million
| dollars of ETH the market cap would now be around 700B, at
| least temporarily.
|
| My guess would be at some point people would realize a takeover
| was occurring and panic, but it seems like a 51% buyout would
| require an ungodly amount of money and time.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| It seems like a state actor could do it without much trouble.
| One important factor is a state actor doesn't necessarily
| have the profit motive. They could just desire to destroy the
| ecosystem.
| crazypython wrote:
| You don't need to buy, you can just get a coalition of people
| who already own 51% and ask them to do the attack.
| sp332 wrote:
| You have to find some people willing to sell you that much ETH.
| Market depth around the current price is obviously not _that_
| deep and it would at least cost way more if you could even find
| that much for sale anywhere.
| Geee wrote:
| You don't have to buy them, you can borrow them. This opens up
| a certain type of attack where you promise to pay interest to
| get control of the stake. If you're running a stake pool, you
| can pay interest on top of the stake reward. It's possible to
| run a staking yield farm, where you pay interest in a different
| cryptocurrency that you can mint yourself.
|
| These kinds of off-network incentives can disrupt the reward
| system. It's even possible to incentivize a lot of people to
| collude in a double spend attack if the rewards can be
| distributed to the participants.
| DennisP wrote:
| True, but a double-spend attack would destroy the stake of
| all the participants.
| leishman wrote:
| Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works.
| The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work
| is provably resistant to this, as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize
| debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted
| to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots
| efforts. A PoS currency will be controlled by a cabal of US
| financial institutions, and indirectly by the US regulatory
| system. Be careful what you wish for.
| roelb wrote:
| Proof of work is no different in this regard: more capital,
| more mining power, more control. Miners interests don't always
| align with the network's users interests (see gas fees). Proof
| of work isn't more decentralized either (a few mining pool
| delegators control bitcoin), eth2 proof of stake is more secure
| because of the pseudorandom validator selection.
| leishman wrote:
| It is very different: The difference is that PoW is
| censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing
| miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is
| external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can
| prevent new stakers from registering. Very important
| distinction.
| zionic wrote:
| > Anybody can be a miner
|
| This is patently false, endgame PoW centralizes mining
| around 3rd world coal/cheapest possible (stolen?)
| electricity. The overwhelming majority of the world has
| been priced out of BTC mining, not that they could get
| ahold of an ASIC anyways.
| throw1234000 wrote:
| Anybody can be a miner the same way anybody can participate
| in the race for Mars.
|
| But that doesn't mean your bottle rocket will beat SpaceX
| there.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Sure. And analogous to PoS is some kind of galactic
| requirement that you pay some kind of space bond in order
| to go to space. Mess around and your space bond is
| slashed. I like the bottlerocket model better.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| Yeah sure, let me just buy a container full of ASICs worth
| hundreds of thousands of $$$ and I'll start mining:
| https://twitter.com/SGBarbour/status/1390504269925654532
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Can't the people with most money buy the most computer power?
| leishman wrote:
| Yes, but they then need to maintain that edge by selling
| their Bitcoin and buying more computer power. They have
| constantly growing operating expenses and there is no force
| that centralizes control. PoS playbook is 1) get a stake, 2)
| set it and forget it.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Well I guess we'll see if you're right...
| troyvit wrote:
| Eh, I gotta say that no matter the system, speculators are
| gonna speculate and power hungry idiots will do everything they
| can to control a currency. That's fine, and human, and
| expected. Just please try not to melt all the ice caps while
| ya'll have at it.
| armandillo wrote:
| Proof of work is currently controlled by 3 companies in terms
| of hashpower and 1 in terms of hardware - Bitmain.
|
| So, the absolute worst case for PoS is already pretty much the
| case for PoW.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Smallish groups of consolidated power already control the
| future of the crypto currencies; see the migration to PoS.
|
| Crypto has made very little(perhaps zero) progress toward any
| solution in decentralizing power.
| reedjosh wrote:
| At least with privacy coins censoring transactions shouldn't
| be possible.
|
| Also with Monero anyone can cpu mine it, and transaction
| participants are obfuscated.
|
| With ARRR, miners don't know the identity of transaction
| participants.
| x4e wrote:
| POW just gives the power to whoever can purchase the most
| computing power. It also gives control of the network to those
| directly benefiting from high fees.
|
| At least POS gives the power to those that actually have an
| interest and stake in the currency itself.
| leishman wrote:
| PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians, which
| certainly have a tremendous incentive to siphon as much value
| from the currency as possible.
|
| PoW has a much more diversified set of actors with competing
| interests, which makes it much more difficult to change the
| rules. This is a feature not a bug.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| Yeah, I'm a big ETH holder, but this is honestly what
| worries me about the POS merge. I think the fact that
| Bitcoin miners have to sell to fund their operations is a
| nice feature and keeps them in a separate class from the
| custodians. Economic incentives that merge validators with
| custodians could create a feedback loop that concentrates
| too much power in the wrong places. That being said, ETH
| has a thriving DeFi ecosystem and a ton of smart people
| working on it, so I'm not betting against it.
| incrudible wrote:
| > PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians...
|
| You might as well claim that the Chinese Communist Party
| controls Bitcoin. Not _entirely_ wrong, but misleading.
| leishman wrote:
| No it's very different. Bitcoin consensus is achieved
| through a combination of mining actors and economic
| actors. PoS collapses this into a single group:
| custodians.
| incrudible wrote:
| Bitcoin consensus is achieved through miner majority, end
| of story. Any other narrative is pure make-belief.
| grubles wrote:
| Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and
| can invalidate new blocks that miners generate. You can
| see examples of this in history e.g. bitcoin.com mining a
| block with a greater block size than consensus allowed,
| which caused the block to be invalidated and the cost of
| energy wasted.
| incrudible wrote:
| What are nodes going to do if nobody wants to mine
| _their_ preferred blocks? Somebody has to mine them, and
| they 'll need a lot of hashrate to do so.
| yaa_minu wrote:
| Yes, in pow systems, miners can only ddos the network and
| they can do nothing more.
| themagician wrote:
| Those who got that stake by purchasing massive compute power.
|
| PoS just solidifies current stakeholders so that they no
| longer have to worry about competition from new players.
| conradev wrote:
| Is that actually the case? Couldn't a new player with the
| money to spend become a stakeholder overnight by purchasing
| large amounts of ETH on the open market and staking it?
|
| Versus taking that money and taking months to invest it
| into mining. Purchasing compute power is harder than
| purchasing ETH no matter how you slice it
| themagician wrote:
| In theory. Which is what the current stakeholders want.
| That was the value offer to do this in the first place.
|
| Either way, you end up with a currency that is far more
| centralized than most stable paper currencies. The number
| of large stakeholders in Etherum is probably measured in
| the thousands. PoS will just further consolidate the
| stakeholders over time.
|
| Ethereum isn't even reasonably transactable anymore. A
| single transaction costs like $40. As an actual currency,
| it died the same fate that Bitcoin did.
|
| Too few people hold too many coins, and then they make
| rules that only benefit increasing the price.
| DSingularity wrote:
| No way dude. Our current system isn't even close to PoS. Most
| obviously the federal reserve controls the monetary policy.
| Beyond that there is no "code is law" that we can all audit and
| fork if we find it inadequate. If ethereum centralized you can
| amend the protocol and fork the blockchain. Show me how you can
| do that with USD.
| lumost wrote:
| The main value of cryptocurrencies is a provable ledger with an
| open API. PoS sufficiently establishes that for all economic
| purposes save for those wishing to make themselves feudal
| lords.
|
| Currently your money is transmitted by csv copies across
| thousands of companies, most of whom use a semi-manual process.
| Moving this type of transaction to a distributed ledger will
| save financial institutions billions in audit costs.
| lawn wrote:
| > almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change
| the protocol
|
| If the miners really wanted to change the protocol, they would
| have done that. The exchanges would have followed, as they had
| declared that the longest chain would win, and that would be
| game over.
|
| Instead the miners gave in to the perceived authority of the
| Core developers, who pinky promised to later raise the block
| size (which they backed away from).
| Taek wrote:
| The exchanges have no reason not to support both sides of a
| fork, for example the BTC/BCH split. Then the owners of the
| tokens ultimately decide which one is more valuable by
| selling their tokens on the chain they don't prefer and
| buying tokens on the chain they do prefer.
| lawn wrote:
| There is a very clear bias if one chain keeps the ticker,
| and therefore the price, so much that in practice exchanges
| exchanges can decide which chain "is the original one".
| rcxdude wrote:
| This. There's a bunch of waffling above about how the
| miners vs stakers will control stuff and so on, but in
| reality it's the markets which define which gets used.
| That's what decided the block size debate, not users
| spinning up nodes or miners pushing in one direction in
| ther other. Miners follow the market, and so will those
| running validators on proof of stake. Those who can
| influence the market have the most power here (and usually
| that's vocal members of the community or developers).
| s7atic wrote:
| Why do you believe a global PoS currency will be controlled by
| US actors? The US has a 10--20% share of global GDP.
|
| Regardless, history has proven that the most legitimate branch
| of a blockchain wins, irrespective of security model. It will
| not be the actor with the most hash power or stake. For
| reference, see the Justin Sun/STEEM drama.
|
| Vitalik Buterin has an interesting blog post on legitimacy:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.
| leishman wrote:
| Because they're all largely funded by U.S. based VC funds.
| simias wrote:
| It's not like cryptocurrencies achieved any of their goals so
| far anyway. If it's about facilitating pyramid schemes and
| creating a worldwide casino we might as well do it efficiently
| and without wasting insane amounts of resources.
|
| I'm personally very happy for PoS and hope that it'll be
| successful, I would be a lot less annoyed with cryptocurrency
| bullshit if it wasn't so wasteful. With proof-of-stakes it
| basically joins the ranks of essential oils and other MLM
| scams, I'm fine with that.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| But like, what were cryptocurrency's goals again?
| miohtama wrote:
| The goals can be technological, cultural and macroeconomic
| ones. I had a presentation recently on this topic:
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/
| mhluongo wrote:
| Originally? Freedom.
| notJim wrote:
| I can't find it right now, but I saw this infographic the
| other day showing how the ideology/goals of cryptocurrency
| have shifted over time. Something along going from a
| literal currency to replace the dollar to going toward its
| present definition as some mix of speculative asset and
| inflation hedge.
| skohan wrote:
| the funny thing is that cryptocurrency _was_ fairly
| useful as a currency in 2014. There were a number of
| bitcoin ATMs in my city, and a number of businesses where
| you could spend it. It seems to me that the whole block-
| size debate proved the failure of the system, since the
| interests of a few ultimately triumphed over the best
| interests of the system as a whole.
| webXL wrote:
| > since the interests of a few ultimately triumphed over
| the best interests of the system as a whole
|
| Is it in the best interests of "the system" (interesting
| choice of words... instead of "the many") to require
| enterprise infrastructure in order to run a node?
| skohan wrote:
| Bitcoin used to be a currency, now it's nothing more than
| a speculative asset. Are "the many" being served by that?
| atweiden wrote:
| Are "the many" being served by USD inflation rn?
|
| And can you name a cryptocurrency which is anything other
| than a speculative store of value, and not something
| whose market cap is based on drum beating over social
| media?
| skohan wrote:
| > Are "the many" being served by USD inflation rn?
|
| That's a nice false equivalency, but I can go to the
| store and buy bread with USD. Where can I do that with
| cryptocurrency?
|
| > And can you name a cryptocurrency which is anything
| other than a speculative store of value, and not
| something whose market cap is based on drum beating over
| social media?
|
| Yes! Bitcoin circa 2014
| imtringued wrote:
| If those are the sacrifices you have to make then it
| failed completely.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Originally anarchist anti-government folks needed some
| medium of exchange for their future plans and bitcoins
| could theoretically fill that niche, being trustless. We
| could argue that anarchy ideology is not good, but at least
| it was some ideology and tool fit the purpose. Now crypto
| is 99.99% occupied by get-rich-quick folks with zero
| principles.
| jollybean wrote:
| And possibly those ideological people were also get-rich-
| quick people as well.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Not anarchists, ancaps and right libertarians.
|
| Crypto-currency has inbuilt hierarchy, as people with
| more hashrate have proportional power over the monetary
| system. This is more hierarchy than an elected chairman
| of the fed, for example.
| billti wrote:
| Serious questions... I genuinely don't know... but I
| assume a country could block access to the "blockchain"
| of any crypto currency, just like some of them do with
| access to Twitter, Google, Facebook, Github, etc.
|
| Is there way to continue using your Bitcoin in this case?
| Or is it effectively the same as having a bank account
| frozen (i.e. you can't conduct any transactions if you
| don't have broad connectivity).
|
| Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental? (I
| realize it's probably not a single domain/endpoint like
| other sites I referenced, but the traffic probably has
| other characteristics that would make it easy for a state
| to disable).
| sokoloff wrote:
| Block live access? Maybe.
|
| Block access entirely? Only if they were willing to stop
| all communications and travel in/out of the country. You
| could carry keys on paper and instructions in your head
| and apply them on the "free side" of the border. I don't
| think it's practically possible to entirely prevent such
| transactions. You can make them illegal; you can make
| them difficult; you probably can't stop them as an
| individual country.
| wmf wrote:
| You can receive the blockchain via satellite and send
| transactions over email, Signal, or whatever.
| https://blockstream.com/satellite/
|
| Or you could just use Tor.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The only way to completely block access to the block
| chain thats remotely feasible are repeated 51% attacks
| and an impediment to general access.
|
| That means raiding mining farms while limiting their
| number by limiting the size of Bitcoin.
|
| Its only something the US or China could do.
|
| Otherwise no, there is no way of completely blocking it.
| There are ways of making it impractical for the vast
| majority, though.
| rafaelero wrote:
| > Crypto-currency has inbuilt hierarchy, as people with
| more hashrate have proportional power over the monetary
| system.
|
| If this is the case, please illuminate us why they don't
| use their influence to increase block size or block
| rewards.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's very simple. The price of Bitcoin converges towards
| the price of mining it. Making mining bitcoin easier will
| only lower its price in the long run. So increasing block
| size will only increase the amount of hashrate in the
| system and thus the profit per dollar invested will not
| change that much.
|
| Given this information, is it worth rocking the boat
| while mining is still very profitable? No.
| thekyle wrote:
| > The price of Bitcoin converges towards the price of
| mining it.
|
| Isn't it the opposite. The cost of mining converges
| towards the current price of Bitcoin. Because when miners
| get Bitcoin as a reward they immediately sell it for
| profit.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well, yes, you could see it that way.
| orblivion wrote:
| FWIW I think some "left-wing market anarchists" like it
| as well. Further left probably not but they also just
| don't like markets.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Which ones? I know a lot of them and they really don't
| like it. IME left wing market anarchists that are
| moderate enough to allow an exploitative hierarchy like
| bitcoin are also moderate enough to allow fiat currencies
| that are more democratic, and those that are radical
| enough also won't like bitcoin's hierarchy.
| exo762 wrote:
| The idea that anarchists reject all hierarchies is
| baseless.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Just hierarchies that don't contain themselves at the
| top.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They don't reject all hierarchies. They seek to minimize
| them and eliminate unjustified hierarchy.
|
| Trading democratic control for oligarchical control is
| increasing hierarchy and there's no obvious benefit.
|
| The core of anarchy is reticence towards hierarchy.
| nathias wrote:
| magic internet money
|
| btw, it is a success.
|
| If not for crypto two companies would have a global
| monopoly on online transactions and able to banish you from
| global economy on a whim
| briankelly wrote:
| The original Bitcoin paper was published late 2008 and much
| of its original momentum was a direct response to the clear
| failures of the financial institutions at the time.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Make it easier to pay ransom demands when you have malware
| attack you. Used to have to have a pile of cash dumped in a
| given area, high risk for the collector. Far easier now.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Monero is closest to the original cryptocurrency dream:
| decentralized and private currency. It's most definitely not
| "bullshit".
| jereees wrote:
| How is that different from how Shiba Inu token works?
| Genuinely curious
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Monero also has active, on-going development. Shiba Inu,
| Dogecoin, and all the other meme coins that have sprung
| up as a result of the smell of free money in the air were
| created in the space of a couple of hours using Ctrl-C
| Ctrl-V of existing open source code, then released to the
| world with no care to actual function or any further
| effort other than pulling the rug when enough suckers
| have bought in.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Monero is an actual coin with a blockchain, mineable by
| normal people, low fees, good transaction speed and
| always on privacy features that actually work. Shib is
| just a meme token created to compete with dogecoin.
| jereees wrote:
| Fair enough :)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Monero has some super advanced tech involved. Here is an
| okay review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O58STfvxZnY
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Shiba Inu is just a token on the Etherum chain.
|
| There is no privacy and they've done some weird stuff to
| play the numbers.
|
| E.g. they sent half of all SHIB to the creator of
| Etherum, why? Because that doubles the "circulating
| supply" and therefore market cap while not increasing the
| available supply at all.
|
| This is a scheme to artificially increase the market cap,
| which mostly worked because VB burned 95% of all the SHIB
| he got & it got a lot of press.
| jereees wrote:
| Hm. That makes sense, I guess the lack of privacy of the
| Ethereum chain could be considered as a feature in terms
| of transparency. Good point about the market cap, do you
| think Shiba Inu wouldn't have gotten as popular having VB
| not giving up control of the token?
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Let me be clear, Shiba Inu is a shitcoin, if someone gave
| me any I'd sell it in a second.
|
| It got popular before VB burned it.
| DickingAround wrote:
| What do you mean? We totally got what we wanted; we have a
| deflationary currency we trade for goods and services.
|
| I'm 100% serious here; it's been working fine for quite a
| number of years. The fiat conversion is pretty noisy but BTC
| on average goes up in value in fiat terms at a fast pace. BTC
| is easy to turn it into stuff. No one has ever censored my
| transactions or asked for ID. Even if you buy something
| really expensive or totally illegal. It has literally already
| worked. It started working the day that guy bought a pizza
| and it hasn't stopped working.
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| The level of delusion when it comes to cryptocurrencies -
| is unreal.
|
| As a market practitioner of many decades, I must say I have
| never witness this level of froth and delusion before.
|
| I'm studying it with great interest (and a touch of disdain
| about my fellow humans unbounded rationality/irrational
| exuberance about cryptos)
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Ah yes the typical HN commenter who sees hundreds of
| millions of people doing something and assumes that he
| knows better.
| phyalow wrote:
| Look, I too am a "Market Practitioner for decades". Their
| is indeed a tremendous amount of froth and outright scams
| going on. Beneath the surface you can actually find a few
| products that generate extremely attractive risk adjusted
| returns with actual cashflows with near 0 counterparty
| risk. Take a look at aave.com its a decentralised money
| market.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Why is illegal transactions a goal? You can hate on
| governments all you want, but that is the only way
| currently known where we can have a reasonable say into the
| laws made and uphold -- and order is not a bad thing in my
| opinion. Why circumvent that, instead of voting someone in
| who will create reasonable laws to protect us all?
| throw123123123 wrote:
| I cant vote in the US. In argentina, however, the
| government seized my bank accounts and made it illegal to
| trade foreign currencies.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| > we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and
| services.
|
| You do not, not really. Merchant adoption is microscopic.
| Even prominent Bitcoin fans admit it's terrible as a
| payment system. E.g., Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures:
| https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
|
| Or look at Overstock, one of the few large retailers that
| accepts it. Something like 0.1% of their business is done
| using it, which explains why most other merchants don't
| bother. Even there, they price everything in dollars, so if
| the Bitcoin price shifts between you purchasing something
| and you returning it, you'll get the dollar equivalent, not
| the Bitcoin you gave them:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-
| actual...
|
| This is especially obvious when you contrast it with
| something like M-Pesa, an e-cash system that launched
| around the same time. It's hugely popular in the countries
| it operates in. (Along the way, it did a lot for banking
| the unbanked, one of the mirage-like goals that Bitcoin is
| always approaching but never arrives at.) The transaction
| volume is orders of magnitude higher than Bitcoin.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
|
| Sure, it technically works; you can probably still buy a
| pizza somewhere. But "technically works" is a shaky
| standard even for something that just launched. It's no
| standard at all for something that launched the same time
| as Android or Uber.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And why would you want a deflationary currency? If you see
| it as an investment, then of course. But for the general
| economy it is better when people spend their money sooner
| rather than later, and capital gets invested where it does
| something useful.
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| Ah, the old Keynesian argument...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Um yes? And reality consistently confirms
| Keynsian/demand-side modeling.
| 988747 wrote:
| Keynsian demand-driven economy is the root of all evil,
| i.e. market bubbles that pop eventually. Everyone except
| market speculators would be much better of with supply-
| driven economy and small deflation.
|
| For one it would provide incentive to save money and
| spend it wisely, instead of mindlessly buying all that
| unnecessary crap.
| 3np wrote:
| Well, now that it exists, what would you as an individual
| rather keep your cash in compared to inflationary fiat
| held in an account with negative interest rate?
| danhak wrote:
| > we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and
| services.
|
| Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency
| activity is actually used for trade (as opposed to
| speculation) that it is a novelty and newsworthy when it
| actually happens.
|
| E.g. We all know about that guy who bought a pizza with
| BTC. And when Tesla decided to allow purchases via BTC
| (which they have since backtracked) it was a media
| sensation and market-moving. This is not normal.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Is this really true? I buy stuff with crypto all the
| time.
|
| It's how I learned about crypto in the first place- back
| ~2015, I ordered legitimate, had-a-prescription
| medication for my father from overseas using bitcoin, as
| it was the only way I could get it, as the even-with-
| insurance price in the states was beyond our means. Wound
| up doing so for several years, and it was much easier
| than dealing with the 'normal' ways of payment. A lot of
| the things I order from overseas in general I pay for in
| crypto, simply because it's cheaper & easier than doing
| regular currency conversions. I'm talking about regular
| things, like specialty foods, or everyday items I can't
| find in the states. Nothing even close to grey market or
| sketchy. Just regular financial transactions, using
| crypto.
|
| I'm sure by numbers my <$100-equivalent purchases are
| small potatoes, but how is that not also true for regular
| money? There are billions of dollars of capital sloshing
| around in the markets, but that doesn't make my personal-
| level spending not useful.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Don't all online payment systems use cryptography?
| perl4ever wrote:
| I don't know what jurisdiction you are in, but as far as
| I know, crypto is treated as a capital asset in the US,
| not a currency, so I'm unprepared to deal with the tax
| consequences of using it as a currency.
|
| If I paid for things with it then every transaction would
| require calculating capital gains/losses. And it's far
| worse than conventional assets like stocks because at
| least the brokers track that stuff for you.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| Have you heard of PayPal? Because i buy things
| internationally and pay with PayPal all the time. If I
| don't receive the order, I can contest and cancel the
| charge (sometimes). And there's no transaction fee that
| I'm aware of.
|
| Do you buy $5 items internationally? Because the bulk of
| my international orders are low value items. If I have to
| spend more on a transaction fee than the item costs, I'm
| not gonna buy the item. Oh, lightning you say? You really
| think I should trust that more than pay pal?
| ipaddr wrote:
| You sound new to the paypal ban me for no reason game. We
| all play we just never know when we lose.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees
| https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-
| card...
|
| There are significant international transaction fees.
| There are also merchant fees involved for sellers. Much
| like the ubiquitous credit card fees, you may not see it
| line-itemized on your bill, but the costs are absolutely
| part of the price you see at checkout.
|
| Literally everything I buy with crypto, the crypto
| network fees are less than what I would have paid
| otherwise.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| I guess my point is that with PayPal, as a buyer, the
| transaction fees are seamlessly included in the price.
|
| With crypto, it depends. Which coin? Which wallet? Which
| seller or marketplace? I'm curious if you care to share
| more about your transactions, that cost less using
| crypto. Now, if you're saying that you bought at $100 and
| it's at $1000, and you "paid less" that way, that's just
| this stage of the ponzi scheme's doing, not an inherent
| feature of the network that lowers costs.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Oh, for sure, there's plenty of work to still be done on
| the crypto side of things.
|
| Regarding which coins I use, it's mostly Bitcoin Cash or
| Doge. No funny accounting or anything. The network
| transaction fees are readily available:
|
| https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/dogecoin-
| transactionfee...
|
| https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-
| transact...
| 3np wrote:
| Have you heard of all the people arbitrarily
| blocked/banned/censored by PayPal? Just for one, I had my
| Paypal account permanently closed because I (many years
| prior to the block) registered it when I was still under
| --age. Separately, I am resident in a new country where
| for arbitrary reasons I don't have all the necessary
| validation to open a Transferwise account registered
| here.
|
| Relying on a small handful of centralized private service
| providers for critical infrastructure is a bad idea. My
| situation is not unique or strange. I could most likely
| illegally submit false information or register new
| accounts, with the risk of having payments frozen or even
| held at any point. Some online vendors only use PayPal,
| which has lifetime banned me as a person, so by extension
| I can not purchase from these vendors.
|
| I do trust Lightning more than any of these. I actually
| regularly use for payments for stuff like you mentioned.
| Last time a $11 purchase yesterday, which even including
| amortized channel opening cost was most certainly less
| fees than PayPal would have been.
|
| ----
|
| You're happy with PayPal now, because it works fine for
| you, but the increasing power they have over individuals
| and the economy is real, concerning and dangerous.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| I'll agree with you that the monopolies (or too big to
| fail whatever) in finance and technology should be broken
| up. And I hope everyone who is into crypto banks their
| fiat at a local credit union.
|
| But I think for most people using lightning means getting
| an account with a wallet provider. Couldn't they suspend
| your account for violating ToS? I guess some people could
| setup their own channel but I don't think that's what
| most people do.
|
| Proof of Stake just means the biggest entities will have
| control. That doesn't sound stable to me but good luck.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Are you being intentionally daft?
|
| Or do you genuinely fail to realise thay there is a
| difference between you and small number of other people
| relative to the global population using cryptocurrency as
| money as compared to everyone on the planet doing so?
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Ideas start from somewhere, and take time to spread.
| 908087 wrote:
| Unless something major changes, I'm guessing we can
| expect to continue hearing about how it's "still early
| days" and "just takes time to catch on" another decade
| from now.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| I think they're literally blind. It is biblical.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| What percentage of dollars are used for trade, as opposed
| to investment? Does it matter?
| [deleted]
| DickingAround wrote:
| I guess I don't totally know how to respond to that; I
| have no idea what everyone is using it for. That's rather
| hard to know just looking at the blockchain, or even
| reading message boards like this. I have no problem
| spending it; pretty easy to convert it to gift cards that
| can be spent anywhere (they give you a kick back even),
| there's some places that do take it directly (not
| restaurants, or car repair, but like electronics stuff on
| the internet). And of course you can just sell it for
| fiat on an exchange then turn around and dump the fiat
| for stuff (in this case, fiat is kind of the weak asset
| since no one really wants to hold cash for long). Plus,
| it can buy some stuff you can't get with fiat (e.g.
| overseas purchases not tied into USD, or all the dark web
| stuff people talk about). It feels pretty darn liquid;
| I've never had a problem turning BTC into stuff. And it
| is way more so than gold, land, even stocks and bonds;
| none of which can turn into stuff in under an hour much
| less without audit/paper-trail/control. Only fiat is more
| liquid, except no one wants to hold fiat; just turn it
| into something else actually worth having. The real
| problem is getting BTC. Lots of roadblocks in acquiring
| it and generally the people who have it would rather pay
| you in fiat and keep their BTC.
| Closi wrote:
| What's the point of a currency where you have to convert
| it to another currency to spend it?
|
| (I've got an idea, and I think the answer is
| speculation....)
|
| Converting BTC to Fiat and then spending Fiat isn't the
| same as buying things with Bitcoin. It's buying things in
| Fiat with extra steps.
| fvdessen wrote:
| If the extra step means my money doesn't lose value as
| government print cash like there's no tomorrow, then that
| step is quite valuable to me
| FalconSensei wrote:
| It only loses value when Elon shitpost on Twitter, right?
| klyrs wrote:
| Transaction fees were north of $50 a couple of weeks ago.
| Who's buying a pizza with that overhead? Genuinely asking,
| because I've a bridge to sell
|
| Before the edit window closes... 5 workarounds and
| counting. Are they interoperable, or is all this a thick
| layer of bullshit that users need to wade through to spend
| their "currency"? I see the plurality of "solutions" here
| indicative of a problem. Yes, you can fix anything with
| duct tape, but then it gets _sticky_
| suikadayo wrote:
| You can use Ethereum Layer 2 tech like Loopring, zkSync,
| and eventually Optimism which Coinbase supports in the
| Coinbase Wallet. They haven't even added support for
| Lightning
| Daishiman wrote:
| Nobody in the real world is using any of this.
| 3np wrote:
| ...yet, all these are fairly new. Give it another 2-5
| years for implementations and integrations.
|
| Also, it's already used in defi, if you count that as
| "real world". Reminds me of when anything on the internet
| wasnt "real".
| Daishiman wrote:
| Sorry but I've been following the last decade of the
| crypto world. In a decade I have not seen a single "defi"
| product sticking around because there just doesn't seem
| to be real demand for these products.
|
| Considering how many spaces in new startups developed
| massive traction in that span of time (social networks,
| other forms of digital payments and banking, online
| marketplaces) the fact that there are no star products in
| such a span of time gives me little consideration.
| grubles wrote:
| You can use Lightning (a Bitcoin technology) to send BTC
| which is extremely cheap in comparison. Talking fractions
| of a cent.
| throwkeep wrote:
| How do you use the Lightning network?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Via the Polygon commit chain, these issues are fixed.
| Polygon's adoption is through the roof, saving Ethereum's
| butt. Hence the massive price climb.
| [deleted]
| andrewzah wrote:
| "or asked for ID"
|
| That ship sailed long ago in the US if you use any
| exchange. Not using an ID is much, much harder now. And is
| kind of besides the point with a public ledger.
| skoopie wrote:
| He was talking about paying w/bitcoin. You don't need KYC
| for that.
| ffggvv wrote:
| protip: dont try engaging cultists. youd have more luck
| persuading a brick wall.
| skoopie wrote:
| Agreed. Fiat maximalists are persistent though.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| I can't believe this blatant denialism still exists on HN
| despite the fact that Ethereum has a thriving defi ecosystem.
| I can get a loan peer to peer today with my ETH in a
| stablecoin and yet you say there's no there there? Right....
| yourabstraction wrote:
| HN crowd are like the flat earthers of the cryptosphere.
| When people's self esteem relies on them being contrarian
| don't expect them to actually put in the effort to learn
| about something.
| skoopie wrote:
| I ignored crypto for several years because I put too much
| weight on opinions from HN. I'd probably be retired by
| now if I'd actually paid more attention.
| boc wrote:
| I understand crypto perfectly and I strongly believe that
| it's ultimately useless. The difference is that I have no
| financial incentive to tell everyone I know about crypto,
| whereas you certainly do.
|
| I'll leave it up to the audience to decide which one of
| us is biased.
| nikanj wrote:
| Cryptos also have a thriving theft ecosystem, and illegal
| uses dwarf the few defi experiments.
| colordrops wrote:
| That doesn't cause the positive use cases to not exist.
| 3np wrote:
| Source for the last point? I'm quite certain this is not
| the case anymore.
| thevardanian wrote:
| Ya... And the internet is used for pirating media, porn,
| wasting time browsing, gaming and the other millions of
| "useless" things that it's associated with. The amount of
| sheer time wasted on the internet is incredible, let
| alone all the filthy illegal things that are happening on
| it.
|
| Guess we can throw the internet into the trash bin too.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I remember the mantra well. I remember the backwards
| messages in rock music were blamed for brainwashing kids.
| They would slow a record down and play it backwards and
| come up with words from the noise that matched their fear
| message.
| [deleted]
| shiftingleft wrote:
| Is there any advantage over existing systems either for the
| lender or the debtor?
| intotheabyss wrote:
| Huge advantages for both. For example, something that's
| only possible on a blockchain is a flashloan. This is
| where you can get a loan for any amount (liquidity
| provided) as long as you repay the full loan amount in
| the same block. This primitive alone allows for much
| higher velocities of money since value can be moved and
| repayed in a single block (on the order of 10 seconds).
|
| All of the advantages of defi boil down to increases in
| velocity of money. For example you can deposit funds into
| a contract and receive a token that represents your
| liquidity position. You can then use this token in other
| applications. So now you have this composability of money
| which allows people to create new financial primitives.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| OK but why and for what purpose?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| THETA->Super Hi Def video streaming
| https://www.thetatoken.org/
|
| VET-> Supply Chain Authentication for Businesses
| https://www.vechain.org/
|
| Are two real world examples that are starting to see
| adoption. Also this articles covers it well:
| https://101blockchains.com/practical-blockchain-use-
| cases/
| leifg wrote:
| I am an engineer for more than 12 years. I think I have a
| reasonably good idea of how a blockchain works.
|
| I have no idea how these two projects are supposed to
| work. Who is supposed to use this if there isn't even a
| concise description of the product?
|
| Judging by their Twitter accounts both of these companies
| have been around since 2017. How many active users do
| they have?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-Op-1peZI for less
| formal overview https://www.thetatoken.org/ contains
| white papers if you want the technicals.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Who is giving out 10 second loans and why would they do
| that?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > This is where you can get a loan for any amount
| (liquidity provided) as long as you repay the full loan
| amount in the same block.
|
| What is the point of that?
|
| > So now you have this composability of money which
| allows people to create new financial primitives.
|
| Are there any useful for anything beyond
| gambling/speculation/NFT-like FOMO-powered bubbles?
| barneysversion wrote:
| >> This is where you can get a loan for any amount
| (liquidity provided) as long as you repay the full loan
| amount in the same block.
|
| > What is the point of that?
|
| Leveraging arbitrage
| matkoniecz wrote:
| "This primitive alone allows for much higher velocities
| of money since value can be moved and repayed in a single
| block (on the order of 10 seconds)."
|
| what can be usefully arbitraged in that time in way that
| guarantees no loss?
| wmf wrote:
| Exploiting contract bugs.
| exo762 wrote:
| It's actually way funnier than GOP presets to be.
| Flashloan must be paid back in the same transaction.
| Since whole thing happens in the same tx, it's atomic. So
| you can use smart-contract logic to determine if you are
| actually making a profit, and if you are not - revert!
| Mc_Big_G wrote:
| You might think Bitcoin is not a good store of value, but a
| lot of people disagree with you. The energy "waste" argument
| is just virtual signaling at this point. It has been
| thoroughly debunked.
| 908087 wrote:
| How, exactly, has the energy waste argument been thoroughly
| debunked? As far as I can tell, the waste has increased
| exponentially in recent months.. which isn't the kind of
| factoid I'd put in the "debunked" column.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I agree with most everything you just wrote. But, note that
| the problem with Proof of Stake, in this thinking, is that
| you won't be able to buy tokens from your local energy
| company, when the regulators shut your blockchain down.
| reedjosh wrote:
| Currency competition alone is a major milestone. The USD is
| the _legal_ tender of the US. As in other currencies are not
| allowed.
|
| Because digital currency can't just be taken down, those that
| don't want to live under an inflationary de-facto tax, now
| have that option.
| leishman wrote:
| Funny how everyone complains it's wasteful yet I see
| absolutely nobody complaining that they have some sort of
| electricity shortage because of Bitcoin miners.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Then you're probably not from Iran because crypto miners
| have routinely sparked power outages there.
|
| https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210203-in-
| ir...
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't know what (if any) effect Bitcoin mining has had on
| electricity prices, but we do have a GPU shortage because
| of Bitcoin miners.
|
| It's a bit ridiculous when regular stores have _lotteries_
| to grant you the privilege of purchasing one of a scarce
| number of GPUs... at regular retail price.
| roskelld wrote:
| Bitcoin doesn't use GPUs for mining. Bitcoin mining is
| performed with custom ASIC hardware. GPUs cannot compete
| as they're not built for purpose.
| Valgrim wrote:
| The issue is not scarcity, it's pollution.
| drdeca wrote:
| In a sense, we could say "lack of CO2 in the atmosphere"
| is the scarce resource which is being depleted.
|
| ( Maybe kind of like how you can think of something which
| can burn by absorbing oxygen, as releasing phlogiston
| (which is just a lack of oxygen, in a certain sense)? )
| Rogach wrote:
| Well, here's a datapoint for you: I've witnessed firsthand
| how a big miner farm resulted in full blackout in a small-
| ish city (~100k population).
| drew-y wrote:
| Because shortages aren't the issue. The issue is using more
| power than all of Argentina for one currency. That is a lot
| of CO2 emissions for something that brings questionable
| value.
| jollybean wrote:
| "The issue is using more power than all of Argentina for
| one currency. "
|
| It's using the power of Argentina for an MLM/Ponzi scheme
| that doesn't apparently create any value.
|
| If it were a) broadly useful and b) used less power it
| would be another story.
|
| 'Cruise ships' at least allow people to 'cruise'.
| atweiden wrote:
| Why is it "not useful" to opt out of the inflationary
| issuance of major government currencies?
| trainsplanes wrote:
| You're not opting out of anything. At the end of the day,
| everyone is trading their crypto for dollars or another
| government currency.
|
| Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way buying
| an unstable stock is. People are buying it hoping to get
| rich and convincing others to do the same, hoping they'll
| sell it off before the price crashes and it's completely
| worthless. Nobody is buying milk and eggs with GameStop
| stocks or *coins, and if they did, it'd make
| international news and that singular event would be
| referenced for 5 years by supporters as an example of how
| "real" their currency is.
| atweiden wrote:
| > Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way
| buying an unstable stock is
|
| Cryptocurrencies are indeed traded like meme stocks --
| their value is 100% based on narrative. The difference is
| meme stocks can't be electronically transacted sans
| trusted third parties, which if you recall from the 2009
| Satoshi paper, is the entire point of Bitcoin.
|
| (There are other benefits to having a global currency of
| fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, e.g.
| transparent supply metrics.)
|
| > hoping they'll sell it off before the price crashes and
| it's completely worthless
|
| What are the holders of Bitcoin supposed to sell it for,
| exactly? USD is being inflated. The stock market is
| insane. Housing is insane and comes with tax and
| maintenance liabilities virtually everywhere. Artwork is
| physical and illiquid. Government debt is increasingly
| dubious.
|
| It would take governments becoming fiscally responsible
| and a return to a gold standard for Bitcoin to become
| less societally relevant. And even then, gold and gold-
| backed government monies would suffer from transparency
| issues and not being able to be electronically transacted
| sans trusted third parties.
|
| I'm afraid there's really just no good news here for
| people who refuse to invest in Bitcoin on general
| principle.
| skohan wrote:
| The problem is with negative externalities.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Cruise ships are hideously wasteful, but I don't see
| anybody complaining that they have some sort of gas
| shortage because of cruise ships _specifically_. Gas prices
| are what they are, and consumers complain in very general
| terms because they don 't have good visibility into the
| global oil markets.
|
| For all I know off the top of my head (where this comment
| is coming from), cruise ships _aren 't_ a significant
| driver of oil prices. I'd expect the scale of the shipping
| market to dwarf their effect, and I'd expect production to
| rise to meet their relatively steady demand, though I could
| be wrong about either or both. None of that (whatever the
| answers may be) means they aren't hideously wasteful in
| absolute and very meaningful terms.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean on HN you really do see a very anti-cruise ship
| sentiment whenever the topic comes up. They are really
| really wasteful and worse than commercial ships since
| they pollute the very water people want to visit for its
| beauty.
|
| I wouldn't really be all that upset to see them banned
| but there's no momentum for it. Crypto just happens to be
| really visible to a lot of people who see no personal
| benefit for its existence.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > I mean on HN you really do see a very anti-cruise ship
| sentiment whenever the topic comes up.
|
| For sure, and in other contexts too, but I don't think
| the issue of not being able to buy gas because cruise
| ships exist comes up often (mostly because AFAICT it's
| not real). And that's really my point: it's perfectly
| valid to complain about cruise ships being wasteful
| _without_ being able to point to some incredibly obvious
| consumer-facing manifestation of that waste, because them
| being wasteful (they are, obviously) isn't predicated on
| any such manifestation. Despite the vast scale of their
| waste, they're a drop in the bucket that is the global
| economy.
| [deleted]
| imtringued wrote:
| It's going to happen eventually.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I wish we could have proof of work but the work would be
| something like , doing an actual workout.
| acid__ wrote:
| That's how you end up with crypto-mining sweatshops...
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Now _this_ is my favorite new cryptocurrency idea!
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| I knew there was a reason I was still slogging through these
| comments. Well commented sir.
| Heteraruki wrote:
| Proof of Stake is the worst form of Socialism. It is Socialism
| governed by the wealthiest elite
|
| Proof of Work is brute Capitalism. It Capitalism without regard
| for life or health.
|
| STX is Proof of Transfer (secured by bitcoin's hash-power and
| the Stacks network).
|
| Proof of Transfer is the best of both worlds. It is community
| and global capitalism with community and global responsibility.
|
| When a technology is simultaneously a store of value, & a
| utility, the demand for it is exponential, people will seek it
| in both states, but for different and individual purposes. STX
| earns BTC for the directed purposes of any individual and as
| that individual desires with minimal network effect. STX drives
| community demand only as demanded by the community. STX drives
| Network benefits only as desired by the Network.
|
| Lets imagine a series of networked micro-communities built with
| sun energy using solar panels that photochemically convert the
| atmospheric water into liquid hydrogen. This is being done
| today.
|
| That hydrogen is then stored as energy in fuel cell batteries.
| That energy is then used in part to mine community bitcoin.
|
| That community bitcoin is used in part to build and maintain
| community infrastructure and finance community healthcare.
|
| The community will also use a small portion of the wholesale
| mined bitcoin to leverage the Stacks Proof of Transfer PoX
| miners. The STX block reward will support the maintenance and
| expense of bitcoin mining. The winning PoX miner's committed
| bitcoin is allocated randomly to the locked Stacks token
| holders that are all also bitcoin miners.
|
| The locked pools secure the stacks chain and bitcoin node
| operators secure the bitcoin chain.
|
| The community through Non-fungible tokenized (NFTized) hashed
| identity quadratically vote on finance mechanisms using the
| creation of decidable language smart-contracts.
|
| Those smart-contracts execute for community tokenized
| provenances or (NFT's) of decentralized communication,
| decentralized wealth & decentralized egalitarian and merit
| based commerce. And the by-product is pure H2O and clean air.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or
| even resistant to it. The people with capital control the
| mining.
|
| At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS
| beambot wrote:
| POW is permissionless, in that you don't need anyone's
| permission to setup a mining rig and contribute significant
| work.
|
| POS isn't permissionless -- you literally have to buy a stake
| from existing holders in order to participate.
| kelnos wrote:
| The money to build a mining rig and consume the electricity
| needed to run it is not even remotely permissionless. To
| add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities
| of that electricity use.
| chrischattin wrote:
| It costs a couple hundred bucks to setup the hardware to
| run a Bitcoin node. As of today's exchange rate, you need
| ~$130k to stake ETH.
| drdeca wrote:
| Wait, to run a node (like, just keeping track of the
| chain), or to mine in a way that isn't entirely
| ineffectual? Because the former doesn't seem like the
| proper analogy to staking.
| chrischattin wrote:
| You can mine with a Raspberry Pi. It won't be profitable.
| But, you'll be contributing to the security of the
| network.
| drdeca wrote:
| What is the impact of a miner on the security of the
| network, conditioned on the event that it never
| successfully mines a block? I would think it would be 0.
|
| The probability that a raspi ever mines a block (like, if
| it were to start now, not if it was going since the
| network first started) is negligible.
|
| Therefore, I consider the probability that a given raspi
| would contribute to the security of the network, or, I
| suppose equivalently, the degree to which it contributes,
| to be negligible.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| It also costs a couple hundred bucks to run an Ethereum
| node. You are confusing running a validator and running a
| node, those are two independent things, just like mining
| and running a node.
| Taek wrote:
| There's a couple of misunderstandings here.
|
| Mining is expensive and low margin. Generally, the people who
| own the most Bitcoins are not the same as the people with the
| most mining rigs, the two parties tend to be completely
| divorced, and the miners tend to be strongly incentivized
| around not rocking the boat (for better or worse).
|
| The other misunderstanding is that mining doesn't shape the
| protocol. The users shape the protocol, and can run any
| validation software they want. No user has to accept a block
| by a miner, and every block made by a miner has to conform to
| the protocol's rules.
| leishman wrote:
| The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody
| can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners.
| Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS,
| existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering.
| Very important distinction.
| owens99 wrote:
| Thank you for bringing this up.
| incrudible wrote:
| The network majority can enforce _any_ rule, doesn 't
| matter if it's PoW or PoS.
| sunsu wrote:
| Wrong. NODEs (individual network participants) enforce
| the rules, not miners.
| incrudible wrote:
| Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions
| sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Its the other way round -- nothing forces nodes to accept
| bad blocks from miners. An honest node would simply
| ignore the bad data. The exchanges run nodes, so I would
| rather be generating or receiving transactions on a chain
| (or fork) that its users are engaging with. Nodes accept
| blocks from miners, miners don't accept blocks from
| nodes.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Isn't there an incentive to run a node for privacy? With
| your own node you are not leaking your xpub and you don't
| leak your transactions by staring at them on a block
| explorer
| Ekaros wrote:
| Wouldn't your own node unless properly hidden be higher
| chance of leaking your transactions? As I would expect
| them to come from your own node... Ofc, tracking the ones
| made from other services sure it is safer.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Nodes still work on consensus, and given that they have
| no incentivization to exist, they have been dropping in
| number over years.
| incrudible wrote:
| Where do those honest blocks come from, if not from
| honest miners? Where do honest miners come from?
| drdeca wrote:
| Aren't both things true? Miners can't force nodes to
| accept blocks as being valid, nodes can't force miners to
| include transactions in their blocks.
|
| These statements are not in conflict.
| [deleted]
| jasode wrote:
| _> Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions
| sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule._
|
| I deleted a previous reply to you because I think I may
| have misunderstood what you wrote. In any case, are you
| saying the _majority of miners_ have the ultimate control
| of the protocol rules of the cryptocurrency?
| incrudible wrote:
| Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case
| for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct
| from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder)
| majority is an extremely important part of it.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Not in principle, but I do believe this to be the case
| for Bitcoin specifically. Network majority is distinct
| from minor majority, but obviously miner (or stakeholder)
| majority is an extremely important part of it._
|
| In 2017, the majority of miner hashpower wanted to change
| the Bitcoin protocol to increase 1MB blocksize to 2MB but
| the SegWit2x failed to be adopted. What's your
| interpretation of that event?
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's the same with PoW though, isn't it?
|
| Existing PoW miners can fork away from any new miners that
| won the last block.
| whyrusleeping wrote:
| Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want
| to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. The protocol
| dictates that the chain created by the majority of mining
| power is the canonical one.
|
| In the event that a censored party can create a heavier
| chain (has >50% of the mining power) then the argument that
| its more censorship resistant holds, but on the PoS side,
| you would be betting that not a single participant in the
| main chain included their new stake registration in their
| blocks. This is different than the PoW model as non-
| malicious nodes in PoW can still be part of the main chain.
| It's definitely not that cut and dry
| crazypython wrote:
| > Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners
| want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can.
|
| Censored transactions can hire/pay miners who won't
| censor more transaction fees, to encourage them to
| include the transactions in a block. In other words,
| since transactors pay miners, transactors are customers
| of miners.
|
| There is an open market competition- any miner censoring
| transactions will lose higher fees from people who send
| censored transactions.
| leishman wrote:
| There are a few distinctions: 1. In PoS you actually
| never know who mined a given block with certainty. You
| can mine anonymously making censorship pretty difficult.
| This is not the case in PoS. 2. In PoW miners risk losing
| money by not building off the block found by a miner
| they're trying to censor. There is a cost to losing. This
| isn't the case in PoS (for the most part), as long as
| they don't double stake. 3. Additionally, the key
| distinguisher is that miners and custodians (almost all
| US based and controlled by VC funds) are two very
| distinct groups in Bitcoin. In a PoS currency they are
| the same group. That results in a power consolidation
| that effectively makes a PoS currency completely
| controlled by a few silicon valley insiders and
| eventually the US government.
| drdeca wrote:
| I think you made a typo in your point #1, as you said
| something is the case of PoS, and then contrasted it with
| PoS, saying "This is not the case in PoS". I suspect the
| first PoS was meant to say PoW.
|
| Correcting that is the main point of this comment, the
| rest is just a side note.
|
| I don't really understand your point #2, but this very
| well may be because I don't understand the proposed
| protocol.
|
| You say "as long as they don't double stake", but if a
| given block is expected to probably be in the consensus
| chain, then either they don't endorse it or whatever, not
| putting their stake behind it, and therefore, I would
| think whatever they do put their stake behind, if the
| block-to-be-censored is included in the long-run
| consensus, then what they backed isn't, and so they get
| no reward, and so they lost out on potential reward, or,
| if they try to support multiple things, they lose (some
| fraction of) their stake.
|
| Uh, unless they can be rewarded for supporting a block
| that is parallel to the block-to-censor even though the
| block-to-censor gets in? But that doesn't seem right. I
| suppose there are uncle blocks maybe (idk if that is part
| of Ethereum's planned PoS system or just its current
| system), but those have a substantially lower reward, so
| deliberately producing probably-uncles would still
| involve giving up rewards on average.
|
| Again I could easily be missing something here.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's a good point, though mining is also controlled by
| access to the cheapest costs (i.e. siphoning electricity off
| of a grid).
| colordrops wrote:
| Controlling the mining doesn't allow you to control much
| about how transactions work.
| trashcan_ wrote:
| If you control mining you do control how transactions work.
| You are running the code that handles transactions and you
| can change that code to handle transactions in any way you
| want. There is a history of this happening too but thus far
| with little effect on the entire network but worst case you
| could create a hardfork.
| incrudible wrote:
| The network majority decides everything, including how
| transactions work, how many coins there are, what the block
| size is...
|
| The prospect that there's only ever going to be 21 million
| Bitcoin is ensured by nothing except majority opinion. It's
| not inconceivable that this will be relaxed in the future
| and Bitcoin will have a "Bitcoin Classic" fork where old
| rules are enforced. This could happen if, for instance,
| transaction fees don't make up for miner majority rewards.
| crazypython wrote:
| > The network majority decides everything, including how
| transactions work, how many coins there are, what the
| block size is...
|
| The informal consensus of network full (non-mining) nodes
| enforce that. Full nodes are economic actors, such as
| people who sell goods and services, who fully verify the
| chain. They simply refuse accept inflated Bitcoin.
|
| A Bitcoin full (non-mining) node only takes 5GB storage
| space and 128MB RAM to run.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Not quite -- the 21 million (or more accurately, 2.1
| Quadrillion sat) is a hard line. Any coin not enforcing
| this rule is not bitcoin. There of course will be forks
| that dont, but they are not bitcoin.
| incrudible wrote:
| > Any coin not enforcing this rule is not bitcoin.
|
| That's _your_ opinion.
|
| > There of course will be forks that dont, but they are
| not bitcoin.
|
| Again, that's _your_ opinion.
| drdeca wrote:
| That's a definition you can use, sure. And, I do tend to
| value using words in a consistent way over time.
|
| But definitions are choices. People are free to choose
| what definitions they think of as "the definition of
| <x>". Some such choices are likely to cause more
| confusion when they interact with others, but this is not
| always sufficient to discourage/prevent some faction of
| people from choosing some definition that differs from
| that used by some other faction.
|
| Under the definition you are using for bitcoin, such a
| thing would not be the thing that you currently would
| consider bitcoin. That's fine.
|
| This doesn't mean that people wouldn't use the name
| "bitcoin" for it.
|
| Perhaps 2000 years from now, the word "bitcoin" will
| instead refer to apples instead, due to random linguistic
| drift. (Or, a fruit which resembles apples. Will they
| technically count as apples, according to our current
| notion of apples?)
| scrubs wrote:
| Agree. Crypto currency is small and has never had to deal
| with major financial fallouts like 2008 mortgage debacle.
| The idea that the number of bitcoins can never be changed
| for example due to the need to respond to national or
| international problems is silly. Ultimately any rules are
| but code decided by human factors. Therefore it's not
| impossible that there are several forks running several
| crypto versions at the same time depending on what people
| think represents the best response. A few guys buying
| coffee on BC or investing in BC is one thing. Running a
| nation on it is a much more dynamic thing. It's for some
| of these reasons the US Treasury controls money supply.
| There are also connections between national indebtedness
| (treasury bonds) and money supply suggesting that
| enforcing rules setup up X years ago may not weather the
| first storm.
| cl0ne wrote:
| Miner Extractable Value (MEV) is a problem. They can choose
| which transactions to include in a block and how to order
| them.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/miners-front-running-service-theft
| fredfoobar wrote:
| There's a whole book written about the history of this:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-
| blocksize-w...
|
| "Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the
| rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn't matter in the
| decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes &
| told them to go f*ck themselves." [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763
| 084...
| dahfizz wrote:
| Why wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS
| system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| [responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just
| did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book
| documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate
| (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes
| of the users.
|
| more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power
| and therefore lots of money. It doesn't really make a
| difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world
| or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to
| be influential.
|
| Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one
| person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed
| consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes
| with advertising as we see today in "normal" elections.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > you don't need any capital to run a node
|
| Please point me in the direction where I can find some of
| these free ASIC miners.....
| fredfoobar wrote:
| full node != miner
|
| Run your own full node,
|
| easiest option: getumbrel.com
| SilasX wrote:
| Did you mean PoS? Parent was talking about a PoW system.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Yes, editted.
| grubles wrote:
| You can do much worse things in a PoS system since power
| in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi
| toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon
| millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen.
|
| It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they
| controlled more ETH than any single account in the
| system.
| vbuterin wrote:
| That was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks;
| that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.
| jude- wrote:
| Coins that no ones' nodes validate are worthless, aren't
| they?
| ekerstein wrote:
| This is only relevant if people aren't holding their coins
| on exchanges. Most users are and that concentration will
| increase as transaction fees are designed to do over the
| next decade.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| I'm here to help that transition, It's already happening,
| many folks I know are transitioning to a hardware wallet.
| I've personally helped people onboard on to lightning and
| running their own node.
|
| The whole process of running your own node has improved
| so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.
| [deleted]
| owens99 wrote:
| You're smart, I like your comments.
| andrewla wrote:
| > Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system
| works.
|
| This is a naive viewpoint. Ethereum (as a currency) is an "M0"
| token, like cash or Fed deposits. There's a lot of handwaving
| about bonds and whatnot, but essentially the Fed can create new
| money simply by changing numbers on a balance sheet, and they
| can make that money into folding money and change which they
| can issue.
|
| The banking system is a complex system that creates IOUs on top
| of that base. Some of those IOUs are even better than the cash
| layer -- you can't buy stock, for example, for cash, you need
| bank IOUs to do that.
|
| That said, then, what is PoW and PoS used for? They're
| essentially distributed methods of ensuring that nobody can
| forge money. So the equivalent in the world of dollars is not a
| bunch of bankers chuckling to themselves about how they're
| fleecing the plebes. The equivalent in the real world is a
| bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and people with
| big guns, which gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is
| a crime to forge dollars no matter who you are or where you
| live.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The equivalent in the real world is a bunch of aircraft
| carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which
| gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to
| forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live.
|
| And yet people complain about cryptocurrency energy usage
| with a straight face!
| reedjosh wrote:
| > The equivalent in the real world is a bunch of aircraft
| carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which
| gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to
| forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live.
|
| Largely funded by forging dollars.
| andrewla wrote:
| If you are a miner and you get a block reward for mining a
| block in Ethereum, you are not forging currency; this is
| the structurally correct way for Ethereum to be created.
|
| Similarly only the Fed has the ability to make new dollars;
| although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a
| narrow sense. There's a lot of mummery around how the Fed
| goes about doing it, but that is the structurally correct
| way for dollars to be created. Calling it forgery or "theft
| by inflation" or whatever are political talking points.
|
| Forgery is specifically when any other party in the world
| decides that they can mint coins or print bills.
|
| Other parties can create dollars in other ways, like by
| committing fraud or by taking advantage of the fact that
| certain forms of IOUs are so liquid that they are
| considered cash equivalents. In the US this is a little
| locked down (although the overnight lending market is a
| particularly insidious form of shadow banking) but
| internationally the Eurodollar market is the wild west
| where anything goes. Anything, that is, except actually
| forging coins or bills.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or
| bills.
|
| Of course none of it is forgery, but the net impact is no
| different. As soon as the USD loses its reserve status,
| the US won't be able to maintain its hegemony that is
| funded largely via
|
| > Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although
| technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow
| sense
| [deleted]
| not2b wrote:
| No, banks make new dollars, every time they make a loan.
| The amount of dollars on the books vastly exceeds the
| amount of currency printed, and is dominated by bank
| deposits. The Fed controls the money supply by regulating
| banks.
|
| "Certain forms of IOUs" would include money in checking
| accounts, which is much more money than the total of all
| bills in circulation, and this is part of M1.
| andrewla wrote:
| Banks can create dollars in the sense that they can
| synthesize contracts to deliver dollars. These contracts
| are liquid enough that they are considered equivalent to
| cash, and in many cases superior (as I describe above).
|
| There is absolutely nothing stopping an institution from
| accepting deposits of ETH, and then lending those ETH out
| by crediting other account holders with more ETH in their
| account. And it is equally possible to imagine that some
| vendors might prefer to receive their ETH payments as
| credits to their bank accounts, and thus the IOUs
| represented by these deposits become "ETH" in the same
| sense that bank deposits become "dollars".
|
| But here we are strictly discussing the underlying
| specie. If account holders in a dollar bank demand their
| payment in specie, the bank is exposed to that risk. This
| risk is small but significant for modern banks because
| the credit market for dollars is very liquid, so they can
| easily sell loans for their present value to increase
| their cash exposure, and thus make good on the demands
| for specie.
|
| The credit market for ETH is all but nonexistent except
| in very specific cases (basically just margin for
| exchanges) so an ETH bank would be extremely exposed to
| the risk of a run, and given the level of volatility and
| general deflationary trend in ETH it would be almost
| impossible to set a value on future ETH.
| vmception wrote:
| Correct, the US Federal Reserve is a Proof of Stake system.
| Members earn 6% dividends for the last 100 years, and this was
| to entice them to join the system at all. Just pointing out
| that the idea of an omnipotent US government is a fairly new
| concept, and it must incentivize and entice people to join its
| payment network as opposed to other private ones.
|
| The private networks for final settlement are becoming more
| interesting to market participants. And they are also aiming
| for distributed (sharded) proof of stake.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > Members earn 6% dividends for the last 100 years, and this
| was to entice them to join the system at all.
|
| Can you tell more about this? Specially the "and this was to
| entice them to join the system at all." part.
| vmception wrote:
| The Federal Reserve Act from 1913 incentivizes banks to
| join the Federal Reserve payments network. Let me update
| this to 2020s lingo: The Federal Reserve System is a
| decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that pays its
| stakers 6% annually. It has operated for over 100 years
| flawlessly. The stakers gain access to a market leading
| depository and credit system, and have the ability to voice
| opinions on some variables but the shares itself are non-
| voting. Like many kinds of entities such as trusts and
| foundations, there are no owners, only trustees.
|
| The human interface to the system is a separate public
| agency called the Board of Governors, which simply tells
| the public what the Federal Reserve has done, and also
| communicates any changes to the Federal Reserve's charter
| (any legislative updates) to the DAO.
| reedjosh wrote:
| The federal reserve is
|
| Decentralized?
|
| > The Board of Governors' seven members guide the entire
| Fed system.
|
| > The Board and FOMC make the Fed's decisions based on
| research.
|
| https://www.thebalance.com/the-federal-reserve-system-
| and-it...
| vmception wrote:
| Pick whatever word you prefer for whatever aspect of its
| multi-part nature you prefer
|
| Idgaf
| vmception wrote:
| Pick whatever word you prefer for whatever aspect of its
| multi-part nature you prefer
|
| Some of the board members come from the member banks
| reedjosh wrote:
| It's just that decentralized is not what I'd call a
| system controlled by 7 people that in turn controls the
| legally enforced tender of over 300 million people.
| vmception wrote:
| Just like all systems that call themselves decentralized,
| some aspects are and some aspects arent
| jude- wrote:
| There's a big difference: the Federal Reserve System
| lives in the real world, where node misbehavior (i.e.
| officers doing bad things) is punished with jail time,
| with ruinous downstream consequences on their families.
|
| Wake me up when The DAO hacker is caught and put in jail,
| and I'll re-consider the analogy.
| vmception wrote:
| Haha Ill entertain this bit: there are no criminal
| consequences for misbehaving as a node. Participation of
| a reserve system shareholder is quite limited and only
| partially helps assist with routing and regional
| statistics. Partially.
|
| There constraints on being a bank at all are not limited
| to federal reserve banks.
| ac29 wrote:
| > Why did the Federal Reserve Act initially offer such a
| generous dividend to member banks? It was essentially part
| of a marketing campaign. "At the time the Fed was not
| terribly popular with the banks, and they wanted to attract
| members," said Allan Meltzer, professor of political
| economy at Carnegie Mellon University and a historian of
| the Federal Reserve. "They had to give up a major source of
| revenue, the charge they made for check clearing. Back
| then, if you received a check for $10, you might get back
| $9.50." The dividend was seen as a way to entice banks into
| joining the Federal Reserve system.
|
| from: https://newrepublic.com/article/116913/federal-
| reserve-divid...
| duxup wrote:
| Cryptocurrency and the philosophical goals / ideals just don't
| match how they...are.
| eloff wrote:
| I don't think your example proves proof of work isn't
| vulnerable to the same effect. At best it proves it's not
| always vulnerable to that - but the same could technically
| happen with proof of stake.
|
| Like it or not the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule may well be
| the most powerful law of the universe. It applies to everything
| from physical systems like stars and galaxies to social systems
| and individual human achievement.
|
| I don't see why crytocurrency should be any different. Proof of
| work through cost of capital investment exhibits the exact same
| concentration of wealth and power, but at least PoS doesn't
| destroy the environment as a side effect.
|
| I'm skeptical about why we need the decentralized aspect of
| cryto when it ends up centralizing anyway. Seems like a very
| inefficient way of doing things. Maybe we just want an
| immutable public ledger - but I could be wrong on that. It
| hasn't lived up to the hype yet.
| leishman wrote:
| There is a very big difference. PoS collapses governance into
| a single group: custodians. With PoW governance is a push and
| pull between miners and custodians. Additionally, PoW miners
| need to constantly sell Bitcoin to cover operating costs,
| whereas stakers in a PoS system have a small fixed cost and
| large stakers will always stay large. Miners on the other
| hand need to constantly invest and expand to stay
| competitive.
| fabioyy wrote:
| people with money can buy mining factories and make decisions
| anyway.
| witweb wrote:
| Please read up on UASF and Bitcoin. People can buy tons of
| mining factories, but if a very large amount of nodes start
| rejecting blocks and therefore the rewards, miners start to
| rethink their stance very fast. There is no discussion here,
| history proves it.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| and UASF are a thing in PoS as well, if some
| entity/entities acquire a majority of the staked coins
| users can simply fork the malicious actors out. It's
| functionally equivalent except that it's an order of
| magnitude more expensive to acquire the required coins as
| opposed to getting the equivalent in hashpower.
| leishman wrote:
| See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers can
| prevent new people from staking. Existing miners can't do
| this in a PoW system
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system
|
| Sure they can. It's easy to only mine on top of blocks from
| certain sources, and if most of the network does this then
| those are the only blocks that matter.
| leishman wrote:
| You can mine anonymously, you can't stake anonymously.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But my comment is about whitelisting, not blacklisting.
| The ability to be anonymous won't stop whitelisting.
| leishman wrote:
| Sure but the difference with mining is that having a
| majority of hashrate doesn't allow you to maintain that
| majority in perpetuity. You have constant operating
| expenses that require you to sell your Bitcoin, along
| with constantly growing competition. Just look at the
| rise and fall of large Bitcoin miners. With PoS if you
| are the biggest on day 1 you will probably be the biggest
| on day 1,000.
| 8note wrote:
| New people can still vote for their governments to affect
| those systems.
|
| The distinction feels irrelevant
| leishman wrote:
| It's very relevant. Mining is very easy to geographically
| diversify. PoS coins will almost all be controlled by US
| based custodians subject to US regulations. PoS coins
| will be controlled by the US financial industry at the
| end of the day
| 8note wrote:
| Your government controls which coins _you_ are able to
| use.
|
| It doesn't matter if the coin becomes run by another
| geographic area if it's illegal for you to trade in them
| zionic wrote:
| This is completely false, late/end game PoW centralizes
| mining around the cheapest electricity. It is impossible
| to mine profitably in the overwhelming majority of the
| world now.
| zionic wrote:
| >See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers
| can prevent new people from staking
|
| There is little to no evidence of this. Completely
| unsupported conspiracy theory.
| suifbwish wrote:
| Proof of work consumes a real world resource. Proof of stake
| does not, therefore proof of work exchanges REAL value for
| virtual value. It literally takes actual value in the world and
| deletes it. What's the difference with the US financial
| institutions buying up all the big mining rigs and then buying
| up all the stakable tokens ?
| ptr2voidStar wrote:
| It is astonishing to me that this has to be stated _explicitly_
| like this for people to see this for what it is.
|
| "Turkeys voting for Christmas" comes to mind.
|
| Cryptocurrency offers the opportunity to break away from the
| current hegemony - only for people to hand over the power back
| to the powerful.
|
| Perhaps the world is in the current state - because that's what
| we deserve? (because we keep voting for it?)
| vbuterin wrote:
| I think you're conflating _consensus_ and _governance_; the two
| are quite different. It's not PoW vs PoS that allows a chain to
| resist a coordinated attempt by elites to force a protocol
| change, it's users personally verifying the chain (and so
| automatically rejecting chains that violate the rules even if
| >51% of PoW/PoS nodes support those chains). So no, PoS is not
| "how our current financial system works". Our current financial
| system doesn't give people the ability to independently verify
| anything at all; it's even worse than the most centralized
| chains in that regard.
|
| I would actually say PoS is more resistant to cabals and
| regulatory systems than PoW; PoW mining requires huge and
| visible capital investments and electricity consumption and
| it's incredibly easy for governments to detect and shut down
| miners in their own countries (not as true for GPU mining, but
| GPU-friendliness is difficult to sustain long term), whereas
| you can be a PoS validator with the most basic computer
| hardware from anywhere.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| > Our current financial system doesn't give people the
| ability to independently verify anything at all; it's even
| worse than the most centralized chains in that regard.
|
| I'm sorry, that sounds incorrect, many people have been
| "verifying" things independently and sounding the alarm, but
| nothing happens.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| Lol. Can you personally verify what your bank is doing? No
| you can't. If it was on the blockchain, you could.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| He's talking about the Financial System, not the Bank
| (akin to a node)
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| With PoS one can just buy _governance_, that's all. All you
| need to have more influence on (PoS-based) Etherium is a huge
| amount of money. More power to money-bags!
|
| So "fresh" idea :)
| grubles wrote:
| It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is
| part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the
| trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social
| media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account,
| ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of
| decentralization.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the
| r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin
| communities are owned by one and the same person that
| have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just
| read up on the r/bitcoin history.
|
| Bitcoin is the illusion of decentralization.
| atweiden wrote:
| > It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the
| r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin
| communities are owned by one and the same person that
| have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just
| read up on the r/bitcoin history.
|
| Cryptocurrency discussions are notoriously filled with
| astroturfing. It's a lot like what would happen if
| present-day nation states quite literally lived and died
| based on the market price of 24/7 globally traded bearer
| shares. The saying "well kept gardens die by pacifism" is
| resoundingly true here, to put it mildly.
|
| Historically, the opponents to the now infamous "Bitcoin
| as digital gold" narrative were pushing things like
| gigablocks, nodes in datacenters, "Bitcoin as PayPal
| 2.0", let's replace all the core developers, etc based on
| populist appeals. There was no way to distinguish between
| those populist appeals and attempts to foil Bitcoin
| socially by all manner of biased attackers (and just
| plain ignorant people).
|
| I think it's rather telling that after these people
| forked to Bcash, they subsequently capped the block size
| of Bcash to 32MB and are now ironically scaling Bcash via
| sidechains -- e.g. SmartBCH -- against the backdrop of
| historically claiming BTC would never increase in price
| past $300 USD without a block size increase. To say their
| entire worldview has been invalidated would be an
| understatement.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Well, I'm not naive enough to expect something else.
| People are making money and protect their businesses. It
| is ok for me.
|
| For some people (not for me) living in poor countries,
| mining was a chance to improve their lives. Now it's sold
| for the opportunity to give more money to those who have
| large amounts of money.
|
| All these talks about the climate are so ridiculous in
| this context - nobody even tried to calculate how much of
| that energy was produced by the wind or sun.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy
| was produced by the wind or sun.
|
| I've definitely seen some analysis that does? But I don't
| see how it matters. There's an opportunity cost there,
| where using solar or wind power for something like
| bitcoin could be better spend on something intrinsically
| (rather than abstractly) productive, like heating/cooling
| homes or whatever.
|
| And like, if suddenly it was decided magically somehow
| that "all bitcoin must be produced with renewable energy"
| I don't think the world would be made better by the
| sudden rise in price of solar panels by 10x like has
| happened with video cards. There's an inherent price
| inflationary effect involved in anything that's capable
| of producing 'free money'.
| viscanti wrote:
| But as soon as someone bought 51% of ETH and abused their
| influence, their investment would go to zero. I'm not sure
| I get the scenario where it's worthwhile for someone to
| invest the amount it would take to get that significant of
| an ownership percentage and then do something that would
| just cause everyone else to leave and it to be worthless.
| Maybe I'm missing something here.
| ppf wrote:
| Apparently, 51% attacks aren't enough to put off
| investors, as ETC had 3 of them in one month last year.
| keymone wrote:
| Why would they publish that fact? You can pretend to be
| as many independent validators as you like.
| Grustaf wrote:
| I see your point, but you could perhaps do what they are
| doing to fiat currencies (and to our countries), exploit
| them slowly.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| To participate in the PoS "validation" network, you need
| a minimal amount of tokens (coins). It raises the bar for
| many people.
| viscanti wrote:
| Can't you delegate your ETH with other people you trust?
| Isn't that an arbitrary decision that seems likely to
| change (ETH is famous for making sure that people can run
| a full node on an older and underpowered laptop)?
|
| Not sure how it changes the question I had anyway. The
| point I was responding to suggested that people might buy
| a bunch of ETH to influence the network. My question was
| about how that could be economically viable because it
| would take a very large investment to get any real
| influence would cost more than what they could get out of
| it (the value of the ETH they bought to influence the
| network would go to zero).
| jude- wrote:
| Why buy the ETH, when stealing it out of buggy defi
| contracts is so much cheaper?
| exo762 wrote:
| Why don't we setup a panel of PhDs who will vet all new
| contracts? Sounds fresh.
| jude- wrote:
| Or, maybe we can step back from this whole discussion and
| consider that maybe, just maybe, tying block-production
| to coin-ownership in a blockchain with undecidable smart
| contracts and a less-than-stellar security record is an
| exercise in tempting fate.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| It's not possible to abuse the power in this case. You
| either use it or not. Either for your profit or not.
| Vitalik made his choice, many other holders will do
| approximately the same.
| leishman wrote:
| I'm mostly talking about governance. The biggest "users" and
| governance decision makers of any PoS protocol will be
| regulated financial institutions (e.g. Coinbase) operating on
| behalf of end users. In theory Joe Schmoe can be a staker
| from his garage, but in practice the only stakers that matter
| will be regulated custodians (full disclosure, I am the CEO
| of a regulated custodian) other than a handful of independent
| ETH whales (like yourself).
|
| Yes there will be a number of custodians "competing" with
| each other, but they will all largely operate under the same
| regulatory jurisdiction (or at least cooperating
| jurisdictions). If a PoS currency becomes mainstream, the
| Federal Reserve (because regulated banks will be the largest
| custodians) and Dept. of Treasury will have significant
| influence on governance debates.
|
| The big issue here is that governance decisions in PoW
| systems are split between miners (geographically
| distributed), custodians (largely US based) and other
| economic actors. In PoS systems _only_ custodians will call
| the shots. That has very serious implications because
| custodians are regulated financial institutions with
| significant network effects, miners do not have this
| centralizing force.
|
| Lastly, to actually become a miner in a PoS system requires
| you to find or create a cheap source of energy and hardware
| and maintain this advantage in perpetuity. This is external
| to the system and can be done without paying off any existing
| Bitcoin actor. In a PoS system you, by definition, need to
| pay to play - you must purchase a sufficient stake of the
| currency from an existing insider if you want to have a seat
| at the table. It's the perfect insider game. Some may argue
| it aligns incentives, but it also centralizes control.
|
| These systems all have different tradeoffs. Maybe some people
| are ok with these tradeoffs for switching to PoS, but I'm
| not.
| grubles wrote:
| Important to note that Vitalik massively gains from Ethereum
| transitioning to Proof-of-Stake since he controls a large
| percentage of total ETH due to premining it before the
| project launched.
| vbuterin wrote:
| Isn't this just saying "the Ethereum proof of stake
| transition benefits ETH holders"?
| meowkit wrote:
| Important to note that anyone who holds ETH gains if the
| price goes up.
|
| I salute you Sherlock.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| looks like you missed "controls a large percentage of
| total ETH"
| hanniabu wrote:
| Except he doesn't
| grubles wrote:
| Vitalik, just one person, owns billions in ETH. That is
| the top 0.1%.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| And Satoshi, just one person, owns tens of billions in
| BTC. That is the top 0.01%.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Satoshi is not actively working to move Bitcoin to PoS
| though. And for all practical purposes, his stash is as
| good as gone.
| yaa_minu wrote:
| Satoshi mined every single one of it and anyone would
| have been able to do same also he never sold his coins
| and left the project early on to avoid having too much
| control. Quite the opposite with Vitalik who on the other
| hand premined his eth, has been selling them Ever since,
| and continues to have significant control over ehereum.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| How can you verify that? currently everybody just listens
| to what he has to say, when he decided to undo the DAO
| hack, the original "immutable" chain just died off
| because Vitalik put his vote on ETH. Sincerely, I really
| wish he hadn't done that.
|
| (I'm guessing vbuterin is THE vbuterin here)
| suikadayo wrote:
| Vitalik didn't decide to undo the DAO hack, there was a
| community vote (http://v1.carbonvote.com/), unlike
| Satoshi who singlehandedly rolled back the chain in 2010
| after the 184 billion BTC hack.
|
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9573#msg95
| 73
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Satoshi fixed a bug (that reverted it back to the initial
| rules everyone agreed upon).
|
| The DAO hack actually was an exploitation of the rules
| that everyone agreed upon in the DAO, recursively calling
| a function in your smart contract layer is not a bug.
|
| This brings us to an interesting topic, bugs are common
| in software,
|
| * Should you make the protocol layer so complex that it
| increases the probability of bugs being found, being
| harder to understand and potentially grind the whole
| system to a halt if a bug is found.
|
| OR
|
| * Should you break them up into layers where each layer
| has one responsibility (base monetary layer, a smart
| contract layer, a micro payments layer etc.)
| fredfoobar wrote:
| I want to add to this, some additional material, anyone
| interested in the current state of DeFi can understand
| this
|
| https://medium.com/coinmonks/demystify-the-dark-forest-
| on-et...
| grubles wrote:
| Coinvotes in the context of massive insider premines is
| completely useless. Of course a coinvote would reflect
| "Yes to censoring the DAO hacker" because the DAO hacker
| controlled more ETH than the top 3 current ETH accounts.
| And the insiders stand to benefit the most from proof of
| stake because it's a system designed to further enrich
| the already rich.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Every single one of your comments up and down this thread
| is incorrect misinformation and it's extremely tiring.
|
| 1) His address is public (which I'm sure you're well
| aware and are intentionally ignoring so you can FUD): htt
| ps://etherscan.io/address/0xab5801a7d398351b8be11c439e05c
| ...
|
| 2) The blockchain wasn't mutated after the DAO hack. This
| has been well reported.
|
| 3) "He" didn't decide to do anything, the Ethereum
| community did.
|
| Stop with the endless BTC maxi talking points and
| misinformation warfare.
| grubles wrote:
| Why did you edit out the actual address?
| grubles wrote:
| Vitalik in particular stands to gain from the system
| switching to rewarding those with more wealth in the
| system.
|
| And shockingly (/s) Vitalik allocated a disproportionate
| stake relative to 99% of people.
|
| It's the rich getting richer but on the blockchain <tm>.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| You mean the same guy that just donated $1.2b to the
| indian covid relief fund is just in it for the money? I
| have a hard time believing that.
|
| Vitalik doesn't even own half a percent of the
| circulating supply.
|
| And shockingly, you are a toxic bitcoin maximalist that
| bought in early & massively profits from trying to
| discredit Ethereum and pushing the "btc is a world
| reserve currency" narrative.
|
| Fuck outta here.
| yaa_minu wrote:
| No, he donated an illiquid pump and dump shitcoin that
| was sent to him by the scammers who created it. There's
| little to praise about this.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| That, and a lot of his ETH. The illiquid shitcoins are
| still worth a couple hundred million at the very least.
| +$200k in ETH.
| chrischattin wrote:
| In Ethereum, you need 32 ETH, which is around ~$120k. That's
| prohibitive a normal person. After EIP1559 goes into effect,
| it's not out of the question that the price could rise 7x
| given the power laws at play. What happens when the cost to
| stake a node is $1M+? What happens 50 years from only the
| very richest .00001% can afford to run a node?
|
| I'm concerned EIP1559 and PoS is a very short sighted
| implementation that will move towards centralization of the
| network.
|
| There should be a floating minimum, or have no minimum at all
| to run a node. Not sure the exact tech solution, or I'd be
| submitting a pull request :).
| miohtama wrote:
| You can do pooled staking with smaller amounts, with little
| bit lost security:
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/ethereum-2.0-staking-and-
| stake...
| meowkit wrote:
| 32 ETH was set when it cost much less.
|
| That can always be changed if the number or validators is
| not sufficient to decentralize the network.
| chrischattin wrote:
| That's was my point. The ability to stake shouldn't be
| based on an arbitrary and temporary exchange rate. What
| happens if USD/ETH is $0.0001? $1B? It should still work
| regardless of the exchange rate.
|
| Current implementation depends on the exchange rate and
| creates an incentive structure towards centralization.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Current implementation depends on the exchange rate
|
| No, it does not. You are staking ETH, not USD.
| Essentially, you are staking a percentage of all ETH,
| percentage capped from below.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Yeah yeah, everything can always be changed in the
| future.
| roskelld wrote:
| Genuine question: Who decides that?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| When there is a prominent founder, everyone usually tends
| to defer to them (in this case, Vitalik, see what
| happened to ETC vs ETH).
| hanniabu wrote:
| There are discussions to lower the ETH collateral
| requirements. Right now there is no validator cap so that
| will lead to issues. The goal is to first set a max
| validator cap with a rotating validator pool. However,
| there's still higher priority items to complete first like
| the merge, unlocking withdrawals, and likely also sharding.
| Given that, it's liking like this change would come 2 years
| from now unless priorities change (and assuming there's
| consensus for such a change).
| eyezick wrote:
| I'd further add on to say PoS has the benefit of being able
| to eliminate bad actors unilaterally. You can't stop anyone
| from attacking a PoW chain over and over again. Attacking a
| PoS chain is much riskier as the attacker's stakes are held
| on chain and are at the mercy of the community who uses the
| network.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| If the community forks to void an attacker's coins, that
| creates a very bad precedent. It already happened with the
| dao hack (which was pretty bad to begin with), but if it
| keeps happening, why would you trust that blockchain.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| PoS doesn't fork the chain, you just lose your stake if
| you stake malicious blocks:
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-
| mechanisms...
| jude- wrote:
| Why does the attacker need to hold or buy any coins? All
| the attacker has to do to wreck havoc is prevent quorum
| from being reached. This can be done by knocking validators
| offline (which is a slashable penalty), or hacking
| validators and making them slash themselves, or hacking an
| exchange or two in order to amass control of 33% or more of
| the voting power.
| eyezick wrote:
| The point is it mitigates the on-chain attack surface
| which is still prevalent on PoW. Off-chain attacks are
| still possible for all consensus mechanism.
| jude- wrote:
| What on-chain attack surface? The only way to permanently
| knock a PoW chain offline is to consistently out-mine
| everyone else. In PoS, once you lose BFT quorum (1/3 of
| all votes), it's game over.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I really wish the UN could get together and implement a global
| treaty on a revenue neutral carbon tax. The only reason energy is
| as cheap as it is right now is because we're not properly pricing
| in the externalities of environmental damage.
|
| This would immediately make unproductive energy use ( _cough POW
| crypto_ cough) a lot less profitable, without the government
| having to come in and set prices and regs for every little thing.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The UN doesn't actually have any power though. Even if all the
| UN members agree to sanction countries that don't implement the
| tax there are countries like North Korea and Iran that are
| already fully sanctioned. These countries would immediately
| take full advantage of the comparative advantage given to them.
| PoW mining for example would end up being completely
| centralized in these countries.
| Taek wrote:
| I agree that we should try to implement global
| fines/taxes/fees/whatever on the externalities of society (be
| it electricity, manufacturing, dumping, litter, etc).
|
| I disagree that it would have a significant impact on PoW. PoW
| is already one of the cleanest energy industries in the world,
| and it's also entirely price insensistive. PoW is going to
| consume billions of dollars of electricity per year at any
| price. An external tax of 50% would cut energy use by nearly a
| third, but it wouldn't do any more than that.
|
| And I should add, PoW would be absolutely happy with such a fee
| in place. It really doesn't care how much electricity costs, it
| only cares that an attacker would also have to pay the same
| price.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Yeah, nope.
|
| Consider the amount of energy wasted right now and also in
| similar "industries".
|
| https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| To me, this says those other "similar 'industries'" should
| *also* be regulated in this way. We shouldn't excuse bitcoin
| just because there's other worse offenders, we should address
| the entire sector. I'll phrase it this way: do high-
| frequency-trading and coin-mining contribute positively to
| the world as a whole? Are they producing goods that improve
| the standard of living on a global scale, tangible or
| otherwise? Are those good worth the negative environment and
| social impact their production causes?
|
| Assuming HFT/coin mining do indeed contribute in these ways,
| are there less energy-intensive solutions that could produce
| the same or a similar effect?
|
| I think it's completely reasonable for there to be
| regulations that limit the global impact of activities (e.g.
| emissions, global warming, chip shortage) for the good of the
| general population, especially in relation to how much
| tangible good they produce. That's the whole point of
| governments and regulations to begin with; see also, things
| like leaded fuels, or asbestos, or trust-busting.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Sorry, it was more for your "opinion" on PoW, not the
| carbon tax.
|
| > This would immediately make unproductive energy use
| (cough POW crypto cough) a lot less profitable,
|
| You seem to have just one target in mind that would get
| hit. Clearly you haven't analyzed the full extent of a
| "carbon tax" and your following statement seemed very
| naive. That said, I'm all FOR carbon taxes, it is actually
| good for Bitcoin and the world.
|
| I don't think there will be a LOT of PoW cryptos, there
| will be one (or two at most) winner and the others will use
| a variation of Proof of Proof (by saving state on a PoW
| chain). I also think that the energy usage curve will
| plateau soon-ish and energy usage will be somewhat constant
| or start trending down gradually (as the rewards are
| tapering off too).
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| You replied to the wrong guy, but I got you :^)
|
| I have no problem with _all_ carbon intensive industries
| paying for their pollution. I think it would be silly for
| governments to go around mandating and regulating every
| little thing that uses energy. Simply tax at the source.
|
| Will that make my power bill go up? Yeah. Will that mean
| it costs more to fill my tank? Yeah. Whatever. I'm
| totally fine with that. If it's revenue neutral I'll be
| getting most of it back on my income taxes anyway. Bonus,
| this now lets me reduce my carbon footprint and pay less
| taxes.
|
| TLDR: Want less carbon? Tax carbon!
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Thanks, A carbon tax will be a boon for stranded/wasted
| energy as well, I wouldn't see why a bitcoin mining
| operation can't use better sources of energy to mine and
| be more profitable. It's based on consuming electricity
| for starters (not natural gas), unlike say ICE vehicles
| which can't switch to another source of energy.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The world financial and banking systems moves literal
| quadrillions of dollars around the world on an annual basis.
| nmz wrote:
| While true, this also gives jobs to millions of people,
| unlike crypto, which is comparatively less.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| You're somehow implying that bitcoin can't do that, how'd
| you come to that conclusion.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Bitcoin already uses a very high percentage of the total
| energy that the global financial services industry does,
| and it moves a very small amount of money around to show
| for it. If the bitcoin network were to move quadrillions
| of dollars per year, it would probably have to use more
| energy than we are capable of producing.
|
| And bitcoin cannot offer insurance, or retirement and
| estate planning, it cannot take my company public or help
| me raise money on the bond market. It cannot facilitate a
| repo transaction on my real estate portfolio, and it
| cannot offer me a mortgage to purchase a home.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| > Bitcoin already uses a very high percentage of the
| total energy that the global financial services industry
| does, and it moves a very small amount of money around to
| show for it.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| Citation that counters that perception:
| https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-
| than-...
|
| > If the bitcoin network were to move quadrillions of
| dollars per year, it would probably have to use more
| energy than we are capable of producing
|
| Sigh, this gets spouted like it's the truth by people who
| don't understand the simple fact that the energy usage in
| bitcoin is NOT used on transactions! and it DOES NOT
| scale with the number of transactions!. [1]
|
| > And bitcoin cannot offer insurance, or retirement and
| estate planning, it cannot take my company public or help
| me raise money on the bond market. It cannot facilitate a
| repo transaction on my real estate portfolio, and it
| cannot offer me a mortgage to purchase a home.
|
| These are the usecases for subsequent layers, and there
| are services popping up for these already! bitcoin is a
| relatively young system that is purely community driven.
|
| [1]: https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-
| consuming...
| libertine wrote:
| I know this is a pressing matter, and that has relevance for
| itself, but after the whole Elon Musk thing it just turns this
| into a reply to his tweet, where so many cryptos folks were
| spamming "we use less energy then bitcoin! choose us! we're open
| to talk!"
|
| Which in the lights of the recent events sounds like: "pump us
| this time around!"
|
| Makes you question: when would be a good time to address this, if
| they can't time travel to the day before Elon posted the tweet?
|
| And I don't know the answer to that. Was this too soon? Well if
| they want to take the ride of Elon controversy, I don't think so.
| Is that a good thing? Who knows.
| nashashmi wrote:
| It is a reply but it was also well known that they were looking
| to improve with a proof of scope concept. This will require
| 100x more storage space in place of compute power.
|
| The market is wondering what will happen next. So ether
| published their progress. I just want to know how realistic are
| they with their schedule.
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| Carbon phobia is a mental disorder.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I was fairly into the space in 2014-2016 but stopped paying
| attention the last few years. It seems like lots of theorized
| applications actually exist and have a proof-of-concept now.
|
| If I'm building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to
| be "crypto-first" instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe
| Connect, where do I start?
|
| The marketplace sells access to resources with an off-chain ACL
| system. It facilitates trades between resource sellers and
| buyers.
|
| I assume I want a smart contract between buyer/seller to record
| resource grants on chain, which the access layer checks as a
| source of truth.
|
| But if I were to do this on Ethereum, the gas fees would be
| really expensive. I've heard about Polygon and "optimistic roll-
| up." Is this a viable solution?
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Polygon & "optimistic roll-ups" are generally referred to as
| L2. In general this part of the etherum ecosystem is just
| starting up and the only one that has seen much adoption so far
| is Polygon (which did 4M tx yesterday & still has low fees).
|
| Using an L2 system will mean that your user will need to be
| using that specific L2 system as well, but the UX doesn't seem
| so bad (at least for ETH -> polygon, and for the cryptocurrecny
| space so far).
|
| ETH 2.0 will reduce gas fees somewhat on the mainchain, but
| it's fairly obvious that there's huge demand, the sharding that
| ETH 2.0 will do is create 1 shard for execution & 63 for data
| only. Most L2 systems will mostly use the data shards, so we
| appear to be heading towards an L2 future.
|
| In short if I were building a company in the space I'd be
| looking at deploying both on the mainchain (L1) and on a L2
| system, but prioritize the L2 system. Unfortunately we may end
| up in a world where there are dozens or more L2 systems and
| either the users or the companies have to pay the cost to hop
| between them.
| TarasBob wrote:
| This is a great solution called zk-rollup (zero knowledge
| rollup) https://zksync.io/
|
| It is just as secure as the base chain (unlike polygon) and has
| low fees and has been live for the past few months. This is a
| perfect solution to simple payments.
|
| The difference between optimistic rollups and zero knowledge
| rollups is that you can't deploy arbitrary smart contracts to
| zk rollup, it only supports a limited set of use cases, such as
| simple payments for now. Read more here
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
| hanniabu wrote:
| Also zkSync has general EVM compatibility coming in a few
| months
| randomopining wrote:
| What coin does zk-rollup use? or just base Ethereum?
| TarasBob wrote:
| It can use any coin. You can send ETH or any token,
| including stable coins such as DAI or USDC.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| the current solutions do 'native fees' which means you pay
| the fee in whatever you are sending. This can't really last
| because I could create SPAM coin with 1B marketcap and
| overload the network with it.
|
| IIRC they'll eventually create their own native token when
| their EVM compatible rollup is out.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| As a side note:
|
| If you as a reader are interested in math & crypto the stuff
| being done in the zero knowledge space w.r.t.
| cryptocurrencies is really cool regardless of your opinion on
| cryptocurrencies in general.
| random_kris wrote:
| If you want to use microlayments, payment processing checkout
| the btcpayserver and Bitcoin lightning Network.
| tootie wrote:
| Realistically, you can't. Unless you want to be a very early
| adopter, no mainstream businesses are accepting payments in
| crypto. Techwise, Coinbase has a thing:
| https://commerce.coinbase.com/
|
| But I've absolutely never seen it in the wild.
| jaggs wrote:
| Um...that's not strictly the case though?
| https://blog.bitgo.com/24-major-businesses-accepting-
| bitcoin...
|
| (Tesla has recanted 'for now').
| Ono-Sendai wrote:
| I use coinbase to accept crypto payments for virtual property
| here: https://substrata.info/parcel_auction_list
| wbc wrote:
| Check out Solana if you want lower fees
| throwaway-8c93 wrote:
| Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem.
|
| If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at
| exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than
| existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole
| purpose.
| de_keyboard wrote:
| > If I'm building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want
| to be "crypto-first" instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe
| Connect, where do I start?
|
| Unless you are building a dark web market, why would you want
| to? It will be more convenient for the vast majority of users
| to pay with card or PayPal.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| One reason that comes to mind is trying to be the change they
| want to see in the world. Cards and Paypal already have heaps
| of adoption.
| svarog-run wrote:
| The end user won't see a change in their cards though
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I believe there are some use cases. Think of a government
| which does not allow currency conversion to more stable
| currencies in a place where volatility or inflation is very
| high. In that situation, it might be worth adopting a crypto-
| first approach, no?
| bhandziuk wrote:
| But doesn't crypto have very high volatility?
| wmf wrote:
| For example, Reserve is a stablecoin designed for markets
| like Venezuela where it's "illegal" to use USD or EUR.
| tratax wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they will make all the stablecoins
| illegal as well. The fact that they cant really enforce
| it .. thats something else.
| svarog-run wrote:
| Normal citizens won't need 3rd party stablecoins when
| cbdcs are available
| 533474 wrote:
| why does it have to be a dark-web market if blockchain
| payments are first class citizens? I suppose the general
| population isn't ready for decentralised payments yet or do
| you have another reason for such use-case generalization?
| _jjkk wrote:
| There are still many barriers to that "first class" status,
| taxes are mentioned most often.
|
| Taxes are paid in fiat. Holding non-stablecoins would add
| even more of a tax headache because you'd have to track
| capital gain/loss as you enter/exit fiat for taxes / fees /
| vendors that don't accept crypto
|
| Also the fact that general adoption has been slow so far
| may be a sign that there is not enough obvious value added
| for the average person to consider using crypto over fiat.
| svarog-run wrote:
| who would pay with non-stablecoins though? The oath seems
| to be cbdcs that are compatible with public smart
| contract blockchains
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's also the risk that stablecoins aren't actually
| stable but just claim to be such:
| https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-
| composition-re...
| oskarth wrote:
| Also see Ethereum is green: https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-
| green/
| a-dub wrote:
| proof of work is a massive waste, it's true, but it does serve a
| one time valuable purpose: it bootstraps the value of the tokens
| by having people make real investments with existing currency and
| hardware in their creation. beyond that, it's literally insane,
| it only works when there's a very competitive race to burn as
| much energy as possible.
|
| however, once the value of those tokens is established (as is
| true for most of the big cryptocurrencies today), there is really
| no compelling reason not to emulate the proof of work block
| lottery with a proof of stake block lottery. there is absolutely
| no reason why people can't lock up digital currency funds long
| term in exchange for share in a 10 minute lottery rather than
| lock up funds in hardware mining investments and associated power
| supplies for them.
|
| i've been watching ethereum's progress on this with interest, and
| fully expect with time that bitcoin will follow.
| randomopining wrote:
| Doesn't POS incentivize oligarchal collusion?
| a-dub wrote:
| no more than PoW. they're both essentially lotteries that
| hand out share/influence based on capital investment.
|
| PoS, done right, simply emulates PoW.
|
| what does PoS done right look like?
|
| "miners" lock up funds for 1-2 years. the amount of funds
| they lock up determines how likely they are to win the block
| lottery. the block lottery, and locking up funds for entries
| within it, remain decentralized.
|
| the challenge is running a decentralized lottery with
| distributed consensus. this is hard, but i don't think
| impossible.
| amarant wrote:
| I'm not saying 99.95% of energy was completely wasted...
|
| I'm saying the last 0.05% was too
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| Oh, I fear that this might be on the route to Ethereum-
| Classic-V2.
|
| Vitalik and core team wake up sulked and there we go..
| mrfusion wrote:
| How do existing Pow coins get transferred to this?
| exo762 wrote:
| Whole chain is changing the rules. For block N-1 and earlier
| blocks - fork choice rule inspects amount of work. For block N
| and later, fork choice rule is one of https://beaconcha.in/
| tylercubell wrote:
| Algorand has been Proof of Stake for years (2019 MainNet launch)
| and it's actually carbon-negative [1]. It's a shame more people
| don't know about it. Its founder is a Turing-award-winning MIT
| professor (Silvio Micali) who solved the blockchain trilemma [2]
| with the Pure Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. The tech is
| leaps and bounds ahead of other cryptos.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...
|
| [2]: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-
| fr...
| lancemurdock wrote:
| i'll check back on this coin when its tokenomics have improved.
| I am not interested in something with 70% of the total supply
| not yet in circulation.
| miohtama wrote:
| The first proof-of-stake coin was PeerCoin from 2012. Also
| Algorand is not leaps ahead of the competiton. More in my
| presentation:
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/
| tylercubell wrote:
| Would it be reasonable to assert pure proof of stake is less
| risky than delegated proof of stake? I don't claim to be an
| expert in crypto but from what I've read it seems like pure
| proof of stake is a leap ahead of other consensus algorithms
| in terms of security, energy usage, etc.
| smaddox wrote:
| I just read about it. It seems highly susceptible to disruption
| by a minority stake, via the birthday paradox.
|
| If only a fraction of the stake holders are validators at any
| given time, but the set of 1000 validators is selected randomly
| from token holders, then all you technically need is 1000
| tokens (or more) and given enough time you will be selected as
| the only validator, right? You can then validate a fraudulent
| transaction, breaking security.
|
| Now perhaps the amount of time it would take for this to occur
| would be longer than the heat death of the universe if you only
| have 1000 tokens, but at the very least, this substantially
| reduces the stake required to mount such an attack below the
| 51% required in a PoW system, right?
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| thats why currently the minimum stake amount is 32 eth. Also,
| you'd learn you were the validator for the cycle only when
| you are awarded eth. If you try to push through a false
| transaction you can get slashed (Losing some of your stake).
| all in all, makes it impractical at best.
| mtlynch wrote:
| That sounded interesting but I couldn't understand from the
| links how a blockchain can be carbon negative:
|
| > _To achieve a carbon-negative network, Algorand and
| ClimateTrade will implement a sustainability oracle which will
| notarize Algorand's carbon footprint on-chain for each epoch (a
| set amount of blocks). With its advanced smart contracts,
| Algorand will then lock the equivalent amount of carbon credit
| as an ASA (Algorand Standard Asset) into a green treasury so
| that its protocol keeps running as carbon-negative._
|
| I'm pretty familiar with the basics of cryptocurrency and
| blockchains, but the above paragraph makes almost no sense to
| me.
| [deleted]
| fumblebee wrote:
| It's times like this I ask myself whether I'm slow, or
| whether the text in question is needlessly complex.
|
| My pessimistic side suggests this could be purposeful
| obfuscation of implementation by using complex language. No
| one will question their solution if no one can understand it.
|
| On the other hand, I'm a big proponent of the Algorand
| project and based on the general quality of their work (the
| tech, docs, tutorials, etc.), I'd be surprised if there were
| anything malignant going on.
| nscalf wrote:
| They're going to buy carbon credits to offset the carbon
| emissions derived from using the network, then lock them away
| so they can't trade them off at a later time. That is
| definitely some marketing lingo tied around "we buy carbon
| credits".
| hanniabu wrote:
| > It's a shame more people don't know about it
|
| It's a shame people don't understand that there's multiple
| aspects. Ethereum is much more decentralized, secure, have more
| dev mindshare, better community, tooling, and ecosystem. Let's
| also not forget that Algorand is powered by and centralized
| around team-run nodes.
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't think the initial "It's a shame more people..." is
| meant to make people forget about Ethereum. I think it's to
| signal that not a lot of people know about Algorand, and
| doesn't anything about other projects.
|
| Since you seem to indicate that you know what you're talking
| about, care enough to make a proper argument? You say
| Ethereum is more decentralized, secure and better tooling,
| but you never actually make a cohesive argument, only giving
| a list of "reasons" without any backing. I'm mostly
| interested in why you think Ethereum is "more secure" than
| Algorand, and what threat model are you considering here
| even?
|
| > Algorand is powered by and centralized around team-run
| nodes
|
| Hm, I run a Algorand node but I don't work for the Algorand
| team. What do you mean that Algorand is run by team-run nodes
| really? How do you even know which node belongs to who in the
| first place?
| webinvest wrote:
| Ethereum 2.0 isn't expected to be released until 2022, 2023, or
| 2024*
|
| If you're looking for something that works now, you can take a
| look at the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase, Stellar
| Lumens (XLM). It sure is energy efficient.
|
| More details here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...
|
| Sources: *Coinbase, Stakewise
| gpsx wrote:
| Wouldn't it be nice if energy were free, and caused no
| environmental damage? Well, how about cheaper and cleaner.
| Whether you think spending energy on coin mining is worthwhile or
| not, energy is required to do any work (by definition), so to
| feed our innovations, easy energy is important (and not evil). We
| will need to work on that.
| kojoru wrote:
| Question from someone relatively clueless: Does that mean that
| NFTs also will use negligible amount of electricity once that's
| completely gone through?
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| Yes. Any action performed in the network will consume 99.95%
| less energy after this change has gone through.
| suikadayo wrote:
| Basically. Also, it's already possible to do NFTs with
| negligible amount using Immutable X layer 2 scaling solution on
| Ethereum - it's just that they seem to be doing it only for
| Gods Unchained right now. There will be even more other NFT
| scaling solutions.
| web3nix wrote:
| Many people are talking about PoW vs PoS here.
|
| Nobody tends to mention that in PoS a hostile takeover by a
| majority stake can just have its staked coins 'forked' out by the
| community. The goal of PoS is to have actors held responsible for
| their actions.
|
| In my mind this is much more powerful than PoW because surely
| hostile majority mining power can't simply be forked away (sure
| you could change the hashing algorithm but even then the attacker
| could just move on to a different chain with no real consequences
| of their actions no?).
|
| Interested to hear what other people think.
| focom wrote:
| So with PoS, we recreate a system where a few rich pool have
| decision over the network. Can someone enlighten me on how this
| is different from the current fiat system?
| je_bailey wrote:
| So I'm more familiar with how Cardano and Polkadot do their POS
| rather than Ethereums. In Cardano since the entry level
| requirement to operate a stake pool is much smaller than it is
| to do something like Bitcoin mining, it creates a larger number
| of stake pools. There's also a soft limit on the size of the
| stake pool that encourages people to spread out their
| commitment so no one pool gets to large.So at least in the
| existing POS systems it seems to be working quite well. I'm
| going to be interested to see how it shakes out in Ethereum
| because they have to commit their funds. Which is in a way a
| burden.The more you put into the system for staking the less
| that you can use.
| spopejoy wrote:
| How do they prevent impersonation? There's no way a
| cryptosystem can prove that two different people actually
| have two different keys. If I want to pwn Cardano/Polkadot,
| don't I just need to run a bunch of different staking keys?
| je_bailey wrote:
| Looking at Cardano. There are currently 2,497 staking pools
| which are staking 72% percent of all Ada that is out there.
| Which is about 23 billion coins staked. So if you owned 12
| billion cardano and set up 188 pools to hold all of it, yes
| you would control the majority of the network.
| loceng wrote:
| Except with fiat system we can at least elect who the
| government is.
| gspr wrote:
| No, they can't enlighten you. They've bought into a cult, and
| if they started considering the fundamental question of how
| this is better than fiat currency, the cognitive dissonance
| would hurt.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| In truth nobody knows. People hypothesize that recreating
| financial products on top of Ethereum (or Polkadot or
| Cordano) will result in competitive offerings. But it is hard
| to predict what will actually happen.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Whenever you have a system where it costs several dollars to
| carry out a transaction, it will always be inferior to fiat.
|
| We could bring microtransactions to the web, and replace a lot
| of advertising, if transaction costs were zero.
| meowface wrote:
| Here's a comparison of PoS and PoW by Vitalik Buterin (creator
| of Ethereum):
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
|
| Obviously he's biased in favor of PoS for various reasons, but
| I think it's a worthy read.
| Vanclief wrote:
| It is a system where you have skin in the game, the more skin
| in the game you have, the more power you have. Think it like a
| democracy where you are voting with your wallet.
|
| The main difference with the fiat world is that with Ethereum
| you have transparency, and there is no corruption. You can't
| just bribe a politician to enact a rule you want. Everything
| that happens in the network is recorded permanently, and rules
| are not a suggestion, but a practical reality that can't be
| circumvented.
| briefcomment wrote:
| What exactly do Ether holders vote on in this scenario?
| Changes to the protocol? Is that process highly transparent
| and easily accessible?
| DennisP wrote:
| There's no on-chain governance like that. Some other
| blockchains do it but Ethereum devs are skeptical. The
| upgrade process will keep working like it does now.
| jayd16 wrote:
| That's called a plutocracy not a democracy.
| zionic wrote:
| PoS is more equitable than endgame PoW. With PoS anyone with
| any amount of capital can secure the network. Even $10 can via
| decentralized stake pools.
|
| With endgame PoW only the rich can acquire mining ASICs and
| locate them in cheap/free (stolen) electricity zones. The vast
| majority of the world is entirely excluded from PoW mining BTC
| because the cost of electricity in their region makes mining
| unprofitable.
| contravariant wrote:
| Governments don't typically own >50% of the current money
| supply.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Current system is no different, as the hash power is related to
| how many computers you can afford to buy.
|
| This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental
| impact.
| pinkybanana wrote:
| No, it is very different because in practice the pools and
| exchanges are totally separate entities. With PoS the biggest
| holders will be exchanges and therefore exchanges will
| control the cryptocurrency. With PoS there will be clearly
| less decentralization compared to PoW.
| micropresident wrote:
| Also, pools are not miners.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| For some reason China seems to concentrate more than 50% of
| hashing rate due to "big money" coming in and building up
| huge data centers while using the dirty local energy
| available.
|
| How's that decentralized.
|
| The times of home mining with CPU/GPUs are long gone
| doomroot wrote:
| Because the only threat from a 51% attack is rewriting a
| couple blocks until they recognized as attackers and they
| get kicked off the network because bitcoin users actually
| validate blocks. In a PoS system there is an incentive
| for large stakeholders to increase block sizes. 1. It
| increases the usability of the network which increases
| the marketcap. 2. It pushes out smaller stakers who can't
| afford to validate anymore because tx throughput becomes
| too high. If everyday people can't validate the chain how
| can they fork it if they think the current block
| validators are acting against their interests? The ether
| account set will be far too large. So they'll start from
| scratch.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| >because bitcoin users actually validate blocks
|
| so do Ethereum users.
|
| >In a PoS system there is an incentive for large
| stakeholders to increase block sizes.
|
| this doesn't work because of Ethereum's social contract,
| just like it wouldn't work with Bitcoin.
|
| Just because you stake a lot of ETH doesn't mean you
| suddenly have unilateral power to increase block sizes.
| There is a thing called consensus, and the entire
| community needs to achieve it to implement changes. Good
| luck trying to convince the community that bigger blocks
| that make it harder for small users to validate the chain
| is a good idea.
| yokem55 wrote:
| Except the barrier for entry on building a stake pooling
| operation is relatively low, so there will be a substantial
| amount of competition in the space over time. Coinbase for
| instance is taking a 25% commission on the staking
| earnings, so anyone who can come in under that, or offer
| options in terms of liquidity on the staked funds that can
| be reinvested, will attract a good amount of the share of
| stakes. There is even a fully decentralized pooling system
| that is nearing release.
| fastball wrote:
| In order to be a validator in PoS (at least Ethereum's
| implementation) you need to lock up the funds, so not sure
| how an exchange would be particularly well-suited for that
| - they need to keep most of the coins on their books liquid
| so that the customers who actually own them can quickly
| trade them.
| pinkybanana wrote:
| You don't seem to understand how exchanges work. Locking
| the funds won't be problem to exchanges. Most of the
| funds just sit dormant in cold storage for long periods
| of times. For withdrawals you always use most recent
| deposits and you minimize the transfers between hot and
| cold wallet.
| fastball wrote:
| I don't know anyone who keeps large amounts of ETH
| sitting unused on an exchange.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Just take a look at any of the account tables. Most of it
| is in exchange cold wallets. These exchanges will be
| staking against your interests. It has happened before,
| it will happen again. Just say no to PoS.
| fastball wrote:
| But that's only because Ethereum is currently on PoW, so
| (naive) people don't care.
|
| But as soon the switch happens, people will want to be
| staking their ETH in pools that will earn them money.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Yeah, in exchanges. Which will ignore the wishes of the
| actual currency owners, just like happens today. A vast,
| vast majority of staking users will not have the required
| 32 ETH for self-staking, and will be delegating this to
| third parties. PoS gives power to the exchanges, which
| should not have this power.
| fastball wrote:
| It only gives exchanges power if users _choose_ to give
| them power, which is exactly how a decentralized
| democratized currency is supposed to work.
| pinkybanana wrote:
| The difference to PoW is that the exchanges can do the
| staking with very minimal effort. I would guess majority
| of exchanges give the staking results to customers while
| taking some % fee.
|
| I don't have any problem with this in general, I don't
| think it is wrong to do business like that. But I
| personally prefer PoW because it looks like it naturally
| separates the mining work from exchanges, creating more
| decentralized economy.
| doomroot wrote:
| Right.. they keep them in secure web browser wallets... (
| ballofrubber wrote:
| PoW is a lot different, as burning real world resources
| (energy) brings sell-pressure to miners, whereas PoS only has
| cost of locking the funds. This means that regardless of the
| size of your "operation" cost scales very flat.
|
| PoS also does not come with the property of innovation and
| disruption. In a PoW (especially ASIC-based) system you will
| find new ways to outperform your peers and disrupt old
| players.
|
| PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries more
| than anything before. It is the fix for environmental
| problems.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries
| more than anything before. It is the fix for environmental
| problems._
|
| That can only become true if and when governments decide to
| suddenly ban PoW, so that all that cheap energy services
| anything other than crypto. I don't think it works as an
| argument in favor of PoW, for the same reason "we're only
| spreading knowledge of chemistry and democratizing process
| engineering" doesn't work as an argument in favor of drug
| cartels.
|
| Also, 'SR2Z is right - "cheap energy in developing
| countries" == coal.
| swiley wrote:
| PoS burns capital in the sense that it could be invested in
| something else (I was looking at staking coins but it
| doesn't come near the yield I get from my 401k for example,
| which is effectively providing unsecured debt to finance
| innovation.)
|
| IMO: it's much better than PoW as long as it doesn't end up
| too centralized. I'm not too sure how I feel about the
| minimum amount required to stake though, that seems a bit
| odd.
| SR2Z wrote:
| This is a spicy take, not least because the cheapest source
| of energy in the developing world (i.e. the one without
| environmental regulations) tends to be coal.
| gruez wrote:
| The difference is that with PoW you constantly have to do
| "stuff" (ie. buying equipment, running datacenters) or get
| left behind. PoS on the other hand you can just sit on your
| ass and wait for the $$$ to roll in.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Good point. But I still don't understand how it changes the
| premise presented by the comment, of "The one who has the
| money controls the network".
| pinkybanana wrote:
| There are lots of participants in the global economy who
| has money. The idea is that you have enough different
| people with competing incentives. PoW provides incentive
| model which separates different actors (pools, exchanges
| etc) and also at the same time doesn't seem to lead to
| monopolies.
| meowkit wrote:
| Can you explain what "sitting on your ass" means? I thought
| you had to maintain a validator?
| sendbitcoins wrote:
| Exchanges like CoinBase will stake for you. You as an
| individual don't have to do anything.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| An earn interest, right? So I could lend Coinbase some of
| my ether for staking and they pay me interest in return.
| So PoS could give us an interesting investment
| possibility.
| sendbitcoins wrote:
| Well, its not called interest, its called 'staking
| rewards'. You can also earn interest lending out your
| ETH, but that's a different process and entails
| counterparty risk.
| tux3 wrote:
| Yes and no. Keeping up with the day to day details is
| something you delegate at some point. PoW is also "just" an
| investment, with extra steps to set things up.
| narush wrote:
| This is not the case. In Ethereum's PoS model, you put
| value at risk when you sign up to be a validator. You have
| to lock funds up to play a part in consensus.
|
| This means that if you start acting maliciously, or even
| just not fulfilling your responsibilities (e.g. you let
| your computer go offline), then you are punished for it
| (depending on the severity of your offense, obviously).
|
| Aka, you can't just wait for the money to roll in. You have
| to run a node, you have to verify blocks, and you have to
| make sure you're acting in the best interest of the network
| + keeping things running smoothly.
| micropresident wrote:
| This is largely done by software. If you are not mucking
| around with the software, there is zero risk.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Who gets these funds? This is beginning to sound
| suspicious.
| thebean11 wrote:
| The other actors in the network running validators.
|
| Specifically you are punished for:
|
| - Being offline (the penalty is small, and roughly equal
| to the rewards earned by being online
|
| - Running the same validator twice (huge penalty, be
| careful!)
| secondcoming wrote:
| Are the funds paid in fiat or ETH?
| bidirectional wrote:
| ETH of course, this is an automated part of how the
| system works, not some behind-the-scenes deal based on
| reputation or whatever.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| This is something I don't understand. You lock the funds
| on a chain and you lose them on the chain. But what
| happens if two groups decide to split the chain, and both
| chains lock the opposing chains funds? It seems like
| there's no way to prevent social forks in the longer
| term, just a lot of hand-waving about that if the current
| social contract stays in place, some minority malicious
| group will be punished for secession.
|
| It would seem that if some participants on the network
| can't abide by their national laws while running some
| contracts, the outcome would be inevitable. And then you
| would just get multiple chains running under multiple
| governments. This seems like a reinvention of the
| international banking system?
| nightpool wrote:
| Ethereum has already proven that there's no way to
| prevent social forks, correct? The DAO incident comes to
| mind as a very controversial instance, but there are
| others. Ultimately, it's up to the individual nodes to
| decide what code they want to run and what rules they
| want to use to decide what the chain is. I'm not sure I
| understand how PoS makes this worse (although maybe
| there's something I'm missing)
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Right, but then the model is not trustless but is instead
| a complex implementation of the current system of
| international banking. Maybe I don't understand the point
| of cryptocurrencies. Most applications of cryptography
| are trustless.
| nightpool wrote:
| "Trustless" is relative. In this case, the protocols are
| still trustless--the trust lies one meta level up, where
| you decide which protocols to use. In this situation,
| there are network effects as well--you can come up with
| your own perfect protocol in a vacuum, but if nobody uses
| it, who cares?
|
| In this case, you can think about it as one person saying
| "I think it's a good idea if we do this" and a few
| hundred other people saying "I agree with you".
| Obviously, they're more likely to agree with the first
| person if they have some sort of institutional
| legitimacy. But is that "trust"? That's very different
| from the definition of "trust" that's generally used in
| protocol design.
| pamplemoose wrote:
| I found the following article to be helpful in
| understanding some of these processes
|
| https://haseebq.com/ethereum-is-now-unforkable-thanks-to-
| def...
| nightpool wrote:
| This article makes a good point about the fragility of
| DeFi, but it fails to demonstrate that the broader
| Ethereum community cares enough about DeFi to let it
| influence their decisions. It makes a general, hand-wavey
| gesture to other parts of ETH ("All websites, interfaces,
| block explorers, and wallets ultimately point to the
| majority chain. Game operators like CryptoKitties lock
| their D-ETH contracts so as not to confuse their
| users."), but it fails to justify this point--it already
| says "a civil war is brewing" and that individual
| developers (presumably including CryptoKitties) would
| have reason to support one or the other.
|
| So while this article is a (good?) argument for why all
| DeFi operators must follow USDC, it fails to make the
| case for why anyone else should care about the fate of
| centralized stablecoins. Maybe these reasons are obvious!
| But I don't know them.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| What stops chain forks to begin with? This isn't a flaw
| that's limited to PoS.
| gruez wrote:
| I think GP's point is that in the event of a fork, in a
| PoW fork miners have to choose to either mine for chain A
| or chain B, whereas with PoS stakers can choose to stake
| for both. This is bad, because either side can use their
| staking power to disrupt the other chain, by doing double
| spend attacks or refusing to confirm transactions. On top
| of that, staking is free to do, so you don't even have to
| expend resources to pull off such an attack, whereas with
| mining you have to spend real world resources to pull it
| off.
| nightpool wrote:
| Thank you, this is a good description of the issue! This
| does seem like a complicated problem to solve, but I'm
| not necessarily convinced that one set of incentives is
| always worse or better--aren't there some situations
| where you do want to import the existing set of "stakes"
| to gain adoption?
| shawnz wrote:
| This is the point of slashing, to prevent the same coins
| from being staked on multiple chains at the same time. To
| stake you need to issue proofs of the stake which can be
| used to slash you on other chains.
| Tzs7GVei wrote:
| Why would you want to prevent social forks? Social forks
| are not only good, they are the killer feature of crypto.
| They are what makes crypto truly consensual and
| voluntaryistic (if that's a word). As for the problem of
| national laws, I hope that can be alleviated with better
| privacy, so people can safely run a node even in
| violation of laws.
| wbc wrote:
| Vitalik talked about splits like this, read
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| I don't think that helps my comprehension of this. Unless
| I am mistaken, it seems like a long winded essay on how
| cryptocurrencies are simply social constructs.
| Polygator wrote:
| Yeah, but obviously the "stuff" has led to a Red Queen
| problem, with the outcome being incredible waste of
| electricity and computing resources (compared to PoS or
| having a less competitive eth mining industry)
| everfree wrote:
| This isn't really true. You also have to buy equipment and
| run specialized software to participate in PoS. It requires
| keeping a node connected to the internet with high uptime,
| and maintaining its software and hardware.
|
| Plus, due to slashing, you are uniquely responsible for
| mistakes your validator makes. So, staking comes with both
| responsibilities and consequences for breaching them, just
| like any legal contract.
|
| The fact that you can rent a turnkey cloud solution to do
| all this work for you and split the profits isn't really
| relevant to the argument IMO (I consider staking with
| Coinbase "renting cloud computing" in a specialized way).
| yokem55 wrote:
| Except, using the same kind of pooling that POW depends on,
| you can still get in at just about any price level. .01 Eth
| can be staked just as easily as 10,000 eth. And running a
| validator with 32 isn't nothing - you still have to keep a
| machine on and online 24/7 with an uncapped connection or
| pay someone to host that machine.
| serverholic wrote:
| I find comments like yours hilarious. The idea that the
| ethereum foundation has spent years and years designing a
| PoS system, writing papers, doing tests, building proofs of
| correctness aaaaaand derp they just didn't think of people
| sitting on their asses.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's not that hilarious when you realize that this is the
| same kind of thinking some cryto-boosters apply to
| hundreds of years of financial regulation and history.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Maybe answer the question instead of scoffing at how
| ridiculous it is?
| shawnz wrote:
| In PoS, you are still permanently burning the time value of
| the money you have staked. That's unrecoverable just like
| the electricity spent in PoW is unrecoverable.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Or you can pay someone a flat amount to do the "stuff" and
| experience your own unlimited percentage-based gains, like
| in pretty much any other market where "capital" is a thing.
| Jyaif wrote:
| They have an incentive to not mess around.
| sp332 wrote:
| Is it different from the current PoW system?
| narush wrote:
| Yep! It's a new chain as well - that will eventually consume
| the old Ethereum PoW chain :)
| TarasBob wrote:
| Read the pros and cons of proof of stake compared to proof of
| work here (written by Vitalik):
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| xiphias2 wrote:
| While I myself stay with Bitcoin, Ethereum still has lots of
| advantages compared to the fiat system: it's still open source,
| and people can still validate the rules (although that full
| validation is extremely hard).
|
| Also the current fiat system is debt based, which means that
| the vast majority of money is printed by banks and the money
| printing power is at the highest ranking sales person, and
| hidden.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Banks will still loan even if fiat doesn't exist.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| And the current crypto system seems to be meme based, while
| the fiat system is market based.
| gspr wrote:
| In a well functioning democratic society, the money printing
| is ultimately under democratic control. Don't lie.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I had banker friends bragging me getting sex for approving
| low interest loans. I'm not sure what democratic control
| are you talking about, loans are approved by people.
| gspr wrote:
| Right. But surely that's someone abusing the system. It's
| not the system itself.
| disruptalot wrote:
| A system being open to abuse is to an extent a property
| of the system.
| meowface wrote:
| You could say the decision to go to war is also ultimately
| under democratic control. Yes, it is, but it doesn't
| necessarily mean you should trust a politician or president
| when they want war.
|
| Similarly, you shouldn't necessarily trust a central bank
| when they want to print money. (I'm not inherently opposed
| to it and think the pros probably outweigh the cons for
| some situations and intents; just saying accountability in
| cases like these isn't as simple as "it's the people's
| will".)
| gspr wrote:
| And these cryptocurrencies are akin to letting whatever
| group holds the highest stake or the most computing power
| decide to go to war instead. So much better. Yay.
| disruptalot wrote:
| Nope. The point of consensus is that when you opt in to
| rules, they don't change under you.
|
| Who has the highest amount of power in Bitcoin, and why
| haven't they done anything, for example increase the
| issuance?
| gspr wrote:
| I agree that the rules don't change. But I want the rules
| to be changed by a democratically elected competent
| government in the face of a crisis.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Who has the highest amount of power in Bitcoin, and why
| haven't they done anything, for example increase the
| issuance?
|
| How would that benefit them?
| disruptalot wrote:
| The issuance is exponentially decreasing every 4 years.
| If you're a miner and have hardware investment,
| increasing your issuance contrary to the expectation of
| the market is essentially taxing the holders.
|
| It's besides the point though, you can certainly benefit
| from holding power of the protocol but the reality is
| that there is very little of this dynamic.
| fastball wrote:
| No True Scotsman.
| jMyles wrote:
| If I understand correctly, that has never happened with
| fiat money ever in the history of humanity, though.
|
| Hence the impetus to try something different and more
| befitting the future of our species.
| gspr wrote:
| What? Most well-functioning democracies have tasked their
| central banks with inflation targets.
| jMyles wrote:
| Today, the dollar is the reserve currency of note across
| the world. That may be changing, but I imagine we can
| agree on that facet of today's global economy.
|
| So, do you think that the dollar - and specifically the
| inflation schedule and distribution mechanisms of the
| dollar - can be reasonably said to be under democratic,
| rather than plutocratic, control?
| gspr wrote:
| There are several well-managed fiat currencies in the
| world that do not rely on being the world reserve! EUR,
| CHF, GBP, NOK, DKK, SEK, to name some.
| kemonocode wrote:
| Truly, as you say, "in a well functioning democratic
| society", which is not the case for a not so insignificant
| proportion of the world.
| gspr wrote:
| I have no problem understanding why people in failed
| states might want these cryptocurrencies. They're
| essentially more convenient (but also more volatile)
| means of barter.
|
| But let's face it: most of the hype is in well-
| functioning democracies. Here, I cannot fathom why anyone
| would wanna replace fiat currencies with this crap.
| briefcomment wrote:
| In the case of a supply capped crypto, to not get burned
| by asset inflation.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Because despite it being very bad for the poor and middle
| classes, money printing is at an all-time high. Just like
| how neither US party is anti-war (but claims to be),
| neither wish to give up QE. The system is rigged for the
| super rich.
| disruptalot wrote:
| Of all the years in which you could make this argument,
| this year is probably the worst.
|
| In the "well functioning democracy" U.S. You have:
|
| - Mistrust in institutions
|
| - An insane asset inflation bubble fueled by the biggest
| fiat printing spree ever
|
| Sure, the state hasn't failed. But are you really
| surprised people want to expose themselves to a new
| paradigm with different fundamentals for money and
| finance, this year?
| gspr wrote:
| And if the US fails, don't you have quite a lot bigger
| problems than the currency over there?
|
| Good luck paying for things with cryptocurrency-of-the-
| day without electricity. Or without authorities to call
| if your trading partner pulls a gun on you. But I'm sure
| the American solution is a diesel generator and an even
| bigger gun ;-)
| secondcoming wrote:
| Have you ever actually used an Ethereum in real life outside
| of price speculation?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Ethereum no, but Bitcoin sure, I'm travelling a lot, and I
| have a lot of payment problems (for example my bank
| disabled my credit card just because they said that it's
| not working with some types of contactless recievers, but
| they can't send a new one to my hotel, just to my home
| address). Bitcoin always works, although it's not real-time
| (still faster than sending money to my Revolut account,
| which takes days).
|
| If a person thinks that fiat payments work well, he hasn't
| really travelled yet to different cultures.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I have traveled to different countries.
|
| Fiat works, and works well. You're advised to keep some
| cash on hand, but it works multiple orders of ||| [1]
| better than bitcoin
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number
| cageface wrote:
| I've been traveling all over the world for the last ten
| years. I've never had any serious problems paying for
| anything with good old fashioned credit/debit cards. Even
| getting cash in the local currency is trivial with ATMs.
| jaggs wrote:
| I ton't mean to sound rude (really) but this sounds
| exactly like the argument 'I've never had any serious
| problems traveling around on my horse, why do I need some
| new-fangled carriage which does nothing better than
| before?'.
|
| This is the genesis of a new crypto universe. It's hugely
| hyped, and a lot of it is clearly BS. But underlying the
| hype and hysteria there's a kernel of a new paradigm
| emerging.
|
| Crypto applications promise to provide disintermediation
| on a scale not seen before. Direct peer to peer
| transactions, conducted transparently, without a need to
| verify trust and happening simultaneously anywhere in the
| world.
|
| Not only that but smart contracts bring with them the
| potential to do stuff that simply is not possible right
| now. For example, providing instant conditional
| transactions (if my fave rental car is available book it,
| otherwise search for another solution, but only from
| these sources at this price) etc etc etc. We don't know
| what this means, but it could be a revolution. Or not. :)
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Crypto applications promise to provide
| disintermediation on a scale not seen before.
|
| They don't. All of "disentermidation" immediately turns
| around and restores all the institutions based on, you
| know, trust.
|
| > Direct peer to peer transactions, conducted
| transparently, without a need to verify trust
|
| Yup. Until you pay for something, and that something
| never arrives.
|
| > (if my fave rental car is available book it, otherwise
| search for another solution, but only from these sources
| at this price)
|
| Literally nothing prevents you from doing it right now,
| with existing technologies... Oh, wait. All rental car
| companies are closed to any integrations of any kind.
| Smart contracts will do literally nothing in this
| scenario.
|
| Besides. If I go and rent a car from, say, Hertz, I get a
| contract written in plain language. It may be a little
| obtuse, but I can read and understand it. Smart contracts
| on the other hand are written in obscure esoteric
| programmming languages. Good luck telling people "don't
| worry, you won't be scammed out of your money because it
| has 'smart' and 'crypto' in it".
| asjdflakjsdf wrote:
| ETH is so cool. But only really if you are into that kind
| of thing.
|
| Smart contracts, and all the other buzz words turn
| regular folk away. I'm hedging my bets on the coin with a
| dog on it for mass adoption. Even the word "Ethereum"
| (and "Eth") is less user-friendly to "Doge".
|
| For me, all this ETH stuff is just hype (very few ETH
| owners actually care about the currency side of things
| and its already gone too far into pyramid scheme
| territory to ever recover imo). The dog coin works just
| great as it is right now for the amount of users it has.
| Any upgrades should be manageable before they are ever
| necessary.
| zepto wrote:
| > my bank disabled my credit card just ...
|
| Yes, this can be a real problem when traveling.
|
| > Bitcoin always works ...
|
| This is obviously a completely bullshit statement.
| Bitcoin almost _never works_ in places where credit cards
| or 'fiat' are accepted.
|
| > If a person thinks that fiat payments work well, he
| hasn't really travelled yet to different cultures.
|
| 'Fiat payments' covers everything from the ATM network to
| cash to western union to Hawala. All aspects of fiat
| payments indeed have problems.
|
| However the idea that _today_ , Bitcoin solves these
| problems outside of a tiny fraction of contrived cases is
| a delusional fantasy.
|
| Almost nobody in the world trades in Bitcoin. Almost
| everybody in the world trades in 'fiat'.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > If a person thinks that fiat payments work well, he
| hasn't really travelled yet to different cultures.
|
| Count me among the people who have travelled and never
| encountered problems. I always bring two cards in case
| something weird happens, but I've never had to use the
| backup.
|
| If established banking cards aren't working in a country,
| it seems unlikely that relatively recent cryptocurrency
| would be working any better at their banking
| institutions. If their banks can't take your bank card in
| exchange for cash, I doubt they're going to be set up to
| take your Bitcoin.
| robjan wrote:
| I've never had problems withdrawing cash, even in
| relatively repressive countries. Your credit card was
| probably blocked to prevent fraud because you didn't tell
| your bank you are planning to travel rather than your
| bank trying to censor your money.
| GordonS wrote:
| I've travelled extensively, and actually found it quite
| common to be unable to withdraw funds from the ATMs of
| some banks.
|
| In practice it has never been more that a nuisance, as
| I've just gone to a different bank's ATM and it's been
| fine.
| lmohseni wrote:
| I've loaded up some eth into an ethereum based browser and
| knocked around their web. It's interesting because the type
| of site where you normally have to sign in ("banking",
| news, etc) you don't have to sign in because every
| interaction is predicated through your wallet. It's as if
| your username were identical to your public key.
|
| However as a speculative instrument eth and Bitcoin are not
| my cup of tea.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Interesting. Sounds like Brave's BAT token then? I assume
| the websites you visited got paid a little bit of your
| Eth?
|
| How does that work? Is it a vanilla Eth transfer, or is a
| contract generated each time and you review the Solidity
| code before proceeding?
| iDisagreedEar wrote:
| I don't accept ETH due to removing the soft cap on EIP 669.
| Infinite inflation like doge coin.
|
| I have a ton of Bitcoin transactions with friends.
| Originally through the blockchain, now we use coinbase
| email for free transfers.
|
| I don't keep my stash on there, but I keep spending money
| in there.
| suikadayo wrote:
| You should read up on EIP-1559 and inflation after the
| merge then.
|
| Ethereum will effectively have a cap of 120m, which will
| burn down to 100m over 12 years.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| Not OP, but I literally use Ethereum every day and have
| been for like 2 years now. I started using dapps in 2016,
| but in 2019 is when the network had a sufficient amount of
| things to do that I found myself using it daily.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| In our current system, decisions are made democratically - you
| vote politicians, who choose central bankers, who make the
| decisions.
| seph-reed wrote:
| On the scale between a full democracy and a full oligarchy,
| what you're describing would be a "representative democracy."
|
| Unfortunately, our representatives don't really represent us,
| so we're much closer to oligarchy than democracy.
|
| Also, a full democracy it terrible. It's basically the
| equivalent of facebook... having representatives who's full
| time job is to be knowledgable is much better than giving
| everyone an equal say on everything.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Unlike with fiat, you're not forced to use any particular
| crypto. If the rich stakeholders of ethereum decide to muck
| around with the network, nobody will want to use it anymore and
| the value will drop.
| gspr wrote:
| Demanding a single currency to settle debts is a _feature,
| not a bug_. I don 't wanna spend each morning researching
| which currency to use today. And I'm sure the local store
| doesn't wanna figure out which set of ten optional currencies
| to sell milk for.
|
| This doesn't even begin to consider long term debt.
| Polygator wrote:
| The justification is that contrarily to PoW, where there are
| economies of scale on computing power, PoS power scales
| linearly with your stake.
|
| Mining has been concentrated in the hands of a few gigantic
| mining pools for a while, and PoS will actually make Ethereum
| more democratic. Again, this is based on documentation, there
| might be unforeseen consequences
| iDisagreedEar wrote:
| Anyone can mine Bitcoin, the rich are the only people in
| control of Ethereum transactions.
|
| Unforseen? This has been known before the miners eliminated
| the soft cap on EIP 669.
| Geee wrote:
| There are no economies of scale in PoW. At least for longer
| term. Cost of energy rises locally the more you use it. Cheap
| energy is somewhat equally distributed around the globe,
| which ensures geographical decentralization.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Energy prices aren't really distributed equally around the
| world:
|
| https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
| micropresident wrote:
| That has nothing to do with economies of scale.
| Geee wrote:
| This has more to do with electricity demand. It's
| important to understand the relationship between energy
| price vs. population density and standard of living.
| Energy is always cheapest where population density and
| standard of living are the lowest. That's why bitcoin
| mining will find it's way to remote sources of natural
| energy.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| It's not that different. But the end goal isn't a revolutionary
| overhaul, but progress in a different direction.
|
| The delusion that crypto is or can be the best thing humanity
| has ever created has to come to an end.
|
| Let crypto just be another moderately useful system in society
| and let the speculation game die out.
| GongOfFour wrote:
| Will this lower the Gas fees at all?
| exo762 wrote:
| No, it wont. Look for L2 solutions.
| kemonocode wrote:
| For the people who criticize as to why they've taken so long in
| shifting to a PoS model: consensus takes time, so does developing
| and testing something that definitively shouldn't go wrong.
|
| Also, there's the inherent issue with Proof-of-Stake that Proof-
| of-Work doesn't have: the initial distribution of the coin has to
| be wide enough before it could feasibly self-maintain a PoS shift
| without being immediately vulnerable to consensus attacks.
| Ethereum is definitively mature enough by now, it wasn't a few
| years ago.
| jerrycruncher wrote:
| Consensus may take time, but when you're pouring gas onto a
| fire, arguing that you need to dump out most of the can before
| you can be sure you know what you're doing isn't a defensible
| position.
| dboat wrote:
| I don't understand what you're trying to say.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > the initial distribution of the coin has to be wide enough
|
| I don't understand how proof of stake works to the depth I
| understand proof of work. But this reassures me that it's
| feasable that they'll accomplish the same distributed
| consensus.
|
| So then, could I say that Ethereum proof of stake will allow
| the owners of the coins (ether) to be independent from the
| owners of the mining operations?
|
| or uhmm...
|
| is the independence between the computaional costs of the
| "mining" and actual minted ether?
| kemonocode wrote:
| Ethereum _proof of work_ made it so the owners of the coins
| could be independent from the owners of the mining
| operations, even if in practice many miners end up keeping
| most of the block rewards themselves and only reinvesting
| what they need in new infrastructure and to maintain what
| they already have. Proof of stake makes it so the miners and
| holders are now the same (you stake the coins that you have,
| or you pool them up with others), however the cost to wreck
| the chain is much greater than it would have been 3-4 years
| ago.
|
| The whole idea is that Ether is so spread out now, it'd be
| unfeasible for someone to snatch up enough of it for an
| attack, in a similar way to how an ever-increasing difficulty
| makes it harder for a hostile actor to coordinate enough of
| it to make such attack.
| jyu wrote:
| Maybe it is spread out now, but won't there be centralized
| aggregators of eth so some point in the future a handful of
| POS nodes control a disproportionate amount of power? Is it
| so hard to imagine that coinbase or some other exchange
| accumulates enough eth to sway transaction validation?
|
| Seriously, please answer if this is wrong!
| 0134340 wrote:
| Yes, that's the problem with validation through concensus
| which is universal in currency. With enough power (nodes)
| you can delegitimize other stake holders.
| swensel wrote:
| I do think there will be some centralization at the
| exchange level. As of April 2021, Kraken had 600,000 ETH
| staked for ETH2 [1].
|
| It's not in the interest of Kraken or Coinbase to disrupt
| one of these PoS networks, but there is some barrier to
| entry for staking ETH2 or other PoS coins on your own, vs
| staking them on an exchange. In the case of ETH2, if your
| staking node goes down, you get slashed and lose some
| ETH. If there isn't slashing (not all PoS coins have
| that), I don't see what guarantee of network security or
| uptime there is.
|
| I'd be curious what PoS coin experts think about this
| part. It seems like PoS / staking can lead to
| centralization. PoW has energy concerns for sure, but it
| has so far demonstrated decentralization pretty well.
|
| I'm legitimately curious about this. I'd love for PoS to
| be feasible and am trying to understand it more.
|
| [1] https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/20/ethereum-2-0-60
| 0-thous...
| nootropicat wrote:
| >but there is some barrier to entry for staking ETH2 or
| other PoS coins on your own, vs staking them on an
| exchange
|
| This is true, but those exchanges either charge fees or
| are going to charge them, making it more profitable to
| stake at home. Because offline penalties depend on
| correlation to how many other people are offline, it's
| actually safer to stake at home. Eth was accumulated
| primarily by devs that understood its value before
| everyone else. Devs are in general paid well. As a
| result, it's nothing special for those individuals to own
| thousands of eth - it was even possible to buy eth below
| $100 as recently as in 2020. Those 600k eth on Kraken
| aren't that much relatively.
|
| Right now it's very early and many people aren't staking
| because there are much higher returns elsewhere, and
| before the merge withdrawals aren't possible, so you
| can't even go back if something better appears. I fully
| intend to stake at home once extreme yields elsewhere
| stop - in the long run staking is likely to have the
| highest yield on eth.
|
| >PoW has energy concerns for sure, but it has so far
| demonstrated decentralization pretty well.
|
| Mining is extremely centralized in China. Mining has
| infinite economies of scale + less efficient miners are
| pushed out, so the most efficient entity/location is
| certain to control all hashpower eventually (not
| necessarily China).
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-
| dro...
| xur17 wrote:
| I definitely do think centralization is a risk of PoS
| over PoW.
|
| > It's not in the interest of Kraken or Coinbase to
| disrupt one of these PoS networks, but there is some
| barrier to entry for staking ETH2 or other PoS coins on
| your own, vs staking them on an exchange. In the case of
| ETH2, if your staking node goes down, you get slashed and
| lose some ETH. If there isn't slashing (not all PoS coins
| have that), I don't see what guarantee of network
| security or uptime there is.
|
| This is actually one place where ETH has tried to
| incentivize independent staking - the penalty for
| downtime is equal to the incentive for mining. In an
| extreme example, if you are down for 6 months of the
| year, and up for 6 months, the downtime costs should
| cancel out the earnings from the other 6 months. One
| caveat to this is that there are larger penalties for
| correlated downtime (ex: if a large portion of the
| network is down). This is to de-incentivize
| centralization of mining.
|
| That said, as someone fairly technical that could run his
| own staking node, I am seriously considering using a
| centralized service, or at the very least using a vps.
| This makes me think that the the majority are going to be
| independently run on a slew of hosting providers and via
| centralized hosting providers.
|
| There are also some interesting "decentralized" options
| like Rocketpool that haven't launched yet, but will allow
| staking via smart contracts against a pool of random
| nodes.
|
| And then at the end of the day, the choice in staking
| providers should allow the network to at least react to
| centralization risks. Say a locality forces a provider to
| censor transactions in some way - I imagine folks will
| move their funds to a provider in another country, or
| switch to something like Rocketpool, effectively working
| around the issue.
| 0134340 wrote:
| Centralization meaning those who have more gain more? I'd
| love to hear about any currency that doesn't have this
| feature/bug. Those who gain power tend to be able to
| acquire more by bootstrapping from prior power; it's
| pretty much universal. Even PoW has its own form of
| centralization in that those who have more can become
| richer and more easily gain therefore leading to
| maturation (centralization) of the currency.
| swensel wrote:
| My understanding is those who have more coins on a PoS
| network have more stake / power. This can matter if there
| are things like on-chain governance / voting rights,
| depending on their stake. Those with more stake would
| also get more staking rewards (it's like an APR % return
| based on the total staked), and if they stake their
| rewards as well, then they'd have even more total stake
| on the network. There also are concerns with those having
| a majority of the stake in a network being able to
| disrupt or attack the network (things like slashing based
| on poor behavior can prevent bad actors from wanting to
| do that, as they would lose some or all of what they had
| staked in that case). There are also different kinds of
| PoS though, and I'm not an expert on it.
| 0134340 wrote:
| Yes, that's a feature or bug, however you see it, that's
| universal in capitalism, even communism or socialism what
| implementations I've read about. I guess if one isn't
| happy with those that have power in one system, a person
| should switch to another system. It's just so universal
| that I don't think there's any other way around it other
| than switch systems as none are perfect, all insofar as I
| can see are susceptible to the power of consensus.
|
| We've tried to mitigate it with constitutions in the
| political world and it helps to some extent but many
| would agree that there is still an exploitable hole in
| that those with power can use their own to gain more or
| mitigate risk. And any time you mitigate that feature/bug
| too much you run the risk of decreasing reward for work
| and stake, thereby delegitimizing the system itself or in
| the case we speak of, your currency. So pick your poison.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| It is in their interests -- remember when CZ asked if it
| was possible to rollback BTC before the hack? Imagine if
| you actually gave the exchanges this power. Nothing to
| stop them staking with customer funds. The exchanges do
| it now with other PoS shitcoins. PoS is the death of
| decentralization.
| CarlBeek wrote:
| Here are a few of the reasons that come to mind as to why this
| transition has been taking us so long:
|
| * The design of the Beacon Chain is far more optimised than our
| initial designs for a PoS system
|
| * There are far more crypto-economic edge cases in a PoS system
| when compared to PoW
|
| * Software development is hard and time estimates are even
| harder
|
| * The use of a hybrid fork choice to balance safety and
| liveness trade-offs
|
| * There is a crazy amount of value being handles on Ethereum so
| it is necessary to be conservative with our changes (move fast
| and break things is not an option)
|
| * There are 4 concurrent implementations being developed all of
| which need to be inter-compatible, and production ready
|
| * As Ethereum governance is decentralised we need a shelling
| point for exactly what Ethereum PoS looks like, this takes time
|
| * We have worked hard to create, encourage, and embrace
| standards with other chains so that the cryptocurrency
| community of tomorrow is more inter-compatible (eg. IETF BLS
| standard or libp2p networking)
|
| * We have spent time designing around quantum-computing
| resistant backups for the majority of the cryptography (eg.
| validators all have a Lamport backup key though most don't
| realise it)
|
| * New cryptography has been developed and previously abandoned
| schemes revitalised (eg. Verifiable Delay Functions or the
| Legendre PRF)
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| * Its a technically flawed solution that now has so much
| hype, abandoning the idea would lead to further FUD,
| tarnishing the project's future direction. So we must go
| through the motions to appease the energy FUD warriors.
| CarlBeek wrote:
| lol, Ethereum's Beacon Chain already been running since Dec
| 1. See https://beaconcha.in/ Please point me towards the
| flaws.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Point me at its purpose?
|
| As far as I can tell, it was a trick to remove coin from
| circulation, locking it away where it could not be used
| again. The fact that people have tokenized these beacon
| coins on other chains to trade show that people want
| their money back!
| jwitko wrote:
| No, it really doesn't. This is akin to saying because
| people take out second mortgages they really want their
| money back that they bought their house with.
|
| Being able to leverage a committed sum of money via
| collateralization is as old as financial systems
| themselves.
|
| If you can find any specific reasons for your take I'm
| very open to hearing about them?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| In the world of hard money (bitcoin), leverage is
| extremely dangerous, you may never be able to repay the
| loan. You would not want to borrow a house worth of
| bitcoin in a 2nd mortgage -- you could never pay it back!
|
| In the legacy financial world, 2nd mortgages just lead to
| private inflation of the fiat money supply (the money is
| being conjured out of nothing to pay for an asset that
| was already paid for). Nothing is produced, except some
| energy is burned updating centralized databases.
|
| Having systems where both realities exist is great. I'm a
| fan of hard money. It is honest.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| To establish "good enough" distributed consensus without
| burning absolutely enormous amounts of energy doing
| throwaway math problems?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I understand what they wanted to achieve, and I
| understand that they cannot achieve this. Seems that
| burning absolutely enormous amounts of energy is the only
| secure way of doing it. I guess rather than fight the
| universe, we better find a way to do it cleanly!
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| > and I understand that they cannot achieve this
|
| Gonna need some citations here for this one.
| defaultname wrote:
| And by far the most significant hindrance to moving away from
| proof of work is that there a number of significant players
| who have a large economic interest in PoW. Ethereum was
| promising this move many years ago, but it always was an
| extraordinarily low priority.
|
| There are a lot of people with perverse biases. Many of the
| comments enthusiastically defending Bitcoin are people who
| are sitting on BTC and have watched it get pummelled due to
| its ludicrous enormous-energy-for-something-that-does-
| nothing-for-humanity reality (seriously -- if I see one more
| chart comparing the entirety of the financial industry with
| Bitcoin. The former powers the entire world. The latter
| powers some speculators, criminals, and a minuscule number of
| legitimate transactions).
| webXL wrote:
| > Does nothing for humanity
|
| Really? If that energy consumption problem wasn't there,
| what advantages does Ethereum have over Bitcoin? Would it
| even exist, since it offers many of the same features?
| meowface wrote:
| Ethereum natively supports smart contracts. Bitcoin
| doesn't support them natively; any attempt to add them
| has to be a separate layer on top.
|
| That's why the past few years have seen a rise in
| fungible and non-fungible tokens (average merit of those
| aside for the sake of argument, since this is just
| answering the question "it offers many of the same
| features"), pretty much all of which are hosted on
| Ethereum or Ethereum code forks like Binance Smart Chain.
| webXL wrote:
| So back to the OP's point, Ethereum minus smart contracts
| and efficient energy use is "nothing for humanity", as if
| the basic features of money haven't improved our standard
| of living and there's nothing wrong with central banks
| and the powerful that benefit from them. The energy used
| provides immense value _today_. The costs need to be
| internalized though.
| sobani wrote:
| > Ethereum minus smart contracts [...] is "nothing for
| humanity"
|
| No shit, if you take away the defining feature of
| something, you will be left with very of value indeed.
|
| That's like saying the web without HTTP is nothing for
| humanity.
| miohtama wrote:
| For more details on advantages of Ethereum over Bitcoin,
| and advantages other new blockchains have over Ethereum,
| please see my recent presentation:
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-
| cryptocurrencies/
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| Interested to hear your thoughts on Polkadot. At the end
| of the first section, you stop the 'innovation train' at
| NPOS. Polkadot takes all the ideas presented in your
| article, combines them and adds a couple unique ideas
| such as parachains.
| vmception wrote:
| I disagree about the priority, they literally didn't know
| what they were doing or how to do it just yet. The security
| demands this community wants are and were completely
| science fiction as there is no proof of stake network that
| has met the goals they are aiming for, and they are simply
| much closer to reality now.
|
| There was poor governance and management that debilitated
| their ability to function during the 3 year bear market.
| And they got their act together. In the mean time, more
| product market fit was made apparent and upgrades to the
| instruction set for arbitrary execution was done to the
| network and continues to this day.
|
| The Ethereum network consists of many-to-many relationships
| for approval transactions for ERC20 tokens to interact with
| other smart contracts. This wasn't even foreseeable 18
| months ago, and 18 months before that the ERC20 protocol
| wasn't even ratified.
| ourcat wrote:
| I really hope they don't rush all this merging and forking.
|
| And also "audit the auditors". So they don't end up on a future
| rekt.news leaderboard.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder if it's already on on a testnet
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Here's the testnet: https://nocturne.rayonism.io/
| DennisP wrote:
| The PoS protocol itself has been running in production since
| December 1, in parallel with the old network, with over $10
| billion staked so far.
|
| What remains is to change the legacy clients to use the PoS
| network for choosing blocks, instead of miners. That has a
| working multi-client testnet.
| swensel wrote:
| This is one thing I've been wondering about new projects that
| start with PoS. How do they have enough distribution of the
| coins in order for them to be resilient against attacks?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Exactly, the devil is in the details, just like how all
| current "scalable" blockchains are only able to do so because
| they sacrificed decentralization. Ethereum is dealing with
| growing pains right now because it's solving scalability with
| an approach that doesn't sacrifice decentralization or
| security.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| AFAIK they are already at 6-8tb for their blockchain. Seems
| to be not very helpful with a high diversity of staking
| nodes. I am in doubt that their turing complete global
| computer can scale AND stay decentralized
| Sargos wrote:
| That's only for an archive node which isn't that useful
| to the network and is generally only used by specialist.
| A full Ethereum node easily fits on a 1TB drive and with
| research ongoing into statelessness the problem of state
| growth won't be a problem long term.
| nootropicat wrote:
| This is a good point and I think only ethereum has sufficient
| distribution. The sole advantage of PoW over PoS is
| distribution - miners sell, dumping the price, which is also
| likely to make other people to sell. Even many ethereum
| founders sold very low - Vlad Zamfir in particular sold ~100%
| below $20 (he tweeted about it, can't find it now).
|
| Ethereum had 6 years of PoW now - most likely nothing else
| can repeat its distribution, ever. The time of PoW is visibly
| over.
|
| Another point is that ethereum was icoed when crypto was
| tiny, few people believed smart contracts could have value
| and VC stayed away. Normal people are much more likely to
| sell just to buy a house. Now new coins start with coins
| distributed to VC and they are prepared to hold for years
| hoping for eth-tier returns. There's an argument that not
| that many people even knew about the ico - but the same is
| true for bitcoin mining early. It's very hard to quantify
| precisely but I think both have almost identical coin
| concentration.
|
| Be wary of manipulative statistics that ignore the inherent
| differences between the utxo vs account model - like
| percentage of coins held by top x%. The assumed practice in
| an account-based model is for one user to use one address,
| while the current practice for utxo coins is to use one
| address per received transaction. Same is true for value sent
| per timeframe - because utxo relies on change addresses the
| actual transferred value is much smaller.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| > The time of PoW is visibly over.
|
| Thanks for pointing this out! I never thought about this.
| To me the biggest long term threat to btc is the shift in
| block rewards from mined coins to transaction fees. I am
| assuming a possibly much smaller security budget available
| for "wasting energy". But at that point it still might be
| enough as there is no network effect supporting new pow
| chains anymore, that could threaten btc security by having
| more sha hashpower.
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| > Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the
| security of the network does too
|
| This does not follow. Security level is independent of miner
| reward value under PoS.
| suikadayo wrote:
| As price of Ether rises, it becomes even more difficult to
| acquire the 32 ETH required to become a validator.
| seph-reed wrote:
| The "Cantillion Effect"
|
| https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect
|
| Ethereum is already a system where those who are closest to the
| money printers benefit the most. At first it was oligarchic just
| because of its pre-mine and air drops, but PoS just takes that to
| a new level. You get paid to be rich.
|
| The reason this uses so much less energy is because it's so much
| closer to a centralized fiat currency. The only value implied by
| PoS is that some rich people are backing it... a lot like the
| dollar.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| ETH wont, and shouldn't migrate to PoS. PoS is a scam -- a trick,
| a reinvention of existing corrupt economic models. It throws out
| the greatest part of decentralized cryptocurrencies -- trustless,
| independently verifiable, auto-adjusting to external conditions,
| hard to fake proof of work. It replaces it with shell games and
| chicanery. I am very pro proof of work. The energy usage is a
| good thing. We can deal with the emissions from generation out of
| band, it is not the protocols problem.
|
| Two primary concerns, technical feasibility and political strife:
|
| I have my extreme doubts that you can move a chain like this
| without causing it to collapse. As yet all we have seen out of
| the eth camp is more broken proof of concepts -- not a viable
| model for a potentially trillion dollar economy. How to you
| replace a jet engine mid flight? (You don't. Unless you like not
| safely landing).
|
| PoS coin is worthless coin. If you want to have your expensive-
| to-mine gas coin be worth something, you have to make it hard to
| acquire. My second concern is that if they do manage to
| 'migrate', enough folks will ignore this and keep mining. This is
| a problem today with more contentious PoW hard forks.
|
| Ultimately this behavior will lead to more chain forks, which
| unlike in the ETC days actually is a big deal today. Whos USDT
| USDC etc is the real coin? The eth1 PoW 'legacy' network, or the
| eth2 'pos' chain, or what about the eth1-a/eth1-b fork when the
| first political staking challenges come up (see all world
| religion schisms). PoW solves this problem. One truth, enforced
| by universal energy usage. Not power players arguing over
| interpretations of religious text.
| hoka-one-one wrote:
| rothschilds
| r32rf43g wrote:
| What are your thoughts on PoET systems?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Proof of elapsed time? The intel thing? Only works with
| trusted nodes and/or permissioned blockchains; not suitable
| for trustless/permissionless public chains. The only
| trustless consensus system we have today is proof of work.
| And it works well, at scale, for 14 years.
| exo762 wrote:
| > enough folks will ignore this and keep mining
|
| Irrelevant. Well designed networks are pretty much isolated
| from whims of miners. Ethereum is one of them, Bitcoin is not.
| I'm speaking about 2 weeks difficulty re-targeting window vs
| single block window.
|
| > It replaces it with shell games and chicanery.
|
| Why do you perceive it like that? I would love to hear details.
|
| Ethereum will use hybrid PoS. Where random number generation
| (deciding who will become next block producer) is separated
| from deciding who is in the pool of potential producers (anty-
| sybil defense). First will be decided with commit-reveal scheme
| unbiased with the use of VDFs, second - with PoS.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Sounds like a shell game to me. You know what isn't? Burning
| energy, using a simple hash function to measure how much
| energy was burned. Simple, effective, safe. Energy usage is a
| good thing, actually.
| exo762 wrote:
| There is nothing simple about hash functions :-) They rely
| on unproven mathematical conjecture that one-way functions
| exist. Their existence would imply that P!=NP :-)
|
| Re: shell game. Are you implying that fraud or misdirection
| is involved? Some bitcoin scientist should be able to point
| where it is hidden. Or is it just a claim without evidence?
| jonplackett wrote:
| Is it possible/likely that exchanges are going to abuse their
| position and secretly use everyone else's ETH for proof of stake
| while they're holding it?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Like they do on all other PoS (worthless) coins? Yes. This is
| the fundamental problem. We have seen chain takeovers from this
| exact scenario. See Steem / Hive for an example of how this can
| go very wrong.
| mgh2 wrote:
| This article comes from the Ethereum blog, can anyone verify the
| numbers or provide an unbiased view?
| erjiang wrote:
| The numbers that they are providing are pretty reasonable and
| nobody is really disputing that removing the mining requirement
| and just staking your Ethereum is enormously more efficient.
| Even if you assume each staker is running 1 server, then 140k
| computers NOT running at full tilt all the time is still a tiny
| consumer of electricity compared to the current situation.
|
| A lot of the debate seems to be around whether or not it's as
| secure or viable, or whether the existing Ethereum miners will
| try to stage a coup or something.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't hold cryptocurrency and I think proof-of-
| work cryptocurrencies are a tragic waste.
| skizm wrote:
| Dumb question: if all popular cryptocurrencies shifted to proof
| of stake, would GPU prices come back down to earth?
| Havoc wrote:
| There are a ton of currencies so no. There will be pow ones
| left for at least a couple years I think
| kevindong wrote:
| > If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed,
| that's ~35Wh/tx
|
| The improved energy consumption is still a lot. For reference, a
| 2019 16" MacBook Pro has a 100 Wh battery. In other words, 3ish
| transactions would fully drain such a laptop's battery.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's an average for the network, not an actual expense you pay
| to run a transaction. Stakers are the ones mainly using that
| energy. If you're just a regular user and send a transaction,
| you just spend the tiny bit of energy needed to make a
| cryptographic signature and transmit it.
| sktrdie wrote:
| Does someone have a deeper understanding into Proof Of Stake? For
| what I remember it never had the same security promises that
| Proof Of Work had.
|
| In other words if PoS is conceptually sound why don't all
| cryptocurrencies switch over to it?
| lifty wrote:
| They actually are. Most new projects have chosen PoS for sybil
| resistance, and once Ethereum switches as well, we should have
| a large enough honey pot in order to gain confidence regarding
| its security.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| "Supermarket Monopoly scratchers now printed on 80% post-consumer
| recycled paper using organic soy ink."
|
| Details at 11.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I hope I'm not being lazy, but does POS not just mean the more
| you have, the more you get? Wouldn't it converge to 1 wallet
| controlling everything?
|
| Or to rephrase the question: where can I find the "POS for
| dummies" page?
| tromp wrote:
| Every staker preserves their fraction of the (increasing) pie
| by staking. Those who don't stake slightly lose in their
| fraction of the pie, benefitting all stakers by the same
| percentage.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| Yep, it literally codefies "rich gets richer" down to the core
| of the protocol.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Just saw that you need 32 ethereums to be able to stake.
| That's more than 60k.
|
| Whatever, I'm out.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| There are staking pools that allow you to stake with less
| than 32 ETH and pool those together to participate. We
| understand the requirement of 32 is high but that doesn't
| mean it is impossible to participate in staking with less.
| Rocketpool or Lido finance are examples.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| It's not just about that limit though and it's not even a
| complaint to be clear. If eth pays me 5-10% per year for
| a simple cryptographic signature, great, not gonna say
| no.
|
| But it inherently makes the system unfair, I have 0
| pressure to sell that eth since it didn't really take me
| any effort to make it and I don't need it to cover life
| expenses, whereas for someone who has much less money,
| well that return on their eth (say from pools), they'll
| probably need to sell it to cover some other costs (rents
| for example). So for the wealthy, their shares grows
| while everyone has pressure to sell. There's also a cycle
| where if you're a staker and few other people sell, price
| will skyrocket, make it even more unaccessible.
|
| I really hope that we avoid these scenarios in real
| world, but I'm a bit skeptical.
| colincooke wrote:
| Honestly this change might actually be the one that makes me
| finally buy some crypto. The energy burden and overall
| wastefullness of these coins has vastly outweighed any potential
| benefit they may provide. A big coin making such a good (at least
| in my books) change should be rewarded. Since crypto for better
| or worse seems here to stay, I hope that energy concious
| decisions continue to be made, and that the market responds
| positively.
| knowuh wrote:
| I hope this means i will be able to buy a graphics card soon.
| knicholes wrote:
| You can buy them right now. In fact, two months ago I bought
| six 3090s and 15 3080s with a two phone calls and maybe twenty
| clicks.
|
| The part you're missing is the price. It's my secret, but I'll
| share it here. You can buy a Dell R12 with one of those cards
| and, upon receiving it, sell the components for more than the
| purchase price.
| Animats wrote:
| Their graphs show a huge increase in energy consumption for both
| Bitcoin and Ethereum since January 2021. Why? What happened
| recently?
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Price increase.
| Animats wrote:
| The Bitcoin hash rate graph didn't go up like that in
| 2021.[1] The Etherium hash rate did.[2] Where are they
| getting their data?
|
| [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-
| hashrate.html#3...
|
| [2] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-
| hashrate.html
| DickingAround wrote:
| This reduces security considerably. Fundamentally, the proof of
| work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that
| was done _historically_. If there is just one honest node out
| there you will be able to tell the difference between the honest
| one and a majority of fakes. With proof of stake there is nothing
| beyond the will of the _current_ majority to lock in what is
| right. If you feel the majority is always right, and you 'd be
| comfortable with the majority being able to re-write all of the
| history of the ownership of your currency, that is fine. I do not
| feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every
| day forever.
| everfree wrote:
| This property is called Weak Subjectivity and is indeed a
| compromise that PoS makes over PoW. However, in practice, the
| trust assumptions aren't much higher than when you, say,
| download node software from a source that you trust.
|
| > I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every
| minute or every day forever.
|
| With weak subjectivity, you only have to trust them to be
| correct on a timeframe of every few months. If consensus is
| actually broken somehow over such a long period of time, there
| will be big headlines about it and you'll be able to configure
| your node accordingly.
|
| Further reading:
|
| https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
| DickingAround wrote:
| How do you know who to trust under Weak Subjectivity? It
| amounts to saying "I'm pretty sure we'll be able to google it
| and figure it out". But that then relies on these 3rd party
| systems to be able to identify who to trust. How can you
| really know who to trust for a protocol that's supposed to be
| distributed and ownerless. If the US turned into Russia-level
| of corruption, we essentially have to trust the owners of ETH
| to successfully flee to somewhere that we can protect them.
| What if they die or go bankrupt and no one agrees on who owns
| ETH?
|
| If the answer is 'we'll trust the majority of users'. How do
| you know who that majority users are? Is that literally
| people the hold a lot of the ETH gas? So I know who has ETH
| based on what software I download and I download software
| based on who has ETH? And I know I'm in the right cycle of
| that form because I googled it and found an 'authority'?
| Risky.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer
| chains because of all the work that was done historically.
|
| VDFs used in Ethereum's hybrid PoS replicate this property to
| large-enough extent. In case of PoW the resource you MUST spent
| to replicate the chain is electric energy, lots of it. In case
| of VDF it's mostly time. So one can imagine launching multiple
| "fake" chains using stolen/bought private keys, but such chain
| will get banned via software upgrade immediately after
| detection. Very hard to pull off, impossible to pull of
| multiple times.
|
| EDIT: my bad, stolen keys will get banned by the network
| immediately and automatically. They break "equivocation" rule.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Wasn't Casper going to do this like four years ago? They have
| been talking about moving to PoS forever now. It still hasn't
| happened.
| suikadayo wrote:
| it did happen (https://beaconcha.in/) and the merge will happen
| either Q4 or Q1 next year.
| vmception wrote:
| I like how these kinds of quips will evaporate
|
| I just wonder what the next criticism will be
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| "Ooops, maybe PoS was a bad idea, sorry about the billions!"
| vmception wrote:
| Have fun with Ethereum Classic or future PoW fork with the
| current state of Ethereum 1.x
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I wont be having fun, as I wouldn't touch ETH. But you
| acknowledge this situation is bad, and could be the cause
| of more drama (potentially economy breaking drama)?
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Eventually switching to PoS has been the established plan
| for Etherium for years. Any drama about it is
| manufactured.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Having an abstract plan to distract energy FUD warriors
| is not the same as having a technical plan to replace
| engines on moving vehicles. The drama is real, but it
| requires putting down the hopium pipe.
| vmception wrote:
| One of my companies has been running an Eth2 node for 6
| months
|
| It fits the risk profile to let that team attempt to
| deploy and merge a proof of stake network with sharding
| milansuk wrote:
| Reading the discussion here, I think most people don't have a
| problem with PoS, but the transition from PoW to PoS. If you
| compare PoS with the dominant client-server model, it's
| significantly better! In the worst case, PoS can become a
| "client-server". PoS is transparent and you know that your smart
| contract will run exactly how it suppose to be executed. No FAANG
| types of problems.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Ethereum doesn't have an energy problem, energy have an Ethereum
| problem.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's great that they are working on becoming
| more effective but the idea that we should judge new technology
| purely on it's environmental impact as we see these days is
| counterproductive to progress. Progress from 0 to 1 will always
| be less effective than the optimization that follows.
|
| We should be much more focused on how to make sure that any
| technologies energy usage doesn't become an issue by creating
| clean technologies with high energy density, which are reliable,
| plentiful and scaleable and doesn't require backup sources.
| AAA_Rating wrote:
| Its price will also tumble 99% .
|
| People motives to get into crypto are clear. They want to
| subtract themselves from government policy of constantly printing
| money. BTC takes care of that and it's a 14 years brand which is
| extremely politically expensive to make illegal
|
| On the other hand people are perfectly satisfied with their
| experience on Youtube, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Ebay, JPMorgan
| etc. which are the entities which Ethereum aims to disrupt
| h4kor wrote:
| Let's hope this will happen. It's time this blockchain hype
| ends.
| kaliali wrote:
| I'm not satisfied with YouTube, amazon, Google, shitbook, eBay,
| etc. I want to use a service that protects my data better and
| drives those dirtbags out of business.
| briefcomment wrote:
| I'd like to see both if possible. Actually I would like to see
| BCH replace USD (or a bigger block BTC).
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I think you are correct. PoS coin is worthless coin. Imagine
| the tales in the future -- about the potential trillion dollar
| economy that was invented by some internet nerds who listened
| too much to people that have no idea what they are talking
| about, and drove it off a cliff with fancy talk of proof of
| stake (which was actually engineered by the existing powers to
| ensure their continued control of global economies).
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Why do you say that? What makes PoW so much more meritorious
| than PoS in your eyes?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Its price will also tumble 99%
|
| From your lips to God's ears. If the price falls steeply there
| will be a glut of gpus flooding the market and I'll finally be
| able to build a pc.
| vmception wrote:
| Or you can do what the market is telling you to do and you'll
| be able to afford a pc whenever you want
|
| The market signals are right there
| DCKing wrote:
| Good. Very good.
|
| This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce
| some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products,
| either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a
| different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their
| trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives
| to literally burn up energy [1] to make financial products.
| Especially because proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to
| _have_ cryptocurrency.
|
| Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW
| cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their
| value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins.
|
| I don't think there's any precedent for banning classes of
| financial products for environmental reasons, but it's time to
| create one.
|
| [1]: In addition to environmental reasons, there's probably also
| economic ones. Mining burns through other scarce resources such
| as chip production capacity, although the true impact there is
| unclear.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Holy shit, lol.
|
| This is an insane take. Proof of Stake is NOT secure, the
| stakers can collude to reorganize the chain at almost no cost.
| This is like the exact system we tried to get away from, the
| USD system is also a Proof of Stake.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| There is no place for a PoS protocol layer on the internet,
| I'm willing to die on this hill.
| Graffur wrote:
| Where can I learn more about this?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0
| asmos7 wrote:
| way to devise a very specific way to kill the gravy train
| cryptobros have been riding on for so long
| BTCOG wrote:
| Again with this same tired nonsense on Hacker News. Famous for
| censoring worthwhile comments to death while leaving up
| misinformed "curious" posts that mislead everyone. Bitcoin is
| using half of the power as banking systems. Bitcoin is using
| half of the power, of the gold industry. Might I suggest, if
| you think you can suggest banning things for using too much
| carbon, that you first quit working, quit driving your
| vehicles, and disconnect the power in your house. I don't think
| it's good for the environment in you doing so. In fact, your
| carbon consumption should be banned. Turn your computers off.
| Unplug your wasteful device chargers, you've had enough.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| The amount of energy used is only one aspect of the matter.
| The other is value derived from that energy. I think it is
| safe to say that regular banking provides not just twice the
| value of Bitcoin, but in fact probably two orders of
| magnitude more. Pretty much everyone uses regular banking,
| while pretty much nobody uses Bitcoin, and not only they use
| banking more, they use it many times a week or even a day.
| The comparison is not even close.
| lowkey wrote:
| The regular banking system leaks your purchasing power over
| time via the mechanism of inflation. The regular banking
| system relies on the US Dollar which is backed by proof of
| violence - aka the largest military industrial complex ever
| created. Externalities are a net negative. It's important
| to consider the externalities of every system. When
| compared with the death and destruction and burning oil
| fields in Iraq, Libya, Syria etc, the cost of proof of work
| seems trite.
| tom-_- wrote:
| Something tells me that a user named "BTCOG" is not here to
| provide rigorous objective analysis but okay lets attack
| the strawman.
|
| The number of bitcoin addresses with a balance is 30
| million. The number of bank accounts is in the billions.
|
| As you said, BTC is two orders of magnitude less efficient
| than banks assuming mining provides the same value to
| people as ALL of the services banks provide including
| loans, savings, and money transfer which IT DOES NOT.
| BTCOG wrote:
| Something tells me you just like to go on tangents nobody
| was talking about here. Never once, have I ever said that
| "Bitcoin is two orders of magnitude less efficient than
| banks."
|
| That's where it stops, because what you've said is
| nonsense.
| tom-_- wrote:
| Do you know how threaded comments work?
| BTCOG wrote:
| And when the comparison is not even close, why are you the
| one making it? All you've stated was an old opinion and not
| a fact about what is more useful, or how they are used.
| It's totally fine for you to have just said "I don't
| understand either banking or Bitcoin whatsoever." Bitcoin
| is going to get a lot more global over the next several
| years in it's use cases and for savings. I hope to see you
| commenting later on after becoming more informed about our
| current times of inflation and what the people want, vs
| what is forced on everyone so that they have no way to save
| hard money. The revolution isn't going to wait for everyone
| who chooses to be truly ignorant about Bitcoin. And there
| is only Bitcoin.
| fuddle wrote:
| I'd be in favour of banning the use of fossil fuels for
| corporations mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. There is a
| few examples of Bitcoin miners using Coal power sources!
| disruptalot wrote:
| This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas.
|
| On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply
| stop. It's actually the entire opposite.
|
| When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable
| organizations running these operations, that is their only
| choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage,
| because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption
| relative to the value of the coin they mine.
|
| The moment these operations are shutdown, there is a massive
| sink in the hash rate, smaller operations and hobbyists will
| rush in to fill it. Hash rate gradually climbs back up and
| instead you have 10x the energy usage because you can no longer
| run the PoW in a scalable way.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The other choke point is conversion to and from USD. With a
| law, BTC loses any corporate 'investment' (eg, Tesla), and
| coinbase stops converting to/from USD, making it much more of
| a pain to work with.
| aeternum wrote:
| This would be like playing whack-a-mole. Other PoW
| cryptocurrencies are out there and it does not make sense
| to just shut down the mining hardware. Miners will just
| mine something else.
|
| The only answer that works is a carbon tax.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| I deleted my comment that was essentially saying the same.
| For once, USD's extra-territorial jurisdiction could
| definitely be put to good use. I don't understand why big
| political parties haven't thought of that. It's an easy
| win, and it would bother an insignificant portion of their
| voter base.
| stuaxo wrote:
| https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-
| what-...
|
| We will see, the trouble with Freakanomics, is that it had
| quite a few avoidable errors in it, so maybe it's not the
| best example.
| zepto wrote:
| > On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will
| simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite.
|
| Not really. It wouldn't stop, but it would decline
| substantially.
|
| Smaller operations and hobbyists only participate because
| it's worth money to do so.
|
| Making Bitcoin illegal would kill the argument that it will
| eventually displace fiat, and relegate it to being used only
| for illegal purposes.
|
| The incentive to mine a currency that can only be used for
| crime as a hobbyist would end up being low.
| foerbert wrote:
| That's assuming PoW cryptos would remain attractive to
| smaller operations and hobbyists. I'm not sure that's a
| given. If no business can change your coins to fiat, and no
| business could accept your coins in the first place (not that
| they really do now, but whatever), your options for getting
| anything out of your coins is... what? Posting on craigslist
| to find people to meet up for illicit localcoin transactions?
|
| And if you can't really do anything with your coins but have
| your coins, why would people rush out to break the law to
| mine them?
| malka wrote:
| Organized crime is as big as a country.
| foerbert wrote:
| Okay? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Organized crime wouldn't going to risk trading PoW
| cryptocurrency. There's no benefit to them, since the
| value of a bitcoin would immediately plummet.
| mckeed wrote:
| The idea was to ban trading, not mining. If Coinbase and all
| the other legitimate companies that facilitate crypto markets
| for U.S. citizens had to drop PoW coins it could tank the
| price significantly and set the coin mining industry back to
| when it wasn't such a huge problem for energy use and GPU
| supply. Speculation would move to PoS currencies and BTC
| would stay valuable, but would act more like an altcoin.
| varispeed wrote:
| Currently the trade of illegal drugs is banned. Have a look
| how that goes.
| rfrey wrote:
| Unlike drugs which have limited substitutes (alcohol and
| caffeine I guess), PoW currencies would have several
| functionally equivalent replacements. I doubt we'd end up
| ravaging underprivileged communities as they turned to
| black market Bitcoin.
| [deleted]
| 627467 wrote:
| The USD and the Zimbabwe dollar are functionally
| equivalent, yet, I'm sure you're not saving in ZD.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| You're only proving our point. USD is a reasonable
| currency for savings and/or as world-wide currency as
| long as it's liquid, non-volatile, backed by a big,
| stable and powerful economy. This could change, but not
| overnight.
|
| BTC's main uses (speculation and laundering) are possible
| only as long as it can be exchanged into fiat. This can
| change tomorrow if the right strings are pulled.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| This is a terrible analogy. Drugs are inherently
| desirable. There is nothing inherently desirable about
| crypto coins
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| You can't have proof of stake drugs. (or other better
| analogies for really really near substitutes)
|
| It turns out laws do sometimes have effects.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| If you can't speculate online and in a convenient, legal
| way, the value of BTC and friends will certainly tank.
|
| Let people trade cryptocurrency to fiat in person all
| they want, it's completely insignificant.
| hahahanonono wrote:
| trading is only a small portion of bitcoin's market cap.
| most coins are outside of exchanges, in noncustodial cold
| storage. even without smooth trading platforms people
| will trade bitcoin peer-to-peer because bitcoin solves
| real world problems
| fredfoobar wrote:
| https://bisq.network/ exists, you can trade bitcoin p2p
| already.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| socialist_coder wrote:
| I think you're probably right. Money always finds a way.
| zepto wrote:
| The proposal is to stop Bitcoin/PoW being money. Other
| forms of money will find a way.
| exo762 wrote:
| > smaller operations and hobbyists will rush in to fill it.
| Hash rate gradually climbs back up and instead you have 10x
| the energy usage because you can no longer run the PoW in a
| scalable way.
|
| This is false. Miners will spend about the same amount of
| money they get from block reward to run their operation.
| Asymptotically, this money is spent to buy electricity. This
| is the result of competitive pressure from other miners. What
| you will observe instead is the same amount of electricity
| burned but with 10x less hash rate.
| swensel wrote:
| Doesn't the mining difficulty decrease then though without
| the massive mining farms, and thus the electricity required
| decreases? I'm not an expert in crypto mining.
| Nursie wrote:
| But in the mean time the value is likely to have tanked,
| because if they can't trivially be traded for national
| currency, the interest in them will wither.
| dimmke wrote:
| This is the thing that has always bugged me about
| cryptocurrency - people are only passionate about it
| because they want to make more traditional currency with
| it. Then they adopt this "decentralized" rhetoric. It's
| always felt hollow. If owning/trading bitcoin became a
| crime, it'd be done.
|
| Ever since Dogecoin had a moment, there's now a million
| coins trying to engineer their own "moonshot".
|
| This is on top of the security issues and of course the
| energy issues. Cryptocurrency is garbage.
| gradys wrote:
| Would Ethereum be able to make the switch to PoS if it had
| never used PoW originally? How would they ensure a good
| distribution of ownership?
| mckeed wrote:
| It's a difficult problem, but there are coins that have
| managed it. Stellar has piggybacked on other services to
| distribute - Facebook, Keybase, and Coinbase. There's an
| energy-efficient memecoin that distributes based on
| Folding@Home contributions that has become the #1 monthly F@H
| team.
| junseth wrote:
| What if you simply don't know enough to not know that you're
| both wrong and being lied to by the ETH marketing team? Would
| you be embarrassed that you believed rhetoric? Probably means
| you would be easily susceptible to most conspiracy theories.
| nanidin wrote:
| I've thought through this over the last few days and I don't
| think it's viable unless all countries enact the ban at the
| same time. Imagine country A bans trade or mining of PoW coins
| - that puts the citizens of country A at a disadvantage to
| citizens of other countries, and encourages holders of PoW
| coins in country A to exfiltrate wealth and capital from
| country A.
|
| You end up needing to solve the same type of problem that PoW
| solves in order to enact a PoW ban simultaneously across all
| countries - how can all parties trust that every other party is
| being honest and will follow through (Byzantine Generals
| problem)?
| mfDjB wrote:
| It might be worth noting that not all Proof-of-Work is just
| finding hashes, newer cryptocurrencies make more economic and
| intelligent use of the work used for proof.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Fucking thank you. I get just as many downvotes when I suggest
| this but it's very obviously the right thing to do.
|
| PoW doesn't scale. It eats up power needlessly and we're only
| stuck on it because the original BTC was a PoW cryptocoin.
| Simply banning trading of PoW coins would do mounds of good -
| the crypto community would be better streamlined to move toward
| PoS coins of the future and environmentalists wouldn't have to
| waste their resources lobbying to ban BTC anymore.
| lucasnortj wrote:
| they should ban cryptos full stop. They have no use case except
| for criminals
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| > Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW
| cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their
| value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins.
|
| This ban needed to be internationally, though. Pretty difficult
| to enforce on a global scale. And then it would only have a
| short term influence on the price of, say, Bitcoin, until
| enough "black" mining power emerges.
|
| I would just relax. Bitcoin is not going to destroy the planet.
| In the long run it's going to be a niche financial tool
| compared to the scale of Ethereum or other competitors
| (Cardano, Solana or Algorand). It'll be the PoS enabled DeFi
| networks that are going to disrupt the banking business.
| BTCOG wrote:
| In the long run, it's going to be very green. There are
| Crypto Climate Accord groups working to ensure Bitcoin is
| carbon-neutral by 2030. What is being done currently is
| making leaps and bounds in using solar, hydro, wind and
| trapped energy for bitcoin mining. It's pushing industry to
| green. Not the phony narrative that's constantly pushed by
| people who are quite literally, spreading allowed
| disinformation across HackerNews for the past several years
| on end.
| swensel wrote:
| Are the people downvoting the above comment considering
| things like trapping excess flare gas [1]? This is energy
| that is literally wasted otherwise, and would be vented
| into the atmosphere, if not used for PoW mining (or put to
| some other undetermined use, but PoW is the only profitable
| alternative that has made sense so far vs just flaring the
| gas).
|
| Maybe there need to be more guidelines around how to use
| excess energy instead of coal, but to totally disregard
| that PoW could be mined from excess energy is shortsighted.
| Flare gas is just one example.
|
| [1] https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-
| flaring-i...
| dboat wrote:
| Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for
| profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall?
|
| I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I
| would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a
| lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose.
| The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my
| question.
| chrischattin wrote:
| Youtube alone uses 2x the amout of energy as the entire
| Bitcoin network, for perspective.
| pavlov wrote:
| That's just not true.
| artifact_44 wrote:
| ..they said authoritatively, and without evidence.
| mytherin wrote:
| Source?
| chrischattin wrote:
| Youtube uses 243.6 TWh - https://thefactsource.com/how-
| much-electricity-does-youtube-...
|
| Bitcoin uses ~118 TWh - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-
| energy-consumption
|
| Youtube souce is from 2019, Bitcoin one is current.
| dtech wrote:
| Youtube provides entertainment for literally billions of
| people
|
| Bitcoin provides... idk a way for some people to make a lot
| of money and some others to lose it?...
|
| Even if we say that BTC provides _some_ value by
| transferring money etc. the amount of value per Watt is so
| slanted its ridiculous to even make that argument.
| chrischattin wrote:
| Bitcoin is an independent financial network. It opens up
| economic access to literally billions of people currently
| shut out of the traditional financial system. I'd say
| that's quite valuable to the human race.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Because entertainment is so useful? What's your utility
| function to decide which one is more worthy of using
| electricity? Why _should_ we use your utility function in
| particular?
| rapnie wrote:
| ..to deliver quality video services to a billion people,
| instead of handling a handful of transactions for some
| greedy financial speculators.
| artifact_44 wrote:
| But.. I pay my YouTube subscription with my Bitcoin. :(
| iabacu wrote:
| > This may be a radical take, but I think nations should
| introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof of
| work cryptocurrencies.
|
| That's not only radical, but a grotesque knee jerk reaction.
|
| If you think about renewable energy, there's a problem of
| mismatched production with consumption and transmission. This
| causes wasted energy (or energy that is very low value), which
| makes renewable energy projects less viable.
|
| Sure, one obvious way to address that is to add batteries to
| store such energy. Now, go mine (and refine) enough lithium to
| build utility-scale batteries. That's a huge environmental
| issue that no one wants to talk about, specially Tesla/Elon.
|
| What's a competitor to energy batteries? Proof-of-work mining
| of bitcoin: it make renewable energy projects economically
| viable, because the energy of low-usage times can be used to
| mine bitcoin, which can pay for energy of high-usage times.
|
| If there's an environmental/carbon cost to BTC mining, then
| attach a carbon tax to it (or something like that).
| iabacu wrote:
| By the way.
|
| If one thinks about tracking the carbon cost of a mined BTC
| (based on the energy source used to mine it) such that a
| carbon tax can be accurately exacted, the usage of blockchain
| to track carbon offsets and cost is a pretty obvious thing
| that comes to mind.
| jMyles wrote:
| Even if banning PoW were agreeable on logical grounds (ie,
| overcoming the arguments of the sibling comments to this one),
| is there any reason to believe that such a law will:
|
| * Reduce trade * Reduce value * Reduce carbon use?
|
| Is there a case ever where an illicit market found a price
| equilibrium which was lower than the licit one? And, if such a
| ban does cause the price go up, won't the same incentives cause
| continued mining competition?
| bko wrote:
| If the government wants to put a higher price on energy or
| carbon, it should do so. But it should not be the arbiter of
| what's a worthy use of energy expenditure.
|
| I could see a lot of people make the argument the production of
| a lot of energy intensive goods is not worth-while.
| mckeed wrote:
| PoW is different because it's energy use for its own sake.
|
| If carbon taxes go up, some things will no longer be worth
| spending energy on, but crypto mining is just competitive, so
| the value of mining will go up with the cost of energy and
| keep using as much energy as ever. The only thing that can
| stop it is reducing demand for the coins, which the
| government is not even trying to do yet.
| xur17 wrote:
| > but crypto mining is just competitive, so the value of
| mining will go up with the cost of energy and keep using as
| much energy as ever.
|
| That is not true. If the cost of energy increases, mining /
| hash rates will decrease. Miners are competing, and the
| limit to the price they will pay for electricity is the
| value of the cryptocurrency they are earning for the
| activity.
| strgcmc wrote:
| If carbon taxes go up, miners will be incentivized to
| pursue low/no-carbon alternative energy sources, thereby
| accelerating the shift to cleaner energy. Mining can either
| be viewed as creating a profit incentive where none existed
| before, or at least enhancing the profit incentive even
| further. Clean energy needs more profit incentives to
| really scale adoption.
|
| I am all for carbon taxes, to shape the market towards
| cleaner energy. And I do think it will successfully push
| miners even faster towards adoption of other energy
| sources.
| barrkel wrote:
| Government is made out of people. If the people don't want
| the economy oriented around energy being put into finding
| hashes, they have the right to vote.
| webXL wrote:
| The government _is_ made out of people and if history has
| taught us anything, power corrupts those people. Income
| inequality has only risen since the last financial crisis.
| Decentralization of money is the whole point of this
| exercise, and many believe Proof of Work is superior to
| Proof of Stake because work is actually scarce. Once you
| make it cheap to transact, that opens up all sorts of
| attacks (spam, phishing) and devaluation. Since PoS can be
| copied very easily, many corrupt governments will do just
| that.
| scrollaway wrote:
| People are made out of opinions. If they don't like the way
| others are voting, they have the right to convince others
| of theirs.
|
| Which is to say, discussing on HN is a valid way to
| contribute your opinion to society. Voting is not your only
| voice.
| Spivak wrote:
| So why does the buck stop with government then? If enough
| of us agree that a law should be passed then why not just
| pass the law? Seems way easier to just make a rule than
| try to individually convince everyone.
| dmoy wrote:
| It's an eventually sort-of-consistent system with a lot
| of buffering and delay.
|
| if enough people agree that a law should be passed, and
| it's a high enough priority, and the opinion stays that
| way for a long time, then eventually enough politicians
| get on board by virtue of pressure from their voting
| base, and a law gets passed.
|
| It's not great.
|
| But on the other hand, near-immediate direct democracy is
| also not great, because it leads to knee-jerk reactions
| causing laws put in place. I'm thinking of stuff like the
| USAPATRIOT Act, except worse.
| TearsInTheRain wrote:
| > Government is made out of people.
|
| _Maybe_ in theory but in actuality it is comprised of
| moneyed interests which is why it needs to be limited to
| preserve the freedom of the people.
| micropresident wrote:
| Obviously the people want to put energy towards finding
| hashes or they wouldn't be doing it. What you're advocating
| for is a minority of people who actually vote to influence
| the government to send people with guns to stop the actions
| of people who are voting with their _labor._
|
| There will come a time when people like you -- who play God
| over others -- are ousted from society.
| mckeed wrote:
| That's like saying people shouldn't try to ban meth
| because meth cooks are working hard.
|
| It's just not a realistic outlook on how typical people
| want society to function. Most people do not believe PoW
| cryptocurrency is important to society.
| pnt12 wrote:
| "The people" who do it are less than 1% of "the people" a
| government represents.
|
| There are already laws in most countries forbidding you
| to litter, and you would never call that "playing God" -
| it just happens that littering with crypto mining is a
| multi billion dollar industry.
| micropresident wrote:
| I do call it playing God. In California there are laws
| against littering and they are not enforced. You cannot
| regulate change into the hearts of men.
| bko wrote:
| So there's no bounds as to what government should be able
| to do, ethically or legally?
| oehpr wrote:
| But this isn't proposed regulation to prevent an "economy
| oriented around energy being put into finding hashes".
|
| It's literally regulation to stop "Proof of work". Which is
| a generic algorithm that can be applied to other
| circumstances.
|
| It could have applications in CAPTCHA's, or anti-spam.
|
| It could be a critical component of other decentralized
| technologies, not just blockchain crypto currencies.
|
| Making this math illegal JUST to kill cyptocurrencies seems
| a tad much, right?
| the_local_host wrote:
| Isn't proof-of-work intrinsically wasteful though, as a
| proxy for costing money (e.g. instead of paying money
| directly for the right to mine BTC, you buy electricity
| and burn it)? In any context other than cryptocurrencies
| it seems like microtransactions would be a better choice.
| pornel wrote:
| Proof of Work used for decentralized consensus is
| maximally wasteful by design. It has to be a race to burn
| more resources than anyone else can. It's unfixable.
|
| Governments already have regulations for energy
| efficiency, waste and pollution, and for most things it's
| possible to negotiate reasonable limits.
|
| For PoW it's not possible. If you put an upper limit on
| its wastefulness, it'll be a limit on its security. Even
| if we had a Dyson Sphere, PoW would eventually eat more
| than half of it just to be secure.
| austincheney wrote:
| Government should arbitrate inappropriate use of any utility
| resource, including energy and water. In many cases such
| restrictions already exist for water.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >it should not be the arbiter of what's a worthy use of
| energy expenditure.
|
| I disagree. If we must cap the CO2 we can emit, we should
| definitely favor basic needs over luxury. Here in France, the
| government tried to set a carbon tax on gas (which is
| required for many simply to commute to work, with no
| affordable alternatives yet) but they refused to impose a tax
| on jet fuel which is known to be used by the ultra rich to
| fly their privates on the weekends (while they can afford
| high speed trains).
|
| We should not just let money decide what's possible, when so
| many are still in need of basic necessities. Many could pay a
| 300% tax just to fly 10x a year across the globe (emitting
| many, many times the carbon footprint of an average
| household). How would that be fair, when the problem is not
| what people pay but how the planet is becoming inhabitable?
| VMG wrote:
| my financial privacy is a basic need, and I need
| cryptocurrency to achieve it
|
| I do not believe consensus mechanism other than PoW can
| provide enough security for a cryptocurrency
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I'm sure jet setters consider their private jet as a
| basic need, too.
|
| What's interesting, is that you can gather ~300 random
| citizens - including jet setters and cryptofans - and let
| them think about it for two years in order to decide what
| they considered as basic needs, on a consensus basis. And
| then, we can organize a vote (e.g a referendum) to make
| sure society finds a common ground on this (just like we
| do for most things, such as banning crime).
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for
| _Climat... for a good example.
|
| I bet PoW would be far down the list of basic needs but
| it might, still. I like democracy (where people vote, not
| their fortune).
| VMG wrote:
| my rights are not up for discussion, let alone a vote
| Aqua wrote:
| I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban
| beef because it uses too much energy.
|
| Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and
| banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a
| ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas
| on the number of children people may have, that will surely
| contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and
| reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the
| USSR back in 1960-1990
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >How about we ban gold mining
|
| Why not?
|
| >or set quotas on the number of children people may have
|
| Some people consume 10x less energy than others, so blindly
| capping the number of children does not seem a good idea.
| What about capping the carbon footprint per person instead?
|
| We track and tax revenues (not perfectly but as well as we
| can). We could definitely track and cap carbon emissions.
| Sounds good to me!
| rantwasp wrote:
| yes. also let's start capping the amount of oxygen people
| are allowed to breathe. I mean, without oxygen you cannot
| produce co2, amiright? /s
| Nursie wrote:
| > Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and
| banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a
| ridiculous advice.
|
| Not right now it's not. Not when we have constraints on how
| much CO2 we can pump into our atmosphere.
|
| Right now, and I mean _right now_ , when we're having huge
| problems de-carbonising the planet's energy supplies and are
| risking making life very uncomfortable for ourselves for
| decades or centuries to come, limiting energy use is actually
| one of the few levers we have to try to make a difference.
|
| In this current situation, bringing online a whole new mid-
| sized country's worth of energy consumption for a _financial
| instrument_ is ridiculous, and a huge own-goal for humanity.
| dd36 wrote:
| Communities tend to ban harmful things.
| rantwasp wrote:
| "communities".
|
| it's all fun and games until I ban something you rely on
| for your livelihood
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| We have banned a ton of things because they are bad for the
| environment. It has worked and will continue to work. Things
| like building design and construction standards are set to a
| minimum environmental standard, why shouldn't
| cryptocurrencies.
| micropresident wrote:
| The government hasn't banned beef, and yet there are now
| vegetarian and vegan products all over. People vote with
| their money.
|
| You're advocating for violence against people who do things
| _you_ don 't like. Use your wallet and leave other people
| alone.
| Nursie wrote:
| > You're advocating for violence
|
| Oh give over, this is ridiculous too.
|
| When other people are causing harm that affects
| _everyone_ it 's perfectly reasonable to look at
| legislation to kerb the behaviours.
|
| And no, that's not violence. No.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| When those same people are contributing to heat waves,
| drought, and sea level rise, do you not consider that
| violence as well?
| rantwasp wrote:
| whatever happened to the efficient market?
|
| i find views that want to ban anything for energy
| consumption ridiculous. also what the people advocating for
| this kind of thing are missing is that it's all fun and
| games until something you rely gets banned because of
| reasons.
|
| here are my proposals:
|
| the entire banking system is obviously using a lot of
| power. how about we ban banks and go back to using paper
| money. that's def more environmental friendly. /s
|
| electric cars run on energy that's generated with coal.
| that's not cool. let's ban electric cars and keep driving
| gas cars. they have been around for a long time and the
| technology is so good that we actually pollute less with a
| gas car /s
|
| the internet in general and datacenters in particular are
| using a lot of power. let's ban datacenters. guaranteed
| between environment afterwards /s
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| We have banned low efficiency vehicles (CAFE standards),
| we have banned refrigerants that are bad for the
| environment (CFCs). We have things that clearly cause
| massive amounts of societal harm (leaded gasoline). The
| market didn't solve any of those issues, the government
| did. I for one am extremely happy that we live in a world
| that is not poisoned by lead and that still has a
| functioning ozone layer. Its kind of silly that you are
| equating bitcoin with the entire modern banking system.
| The regulations to ban leaded gasoline didn't destroy
| automobiles, they just made them change. Changes to proof
| of stake aren't existential to BTC holders, but they are
| existential to the rest of us.
|
| Also "until something you rely gets banned", what do you
| rely on bitcoin for besides being a store of value?
| chrischattin wrote:
| Youtube alone uses 2x's the amount of energy of the Bitcoin
| network. Ban Youtube?
| leesalminen wrote:
| I mean, all YouTube does is generate money for the ad-
| tech industry. I think it should be banned before PoW
| cryptos.
| scrollaway wrote:
| No that isn't all YouTube does thank you very much. It's
| one of the greatest treasure troves of educational video
| content. It has helped my life, career, and those of my
| friends. It has probably contributed far more to
| humanity's advance, in efficiency alone, than most other
| websites of its kind.
|
| That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain
| to your life is a You problem.
| simonw wrote:
| No it doesn't.
| chrischattin wrote:
| Yeah, it does. I posted sources in a reply to another
| comment. Or, you can look it up yourself.
| simonw wrote:
| You quoted https://thefactsource.com/how-much-
| electricity-does-youtube-... which says:
|
| "the internet uses 10% of the total electricity
| consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by
| Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is
| the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About
| 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube"
|
| That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the
| internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth -
| so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total
| bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the
| internet's total electricity consumption.
|
| That is a highly dubious assumption.
| lovecg wrote:
| Google is claiming to be Carbon neutral though, so not a
| good comparison.
|
| https://sustainability.google/commitments/
| generj wrote:
| YouTube also entertains hundreds of millions of people,
| whereas crypto benefits the average person...how exactly?
|
| By enabling ransom ware attacks? Creating GPU shortages?
| jude- wrote:
| YouTube also promotes conspiracy theories, racism, anti-
| intellectualism, authoritarianism, anti-vaxxing, and so
| on. These things pretty severe negative externalities, to
| put it mildly. So let's not pretend that YouTube's
| existence is a net-positive for humanity; that remains to
| be seen.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I think the difference is that a means of building green
| buildings and green cryptocurrencies have been proven
| viable. Once the same happens for the category of product
| YouTube falls into (which goes beyond just video
| distribution), the non-green way can be eliminated.
| schmorptron wrote:
| No? Youtube's use of compute power serves a purpose that
| is not quite literally wasting energy for the sake of it.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| A quick google seems to turn up that this claim is from
| thefactsource.com based on the internet uses 10% of
| global power. And YouTube is 11% of internet traffic. So
| 1% of global power.
|
| VS
|
| An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge
| Centre for Alternative Finance.
|
| I know which one I'm more prepared to believe.
|
| Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn
| things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery,
| harmonica lessons.
|
| Bitcoin literally does nothing.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Remember the infrastructure is one part of the equation.
| The billions of devices consuming YouTube are running in
| electricity as well.
|
| The virtue of energy use argument is just dumb.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| But again, read what the person you are responding to
| wrote. YouTube provides something of value to millions.
| PoW is not required for cryptocurrency to function. PoW
| provides no value. It wastes time and energy for the sake
| of wasting processor cycles.
| swensel wrote:
| Come on... PoW provides no value? So the almost $1
| trillion in Bitcoin is just, nothing? Not worth anything?
| I think the people invested would beg to differ.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| There is no need for Bitcoin to use PoW. Bitcoin can
| continue to exist using a different algorithm to
| establish distributed trust. But since you brought up
| Bitcoin, yes, I would say that it provides little value
| to society in it's current state. It operates primarily
| as a speculative investment rather than a true currency.
| swensel wrote:
| What would you propose the Bitcoin core team should
| switch to? Have you looked into the other algorithms, the
| feasibility of migrating of the existing network, etc.?
| It sounds more to me like you've just written off
| cryptocurrency in general.
|
| As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus
| mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2
| successfully switching will be telling.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| I haven't written off anything. PoW is inherently flawed.
| It does not scale and Bitcoin has proven that. Bitcoin
| averages ~300K transactions a day while using more energy
| than some countries. That is unacceptable.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Says you.
|
| Electricity is a commodity and a utility. Who are you or
| I to subjectively decide that a use is valuable or
| virtuous?
|
| Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable? What are the
| criteria that you use to determine worth?
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| _Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable?_
|
| Yes because people like porn and baseball.
|
| Bitcoin is like gold. It's valuable because other people
| say it's valuable. But nothing useful happens when you
| mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something?
| Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into
| jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just
| uses power.
| simonw wrote:
| That article assumes that if YouTube is 11% of total
| internet bandwidth then YouTube is 11% of total internet
| electricity usage. That's a very dubious assumption.
| webXL wrote:
| > Bitcoin literally does nothing.
|
| Except make those little pieces of green paper in your
| wallet look foolish.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Building construction standards are a great example of
| regulatory failure.
|
| By optimizing around energy conservation at all costs, we
| have homes that cost 3x, held together with glue,
| susceptible to mold, and filled with toxic crap like vinyl.
| noja wrote:
| Wow. Where to start on this one!
|
| Where do you see the problem in using less energy for a
| crypto currency? Why not make a cryptocurrency that uses even
| more energy?
| pamplemoose wrote:
| those currencies already exist. people can choose to use
| them, while understanding the trade-offs.
| artifact_44 wrote:
| Because electricity costs money. When the cost of
| electricity exceeds the value of coin you mine, you will
| stop mining. If you make a coin that takes half as much
| energy to mine, miners will just mine twice as much of it.
| Its like y'all are just discovering capitalism for the
| first time.
| mrfusion wrote:
| You people terrify me.
| rantwasp wrote:
| if you're afraid now, wait until you learn that these people
| vote.
|
| democracy! f yeah!
| 627467 wrote:
| Government can already effectively (and is already
| inadvertently doing so) prevent mining by manipulating energy
| prices within it's jurisdiction. It does NOT mean that
| government can easily ban the use of PoW blockchains.
|
| Miners will move to where is is profitable and will be
| ultimately incentivized to find cheaper (ultimately cleaner)
| means to mine.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Very bad. Ive got another radical take -- cypherpunks should
| ban proof of stake cryptocurrencies. They are bad for freedom,
| bad for decentralization, bad for store of value. Wall street
| tricks attempting to put the genie back in the bottle.
|
| Proof of work is the only thing of value, the only distributed
| consensus model that is secure and the only way forward for
| store of value cryptocurrencies.
| artifact_44 wrote:
| 100%
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Sure, ban away all PoW crypto, but don't you dare touch my
| YouTube cat videos and Netflix series ! (that likely use a TON
| of bandwidth)
|
| Jokes aside it's really hard to decide what's reasonable energy
| usage from waste. Ultimately the real question is who gets to
| make that decision.
|
| And overall, the idea of government getting to decide what are
| acceptable uses of energy and what isn't is actually terrifying
| rvz wrote:
| > This may be a radical take, but I think nations should
| introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-
| of-work cryptocurrencies.
|
| Unless you want to also ban servers or services that are using
| deep learning training, decoding massive videos and livestreams
| on storage systems that are also burning up the planet.
|
| It's not fine to allow PoW cryptocurrencies to continue to burn
| the planet but collecting mass amounts of user data and using
| wasteful deep learning training continuously is fine to burn up
| the planet on GCP, AWS and Azure?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies.
|
| I'm a crypto-skeptic, but why would I ever hold a
| crpytocurrency in that scenario? If governments would ban it
| for environmental goals, they'll ban it for political goals,
| too.
|
| The only interesting bit is cryptocurrencies would have to
| legitimately bring something new to the table that's actually
| better than the existing financial system in order to be
| viable.
| satyrnein wrote:
| If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon. I'm skeptical of
| cryptocurrency, but the idea that regulators, already captured
| by banks, should aggressively ban new financial products that
| may one day threaten the incumbents makes me wary.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If anything the regulatory solution would be to find the ways
| in which demand for cryptocurrency exists because of failures
| in the existing financial system, and fix them so that the
| existing financial system can satisfy them. Allow bank
| accounts that work exactly like coin wallets, but rely on the
| banking system rather than PoW.
|
| An obvious example is the existence of pseudonymous digital
| payments. Given that cryptocurrency already exists, and will
| continue to exist for all _illicit_ activities even if you
| ban it, you might as well let people open numbered accounts
| at a bank.
|
| Do this for any other advantage cryptocurrency has over the
| existing banking system and there is no more demand for
| cryptocurrency. And without demand, the price crashes and
| people stop burning coal to mine it.
| Nursie wrote:
| > If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon.
|
| What if we want to decide that we want to minimise carbon,
| but some use of energy is preferable (for instance
| consumer/home use) to bootstrapping new financial products?
| chii wrote:
| > but some use of energy is preferable
|
| and that's where the price signals what is preferable. The
| correct allocation of energy should be based on the price
| people are willing to pay for the energy. Like any other
| commodity.
| Nursie wrote:
| > The correct allocation of energy should be based on the
| price people are willing to pay for the energy.
|
| Why? Why is that 'correct'? Why would we not want to
| ensure the population has affordable energy for home use,
| but others seeking to make a profit from it rather than
| use it for basic needs pay more?
|
| You phrase your reply as some sort of moral absolute, but
| it's nothing of the sort.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Why would we not want to ensure the population has
| affordable energy for home use, but others seeking to
| make a profit from it rather than use it for basic needs
| pay more?
|
| Because we already have the former and we don't need the
| latter.
|
| A carbon tax with a dividend doesn't make life harder for
| lower income people, because they already have below-
| average energy consumption (wealthier people have bigger
| houses that need more heat etc.) and as a result the
| dividend would be larger than what they pay in tax.
|
| But you still want them to have good incentives. If they
| can use the dividend to switch to solar or buy an
| electric car, you want them to do this, because that's
| the whole point.
|
| Meanwhile there is no reason to charge profit-seeking
| enterprises _more_ than the true cost of their usage,
| because all that 's doing is inhibiting economically
| productive activity. Aluminum smelting uses a tremendous
| amount of electricity, but what you want is to cause them
| to switch to non-carbon electrical generation, not to
| shut down operations.
| Nursie wrote:
| > A carbon tax with a dividend
|
| Is not what was being proposed in the free-market
| fundamentalist post I was replying to.
|
| > Meanwhile there is no reason to charge profit-seeking
| enterprises more than the true cost of their usage
|
| But there might be if it's merely "burning energy for a
| new financial product", society might decide that it's
| not worth the carbon to have that around, regardless of
| tax, but that aluminium is a useful physical product.
|
| We have differential taxes on all sorts of things, I
| don't see why they would be so wrong here.
|
| But even given all that, my comment you're replying to
| was specifically adressing the "price _should_ be the
| only indicator " assertions in the libertarian spiel
| above.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Is not what was being proposed in the free-market
| fundamentalist post I was replying to.
|
| A carbon tax with a dividend _is_ the free-market
| fundamentalist proposal. Markets require externalities to
| be priced and a dividend is the most economically
| efficient use of the revenue so generated.
|
| > But there might be if it's merely "burning energy for a
| new financial product", society might decide that it's
| not worth the carbon to have that around, regardless of
| tax, but that aluminium is a useful physical product.
|
| The way of determining which is pricing. If society
| values "new financial product" more than the cost of the
| energy, including the carbon tax, then it gets produced.
| If the carbon tax increases energy costs to the point
| that "new financial product" isn't viable in the market,
| it doesn't. Or it switches to non-carbon electrical
| generation at which point you can't blame them for
| climate change anymore and they're expediting the
| transition to renewable energy by financing the creation
| of generating capacity and increasing economies of scale.
| Nursie wrote:
| > A carbon tax with a dividend is the free-market
| fundamentalist proposal.
|
| It's specifically not the one I was replying to -
|
| "The correct allocation of energy should be based on the
| price people are willing to pay for the energy. Like any
| other commodity."
|
| > The way of determining which is pricing.
|
| It's not the only way, it's not even the only way that's
| employed right now in a lot of places, for instance we
| don't apply sales tax to items we deem 'essential' here
| in the UK, have a 5% rate for some things and 20% for
| 'luxuries'.
|
| Price is not the only mechanism available, nor is it
| always the best one.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > "The correct allocation of energy should be based on
| the price people are willing to pay for the energy. Like
| any other commodity."
|
| This is in no way inconsistent with the need to price
| externalities, which is the default assumption in free
| market theories. (Otherwise you have obvious problems
| with people dumping industrial waste into rivers etc.)
|
| > It's not the only way, it's not even the only way
| that's employed right now in a lot of places, for
| instance we don't apply sales tax to items we deem
| 'essential' here in the UK, have a 5% rate for some
| things and 20% for 'luxuries'.
|
| Just because somebody does something doesn't make it a
| good idea.
|
| Things like that have counterintuitive economic
| consequences. See what subsidized student loans do to
| education prices. Is this what we want for "essential"
| goods?
|
| If we do that, the tax rate has to be higher for
| non-"essential" goods in order to generate a given amount
| of revenue. Now you're into central planning to determine
| what's "essential" and what isn't. Is a laptop a luxury
| good? A poor person might need one. What about an
| electric car? Meanwhile every such decision of what to
| tax more is subject to lobbying and corruption.
|
| If you want to help the poor, give them money. They know
| what's "essential" to them better than the bureaucracy
| does.
| Nursie wrote:
| > This is in no way inconsistent with the need to price
| externalities, which is the default assumption in free
| market theories.
|
| There's nothing in free markets that will make this
| happen without regulation, as evidenced by the fact that
| it so far hasn't happened.
|
| > Just because somebody does something doesn't make it a
| good idea.
|
| No, but it also doesn't make it impossible or something
| which can just be dismissed. There blatantly _are_
| mechanisms that can be used other than the ones you
| mentioned. You don 't like them, that's not the same as
| them not existing.
|
| However ridiculous you want to make the results - oh my
| god now you're into planning! - this already happens in
| quite a number of pretty successful countries, so it's
| clearly not some bizarre fantasy.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| You're begging the question a bit there. I'm not at all
| convinced that the free market is the optimal method for
| allocating scarce resources, especially energy. Just look
| at how well that went in Texas earlier this year.
| GhostVII wrote:
| Subsidize certain usages of electricity then. Or pay for
| the first x units of electricity for each household.
| Nursie wrote:
| Indeed, or make it punishingly expensive for some uses,
| which is tantamount to a ban.
|
| That's the point - it's perfectly fine for a society to
| decide what energy can and can't be used for, because we
| don't live in a time when we have infinite,
| environmentally neutral power available to us.
| beowulfey wrote:
| A carbon tax would filter down to the electricity consumer
| cost. I dont know about you, but I dont want to pay more for
| electricity so other people can burn electricity for virtual
| money.
|
| Unless you are suggesting taxing crypto itself, in which
| case... sure!
| eeperson wrote:
| Consumers can make a net profit if the tax revenue is paid
| as a dividend to citizens. There are number of papers about
| this if you are interested [1].
|
| [1] - https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-
| studies/
| lifty wrote:
| Yes, because that's the negative externality, the carbon
| that you dump in the atmosphere by consuming electricty.
| Would you be willing to pay more so that videogaming is not
| banned as well, or would you ban that too?
|
| Also, you can make the tax progressive so that the high
| consumers can pay much more.
| disruptalot wrote:
| Why should anyone pay for your consumption and values when
| you aren't willing to pay for others?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't want to pay more for fancy sports cars or houses
| because other people are willing to pay higher prices for
| those things either.
| jlmorton wrote:
| As others have said, a carbon tax can be designed to refund
| either the entire amount, or a portion of the amount back
| to consumers, which might also transform it into a non-
| regressive tax.
|
| But perhaps more importantly, you wouldn't be taxed because
| others are using electricity for virtual money. You would
| be taxed because your carbon emissions are causing climate
| change, and to encourage you to reduce energy usage where
| possible.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Why is your electricity use posting on HN more virtuous
| than making Bitcoin?
| micropresident wrote:
| Crypto is already taxed.
|
| All money has a cost on society. You have to do something
| to maintain its value. You don't think wars in the middle
| east -- to maintain the petrodollar -- have an
| environmental impact?
|
| And when it isn't oil it'll be fights over germanium and
| lithium veins.
|
| If you actually cared to do more than sit in a chair --
| advocating random things you didn't research -- you'd be
| advocating for Thorium power. Thorium is nearly as abundant
| as lead -- it's all over the place -- and it's much more
| clean and less dangerous than even solar or wind.
| cedricd wrote:
| That's a common take, but a well-designed carbon tax could
| be made revenue-neutral and non-regressive.
|
| In other words, the amount it takes in can be given back to
| the average person -- in forms of tax rebates, investment
| in public transit, education, whatever. In an ideal world a
| carbon tax would have no adverse impact on lower and middle
| class people.
|
| I should also add that in that world higher electricity
| cost due to carbon tax is a good thing -- it'll help
| carbon-neutral sources of energy to compete and replace the
| more dirty forms. Which is exactly what we want.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I have nothing against carbon taxes actually would love
| to see them implemented, but I am not sure how they would
| help prevent excessive energy use due to crypto. OP was
| suggesting a carbon tax instead of direct regulation, but
| I don't quite get how it would dissuade crypto use
| without increasing electricity costs.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| If we are passing radical legislation that cuts across borders
| I'd much rather see a carbon/greenhouse gas tax.
| txsoftwaredev wrote:
| We should impose a large tax on data centers for their
| massive energy usage to power such "valuable" resources like
| Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Who the fuck is gonna determine what is valuable?
|
| A re-distributive carbon tax incentivizes efficiency,
| doesn't hit stuff like renewables and allows individuals to
| keep on choosing what they want to do with their life.
|
| Just because you don't find facebook valuable doesn't mean
| that others feel the same way.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Banning a certain kind of computation is a novel idea. Was this
| a knee jerk reaction or have you considered all the other types
| of computation that should not be allowed and why? Do we have
| an empirical understanding of the negative impacts of these
| specific kinds of computation, their general threat to
| humanity, and the negative side effects of regulation?
| anm89 wrote:
| How do you ban open source software that millions of people
| already have? It's like banning algebra or something. You can
| tell people they can't do it but you can only truly ban it to
| the extent that you can micro monitor and enforce the actions
| of every person interested in it.
|
| To me this illustrates a lack of understanding of the space.
| pamplemoose wrote:
| i'd prefer you ban cars
| GhostVII wrote:
| How about we just make people pay for their negative
| externalities, and let them do whatever they want. Tonnes of
| things people do are wasteful, no one needs a sports car
| either, but for some people it is worth paying extra for it.
| Why should it matter what I'm using my electricity for as long
| as I pay for the negative effects.
|
| If you want to encourage other uses of electricity, subsidize
| them, don't just ban arbitrary forms of consumption.
| Nursie wrote:
| > How about we just make people pay for their negative
| externalities, and let them do whatever they want.
|
| Well, for one, because that tends to mean "rich folks and
| large companies can act with impunity, everyone else not so
| much".
|
| For two, we actually do discriminate quite happily between
| different uses of things. Maybe it's OK to keep energy prices
| low for households, as a compromise, but not for crypto
| mining?
| GhostVII wrote:
| Whats the problem with rich fold acting with impunity, so
| long as they pay for what they use? If someone burns enough
| electricity to power 1000 homes, but they pay for the
| environmental impact, and are charged enough for the
| electricity to fund building more generation capacity,
| that's a net win. Giving each household some amount of free
| or subsidized power makes sense. If they want to burn that
| power crypto mining that's their decision.
| Nursie wrote:
| > If someone burns enough electricity to power 1000
| homes, but they pay for the environmental impact ...
|
| Well, firstly, are we even sure that's really possible?
|
| > Giving each household some amount of free or subsidized
| power makes sense
|
| Which is basically exactly what I was talking about - we
| can and do decide that some uses are better than others,
| and use regulation (some of which may be tax or credit)
| to achieve that.
|
| We already do this. I'm not sure why people are so aghast
| that we might do it some more for PoW cryptocurrencies.
| woeirua wrote:
| We don't need to ban PoW crypto entirely, just tax the carbon
| emissions associated with it. If miners can switch their entire
| operation to geothermal in Iceland, then why should I care?
| micropresident wrote:
| Yeah man, Government should point guns at people who don't
| comply with your ideology! Let's advocate violence against
| people because they do stuff we don't like!
| tromp wrote:
| > proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have
| cryptocurrency.
|
| It seems kind of necessary to achieve wide distribution and
| avoid wealth concentration.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We're supposed to just ban uses of energy we don't like? Why
| not a complete and total ban on electricity consumption by the
| adtech industry? Surveillance capitalism does more damage to
| society than these little coins ever will.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm sure the recent, existential hand-wringing over Bitcoin
| energy consumption has nothing at all to do with upcoming
| ethereum changes.
|
| It's all bullshit and hype -- the crypto equivalent of the
| Chick-Fil-A cows saying "eat more chicken".
| dheera wrote:
| By banning them, don't you increase their value by creating
| scarcity?
| lhorie wrote:
| I can see that this idea comes from a place of good intentions,
| but I think this is a slippery slope. With this idea, PoW
| Ethereum is banned, but PoS Ethereum is ok; how does one even
| regulate that? And what of things like Chia (proof of space,
| i.e. "let's hog hard drives")? And what about L2 solutions? And
| how much is too much? Should Ethereum 2 be banned if Nano is
| shown to be more scalable? Where does one draw the line?
|
| I think that at some point, PoW will become so economically
| unfeasible that it'll simply make more sense for miners to
| ditch those coins and whale up on PoS ones.
| hannofcart wrote:
| That's a slippery slope of an argument.
|
| If the government starts arbitrating on what is a judicious use
| of energy on environmental grounds, then you're a short step
| away from banning, say, beef production.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Forget just the environmental issues. The price of commodity
| hardware for AI research is astronomical right now (try getting
| into deep learning right now, I dare you!). Crypto is directly
| trading off with AI research and game development.
| artifact_44 wrote:
| Gary Larson: School for the gifted.
| lancemurdock wrote:
| While the energy consumption of bitcoin is debatable due to the
| unknown usage of clean, renewable energy (some reports are at
| 75%) to to secure the network and prevent bad actors, even for
| arguments sake, we can agree the energy consumption is
| extremely large. We also do not know how much energy is
| required to maintain SWIFT, or the global ACH network and other
| banking services.
|
| However, some of the biggest plagues to society are rooted in
| central banking policies that over time devalue a nations
| currency through excessive money printing backed by nothing, or
| gambling via derivatives that when a bubble pops requires
| bailouts. Even worse, where we are now is done via quantitative
| easing which is a fancy word for more money printing to buy
| government debts to keep the economy afloat. If Bitcoin or
| other cryptocurrencies can provide all the same services banks
| offer (borrowing/lending/saving) and be backed by a finite
| number ensuring value over time then we, as a society will be
| less manipulated by politics and therefore experience deflation
| which will could close wealth gaps.
|
| Bitcoin may have an energy problem but the problems it aims to
| solve are extremely important as well. "Necessity is the mother
| of invention." If Bitcoin can really solve some areas maybe the
| conversation should be about how can get 100% of BTC energy
| consumption to be renewable.
| kerng wrote:
| I agree that this is good - the world probably only needs one
| blockchain that is secured by PoW for the most fundamental use
| cases.
|
| Ethereum will drive and that is good - but it solves different
| problems compared to Bitcoin.
|
| In regards to banning PoW, sounds like the net neutrality
| discussions honestly... so to me that does not make sense for
| the same reasons.
|
| And here is the kicker, because its permissionless, it can't be
| stopped.
| chmike wrote:
| > ban trade of PoW cryptocurrencies
|
| That might cause a financial crash of the cryptocurrency
| market, with the trust issues, etc. It wouldn't be wise.
| schmorptron wrote:
| would be funny to look at the internet for a few days though
| Trias11 wrote:
| Think about it from the other side.
|
| How about continuing research and development of solutions
| providing cheaper, greener energy instead of sparking righteous
| war against something that consumes energy based on incompetent
| social media fart?
|
| The loudest voices against something are typically hypocrites
| that happily fly on their gas guzzling private jets bitching
| about people driving their oh so inefficient cars to work.
| fvdessen wrote:
| PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a
| lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes
| over / subverts / influences the limited number of
| stakeholders, then it is game over.
|
| With PoW the state can influence the existing miners, but
| cannot prevent new independent miners to pop up and counter
| act.
| CarlBeek wrote:
| There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak
| (source: https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people
| is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg.
| tens of validators which are more susceptible to state
| capture.
|
| Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of
| their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: htt
| ps://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...)
| State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is
| comparatively easy.
|
| In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that
| hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the
| large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably
| require social consensus and a hard fork
| eeegnu wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief
| overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k
| validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is
| independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is
| actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
| meowkit wrote:
| But that doesn't mean all of those validators will be in
| the same voting committee, or that any of them will be
| selected to propose a new block.
|
| Many of you in this thread need to read up on how the
| staking is designed to work.
| eeegnu wrote:
| The point is that the parent comment conflated validators
| with people, whereas one person or entity can control
| many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being
| better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim
| that an attack needs to compromise so many individual
| people rather than potentially just a few entities that
| control vast quantities of eth.
| fvdessen wrote:
| Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and
| can make laws that affect many people.
|
| With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other
| superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.
| micropresident wrote:
| Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an
| incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to
| increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these
| costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and
| electricity.
|
| And other methods introduce the possibility of stake
| grinding.
|
| _BOTH_ converge to the same energy usage as mining.
|
| OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more
| energy intensive for a given financial network value. You
| don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain
| the value of the network have an environmental impact?
| pamplemoose wrote:
| or you can fork and remove the bad actors, burning all their
| coins. good luck with their next attack. in contrast, you
| can't burn an attackers fleet of miners
| micropresident wrote:
| What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being
| done by ASICs?
|
| Slashing stake is significantly more arbitrary. You
| basically need to reset the coin's ledger in order for it
| to make any sense.
| nootropicat wrote:
| >What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is
| being done by ASICs
|
| It's only possible once, and this move is so obviously
| predictable any determined attacker is going to have gpus
| ready.
| micropresident wrote:
| Repeating "ultrasound money" memes. That specific meme
| has to do with state level attackers blowing up mining
| farms. It has nothing to do with changing issuance. And
| the entire premise is that an external force comes in and
| tries to co-opt it.
|
| That isn't relevant to the conversation of stakers having
| misaligned incentives to change the rules. The most a
| state level actor can do is censor transactions if they
| were to take over a chain.
|
| With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a
| fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers
| _run the validators_ everyone is using. You already _saw
| this_ with the steemit takeover.
|
| In PoW coins, the miners and validating economic nodes
| are two separate groups. Watch what happens when
| exchanges slip over to Eth2 nodes and call it Eth.
|
| During the BCHA/BCH split the exchanges were the ones
| that decided the ticker. Most users have ZERO CLUE about
| what happened. They went on their with their lives
| calling the fork the exchanges chose BCH. Once exchanges
| are validators there is no bulwark against changes.
| nootropicat wrote:
| >With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a
| fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers run
| the validators everyone is using.
|
| Sorry but I don't see your point here. A fork inherently
| requires action, it's enough to force a node to follow a
| different block from some height. At that point the
| attacker would get penalized for being offline. Outright
| deletion would require code modification. It's even
| possible to automate a minority fork in the case of
| censorship, although this capability doesn't exist yet.
|
| >You already saw this with the steemit takeover.
|
| Steem isn't even PoS, it's dPoS. Even in this case users
| successfully created a fork called Hive and removed
| Justin Sun's coins.
| fvdessen wrote:
| > The most a state level actor can do is censor
| transactions if they were to take over a chain.
|
| Which is the exact thing state level actors want to do !
|
| What is the use of crypto if the state can ban me or my
| country from it ? Isn't that exactly what
| decentralisation was supposed to prevent ?
| nootropicat wrote:
| The exact opposite is true. It's always possible for a state
| to obtain enough mining hardware - PoW is hopelessly
| insecure. It also has infinite economies of scale inevitably
| leading to absolute centralization even absent state attack.
| Once majority of hashrate is achieved, profits nearly double
| as minority can be censored. That's the inevitable end state
| of PoW.
|
| PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require
| buying up tokens on an impossible scale, and in the case an
| attack somehow succeeds a fork can be created that deletes
| the hostile stake. This can be repeated indefinitely. That's
| impossible in PoW more than once, once a gpu PoW gets
| attacked it's over.
|
| PoS has no economies of scale, so contrary to PoW it can stay
| decentralized forever. There's no way to make existing
| stakers unprofitable by adding more nodes, like it's possible
| with mining hardware in PoW.
|
| PoW is also vulnerable to takeover of existing miners because
| mining at scale requires big industrial warehouses with
| industrial power owned by registered companies. Impossible to
| hide. PoS can run on anonymous home nodes.
|
| In every single security and decentralization aspect PoW is
| hopelessly inferior to PoS.
| swensel wrote:
| Are there any proven PoS coins out there yet that have
| demonstrated resiliency under an attack? Honest question.
| nootropicat wrote:
| I don't know of any PoS coins that were attacked.
| Contrary to PoW, PoS is used for a very general category
| and differences between multiple versions are great. Many
| don't even have slashing making them a trust-based system
| (like Cardano) and I don't think they should be
| considered proof of stake - because without slashing
| nothing is actually at stake.
|
| Additionally except for eth all have the fundamental
| problem of extremely centralized distribution. This [1]
| extreme centralization is representative of new VC coins.
| That tiny sliver of 'Coinlist (unlocked auction) 4.3%' is
| the only part that was available to non-insiders.
|
| [1] https://icodrops.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/04/Solano-token...
| swensel wrote:
| Yes, I'd be curious what some PoS coin experts have to
| say about the centralization concern of PoS, and how
| network security and uptime is guaranteed in a PoS
| network that doesn't have slashing.
|
| I'm also wondering about the resiliency of PoS. The PoW
| used in Bitcoin has demonstrated resiliency against
| attacks, and none of the attacks have been successful so
| far, that I know of.
| nootropicat wrote:
| >The PoW used in Bitcoin has demonstrated resiliency
| against attacks
|
| Multiple PoW coins have been successfully attacked, like
| ETC. Because they are already on GPUs there's no fix -
| just hope it doesn't repeat. Those successful attacks
| prove that any attack on PoW is only a question of
| external resources (sha256 ASICs for btc).
|
| It's also surprisingly hard to profit from a 51% attack
| on pure speculation coins like btc or etc because next to
| zero actual economic activity is happening on them, which
| is why such attacks were rare and small in scope. The
| best you can actually do is to try to double spend an
| exchange. If they were actually used for real commerce
| profit becomes much easier. It could also become a
| military goal - if Iran relied on a PoW-coin for its
| economy, blocking their coins would destroy their
| economy.
|
| This is one of the reasons why ethereum absolutely must
| switch to PoS - PoW is extremely insecure for smart
| contracts because there are many more ways to profit from
| an attack, like censoring price updates for defi.
| swensel wrote:
| I'm aware of the ETC attacks. I don't think ETC can
| really be compared to BTC though. The ETC network is
| composed of the idealistic (or maybe stubborn) folks who
| didn't want to switch over to the new ETH chain after the
| DAO hack. I'm not saying ETC has no merit, but it didn't
| have the same network resilience due to the split.
|
| Seems like you know a lot about PoS, would you be willing
| to check out my other comments on this post
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=swensel)? I've
| covered some concerns / questions that I have about PoS
| that maybe you can answer in more detail.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| PoW can also fork.
|
| It's not just miners, it's also full nodes that validate.
|
| Full nodes can disagree with miners: instant fork.
|
| If say Putin would acquire 51% of mining hash rate people
| would realize (before he gets there) and would fork.
|
| My comment is not in support or against PoW, I'm just
| stating the fact that PoW isn't inherently unsafer than
| PoS.
| nootropicat wrote:
| That's only possible once - from asic PoW to a gpu/cpu
| PoW.
|
| After that, if the fork becomes popular, the attacker
| moves and attacks it again. Are people supposed to fork
| once per week? At that point it's not PoW consensus
| anymore, because the interventions move from emergency to
| normal, and you're under something else.
| fvdessen wrote:
| > PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would
| require buying up tokens on an impossible scale
|
| You don't need to buy the tokens. You make laws which the
| stakers have to follow, otherwise you seize their tokens
| for breaking the law. You can also use electronic warfare
| to steal the tokens of stakers outside your juridiction. If
| you are doing this as a big country such as USA/China, then
| other stakers might be tempted not to fork because a
| compromised system that works with those countries might
| still be more valuable than an uncompromised system that
| has not access to a large part of the world economy.
| nootropicat wrote:
| This is only enforceable against miners, not stakers.
| Stakers can trivially hide, miners can't.
|
| >otherwise you seize their tokens for breaking the law.
|
| that's not possible, there's no mechanism to seize eth.
| What can be trivially seized, though, are physical
| miners.
| hajile wrote:
| Don't forget the billionaire problem either.
|
| Proof of Stake as setup gives all the power to
| people/companies who have large amounts of liquid assets.
|
| Consider Amazon, they keep a rolling window of cash in-
| between when an item is sold and when the seller gets paid.
| This effectively gives them billions in interest-free
| capital. If this were Etherium, it would translate into huge
| amounts of voting power.
|
| Likewise, if/when people deposit their etherium into banks,
| those banks can then leverage that "free" capital to grab
| huge voting stakes that wouldn't otherwise exist (because no
| person living paycheck to paycheck has the equivalent of 100k
| sitting around).
|
| This leverage simply does not exist with proof of work.
| useful wrote:
| I'd much rather put kwh limits on proof of work. That would
| stop large farms that aren't green.
|
| Outside of ethereum, proof of stake is no different than a
| database. The ownership is so centralized that you only have
| 3-5 people/organizations approving everything.
|
| The whole point of crypto was to be decentralized, proof of
| stake is not that. Cardano, solana, they all are pointless as a
| token because the whole supply is largely owned by a few
| people.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| Who decides what is a good use of energy and what isn't?
| cactus2093 wrote:
| This certainly seems like an unnecessarily oppressive stance to
| take, all effectively at the whim of your own personal
| aesthetics.
|
| There are tons of things that people do that I might deem not
| worth the environmental impact, like flying a hundred thousand
| miles a year for business, or eating beef, or driving to work
| every day, or having bigger houses and lawns than they need.
| Seems kind of arbitrary to allow most wasteful things that
| people do but draw a line at being able to participate in a
| certain kind of blockchain. The per-person impact of holding
| and transacting with bitcoin is not egregiously high compared
| to all the other things people do in their day to day life.
|
| And based on ethereum's move here, perhaps people are starting
| to vote with their wallets anyway and such dramatic limiting
| measures aren't needed?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway
|
| Did you mean "the rich"?
| cactus2093 wrote:
| "The Big Scary Scare Quotes Rich That We Should Be Eating"?
| No, that's not exclusively who I mean.
| macacobranco wrote:
| What about ASIC resistant PoW? Should it be banned too?
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| The economic and monetary risks of deflationary coins are
| potentially much greater than the environmental risks imo (Even
| Douglas Adams tried to warn us:
| https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html ).
|
| You don't necessarily need to ban the coins to fix this aspect
| however, just make sure they don't get integrated in the
| financial system too much. They're basically digital gold. Gold
| was ok until central banks tried to anchor to it which caused
| the Great Depression and maybe even WWII.
| generalizations wrote:
| This just sounds like an excuse to ban something that
| governments (read: the US) are trying to bring under control.
|
| First it was 'but criminals use it'. Now it's 'think of the
| environment'. What's the next excuse going to be?
| rmtech wrote:
| Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are in the process of banning
| themselves.
|
| All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders, and proof-
| of-stake is just more financially attractive.
|
| No government intervention is required IMO.
| capableweb wrote:
| > All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders
|
| Could you explain me what energy is "wasted" in Proof-of-Work
| and also how the people currently holding the cryptocurrency
| is paying for that "waste"?
|
| AFAIK, the same number of blocks are made no matter how many
| transactions are being made or how many holders there are (or
| how much each holder "holds"), so the energy consumption of
| Bitcoin remains more or less the same during an hour, only
| slowly rising as more miners get on-boarded. But the energy
| consumption of those brought online remains the same over the
| lifetime of the miner instance itself.
| DickingAround wrote:
| As a technical person, I think we should be a little more
| careful than to _ban_ a technology because there 's a
| _proposal_ for a newer tech that could work (knowing if it
| works is harder than a posting on a website saying it 's going
| great in beta). Crypto at all is risky and the tech is
| uncertain. Seems pretty extreme to get the guns involved on the
| premise someone somewhere can do it better.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not
| right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook
| or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the
| arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
|
| If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all
| use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who
| use too much?
| takeda wrote:
| > So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not
| right, but burning electricity on running servers for
| Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case,
| who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
|
| Yep, I hate to say it, but even FB is more useful compared to
| BTC. No one uses BTC for actual payment but to hold a value.
| People holding BTC could just switch to MtG cards and saved
| tons of energy without losing any benefits that they are
| currently using.
| austincheney wrote:
| > who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use
| case?
|
| Congress, courts, Department of Energy.
| grogenaut wrote:
| We have such a system for appliances already, energy star.
| And we do restrict the manuf and sale of appliances that
| can't meet those goals. Same for cars.
| schmorptron wrote:
| The arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case is the
| fact that proof of work systems are literally _designed_ to
| waste resources / power.
| baby wrote:
| Yes. The latter has value whereas the former is just dumb as
| green cryptocurrencies exist.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every
| way -- be it be providing a captive audience for
| authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for
| surveillance states to collect and build models to control
| humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and
| implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.
| oefrha wrote:
| Last time I checked, Facebook isn't designed to adjust its
| computational difficulty in order to suck up as much energy
| thrown at it as possible to do the same (pitiful) amount of
| work.
| gideon13 wrote:
| I think the correct comparison is against the Bloomberg
| Terminal, through which the vast majority of capital flows
| responsible for environmental damage, occur. Not only does
| the terminal itself use a vast amount of power with its
| humongous do-it-all servers and 8-screen users, but the
| facilitated capital flows, commodity trading, speculation,
| are probably responsible for 2-3 orders of magnitude more
| environmental damage than proof of work.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Yes, what about _that_ other thing? Look over there! Is there
| literally any response that isn 't this mere Whataboutism?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Not everything is "Whataboutism". The parent poster wants
| to know how we should treat various uses of energy in the
| context of calls for the outright banning of specific uses.
| How can you expect them to talk about that topic without
| talking about the various uses of energy that currently
| exist?
| agloeregrets wrote:
| > If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much"
| power for a use case?
|
| "If there is a clear and obvious better with minimal impact."
| It's just that simple.
|
| We make choices like this all the time. Here in the US we set
| CARB rules to slow emissions but we don't just ban old cars
| even though that would be better for the environment. Grey is
| okay in laws if the black and white bit behind it is clear!
| (Reduce emissions if possible with least possible impact on
| people.) Otherwise you will never be able to improve anything
| until the harmful methods have grown too much.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Crypto is currently the only viable reason to overbuild
| renewables so we can expand their capacity faster than the
| battery technology allows us.
|
| Just tax the carbon sources and ban building new coal power
| plants or reactivating defunct ones.
|
| Instead of downvoting please give me one other example why
| would rational market entity build more renewables than to
| satisfy demand when production peeks. Because to go full
| renewables without batteries (and we barely have any when
| compared to our renewables) we need to always meet the demand
| even when renewable energy production is the lowest. And what
| should rational market entity do with the power at all other
| times where production is far higher than demand?
|
| Because "mine cryptocurrencies with it" seems like the only
| reasonalble answer in the world where cryptocurrencies exist
| and people with too much money buy them enthusiastically.
| iabacu wrote:
| It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make
| renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological
| toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting
| downvoted.
| hannob wrote:
| The arbiter is "if you build something that is build to be as
| inefficient as possible by design that's forbidden". I can't
| think of anything other than PoW that matches this.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Burning gasoline to drive somewhere is fine, but (at least in
| my city) sitting parked with your engine running incurs a
| fine.
|
| Fundamentally it's become too big a waste to ignore, like so
| many other things. We banned incandescent bulbs, we can ban
| proof-of-waste, which is basically an incandescent bulb that
| never illuminates anything.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I keep
| waiting for Google's Chrome team to add an energy rating icon
| to the browser that gives you a rough feel for how energy
| intensive a given page is.
|
| At some point the shaming would begin, web devs would
| respond, and then I'd generally get what I'm really after --
| much faster page load times!
| [deleted]
| Aunche wrote:
| The difference is that Facebook is actually using electricity
| to provide services that somebody wants. It's just that you
| happen to disagree with the value of this service. Meanwhile,
| Bitcoin uses a country's worth of electricity just to provide
| a tiny amount of accounting.
| 8note wrote:
| Burning energy to prove that you burned energy is not right.
| You can run cryptocurrency without requiring proof that
| burned electricity.
|
| You don't need to worry about how much electricity was
| burned, only that it wasn't done in exchange for a plaque
| saying "I filled a swimming pool with gasoline, then lit it
| on fire"
| quonn wrote:
| The government can simply pass a law. There are far bigger
| injustices. Why do I pay taxes and Facebook doesn't?
| bwb wrote:
| FB pays insane amounts of taxes. Employment taxes, property
| taxes, etc. Not to mention taxes on any profits.
| quonn wrote:
| As a percentage of their profit? Let me check. Around
| here small businesses pay around 30%, individuals can pay
| up to 45%. I doubt Facebook pays that.
|
| The tax avoidance schemes in Europe are well documented
| for all tech companies.
|
| And what do you mean by employment taxes? Just the
| employers part of the income tax?
| bwb wrote:
| Why would a company pay the same tax rate as a person? A
| company pays a tax rate of x% because that income is also
| taxed when they distribute it to individuals. Thus we've
| built a system that incentivizes them to invest it back
| in the company (doesn't always work - but that was the
| intent).
|
| So 21% + 15% to 20% capex on individuals = a tax rate
| around the same.
|
| Now, if you really want to look at the big picture, look
| at a company's tax rate of 21% on profits, but they also
| pay taxes on employees of ~21% of salary in the USA not
| to mention health care (which in europe would be included
| as taxes so maybe in Europe 46% to 50%). So if payroll is
| 40% of your costs that is another 8.4% of taxes added in
| there. And, you can probably add health care as a tax as
| well.
|
| Legal tax avoidance is legal. I hate when people bitch
| about companies doing legal maneuvers. It is very easy to
| stop that, apply a tax on gross receipts for all income
| created in the country.
|
| Washington State does that for example if you have a
| company operating in their state.
| memming wrote:
| We gotta optimize the bottleneck (and future bottlenecks).
| helmholtz wrote:
| Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants
| where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking
| edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child
| comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable,
| wearisome and _boring_. It always follows the same pattern
| too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the
| truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every
| fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. I think the
| HN audience wears Being Anal as a kind of badge of honour.
|
| To paraphrase Alan Watts slightly, do you know of a law that
| set everything to right? Let's just all sit around twiddling
| our thumbs eh? Since you obviously didn't really offer a
| _counter_ solution.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't know if that was their intent, but I would actually
| like a good answer to your parent's question to have a
| strong argument for backing OP's proposition, which I'd
| like to happen.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| A more apt comparison might be burning fuel to mine copper,
| nickel and zinc out of the ground for coinage.
| kd0amg wrote:
| That comparison would fit even better if we acquired
| Cu/Ni/Zn at the same rate no matter how much energy we
| spent on mining it.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at
| total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an
| indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually
| caring about the environment. Compare it to say,
| eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is
| the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would
| be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal?
| My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic
| straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real
| solution.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real
| solution.
|
| modern politics in a nutshell
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on
| Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens
| that replacing every single car in the world with a
| totally different energy system is a way harder problem
| than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning
| energy to fuel equity bubbles.
| shawnz wrote:
| Only if you just consider how hard it is to ban, not how
| hard it is to replace while achieving the same utility.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| So instead of dolvibg the hard problem well focus on
| something easy and useless. SV moto in a nutshell
| kaesar14 wrote:
| You may have heard of this company Tesla based in Silicon
| Valley, one of the largest companies by market cap in the
| world, just led an electric car revolution that's
| inspired automakers worldwide to shift off IC engines
| joshuamorton wrote:
| No, it's addressing the low hanging fruit first. An
| efficient approach to solving a problem.
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| Why? Because that's what I bet most people come to HN for.
| I'd rather find out that my idea is impractical or plain
| stupid on a HN thread than in some other and expensive way.
| setum wrote:
| It violates principle of equality to target only one
| wnevets wrote:
| > Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up.
|
| unless of course those regulations are about regulating
| "big tech" for "censorship".
| panarky wrote:
| _" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith."_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of
| those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care
| less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by
| other endeavors.
|
| It's like an uncle of mine who is outraged that mosques get
| tax exemptions, but he doesn't care that churches get tax
| exemptions.
|
| Clearly tax policy isn't a genuine concern for him. He's
| angry about something else that he won't say out loud.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of
| those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't
| care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated
| by other endeavors.
|
| I don't think that's correct. I think that it's possible
| to care about both, _but_ to be dismissive of
| misdirecting subject changes, i.e. "whataboutism".
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I wish there was a better name for an "order of magnitude
| fallacy" (but given Roman numerals I can understand why
| they probably didn't have a fun Latin name for an order
| of magnitude problem), because we seem to be seeing them
| all the time right now.
|
| Industrial production of greenhouse gases is nearly an
| order of magnitude larger than consumer production, but
| often inordinately the "guilt" burden is pushed to the
| consumers: Do you have an EV? Have you changed all your
| light bulbs to more efficient LEDs? Are you Vegan enough?
|
| Here too: Bitcoin alone has risen to an order (or three)
| of magnitude more energy consumption than Facebook could
| ever use/do ever use to track people. (Cumulative, the
| rest of cryptocurrencies only further dwarf Facebook's
| comparative energy costs.) We can be angry about two
| things, we can be angry at both, _but_ why can 't we
| discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the
| weeds of all the smaller problems?
|
| (And of course, the two order of magnitude problems above
| are inextricably linked: Bitcoin is on track to make many
| industrial users of electricity look like chumps and
| dwarf them by an order of magnitude. Nearly all of the
| consumer-side gains from veganism, LED lightbulbs, EVs
| has been offset again, if not entirely dwarfed, by
| cryptocurrency mining.)
|
| People are bad at reasoning things at large enough
| scales, have a hard time gut understanding order of
| magnitude problems, so the fallacies keep creeping up,
| and keep getting weaponized by bad agents (the consumer
| "green guilt", the consumer "recycling guilt", so many
| other "demand-side fallacies" that if consumers just
| bought "smarter", problems would just go away, when
| really it's the suppliers that are in control).
| cwkoss wrote:
| What is a fair method for determining the amount of
| acceptable energy for a cryptocurrency or a social
| network to use?
|
| It seems like you implicitly draw the 'fair' line between
| FB and BTC.
|
| BTC's market cap is roughly equal to Facebooks. If a POW
| coin used facebook levels of energy at the same value,
| would you find that acceptable?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| _I 'm_ not setting any line here. I'm saying that we
| _could_ worry about the big problem first without
| immediately deciding where any "line" needs to be drawn.
| I'm saying it doesn't matter which side of the "line"
| Facebook falls on because we could start with the biggest
| problems first, then circle back to Facebook when it's
| top of the list (not a whopping log_10 of at least 2 (!)
| difference from the current worst offenders, such as
| BTC).
| beaner wrote:
| > why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without
| getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?
|
| People seem to be intentionally conflating some things. A
| carbon tax is nice precisely because it avoids getting
| into weeds and is a general approach that applies equally
| to everything. Some people are proposing this and others
| are saying "don't get caught up in the weeds." What?
| Makes no sense. It just reinforces the poster's point:
| that some people's real motivation doesn't seem to be
| environmental, there's a strange focus on crypto
| specifically that makes it seem like they want it to be
| reigned in for other reasons.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| General solutions are great, but when there's a
| noticeable log_10 distinction between two examples given,
| why _can 't_ we start at dealing with specific solutions
| to the biggest problem first and worry about the general
| approach later? It's a 99%/1% problem: we'd potentially
| get a huge savings if we dealt with the 99% of cases
| first and worried about the 1% later.
|
| The raw statistics already tell a story that the
| difference between "BTC" and "Facebook" is _greatly
| exponential_. Wanting to focus first on the (much) bigger
| exponent isn 't necessarily a sign that people's real
| motivation is "conspiratorial" against crypto.
| beaner wrote:
| Because an outright ban is misguided anyway. PoW systems
| incentivize renewable R&D and investment. If you just
| straight-up make it illegal, you kill a major driving
| force of change for the better. If you restrict carbon
| output instead, you just further challenge the industry
| to find a way to work inside those bounds, allowing
| creativity and positive externalities to continue to
| develop.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There was an article just the other day of a coal plant
| that was entirely restarted for PoW coin mining. PoW
| systems are _not_ proven to incentivize renewable energy
| R &D and investment. There's no proven link there.
| There's no proof that a PoW coin ban would "kill a major
| driving force of change for the better". Sure, a
| restriction on carbon output _would_ be such a driving
| force, but there is no such restriction today and it is
| wishful thinking to believe that PoW miners are following
| anything like one in a market where such externalities
| continue to be unregulated.
|
| It is orthogonal to the issue at hand that PoW is using
| _far too much energy per transaction /per capita/per
| GDP/per most metrics you want to point to_. Not using the
| energy in the first place is always going to be greener,
| no matter how much PoW systems invest in renewables and
| their R&D! I can't see that as "misguided". An outright
| ban would get immediate results versus a carbon output
| tax would incentivize eventual results, _maybe_. That 's
| not misguided, that's just a different perspective, and a
| different preference on an ideal time window to address
| the situation versus wishful thinking and "golly gee,
| sure hope the market eventually figures it out someday".
| josh2600 wrote:
| https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
| << This is the seminal essay on this subject, IMHO.
| 8note wrote:
| The argument stands for itself. If your uncle gave a good
| argument against tax exemptions, it's a good argument for
| tax exemptions. Just pretend somebody else gave it that
| doesn't have the same alterior motive.
|
| Attacking the motive or whatever is not said out loud is
| responding to a weaker interpretation
| Nursie wrote:
| > Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of
| those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't
| care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated
| by other endeavors.
|
| Have you observed this, or are you simply speculating?
| bigbob2 wrote:
| Was thinking the same thing... There's no evidence I can
| see to suggest the parent is not also against other forms
| of excessive energy consumption.
| Karunamon wrote:
| There's a hidden subjective value judgment built into the
| word "excessive" that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting
| here. These "regulation" comments tend to have a high
| likelihood of boiling down "I want the government to stop
| things I don't like", where environmental concerns
| (crypto) or data collection (adtech) is a mere pretense
| grounded in incomplete information at best, emotion at
| worst.
|
| Personally speaking I find it just as irritating of a
| pattern here that knee-jerk calls for "regulation" (i.e.
| bring in the coercive power of the state) or outright
| banning are so often floated as a/the solution to every
| problem. When legal coercion is suggested, it is entirely
| proper to bring up the existence of the dragons that lay
| down that road.
| Nursie wrote:
| I want the government to look seriously at things that
| are using the energy footprint of a mid-sized country
| simply to spin up a new financial instrument.
| Particularly when there appear to be equivalent things
| that don't.
|
| If cryptocurrencies didn't have the energy footprint, I
| would find them pretty uninteresting and/or ridiculous
| for various reasons, but ultimately it wouldn't bother me
| that people do what they do with them. When they start
| adding seriously to the global energy load in a time of
| climate crisis that makes them pretty offensive.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| So you answered his complaint about the use of "slippery
| slope fallacy" by deploying the "whatabout" fallacy and
| created a strawman.
|
| Nicely done, nicely done.
| helmholtz wrote:
| Fair enough. I love this orange website, but I also
| despise it. Flying off the handle is rarely a sensible
| solution.
|
| To your point, though, I'm willing to wager that most of
| the people whose biggest problem with crypto is energy
| consumption would happily also support other harsh
| measures against all manner of pollution generating
| entities. I know I would.
| admax88q wrote:
| A pollution tax is really the only viable solution
| though. Playing whack a mole against individual entities
| and activities will never solve the problem, and creates
| a lot of legislation.
|
| So long as pollution and carbon are free or cheap, people
| will find wasteful ways to generate it.
|
| Incentives work, and taxing carbon and pollution will
| incentive green alternatives.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| In the specific case of proof-of-work cryptocurrency, I
| don't think a carbon tax is directly useful: If it's
| unilateral then mining trivially shifts across borders;
| if it's global then it's an inflationary pressure on the
| coin price which offsets the reduction in mining you
| might otherwise expect.
| lancemurdock wrote:
| a pollution tax will not work. That just becomes the
| price of doing business and that cost is factored into
| other areas of the business model. Even worse, it just
| gives more capital to inefficient governments
| chalst wrote:
| I have a few disagreements with the MMT crowd, but on
| this one point they are transparently correct: the exact
| level of taxation has little relationship to government
| ability to spend. Talk of "giving more capital" to
| governments shows a deep misunderstanding about the
| nature of fiscal constraints.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| > other areas of the business model
|
| And what are those? District heating?
| admax88q wrote:
| It becomes the cost of doing dirty business.
|
| Solar is taking off not because we banned coal, but
| because it's cheaper than coal. If coal and natural gas
| were taxed according to their carbon output, solar would
| be even more ahead, nuclear may become more attractive as
| well.
|
| Aluminum is heavily recycled not because it's green, but
| because it's significantly cheaper than mining new.
|
| Incentives work. The free market responds to incentives,
| and works around regulations.
| hllooo wrote:
| > That just becomes the price of doing business and that
| cost is factored into other areas of the business model.
|
| Yah that's the point and business with less environmental
| impact will be more competitive. Industries/products with
| more of an impact will be more expensive, reflecting
| their true cost.
|
| > Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient
| governments
|
| Most pollution/carbon taxes are proposed to be revenue
| neutral, i.e. all the proceeds are returned to the tax
| base. This is also important because like other (non-
| luxury) consumption taxes, a carbon tax is regressive.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Are there any estimates of how much power crypto mining
| has consumed and how much running all of the
| Facebook/Instagram/whatever servers has consumed?
|
| Best i found for Bitcoin was 40-100 TWh per year:
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
|
| And for Facebook it appeared that they used 5140 GWh in
| 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-
| use-of-fac...
|
| So essentially: Entity Consumption
| (GWh) Facebook 5 140 Bitcoin 40 000 - 100
| 000
|
| I wouldn't have expected Facebook to consume
| comparatively so little energy, if i'm doing conversions
| right.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| Moral arguments (ones that offer only _should_ and _should
| not_ with some supporting evidence but no actual solution)
| are going to be dismissed more regularly because while they
| may offer perspective, they offer very little value beyond
| that. That makes them fairly non-actionable.
|
| Choose an argument which requires you to offer a viable and
| compatible alternative and you'll probably get a lot more
| ears.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| This is not an edge case at all. Who is to decide on what
| to spend energy or not? This is curing the symptoms only.
|
| The (counter) solution is not to discuss for what to burn
| coal, but to finally stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA
| and EU could do that within a few years. And then stop or
| tax imports from countries that still do burn coal.
|
| But that is inconvenient for many, so they prefer
| discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead.
| layla5alive wrote:
| You do realize that while sunlight and wind are
| renewable, lithium-ion batteries are not, right? Nor are
| solar panels. Cadmium and lithium are highly toxic
| materials we must mine, just like coal. They have the
| benefit of not directly adding CO2 to the atmosphere as
| you use them -- but they come with their own set of
| issues. There is no free lunch. POW is Proof of Waste,
| and we shouldn't be blithely wasting any of these non-
| renewables.
| merpnderp wrote:
| If you think the US and EU could completely stop burning
| coal, oil, and gas in a few years (less than 10?), you
| must know something no one else knows, or this plan
| involves a lot of dead people. But I'd love to hear more
| about it.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| > so they prefer discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead
|
| Why not both?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA and EU could do
| that within a few years.
|
| Is there a concrete plan for how this would work
| documented somewhere? The ways I can think of doing this
| in the USA are all politically nonviable.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Electricity produced in France by coal + gas + oil is
| around 8% (vs. 70% nuclear, 10% hydro, the rest is wind +
| solar + bio-energy). It took more than "a few years" to
| build, though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "politically nonviable"
|
| Which makes it a self-inflicted injury. Like corruotion
| in Russia - it can't be adressed by anyone else.
| [deleted]
| emptyfile wrote:
| Agree. Wasting energy on bitcoin isn't the problem,
| energy production causing earth to heat up is the
| problem.
|
| I can think of many things equally or similarly energy
| wasteful as Bitcoin.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| What things are similarly energy wasteful as Bitcoin?
| [deleted]
| SerLava wrote:
| What is something more wasteful than Bitcoin?
|
| It's a nondescript pollution factory from the Captain
| Planet cartoons.
|
| Every other wasteful activity has just been
| overconsumptive, decadent, or externalized, not an actual
| burning of resources for no reason.
| damon_c wrote:
| Yes. The weird thing about bitcoin is that at least
| mining it doesn't create additional waste products.
|
| If you spent the same energy used to mine bitcoin on
| producing Legos or In-N-Out burgers, then you'd have much
| bigger problems.
|
| I
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Like lawns. We seriously use way too much water,
| chemicals, energy and time on a plant crop that is
| basically only for our visual enjoyment. We often think
| of the big fixes, which are needed, where there are some
| low hanging fruit we could pick first that would make an
| impact.
|
| https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/06/04/the-problem-
| of-...
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-
| practic...
| helmholtz wrote:
| I mean, thank you for offering the alternative solution!
| I couldn't agree more that not burning coal is the only
| ultimate solution. A severe, possibly overly severe,
| Carbon tax is maybe the way. But as the great Stephen
| Schneider once quoted some other great, "Don't let the
| perfect get in the way of the good". And he was talking
| about cap and trade vs carbon tax!
| insert_coin wrote:
| The real reason is twofold, first and more importantly,
| because you don't know the unintended consequences of
| proposing something like that. Who knows what else would
| get caught between the regulatory framework needed to
| prevent someone from doing math, because let's face it,
| that is impossible so unintended consequences will be the
| only consequences.
|
| And secondly and most importantly, the government should
| not decide what products are allowed to be traded:
| Governments should lift all bans on products currently
| banned, all drugs, all books, all music, all banned
| clothing, etc.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think it's useful to spin up nuclear reactors to
| run Bitcoin PoW either.
|
| All energy production will have an environmental cost,
| not just carbon dioxide emitting ones.
| shawnz wrote:
| It's not a counter-solution, it is a suggestion that the
| problem isn't really a problem. PoW power usage is high in
| an absolute sense but lower than many other things which
| people would consider an obvious waste. So why does PoW
| power usage have so much contention compared to those other
| things? I would say because there's too much baggage/hype
| associated with cryptocurrencies, not because there's a
| genuine belief that increasing the energy usage of our
| species is a universally bad thing.
|
| As for the carbon side of the issue, that isn't something
| which is specific to cryptocurrencies or any other kind of
| energy usage. I support carbon taxes and import taxes on
| CO2-producing goods/services, including cryptocurrency
| services, and I am certain that many cryptocurrency
| believers feel the same way.
| mc32 wrote:
| So if ready alternatives didn't exist, sure PoW is
| wasteful but has no alternative... but we have an
| alternative. If there were alternatives to running a
| social media platform that didn't spend energy we should
| also back that option.
| shawnz wrote:
| Assuming you are talking about PoS systems, I think they
| are very promising but it's still not obvious that they
| can achieve the same risk profile as PoW systems. I think
| they are worthy of further research and I am excited to
| see how Eth 2.0 works in practice, but I don't think we
| understand the economic nature of cryptocurrencies well
| enough to definitively say that it can completely replace
| Bitcoin.
| micropresident wrote:
| There is a counter solution to advocating for regulation.
| It's to create an economic system where people are
| naturally incentivized to do what's best. Vote with your
| wallet. You don't want energy that produced Co2? Don't buy
| it and advocate for others not to buy it.
|
| Instead what people are doing is advocating for the
| government to come and point guns at people who don't do
| what _they_ want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And
| when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as
| is currently extremely apparent in California. There are
| all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the
| severe homelessness and extreme government waste.
|
| The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom
| of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when
| regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what
| is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory
| capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving
| people to their own devices.
|
| Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of
| beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing
| out.
|
| https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BA65/production
| /...
| bjt wrote:
| "Vote with your wallet" depends on several micro-economic
| assumption holding true, that don't hold true here.
|
| One of those is the assumption of perfect competition.
| Electricity is far, far from being a market with perfect
| competition. How many electricity providers are you able
| to choose from at your house? I'm going to guess 1.
|
| Another assumption that doesn't hold here is the absence
| of externalities. The full cost of damage to the
| environment is not included in the price you pay for
| electricity, so people are going to over-consume it.
|
| You rail against laws and regulations but even in the
| second sentence of your post you assume their necessity
| with the phrase "create an economic system..." Laws and
| regulations are how you create such systems.
|
| Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's not a good
| argument against all regulation. Maybe it's an argument
| for relatively less regulation than we'd have otherwise.
| It's also an argument for doing regulation better.
| Nursie wrote:
| This is not a solution in a world in which we have
| catastrophic global climate instability on the horizon.
|
| Sorry, sometimes there are great reasons for regulation.
| micropresident wrote:
| Those regulations are going to create as much cost on
| humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.
|
| Fixing the problem is up to _you._
|
| ~"The reason things things never change is that those who
| stand to lose by change are the ones who hold all the
| power" -- Machiavelli
| Nursie wrote:
| > Those regulations are going to create as much cost on
| humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.
|
| Humans optimise for short term gain, generally perceived
| gain over others, and rationalise this over large
| nebulous things like climate change, environmental health
| etc. They don't count externalities without being made
| to. And that's individuals. Companies are downright
| sociopathic and will happily defecate in their own back
| yard if they can make a dime out of it.
|
| As a result we can already see what happens when people
| are left to choose themselves or the environment, they
| choose their own short term relative gain over the long
| term prospects of the whole species (before we even look
| at other species).
|
| > Fixing the problem is up to you.
|
| Yes, in a democracy it is, which is why I vote for
| political parties which will bring in regulations.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Fixing the problem is up to you."
|
| Huh? Great newa! I can pollute and create oilspills and
| its all someone else's problem!
| ForHackernews wrote:
| This idea doesn't apply at all for stupid speculative
| bubbles like proof-of-work crypocurrency.
|
| As another good counterexample to your "market solutions
| for everything": I don't want rhinos driven to
| extinction, so I vote with my wallet by never buying
| powdered rhino horn or other poached products, and
| donating to environmental charities to protect them.
| However, it's very likely that rhinos will be extinct in
| the wild within our lifetime. Does this mean "the market"
| has decided to exterminate wild rhinos? Should we
| eliminate poaching regulations and remove red-tape to
| stop distorting the free-market price of rhino horn?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Rhinos are heritage of mankind abd are woth countless
| trilions to future generations. Just like forests and
| climate.
|
| Current 'free market' is just fancy name for barbaric
| ransaking
| micropresident wrote:
| Create your own nature reserve for rhinos if you think
| it's so important. There are huge swaths of the US
| dedicated to nature reserves.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Infact create your own planet with its own climate if you
| think it's so importsnt
| acituan wrote:
| > must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out
| by the immediate first child comment about failing to do
| so.
|
| Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore
| boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when
| proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to
| _just fix things_.
|
| Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will
| need to work with _every input_ and minimize some class of
| error, be it precision or coverage or some other system
| level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a
| system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty
| of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the
| difficulty of building such a system to begin with.
|
| It is like saying "why don't we build a system that
| punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and
| popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly
| complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation
| level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive
| convictions rather than maximize conviction rates.
|
| > It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring
|
| Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their
| favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on
| those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and
| boring themselves than anything else. Many find
| intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining
| and thus those comments enjoyable.
| beaner wrote:
| The crowd of HN tends to be more philosophic. Without a
| moral / ethical / long-term practical view, we're just
| ships with torn sails floating in the waves, wandering
| about, making short-term decisions. Decisions often have
| 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order consequences that can be unpredictable
| and often counter to the goal we think we're working
| towards in the short term. It pays to think them through
| from a high level and apply long-term thinking principles.
| helmholtz wrote:
| Lol, please. The crowd on HN is just as impotent as the
| crowd on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook. But with more
| "first principles" thrown in.
| beaner wrote:
| If that's how you feel, maybe that's the vibe you're
| bringing with you.
| virmundi wrote:
| We're talking about HN. Most people here are moral
| relativists that think their feelings based worldview is
| absolute. They already are ships without a sail. How many
| have actual researched and applied a philosophy? I bet
| most here can't even find utility in Kant.
| fwsgonzo wrote:
| I agree. Having used Reddit for too long, and Facebook
| too before I deleted it completely, my experience has
| been that HN is much better at talking about things, and
| more careful about wording. Despite the predictable
| slippery slope comments, there is always some good
| commentary in most threads. I can't think of anywhere
| else to go to get discussion on a multitude of complex
| topics like this.
|
| That doesn't mean that threads on HN can't take a
| nosedive and become flame wars. But that's what good
| moderation is here for, and I believe HN has that.
| Teelo wrote:
| Just can't escape this mentality.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| While I agree with the genral thrust of your tirade, this
| is not slippery slope, this is hypocracy of the highest
| degree.
|
| OP proposal to ban cryptocurrencies for 'damaging
| environment' while we have companies who's entire business
| model is giving their customers cancer and preying on
| addicts.
| acdha wrote:
| 1. We can work on more than one thing at a time and I'd
| be quite surprised if the original poster didn't want to
| do something about those companies, too.
|
| 2. For all their many flaws, those industries also
| provide something of value. If they shut down tomorrow,
| people would miss having cars, pesticides, fuels,
| medications, etc. but if every cryptocurrency suddenly
| halted tomorrow nobody outside of a few speculators would
| find their daily life any different. That doesn't mean
| that those externalities aren't real and don't require
| action but they're widespread because there is some kind
| of real value to society and you'd need a transition plan
| to avoid disrupting a lot of processes.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If a heroin dealer is imprisoned, his customers could
| have severe withdrawal. Some might even die from it.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| I'm gonna bet OP would be happy to ban hammer the hell
| out of the companies who's entire business model is
| giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts too
| davidcbc wrote:
| This is classic whataboutism. We can't do anything to
| improve the world because there are other bad things
| happening in the world too.
| nickpp wrote:
| Because banning outright is stupid, and banning a
| technology is even stupider. Technologies have both
| benefits and drawbacks. TAX (not ban) the drawbacks.
|
| In this case, tax carbon. Then people will decide what they
| want to spend their (expensive) energy on.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I'm actually hopeful that crypto will bring about a
| carbon tax. I figure the people getting rich in crypto
| are a different set of people than those getting rich in
| traditional CO2 emitting industries. So there's a
| slightly better chance that politicians will enact the
| necessary legislation.
| belltaco wrote:
| Carbon tax will increase the prices of essentials for the
| poor and middle class.
| hllooo wrote:
| Redistribute the proceeds as a tax credit then
| fsflover wrote:
| Basic income?
| soco wrote:
| Unless they do that outside your jurisdiction and/or get
| tax cuts from the powers to be.
| syndacks wrote:
| Because HN is full of fucking leetcoders or other specially
| minded folk that sees things as black or white. If any part
| of a statement is falsifiable that statement is False (or
| so it goes) so that's why we get this kind of Malcolm
| Gladwell-level brain candy masquerading as rigor.
| XIVMagnus wrote:
| I literally LOL'd. Thank you and never stop being this way
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Because this is a website full of engineers who write
| computer software for a living? And finding and solving for
| those edge cases is literally a core function of what most
| of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time
| doing?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I'm a software engineer, and I'm probably at least in the
| 90th percentile for ability to manage (or design not to
| have) edge cases. I try not to be that pedantic when
| criticizing coworker's designs, other than perhaps
| pointing out that lots of edge cases in a design is a
| common symptom of over-complexity.
|
| On this particular topic, I particularly hate the amount
| of fossil fuels getting burned on cryptocurrency. I'm
| less concerned about the amount of energy getting
| "wasted" on data centers in general. At least in most
| cases, there's alignment of interests when it comes to
| efficiency optimization. Facebook has an incentive to
| make their servers more power efficient over time, and
| scale their capacity to the size of their customer base.
| With proof-of-work, there's also incentive to increase
| power efficiency, but also incentive to scale up to
| capacity limits.
|
| I think it is possible that proof-of-work cryptocurrency
| algorithms could be tuned to the point of striking a
| sustainable balance long term, but that would require the
| world economy to converge on one or two of them. The
| issue with that I think is the speculative nature of the
| currency's distribution of ownership. With large portions
| of the currency being held by a small number of anonymous
| people, and no clear path for the majority of normal folk
| to exchange their wealth, it's just not going to happen
| without some sort of societal collapse. I also struggle
| to have faith in a system meant to disrupt the global
| economy when its existence depends on global scale
| internet infrastructure.
| EricMausler wrote:
| To me the big gripe is not the concern for edge cases but
| the immediate dismissal of a very productive first step
| in addressing an issue by resolving the entire
| conversation before it even happens.
|
| It is very possible to bring up edge cases in a
| productive manner. Expand the conversation to include
| them. there's no need to assume the first solution idea
| posted is meant to be the final form
| emteycz wrote:
| Making this change would introduce an enormously
| impactful precedent. Politicians might take it and run
| with it to places we don't even want to imagine. I'd
| agree with you in a world without the current style of
| politics and decision making, but that's not where we
| live - and sadly alternative to that is unknown to me
| too.
| beaner wrote:
| But is it even a productive first step? There are
| arguments to be made that proof-of-work mining
| incentivizes renewable R&D.
|
| By banning that because it uses "too much" energy now -
| what are we potentially losing? What developments in
| renewables, energy storage, or grid development simply
| won't be there, which we won't know we don't have,
| because we banned the largest for-profit, skin-in-the-
| game competitive contest for low-cost energy that the
| world had ever seen 25 years prior?
|
| Banning it outright is short-sighted. Thinking about it
| from a higher level is a way of addressing the real issue
| of carbon emissions while allowing a phenomenon that has
| the potential to _massively help, not hurt_ , to thrive.
| SerLava wrote:
| Making renewables isn't actually useful if they're used
| for something we don't even need to do. We could switch
| to a low-energy crypto currency and do all the things we
| were going to do with Bitcoin.
| belltaco wrote:
| Lighting all the oil and gas in the world on fire will
| also incentivize renewables. But that's not a good
| practice for a lot of reasons including increasing the
| pollution and CO2 levels.
| Qworg wrote:
| The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply
| bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases,
| the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
|
| The issue is clearly a tragedy of the commons - the cost
| (higher air pollution/higher energy costs) is socialized,
| while the profits are centralized. So the maximization
| function is cheap >>> anything else. Why wouldn't we
| expect more and larger coal plants versus research into
| fusion reactors?
| beaner wrote:
| That's only true so long as the price continually rises.
| As soon as the price settles, everyone is operating on
| the margin and can only become more profitable by
| reducing costs.
|
| Unsubsidized renewables are already the cheapest new
| source of energy generation. [0] Even if miners wouldn't
| be doing direct renewable research themselves, their
| capital investments into renewables in the name of
| competition and cost-savings would incentivize more
| efficient technologies.
|
| In this case the immediate marginal profits from mining
| are centralized, and the larger benefits of more advanced
| renewable energy are socialized.
|
| Plus - do you believe that the price of Bitcoin will rise
| forever? If it did, wouldn't that mean to you that it
| might be doing something important, to constantly have
| growth and demand for 100 years? Cuz if I thought so then
| I'd want to preserve it, not throw it away. Sounds
| important.
|
| [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15
| /renewa...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Bitcoin isn't the only option. We've already seen that
| when the price of Bitcoin dips miners flip over to
| whatever cryptocoin seems next to bubble, seems next most
| interesting. Certainly what is called Bitcoin itself
| (today) has "hard" "deflationary" "caps", but as soon as
| miners get bored with that, there's always more room for
| more forks and other coins.
|
| Even if Bitcoin isn't intended to be "growing forever",
| the ecosystem can and will.
| craftinator wrote:
| > The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply
| bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases,
| the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
|
| Shameless hijacking here: at what point will the heat
| consumption/release rate be so great that the Earth
| becomes unable to support life? I've seen some back of
| the napkin calculations that estimate a couple hundred
| years, at our current acceleration.
| Qworg wrote:
| IIRC (it has been a few years), we only need a few
| degrees to reach a tipping point. The decay of methane
| hydrates could push out 1000 GT CO2 equivalent suddenly,
| accelerating warming by roughly ~40-50 years.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Then offer a counter solution, that you think is better
| and defend it.
|
| Don't just sit around making the same useless attacks
| against other people's arguments.
|
| Instead, offer a different proposal and explain why it is
| better.
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| CO2 tax.
| gvhst wrote:
| In my mind its not about figuring out the edge cases, its
| more about building a framework in which tradeoffs can be
| analyzed, debated, and mindfully considered before drafting
| legislation. In order to do this there might need to be a
| few conversations that some may consider pedantic.
|
| I will say that given the text based medium of HN, it can
| be hard to gauge whether one wants to have a mindful
| discussion or if one is just trying to mindlessly ding a
| poster.
| lhorie wrote:
| It's not pedantry, it's calling out issues in armchair
| proposals. "Why not regulate" and "Why not let the market
| sort itself out" are kinda intellectually lazy
| propositions: there are good regulations and bad
| regulations, and good and bad implementations.
|
| And banning isn't really a proper solution in the first
| place. It's a literal avenue for tax revenue for countries
| at this point. The fact that PoS coins like Cardano and L2
| solutions like Polygon are bullish despite the crash in
| Bitcoin shows something about investor sentiment
| surrounding the whole energy consumption ordeal. Voting
| with your wallet is a real possible solution and IMHO,
| people are starting to take the hint.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't understand why you don't find these "where do you
| draw the line?" inquiries extremely relevant to this
| conversation. It seems like everyone here has just assumed
| that Bitcoin is useless and therefore the externalities
| from its energy usage should be unacceptable. Personally
| I'm not a big fan of bitcoin's energy usage either, but it
| strikes me as bizarre to recommend banning arbitrary things
| that use energy rather than, for example, addressing the
| externality problem directly.
| helmholtz wrote:
| I wouldn't say OP recommended banning anything
| 'arbitrary'. It was very relevant to the discussion to
| state that the ban should be on proof-of-work currencies.
|
| Here's my issue. There is such a thing as too-late in
| environmental matters. Once it's too late, it's a fire
| that sustains itself. Therefore, acting quickly matters.
| Addressing the source directly is obviously the superior
| solution. But I just don't see it happening at a fast
| enough rate. I see nuclear power in the same way. Yes,
| it's a little bit of trading one problem for the next,
| but it's a very necessary stop gap to buy us time.
| kietay wrote:
| How is that an edge case? The OP said ban all POW crypto
| and the reply questions whether that is really a wise
| suggestion.
| Graffur wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Be kind. Don't be snarky.
|
| Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive.
|
| When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names.
|
| Please don't post shallow dismissals
| mpfundstein wrote:
| the thing is that 'simple' solutions are never that. and if
| you find that boring or whatever than maybe its time to
| think a bit further before making some arguments. if a case
| is so easy to dismiss, it might not be a good case after
| all.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with pointing out problems with a
| solution and not providing a counter-solution. When one
| isn't provided, it can simply mean that the offered
| solution is actually worse than the status quo.
|
| In this particular situation, I may not have the solution,
| but I know that the offered one is a short-sighted knee-
| jerk reaction which has terrible implications for other
| things
| MR4D wrote:
| > edge cases
|
| That's the first time I've ever seen someone describe
| Facebook as an "edge case".
|
| If $900,000,000,000 of market capitalization counts as an
| edge case, I'd think you must be hard to please at
| Christmas - those are some really high standards!
| OOPMan wrote:
| There is a good reason n-gate exists and endlessly mocks
| the HN comments
| helmholtz wrote:
| I love n-gate. My best guess is that it's Maciej from
| Idlewords running it :) I've seen him rant about HN on
| Twitter as well.
| lancemurdock wrote:
| just because you lack an understanding to rebuttal
| coherently doesn't render the argument useless.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| This comment isn't productive. The original comment
| suggests states act to ban wasteful energy use. The comment
| you're replying to asks "who decides?" , and gives an
| example of energy use they find particularly wasteful.
|
| You're presupposing this is a problem that needs a
| solution. I think myself and the commenter you are replying
| to would agree that either: A) it's not or B) it does not
| need to be solved by a regulatory body.
|
| Instead of getting annoyed by people pointing out edge
| cases, it would be more productive to explain what criteria
| should be used, or admit this is a half baked solution.
| declnz wrote:
| Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3!
| Unless, err, that's already happened
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Facebook used 5 TWhr in 2019 (citation: totally unverified
| top summary from google). Bitcoin alone is estimated to have
| used 110 TWhr in a year. To put that in perspective, that is
| sixfold the power output of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power
| Plant. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Produces power on the
| order of magnitude of detonating two small atomic bombs per
| day.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much"
| power for a use case?
|
| The difference is that Facebook's energy use potential is
| limited and gets better with improved computer tech.
|
| There is a limit to how much analysis you can do. As you get
| more efficient hardware, the energy use would go down.
| Facebook also invests a lot of effort in optimizing their
| code to run more efficiently.
|
| With proof of work crypto, the only limit is the price of
| crypto. Despite any efficiency gains, you can always expect
| the energy use to scale with the price of crypto. For
| example, a 10x more efficient miner, won't cause 10x less
| energy use, it may actually increase energy use as more
| people mine with higher rate electricity.
|
| There is a chance that we develop a situation that the most
| monetarily efficient thing you could do with electricity is
| to mine proof of work crypto. If that becomes the case, then
| even a carbon tax won't help because proof-of-work crypto can
| easily pay the tax compared to all the other uses of
| electricity.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| It's not about power. Well, not electrical power. It's about
| control over our currency. The argument is a trojan horse for
| an effective ban on the entire category of currencies not
| controlled by central authorities.
|
| Without Proof of work, cryptocurrency would have never been
| established as a novel concept. Proof of work was the only
| rationale way to decide who should initially own how many
| units of the currency.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Does it need to remain? At some point coins were composed
| entirely of valuable metals because that's how their value
| was determined, but we've moved on from that. Can't we move
| on from proof of work as well?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Exactly! Just because _you_ don 't think something has value
| doesn't make it so. Value is a matter for the market to
| decide.
|
| Electricity _usage_ has almost no negative externalities.
| Electricity _production_ does. Attacking people for using
| their own resources on something that _they_ find to be
| useful and worthwhile is foolish. Confront the actual
| problem, and quit harassing innocent third parties.
| okareaman wrote:
| I know something about addiction so to me Bitcoin enthusiasts
| sound like alcoholics who justify their drinking by saying
| "many people drink and doctors say a little drinking is good
| for you so lay off me." The fact that I couldn't even
| criticize Bitcoin's energy usage on HN util Elon Musk came
| out against it reinforces my opinion that it's an addiction.
| I imagine Bitcoin is a game like poker with a bluffing and
| holding strategy. Bitcoin as it is currently played has many
| addicted to it without regard to disastrous environmental
| consequences.
| adonovan wrote:
| Exactly, that's how laws work: they express value judgements.
| Installing solar on the roof? Good, the people will help you
| pay for it. Earning a fortune? Bad, the people want a piece
| of that.
|
| The laws set up the playing field, and the market responds to
| the incentives. There has never been any such thing as a
| "free" market, and it's a good thing too.
| shiado wrote:
| HN embodies this weird upper class environmentalist fascism
| where they proudly pick and choose what the plebes should be
| allowed to do with their lives based on totally logically
| inconsistent environmental reasons. The Musk thing was so
| funny for this. "No you plebes should have no recourse or
| experimentation against a fiat system it's bad for the
| environment, now don't mind me driving my Tesla around to do
| things like shop at expensive stores in my gated community or
| just kick it on the weekend doing a road trip in my TOTALLY
| ENVIRONMENTALLY NECESSARY electric vehicle that uses
| electricity from my wall socket not derived from fossil fuels
| at all which was not mined from not dubious sources whose
| environmental impact is totally not cool". I can't imagine
| where this ideology will land but I imagine the scope will
| expand greatly outside of PoW cryptocurrencies. Pretty soon
| commenters here will be scolding your for turning up your
| graphics settings in AAA games but only if you're poor and
| your house is in a dump that doesn't have a renewable grid.
| helmholtz wrote:
| Nah, you're right. Best not to do anything just in case we
| incovenience the 'plebes'. Or just in case First They Came
| For My PoW's And I Said Nothing. Then They Came For My AAA
| Games. Nevermind the burning planet, nothing should ever be
| done for the greater good if 100% logical consistency isn't
| baked into the thought.
|
| _Always the same fucking slippery slope!_
| shiado wrote:
| You just proved my point. Your comment presents the idea
| that Bitcoin is "burning the planet" and needs to be
| focused on with ZERO elaboration as to why, then you use
| an appeal to emotion invoking the undefinable term
| "greater good", then you ignore logical consistency as if
| it doesn't matter when making an argument. Absolutely
| pathetic.
| graeme wrote:
| If Statistia is to be believed, Facebook consumes 22x less
| energy than Bitcoin. 5 vs 110 Terawatt hours.
|
| And Bitcoin is hardly used for any transactions, and its
| energy usage will increase linearly with BTC price.
|
| (If someone has a direct source that would be great. Statista
| is not good)
|
| Update: seems the FB figure is correct, for 2019:
| https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/
| cm2187 wrote:
| Why does the energy moves with the price? Is it because of
| increased number of transactions?
| wcoenen wrote:
| Miners tend to increase their hashrate because that's how
| they compete for block rewards. However, the electrical
| energy a miner spends on finding blocks should not be
| more than the value of the block rewards, otherwise they
| would operate at a loss. This provides a ceiling for the
| energy expenditure.
|
| Therefore, if the price of Bitcoin doubles, miners can
| afford to burn twice as much electricity. (Roughly. This
| is a simplification of course.)
| lottin wrote:
| Why is proof of waste needed at all? What do you achieve
| by proving that you have wasted a certain amount of
| electricity?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| If one didn't need to prove they'd done _something_
| difficult, then cryptocurrency didn 't be a workable
| idea.
| lottin wrote:
| Why do they have to prove that they'd done something
| difficult? That's what I'm trying to understand.
| DennisP wrote:
| Because the chain of transactions with the most
| accumulated waste is chosen as the "correct" chain. In
| order to double-spend, you have to cause a different
| chain to be the "correct" chain, so you'll have to waste
| even more energy than has been wasted by everybody else,
| over whatever span of time you're trying to roll back.
| Thus the more waste, the more secure the chain.
|
| Proof of stake is a newer way of coming to consensus on
| one correct chain. It took people a while to figure out
| how to do it securely and efficiently.
| lottin wrote:
| Okay, so the chain of transactions that is regarded as
| correct is the one that has been more _expensive_ to
| create. Instead of wasting energy, the same result could
| be achieved by wasting other stuff, such as bitcoins
| themselves, for instance?
| DennisP wrote:
| Sure. In fact, that's almost how Ethereum's proof-of-
| stake works, except it has a protocol that comes to
| consensus without wasting anything as long as people
| follow the rules, and only destroys stake when someone
| provably breaks the rules.
| lottin wrote:
| If this is true, PoW is simply a stupid version of PoS
| and should be abandoned immediately.
| brazzy wrote:
| No, it's because competition between miners necessarily
| drives the hash rate and thus energy usage to scale up
| with the value of mining rewards and transaction fees.
| cm2187 wrote:
| But if there aren't more transaction (as number of
| transactions), what happens when the hash rate increases?
| They hash incomplete blocks of transactions? Or does the
| same block gets confirmed by a greater number of miners?
| est31 wrote:
| The second answer, although there is only one "winner" of
| each block's competition, so it's only one miner/mining
| pool which ends up confirming a transaction. It's
| controlled by a hardness parameter that's readjusted
| automatically in a regular fashion.
| mantenpanther wrote:
| But maybe Bitcoin is of 1000x(+) more value for humanity in
| the long run?
| mcdonje wrote:
| Whatever humanity is left after the climate crisis
| bitcoin is significantly contributing to.
| mantenpanther wrote:
| Bitcoin uses far less energy than the gold or banking
| industry, uses more and more renewable energy every day
| and has some significant game theory going on regarding
| renewable usage and research.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run what
| is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our
| personal data must take up an outrageous number of computer
| cycles.
|
| However, in Facebook's defense it's per-user per-
| transaction energy costs are going to be much lower than
| Bitcoin.
| vkou wrote:
| > I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run
| what is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our
| personal data must take up an outrageous number of
| computer cycles.
|
| Did Ye Olde BBS support 1:millions broadcasting, and
| real-time viewing of high-definition video? Uploading and
| viewing thousands of high-quality photos?
|
| Calling Facebook 'basically a giant BBS' is a lot like
| saying 'Oh, I could build Twitter in a weekend'.
| sharpneli wrote:
| It depends on what is counted there. It might be the
| total operations of the company. Offices, AC for offices
| and whatnot.
|
| Especially when talking about CO2 emissions absolutely
| everything is included, including plane trips and
| whatnot.
| jandrese wrote:
| Seems a bit disingenuous to compare that to just the kWh
| consumed by the ASICs that mine Bitcoin.
| donkeyd wrote:
| It definitely is. Either that, or it's incredibly short-
| sighted.
|
| That comparison ignores the actual value add of Facebook
| and the fact that people are using it. Most BTC trades
| happen off blockchain and are powered by the servers of
| the market places and nobody really knows how much energy
| they use.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If Facebook has a value add, then so do columbian drug
| lords
| sharpneli wrote:
| That's true. But in a way it just emphasizes how much
| energy Bitcoin wastes, so it's fine-ish.
| mckeed wrote:
| FB is a top video streaming platform. Also they run
| WhatsApp, which I think is the largest global telephony
| system.
| gpm wrote:
| I think the proposal here is very simple. Pass a law against
| proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the
| enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when
| it comes about by passing a law about it.
|
| Don't address of any the things that you are proposing need
| addressing, because they don't need to be addressed in the
| same law, or really addressed right now at all.
|
| The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions that
| occur in the future, we will still have a legislature in the
| future capable of addressing the future when it comes about.
| The law needs to address the actions of today.
| chii wrote:
| > Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies
|
| once again, you have merely just assumed the role of
| arbitor. What makes this opinion better than the
| opposition?
|
| What needs to be addressed isn't energy usage, but the cost
| of energy in the first place. Why isn't the fix be passing
| a law to tax carbon properly? Tax the externalities, and
| the rest would follow. I don't care if people burn up
| energy for crypto, as long as they pay for the cost
| properly.
| gpm wrote:
| > once again, you have merely just assumed the role of
| arbitor. What makes this opinion better than the
| opposition?
|
| This is literally the role of legislators. What makes
| "my" opinion better, is in the event that this sort of
| legislation passed, the majority of the elective
| representatives in both houses agree we should ban proof
| of work crytpo currencies, nothing less, nothing more.
|
| > [alternative proposal]
|
| I mean, I happen to like this proposal too, but you
| haven't given any reason not to do both...
| Aeolun wrote:
| > What makes this opinion better than the opposition?
|
| Nothing about the opinion is better than any other. But
| the only thing we have to achieve is that it is a
| majority opinion, which frankly doesn't seem all that
| hard to me.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I think OP is suggesting that a targeted ban on proof of
| work crypto will be more politically feasible --
| particularly in the US -- than a carbon tax. Even the
| state of Washington (which is _far_ more left
| /democratic/liberal than the US as a whole) failed to
| pass two different modest carbon taxes in recent years.
|
| So while carbon pricing would be a more ideal solution,
| OP is suggesting that a targeted ban on POW crypto is a
| good-enough bandaid that might actually pass.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't
| let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next
| big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law
| about it.
|
| If we won't legislate it now, it's possible we won't get a
| chance to do it later thanks to bickering from lobbyists
| and fossilised laws and practices. See IPv4.
| gpm wrote:
| You seem to be proposing that not passing a law against
| proof of work cryptocurrencies somehow makes it more
| likely that we will quickly pass a law generally "solving
| the climate issues" ... I think that is highly unlikely,
| and in fact I think the opposite direction is more
| likely, that passing a law banning PoW cryptocurrencies
| makes us more likely to pass another law which solves
| climate issues in other ways.
|
| Banning PoW cryptocurrencies is not a big enough priority
| for anyone that it will be a motivating factor to move
| past the other issues surrounding the climate debate,
| especially not anyone on the side of "don't do [thing] to
| fix the problem". I don't see any other mechanism by
| which it makes passing other climate legislation harder.
|
| Banning PoW cryptocurrencies removes money that is
| currently on the side of "don't pass climate legislation
| because it will harm my PoW cryptocurrency business" from
| the table. That makes passing future legislation easier.
|
| In general, trying to solve all the worlds problems at
| once doesn't work. It's too complex, you paralyze the
| decision making body with too many tradeoffs. When
| something is obviously bad, banning it immediately not
| only has the effect of meaning it's gone immediately (and
| doesn't hang around until you solve the whole problem),
| but it simplifies the remaining problem for the decision
| making body. This makes them more likely to come to a
| consensus on exactly what to do in a finite amount of
| time.
| jude- wrote:
| > Banning PoW cryptocurrencies removes money that is
| currently on the side of "don't pass climate legislation
| because it will harm my PoW cryptocurrency business" from
| the table. That makes passing future legislation easier.
|
| Does it? And, do you have data that backs this up? It
| stands to reason to me that PoW miners only want cheap
| power; they don't really care too much how it gets
| generated. Considering that the cheapest power source you
| can build out today is green energy, it sounds like a
| win-win to me for them to put their money into "advocate
| for more cheap power."
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions
| that occur in the future
|
| But that's exactly what the law should do...
| jedimastert wrote:
| > don't let perfect be the enemy of good
|
| I don't think this applies to laws. In fact, I'd claim the
| opposite. Laws are something you REALLY want to get right
| bidirectional wrote:
| It applies to laws in the sense being discussed here. Ban
| X which is really bad while not banning Y which is
| totally unrelated but happens to be bad in the same way.
| Why does that need to be perfectly right?
| beaner wrote:
| You answered literally nothing that the person you're
| responding to asked.
| Garlef wrote:
| You are right.
|
| Instead, they explained why these questions are
| (partially) misguided.
|
| That's also an answer.
| beaner wrote:
| They didn't do that either. It reads more like avoidance.
| The semblance of an answer by posting anything, rather
| than a plain, direct response. Which gives the original
| questions more weight: why were they not able to be
| responded to directly? Are the questions potent? Your
| reply here is just shifty on shifty.
| stale2002 wrote:
| You really don't understand the problem with asking
| questions like "well who decides?!?" To literally every
| proposal of legislation ever?
|
| Because that is what always happens. Every time someone
| make s a general proposal, for any law at all, there are
| people making the same old, dumb argument, of "well who
| decides?!?" Every single time.
|
| Sure you do not believe that all laws ever are wrong,
| right?
|
| Because the answer to this dumb question is the same as
| for every law ever. That makes it valid, unless you
| believe that all laws ever are bad.
| beaner wrote:
| I don't understand. We clearly have general laws like
| "don't shoot people," rather than 320 million individual
| laws like "John Edmund Smith IV of Springfield, Ohio
| cannot shoot people." And we didn't start with laws
| targeting individuals and then broaden it later. "Don't
| shoot people" was the proper, general rule that addresses
| the problem of shootings. Laws like this seem to be
| pretty effective and desirable. I don't know why we
| wouldn't take the same approach with something like
| carbon emissions.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > And we didn't start with laws targeting
|
| There are absolutely many laws, that are very targeted
| and specific. Were you unaware of this?
|
| For a random example, there are laws that probably say
| something like "A truck, of this size, must follow these
| specific environmental regulations".
|
| That would be a specific law, that applies to a truck,
| and required it to do a specific thing, like have a
| certain mileage efficiency, and it is not general. It is
| pretty specific, and it is not a general law that applies
| to all environmental related things.
|
| The world is full of many specific laws, all over the
| place.
| mcdonje wrote:
| They answered it. The person they were responding to was
| trying to broaden the scope too much. Many laws purposely
| have narrow scopes in order to handle problems that arise
| without setting too much precedent.
| beaner wrote:
| They did not answer it. "Broaden the scope too much" -
| why? The question seems completely appropriate if you're
| actually trying to solve the climate problem. The
| response didn't address this, it targets crypto
| specifically, which makes it seem like the motivations
| are not climate but something else.
|
| The question was about how to choose who is using too
| much and how, and the response was basically "don't think
| about it, we will exist in the future and can think about
| it then." But we exist now. And even if we were to wait,
| it's still a question we can answer now to have enacted
| later. The response provided was a bypass, a non-answer.
| bko wrote:
| > The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions
| that occur in the future
|
| That's an incredibly dangerous idea.
| hjek wrote:
| Bitcoin is an incredibly dangerous idea because of its
| contributions to the climate crisis.
| nickpp wrote:
| Would you like to ban all that contributes to the climate
| crisis then? How about ice cream? Or flying to a vacation
| spot? Or having kids?
| hjek wrote:
| Now "the antifa Biden voters are stealing our hamburgers"
| again.
| doggosphere wrote:
| Bitcoin does not consume fossil fuel as a raw material;
| it is not an ingredient required for its operation. It
| uses electricity which can be generated from any source,
| be it wind, solar, or coal.
|
| Subsidized coal mining and untaxed carbon emissions are
| dangerous ideas.
| lottin wrote:
| Gratuitous use of electricity is anti-economical
| regardless of the source.
| doggosphere wrote:
| Electricity has higher economic value due to miners
| seeking to maximize profits.
|
| This makes investments in renewable energy infrastructure
| more profitable and paid off sooner. A solar farm has
| more demand and higher margin for its products.
|
| On the other hand, it means cheap coal energy is also
| financially productive.
|
| What is anti-economical is the unfair price competition
| due to externalities not captured by coal energy's
| pricing.
| webXL wrote:
| "gratuitous use" is completely subjective, so the anti-
| economical assertion isn't provable. You're suggesting
| there are no trade-offs between PoS and PoW, no tradeoffs
| between solar+batteries vs coal or nuclear.
| lottin wrote:
| Yes, I'm saying there are no trade-offs between PoS and
| PoW. If there's one I'd like to know what it is.
| webXL wrote:
| PoS can be easily copied and modified by the powerful.
| There's little cost to create the system and force
| adoption rather than incentivize. There's an enormous
| amount of investment and technology dedicated to bitcoin
| that makes it more resistant to devaluation and
| duplication. But it saves electricity. That's the trade-
| off.
|
| Why not focus on the source of the electricity rather
| than what the electricity is used for?
| lottin wrote:
| I don't see how proof-of-waste makes bitcoin more
| resistant to devaluation and duplication. How would
| switching to proof-of-stake make bitcoin more prone to
| devaluation, for instance? As far as duplication is
| concerned, bitcoin is open-source software which means
| anyone can duplicate it and make derivative works from
| it. There are dozens of bitcoin clones. It doesn't seem
| that bitcoin is resistant to duplication at all, or that
| there is any reason the lack of difficulty with which it
| can be duplicated should be influenced by whether it uses
| proof-of-waste or proof-of-stake.
| webXL wrote:
| Any software engineer can clone Twitter. The value of it
| is in the network and the high cost of users switching
| because they can't convince the people they follow and
| those who follow them to switch at once. The same applies
| to Bitcoin, but miners have an even higher cost of
| switching because they have specialized hardware that can
| only generate revenue on the Bitcoin network. Ethereum
| validators have a much lower cost to switch.
|
| > proof-of-waste
|
| It's Proof of Work. Productive work has value and in this
| case, it's widely distributed censorship-resistant
| validation of transactions.
| lottin wrote:
| Network effects have to do with the amount of users, not
| with the choice between proof-of-waste and proof-of-
| stake.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. Surely
| there are far more dangerous things to worry about out
| there.
| blibble wrote:
| it's not 1% of energy consumption... yet
|
| there's every incentive for it to keep growing forever,
| which is what makes it dangerous
|
| vs. there's only so much ice cream people can eat
| Shaanie wrote:
| Isn't it still quite insane that around 0.5% of our
| global energy usage is spent on bitcoin, though?
| broighbrobroigh wrote:
| How much of our global energy usage is spent on poorly
| implemented ACPI code, Windows drivers, inefficient GPU
| drivers, etc...
|
| Even better, how much energy is wasted per page view due
| to inefficient frontend web frameworks?
|
| Seems to me that code is speech, and restricting what one
| can and can't do with silicon that one owns is absolutely
| ridiculous.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Bitcoin? Yes, it's a useless coin. I wouldn't mind _even
| higher_ amounts of energy being spent on Monero though.
|
| It's good that Ethereum is moving to proof of stake. Not
| because of some environmental impact though. Mining is
| just really expensive, it results in huge fees making the
| coin almost unusable for normal people.
| reedjosh wrote:
| 100% Monero is amazing. 1500+tps and it's just getting
| started. Faster transaction speeds, privacy, just
| awesome!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. It's essentially a perfected version of bitcoin. It
| should be the number one currency.
| doggosphere wrote:
| Is it? Over time human energy creation and consumption
| has grown exponentially with technological innovation.
| Fire to cook meat, a wagon attached to an ox, combustion
| engines, air conditioning, wireless networks, data
| centers, etc.
|
| Today you probably consume more energy in a few days than
| your ancestors whole lives.
|
| Now, we've created distributed, immutable property,
| something that has never existed before. It turns
| electricity into value storage. What is the "correct"
| amount of energy for humans to spend on such a thing?
| hjek wrote:
| > What is the "correct" amount of energy for humans to
| spend on such a thing?
|
| Perhaps the "correct" amount is less than what it would
| take to increase planet temperature by 4degC?
| doggosphere wrote:
| Energy consumption has nothing to do with increasing
| planet temperature, if Bitcoin consumed 10x the energy
| via solar panels, it would not have any environmental
| impact beyond the raw materials used in the panels.
|
| You're equating energy usage to carbon emissions, but you
| should be able to distinguish the difference.
| hjek wrote:
| > Energy consumption has nothing to do with increasing
| planet temperature,
|
| As long as we're using fossil fuels, planet temperature
| _does_ in fact have _something_ to do with energy
| consumption. You seem to be arguing that because
| renewable energy sources exists, Bitcoin has _nothing_ to
| do with fossil fuel emissions. However, that is false, as
| 8% of Bitcoin mining happens in Inner Mongolia, which is
| home to many of China 's large coal mines[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-
| and-tech/bi...
| doggosphere wrote:
| I'm arguing that China subsidizes coal[0], and that China
| does not utilize a carbon tax[1].
|
| So when you call for a ban of Bitcoin in the name in
| environmental concerns, you've decided to be the arbiter
| of energy usage, on what is productive and valuable, and
| what is not.
|
| You're welcome to argue your points, but it would still
| be far more efficient and productive to addresses the
| actual core problem: coal fire plants, and energy prices.
|
| [0]: https://www.iisd.org/gsi/faqs/china
|
| [1]: https://www.carbontax.org/issues/what-about-china/
| reedjosh wrote:
| How much energy maintains the USD's reserve status?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| According to some other comment on this thread:
|
| > a bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and
| people with big guns, which gives the ability to say
| (credibly) that it is a crime to forge dollars no matter
| who you are or where you live
|
| Cryptocurrency offers all this and more for a fraction of
| the price.
| hjek wrote:
| It's using more energy than most countries:
|
| > Current estimates put bitcoin's energy requirements at
| around 130 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, which would
| rank it in the top 30 electricity consumers worldwide if
| it were a country.
|
| Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-
| and-tech/bi...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Not even 1%. The USA alone pollutes a ton more and is
| always utterly unapologetic about it. Historically I
| don't think they ever adhered to any global effort or
| treaty to reduce pollution. You have big entrenched
| organizations such as the oil industry doing far more
| damage and nobody messes with them. Not to mention the
| entire developed world's dependency on China for their
| borderline useless cheap consumer products.
|
| This concern over the environmental impact of
| cryptocurrencies is utterly laughable when you figure out
| the _real_ source of these problems. I guess they 're
| just too powerful to be messed with.
| hjek wrote:
| > Nobody messes with them.
|
| Well, some environmental activists try by turning off oil
| valves[0], just like environmental activists are upset
| with Bitcoin.
|
| > You have big entrenched organizations such as the oil
| industry doing far more damage.
|
| People who criticize Bitcoin for its environmental impact
| don't give a pass to oil companies. The issues overlap,
| like in Texas where they plug Bitcoin mining rigs
| straight into the oil well[1].
|
| But I hear you. All big entrenched organizations must be
| held accountable. Of course.
|
| [0]:
| https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/companies-
| dec...
|
| [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-
| change/news/bitcoin-mi...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The problem isn't even bitcoin mining, it's pollution.
| The energy usage wouldn't matter at all if it was
| generated via renewable sources such as solar.
|
| People who want to see real change need to deal with
| fossil fuels. Taxing mining operations will do absolutely
| nothing to solve the actual problems of this world.
| [deleted]
| imtringued wrote:
| > and how do you punish those who use too much?
|
| CO2 taxes
| est31 wrote:
| IDK in Germany it's forbidden per SS 30 StVO to drive around
| senselessly inside settlements. You are still allowed to
| drive around, even if the reasons are stupid. But if they are
| too stupid, police can fine you. There is a youtuber in
| Berlin who specializes in driving around for hours and he's
| been stopped by police already. The original video has been
| made private [0], but a raw version of it still exists [1].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLozreFvl24
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfccX_pBHM
| riskable wrote:
| Is the reason for the law to reduce the number of cars on
| the road or is it more to reduce emissions?
|
| I'm curious if someone driving an electric would get
| ticketed as well.
| hobofan wrote:
| It's mainly to reduce emissions and to protect the local
| environment. The paragraph also more generally states
| that you have to "prevent unnecessary noise pollution and
| emissions", which as we learn in driving school also
| means shutting off your motor when sitting at a red
| light.
| lostandbored wrote:
| So at redlights you need to turn off your car, then turn
| it back on when it changes to green
|
| EDIT: Specify the part of the post that bewildered me.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Many recent car models do this by themselves nowadays.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-stop_system#History
| lostandbored wrote:
| Huh, that is really cool. Never heard of it.
|
| Thanks for the information.
| tnecio wrote:
| I think the real problem is that there is no cost associated
| with emitting CO2 for the emitter even though it creates
| tremendous costs for the society in the long term. If there
| was a tax associated with the act of emitting CO2 itself
| (purpose of which could be to invest in green technologies)
| then the market could be the arbiter.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| The key difference is that I'm certain that Facebook makes
| continuous efforts to use less energy. Maybe not for
| environmental reasons, but they have an economic incentive to
| increase efficiency.
|
| Regulating the energy consumption/efficiency is more akin to
| fuel efficiency standards for cars.
| csomar wrote:
| > who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use
| case?
|
| The king. The digital crypto king.
| mgdev wrote:
| Facebook is net-zero emissions.
| dheera wrote:
| It's easier to get Facebook to be carbon neutral because they
| are a centralized institution, and it only takes a committed
| government to zero down on a corporation and force them to
| move to clean energy or pay a carbon tax.
|
| With crypto it's too decentralized to implement either.
|
| > who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case
|
| Ultimately Mother Nature will be the arbiter. If people spend
| too much time arguing about politics instead of either
| lowering power usage or moving to clean energy, those people
| will be killed sooner or later.
| DCKing wrote:
| > If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much"
| power for a use case?
|
| I see a lot of people replying with a slippery slope argument
| of this nature, which makes me think I should explain my
| argument better.
|
| I'm not arguing that burning electricity _alone_ is the
| problem. I 'm arguing that burning electricity for the direct
| purpose of making a financial product is a problem for
| society, when 1) the financial product explicitly
| incentivizes burning up _as much as you can_ to make more
| money and /or 2) burning up that energy can be alleviated by
| other technical solutions.
|
| I'm not arguing that mining should be illegal. I'm saying the
| 'sale' of the results of that mining should be illegal. Using
| or making incandescent lightbulbs is not illegal, but the
| sale of them is banned or restricted in large portions of the
| world [1]. Less harmful alternatives exist, so sale is
| disincentivized, the world moves on.
|
| This is not the government deciding how you spend energy
| resources. You can continue to mine all you want. But you
| shouldn't be rewarded for that.
|
| One thing I should point out is that I recognize that an
| alternative solution for these incentives is to make
| electricity always so expensive that it costs more money in
| electricity spend to mine crypto than you can make money of
| it. Make electricity price depend on crypto price. Needless
| to say I don't see that working out :)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-
| out_of_incandescent_ligh...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The elephant in the room is bitcoin literally requires the
| mass consumption of computation to work - the more the
| better. And it was designed this way. In comparison, Facebook
| and industrial processes work to make their processes more
| efficient and use less resources for their workload. Bitcoin
| will just gobble up any efficiency to do more mining and end
| up consuming the same amount of resources.
|
| Bitcoin is an endless energy pit. The same isn't true of
| things like Facebook.
| chrisan wrote:
| I'm not a user of Facebook, but is their electrical use near
| bitcoin levels?
|
| The quick google says facebook uses 5 while bitcoin uses 143
| terawatt-hours
| trimbo wrote:
| > So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not
| right, but burning electricity on running servers for
| Facebook or user tracking is all right?
|
| Spinning up cores to do intensive math for the sake of its
| difficulty is wasting energy by design. PoW's financial
| incentive is to waste power.
|
| Facebook spends a massive amount of money on compute, and
| their profit is only as good as the margin they can make over
| that compute cost. Therefore they have a financial incentive
| to save power.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _If that 's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too
| much" power for a use case?_
|
| The legislature and the regulatory agencies it has created,
| obviously.
|
| The exact same way literally every other environmental
| regulation has ever been passed.
|
| There are entire _divisions_ of agencies _dedicated_ to
| drawing the line of "too much" in all sorts of areas, for
| pollution, poisons, contamination, energy usage, etc. In
| fact, pretty much everyone but extreme libertarians agrees
| this is one of the main functions of government.
|
| So while you might not agree on the resulting policy or even
| the mechanisms that arrived at it, it _is_ a solved problem.
| You don 't need to wonder _how_ we 'd accomplish it -- that
| part is easy.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| You want air conditioning? You want to eat steak? You want some
| microprocessors with that guided missile?
|
| Buy bitcoin.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co...
| citilife wrote:
| Bitcoins "power consumption" has two aspects - mining and
| processing transactions. The power consumption used for mining
| (or processing) is directly correlated to the relative earning
| potential - i.e. bitcoin price - power cost. Mining takes up
| the vast majority of the computation(s) and mining bitcoin
| should end somewhere between 2040 and 2050.
|
| That is to say, it's self correcting. If the price of energy
| increases, there is less mining. Alternatively, the miners are
| also incentivized to find cheaper or develop cheaper
| alternatives; this spurs innovation.
|
| If prices rise due to mining, innovation will take place and
| more energy will be developed.
|
| There's nothing wrong with this mechanism, as it corrects
| itself. In 2050 when you can no longer mine bitcoin we will
| that have an abundance of cheap power. Which is the single
| greatest factor in reducing poverty.
|
| Frankly, I think this comment is off base. So far there have
| been zero negative measurable impacts from power usage related
| to crypto.
| meowkit wrote:
| This is a really weak argument. The better argument is we
| shouldn't tell people how to use energy they purchase and to
| tax consumption of it.
|
| > innovation will take place and more energy will be
| developed.
|
| This has way too many assumptions baked in. Increased demand
| will not guarantee a clean supply, nor does it guarantee
| technological progress in performance of efficiency.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as Christmas lights in the
| USA. Should we ban Christmas lights because of their energy
| usage? This debate is turning to madness
|
| https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-...
| jude- wrote:
| More feasible take: ban the trade of PoW coins that cannot be
| shown to have been mined via green energy.
| seniorivn wrote:
| it's all bullshit
|
| Just ban people doing bad things, like all of them.
|
| Problem solved
|
| All problems solved
| lend000 wrote:
| This is an Orwellian take to want the government to tell you
| how you're allowed to use electricity. Is watching TV a waste
| of energy? How much energy goes into steaming Netflix?
|
| If you want to target an externality of the free market, do it
| directly: simply tax emissions. This will guide the market
| towards greener energy generation and direct capital out of
| activities that produce emissions without generated value.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept
| rampant incentives to literally burn up energy
|
| Videogames run GPUs at full capacity too, we should ban them
| too. No one NEEDS to pretend to be a cowboy for 100+ hours each
| across 36 million GPUs.
|
| Actually maybe there should be a ban on computing power above
| mobile CPUs available to non-government bodies, if this really
| is so devastating to the environment we need to limit the
| amount of damage people can cause as individuals, why does a
| normal person need a GPU anyway when smart phone graphics
| should be enough.
| goda90 wrote:
| But gamers aren't buying up dozens of GPUs each to pretend to
| be a cowboy, and they don't pretend to be a cowboy 24/7.
| reedjosh wrote:
| POW guarantees distributed security better than any other
| currency so far. POS relies on a _relatively_ small number of
| nodes to run the network.
|
| POW is more _government_ proof than any other method. To many
| the threat of central bank digital currencies is justification
| enough for POW's energy consumption.
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| You people obsessed with reducing humanity's energy usage are
| so tiresome. Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of
| humanity should be focused on increasing the amount of energy
| available. I want to climb the kardashev scale, not live in an
| eco-pod and eat bug burgers so I can scrounge every last joule.
| Graffur wrote:
| Who is working on this problem today?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Arguably, all of the Bitcoin miners.
|
| Bitcoin mining creates a price floor for energy. It is a
| buyer of last resort with infinite appetite. By pushing up
| the value of energy in the market, it encourages expansion
| of energy production.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| What you want and the realities of our current world are two
| very, very different things.
| nmfisher wrote:
| The reality of the current world is that a _lot of people
| feel exactly like that_ , so you're unlikely to convince
| them to change their behaviour.
|
| Rather than deny that reality, you're better off working
| with it to produce more, but cleaner, energy.
| rwcarlsen wrote:
| Necessity is the mother of invention.
|
| [edit] - downvotes because I used the word "mother" maybe?
| I don't understand this community.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| We all want luxury, but at some point the changes that come
| from energy usage will be very unluxurious, no?
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| Yeah, maybe when we've exhausted the sun's net output.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Bingo! The more energy a system has available the greater
| capability it has. For example, if a mining community is able
| to generate cheap excess power it opens up possibility for
| local smelting and foundry industries.
|
| I think of each community as a game of Civilization. As you
| progress you unlock higher rungs of the tech ladder.
| Exporting your raw materials to later import finished
| products made from them is a waste of resources and stagnates
| the local industries at the raw material stage.
|
| What industries could be developed in your community if the
| power was available?
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Could somebody help me understand the valuation of Ether?
|
| Let's assume for a second that future developments in the the
| Ethereum protocol really unlock the widespread use of distributed
| apps, and herald a new technological era. As far as I understand,
| Ethereum optimists are betting that then people will be forced to
| buy Ether to participate in this Internet of distributed apps,
| driving the price higher.
|
| In this (optimistic) case, wouldn't someone just start a new
| blockchain with the Ethereum protocol? It's open source, right?
| To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every human
| a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for staking
| (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast majority of
| people than a blockchain where the early adopters are the new
| rubber barons of the Internet.
| scsilver wrote:
| People are buying it now to run apps making money off of defi.
| Binance has their own network thats growing similarly. Both do
| have a huge amount of speculators. There are other up and
| coming complements to the market aswell including Polkadot.
|
| Some like ethereum for its maturity and dev team.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Imo Polkadot is "obsolete" now with Ethereum moving forward
| with a rollup-centric roadmap since L2 rollups are pretty
| much the same as parachains.
| exo762 wrote:
| What is your take on Near?
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| > People are buying it now to run apps making money off of
| defi.
|
| Serious question - what does this actually mean? What defi
| apps are people running to make money besides minting other
| coins?
| seibelj wrote:
| In the internet, the more websites and APIs exist, the greater
| the utility of the internet as a whole - the sum of its parts
| is worth more than each individually.
|
| With Ethereum, every time a new smart contract is added to
| Ethereum, the whole network becomes more useful, as each
| contract can communicate with each other. You can assemble new
| applications based on the building blocks of existing
| contracts.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Are the smart contracts not out in the open? Can you not just
| copy over the good/useful smart contracts as well?
| wmf wrote:
| You can copy the code but not the money. A distributed
| exchange with no traders isn't very useful, for example.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > wouldn't someone just start a new blockchain with the
| Ethereum protocol?
|
| Sure, and many have, but they don't have the security,
| decentralization, dev mindshare, community, tooling, or
| ecosystem that Ethereum has.
| cwkoss wrote:
| > To me it seems that a new blockchain that e.g. gives every
| human a wallet pre-filled with the amount of Ether needed for
| staking (plus some extra) would appeal more to the vast
| majority of people than a blockchain where the early adopters
| are the new rubber barons of the Internet.
|
| That sounds awesome. If you can securely deliver a
| cryptographic key to every human on the planet and teach them
| to use it, I'd happily invest my life savings towards that
| ends. Unfortunately due to disparities in education, safety and
| access to technology, I think this is a near-impossible task in
| 2021.
|
| Cardano is issuing cryptographic student IDs to 5M students in
| Ethiopia though! The future is bright!
| exo762 wrote:
| Re: valuation. The biggest contributing factor is speculation.
| I think it dwarfs every other possible factor. The second
| biggest one - fees are paid in ETH, and fees will continue to
| be paid in ETH. More, EIP-1559 will actively decrease amount of
| ETH in circulation by requiring miners to burn ETH to include
| transactions via base-fee mechanism.
|
| Re: new chain / forking. Just network effect. Ethereum
| currently secures huge amount of value in DeFi. Any new network
| will not have those funds in it. There are also stablecoins. If
| blockchain-native assets (BTC, ETH, DAI etc) can be "doubled"
| by forking (e.g. BTC to BTC+BCH) it's not possible for fiat-
| backed assets such as USDC, USDT, EURc etc. Issuing bank has to
| pick a side of the fork.
| wmf wrote:
| There are already new Ethereum-compatible blockchains like
| Avalanche but they're missing out on the network effects that
| exist on the original Ethereum chain.
|
| The only use of crypto is to get rich by being an early
| adopter. It's easy to design a new system that doesn't benefit
| early adopters but no one will care about it.
| jerye wrote:
| I'm interested to know more about a system that doesn't
| benefit early adopters... Do you have any sources? Thanks :)
| wmf wrote:
| Basically either stablecoins or some kind of volatility
| dampening which would increase emission in sync with
| adoption. Nobody wants this so there's not much work being
| done on it.
| bigphishy wrote:
| IF it merges. That's a big "if" The ethereum Miners will rebel,
| "The Merge" will introduce catastrophic bugs, 0-days will appear.
|
| However, if it does successfully transfer to proof of stake,
| we're in for a long and exciting ride.
|
| Trust is a valuable commodity these days.
| suikadayo wrote:
| It's not up to the miners to decide, it's up to the nodes to
| decide.
|
| Also, merge testnet is up already, making sure there are no
| significant issues.
| exo762 wrote:
| > The ethereum Miners will rebel
|
| I don't think miners can do anything about this. In the worst
| case, they coordinate to stop mining on N-1 block. But this
| requires an amazing level of coordination, plus network can
| directly bribe/reward next block producer by paying to
| `coinbase` address (real `coinbase`, not Armstrong's coinbase).
|
| > "The Merge" will introduce catastrophic bugs, 0-days will
| appear.
|
| This is why you have testnets.
|
| > we're in for a long and exciting ride.
|
| Definitely!
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| testnets are great, but cannot approximate the economic
| impact of technical decisions as they have zero value. Just
| because it works on a testnet is not a good justification
| that it would work at scale on a chain worth billions.
| exo762 wrote:
| I agree. Ropsten is the proof. Still, I'm fine with
| Ethereum moving fast and breaking things.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Ropsten coins are worthless, and cannot approximate or
| prove anything cryptoecomically.
|
| Moving fast and breaking things is great for things of no
| consequence, but for decentralized money -- I'm not a fan
| of this philosophy! I like slow, methodical, well tested,
| well reasoned code from the best minds in the space --
| aka Bitcoin.
| exo762 wrote:
| > Ropsten coins are worthless, and cannot approximate or
| prove anything cryptoecomically.
|
| We agree on that. You misread my comment.
|
| My risk tolerance is just different than yours. I've sold
| all of my BTC for ETH long time ago. Everyone is building
| on top of Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin's meme about
| "every worthy usecase will get implemented on top of
| Bitcoin"... it's short-lived. Flippening is nigh, why
| would people re-implement something which exist on
| dominant chain on a chain that is subpar in every
| possible way?
|
| And I disagree about best minds. Bitcoin hasn't produced
| anything of interest for a long long time. Most patient?
| Surely. Best? Not even close. Maxwell has missed zero-
| knowledge proofs in 2013.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Lets revisit this in 5 years. Everybody regrets selling
| their bitcoin for magic beans eventually.
| musesum wrote:
| Ironically, lowering the cost of mining may also lower the value
| of the asset.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I struggle to understand how you came to this conclusion.
| o_p wrote:
| I think the final outcome of this is that people will go to the
| next hot PoW coin and the eth "elites" will be left alone playing
| oligarch
| sollewitt wrote:
| As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 encouraging
| folks to state their stake in the comments.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Everything in this universe is analogous to Proof of Work, it's
| the most natural system out there. If there is a base monetary
| layer for the internet, it should be Proof of Work based (and
| Bitcoin, because it's got the most work done to improve the
| technology + network effects).
| manx wrote:
| Could you elaborate a bit? Why do you think that?
| fredfoobar wrote:
| The crux of it is that you can't rewrite history trivially,
| you have to expend a lot energy to change history, and energy
| can't be created nor destroyed.
|
| For something specific to bitcoin/blockchain:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Can you give an example? Struggling with analogy
| 0134340 wrote:
| And Stake is derived from Work. Some of you assume PoS exists
| within its own ecosystem. Even in PoW, the work is derived from
| previous works, ie, the work required to buy and build the
| hardware and pay for electricity, etc.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Yeah, now you are proposing a system that is going to be
| secured purely on that stake everyone acquired, THAT's the
| issue.
| 0134340 wrote:
| It doesn't exist within its own ecosystem, as I mentioned.
| Stake is derived from work and work itself is a security,
| ie, your work is secured by prior works. Everything that
| built it needed prior work and everything to secure it
| needs prior security, up the ladder you'd have yourself to
| secure and work for the currency, your community along with
| its own governance to state level and on and on up the
| ladder. PoW and PoS both exist within the same ecosystem.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| Except, most people chose to move their stake from one
| system (USD) to another (ETH) and now, you are a powerful
| person in this new system. If you owned more stake in the
| Bitcoin network, you are still a user.
| sva_ wrote:
| The minimum amount of Ether to be eligible to stake is 32 Coins,
| so it appears that last year in June, about 120k addresses
| would've met that criterion[0]. That probably changed by now, I'd
| assume the number to be higher as more people set up 'mining
| rigs'. That's at least a larger number than I would've guessed. I
| wonder how many people/entities are behind those addresses.
|
| On a side note, I have mixed feelings about PoS. The idea behind
| Ethereum - that is, as I understand it, being able to deploy
| smart contracts using a Turing complete language -, is pretty
| intriguing; but the costs associated with doing so put me off. I
| tried to estimate how much it'd cost to deploy a fairly small
| smart contract a couple days ago (admittedly when 'gas costs'
| were high), and it would've been several hundred dollars, perhaps
| even surpassing a thousand. It seems like PoS would lower that,
| which is good, but comes at the great cost that people who aren't
| already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without
| basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat
| currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'. (And yeah, there might
| be other means, but none of them are really practical for the
| average person.)
|
| If there hadn't already been cryptocurrencies, nobody would've
| thought PoS to be a good idea. A bunch of people who hold some
| digital certificates that predictably multiply themselves want
| people to give them money to 'acquire' those? That would've
| sounded like a scam to me...
|
| [0] https://decrypt.co/31646/nearly-120000-ethereum-wallets-
| prim...
| miohtama wrote:
| You can do pooled staking with small additional risks:
|
| https://capitalgram.com/posts/ethereum-2.0-staking-and-stake...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I too have been skeptical of PoS, but IMO the thinking behind
| it has gotten better and better and there are pretty large
| chains that have been running without compromise.
|
| Thankfully with ETH 2.0 the cost of publishing data on the
| chain will drop dramatically (there will be ~63x increase in
| throughput of publishing data, not transactions) so contract
| creation should be cheaper.
|
| But really if you are interested in the space it might make
| sense to just publish on an L2 like polygon.
| djrhails wrote:
| Frankly, right now anyone who isn't already in the game isn't
| able to acquire Ether without paying for it.
|
| Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of
| Ether is a huge investment, and is already out of reach for the
| average person. Setting your desktop computer to mine
| definitely won't pay for your small smart contract.
| sva_ wrote:
| > Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of
| Ether is a huge investment,
|
| I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the
| GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so
| far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency
| that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract
| on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.
| webinvest wrote:
| What mining software are you using?
| sva_ wrote:
| I just use PhoenixMiner. Anything that has the feature of
| reducing memory latency ('-straps 2'). Getting 47 mhash/s
| per 1080ti with that.
|
| I actually had to spin up a Virtual Machine with GPU
| passthrough to launch Windows because I couldn't get the
| GPU tweaks working on Linux. Really nice how vfio is now
| in the Linux kernel, it's been a breeze going through the
| setup (compared to a couple years ago when you needed a
| custom kernel.)
| sschueller wrote:
| Same goes for staking in ETH2 as you don't need 32 ETH. You
| can join a stake pool.
| everfree wrote:
| >but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in
| the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically
| paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat
| currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'. (And yeah, there might
| be other means, but none of them are really practical for the
| average person.)
|
| There's no inherent weird dependency on cash, there's only a
| dependency on whatever currency people choose to pay each other
| for work, which currently happens to be cash.
|
| If people started paying each other in Ethereum-based tokens,
| you could close the loop and cash would not be a dependency.
| micropresident wrote:
| It is a scam -- all current crypto is a scam for the same
| reason. One of the other things that people don't understand is
| that currency and government are inseparable. When you buy Eth
| (or any other crypto) you're buying into a new system of
| government.
|
| Do you want to be a citizen of that new government? What will
| they do for their citizens? Do they plan to build roads or
| anything else?
|
| Seigniorage should go to the people not the capital holders.
|
| Also, if people don't think there will be validators for each
| wallet with 32 coins -- which are producing Co2 -- then they
| are wrong. It just changes the game, not the incentives.
| 0134340 wrote:
| Currency and local government can be completely divorced and
| I think crypto will prove this in the future. I don't think
| governments will begin to care one way or another as long as
| they get theirs and taxes are paid. If you can score currency
| from around the globe and bring it home to a more local
| domain and pay in to the system where you live, they should
| have no problem with it.
|
| And the validators, PoS anyway, use very little energy even
| compared to traditional coin minting.
| SwagtimusPrime wrote:
| >but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in
| the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically
| paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat
| currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'.
|
| PoW is just as much depending on fiat currencies. You can't get
| electricity without paying for it, you can't get a mining rig
| without paying for it, etc. This is one of the more common
| critiques against PoS and it just doesn't hold true at all.
| With the decentralized finance ecosystem, you can put any
| supported asset to work and earn ETH or stablecoins or anything
| else you want and accumulate that way.
| sva_ wrote:
| >This is one of the more common critiques against PoS and it
| just doesn't hold true at all.
|
| Maybe I'm an edge-case (I don't think so), but I was able to
| use the hardware I already owned, and the electricity already
| included in my utilities bill to acquire enough Ether that
| would allow me to deploy a smart contract. That won't be
| possible anymore in the future. So you're factually wrong, at
| least in my case.
| wmf wrote:
| Globally, very few people have gaming GPUs. You're super-
| privileged and you're effectively arguing for locking in
| your privilege and making the other 90% of the world worse
| off. PoS puts everyone on an equal footing. You want to
| stake? Buy in.
| sva_ wrote:
| PoS does not put everyone on an equal footing. PoS
| privileges those who got in early and had the money or
| hardware to acquire a large chunk of the coin.
|
| It's ridiculous you talk about financial privilege. Who
| the hell do you think owns most crypto? You think it is
| people living on the streets in India? Children in
| Africa?
|
| You sound super delusional. I can't believe it.
| kd0amg wrote:
| You definitely are an edge case if you were already paying
| your utility bills in cryptocurrency. Otherwise, you spent
| fiat currency to bootstrap your use of Etherium.
| sva_ wrote:
| I didn't mean that I pay my electricity bill in crypto. I
| meant that my small apartment has a fixed electricity
| rate so that I don't have to pay any extra for running 2
| GPUs, and that I already owned the hardware to mine,
| independent of crypto. So I didn't invest anything. Sorry
| for being unclear.
| themagician wrote:
| Does anyone know of an estimate of how many individuals actually
| hold ETH?
|
| The transaction fees are absolutely ludicrous. I can't imagine
| the dispersion is actually as high as some people seem to think
| it is.
| h4kor wrote:
| > Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that
| The Merge arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising
| on safety.
|
| Overworking your engineers will most definitely lead to
| compromises.
|
| But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are
| serious about reducing the environmental impact they have.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| PoS has been the goal of Ethereum for a long, long time.
|
| I don't know the technicals of why the migration has been
| gradual, but the destination has never really been in doubt.
| svarog-run wrote:
| Are you serious? This was proposed in the initial white paper.
| It's not something that suddenly came to mind. This stuff takes
| time
| bhandziuk wrote:
| I think they're being hyperbolic. "we're working really hard to
| make it happen"
| serial_dev wrote:
| Yes, I would not read much into it. In the end, writing "We
| were sort of working on it at a reasonable pace, you know,
| work life balance is more important to our developers than
| finishing a month earlier" just doesn't have the same ring to
| it :)
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| No it doesnt. Having hard time/budget/whatever constraints
| does.
|
| Otherwise, theoretically you can "overwork" i.e. (work more
| than standard 40 hour weeks or some standard of work hours)
| whatever without compromise
| shakna wrote:
| > Otherwise, theoretically you can "overwork" i.e. (work more
| than standard 40 hour weeks or some standard of work hours)
| whatever without compromise
|
| That's simply not true. Humans aren't machines. Productivity
| falls off a cliff after 50 hours, and after 55 you may as
| well not even be in the office. There are diminishing returns
| with "overwork"ing.
|
| [0] https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/producti
| vit...
| ysavir wrote:
| On paper, sure. In practice, having people overworked leads
| to compromises you never intend to make, simply due to
| exhaustion and burden clouding judgement values.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Thats a problem of process where errors are caught.
|
| It makes things more inefficient, but it doesn't compromise
| final quality assuming issues are found and addressed.
| nradov wrote:
| No quality control process can reliably catch software
| errors. That's why it's generally better to prevent
| errors rather than catching and fixing.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Why does "normal working hours" solve the "reliably catch
| software errors" issue.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Every software error? True. But essentially every
| software error, especially errors of significance?
| Untrue. The Space Shuttle control software was famous for
| its rigorous process control, and deliberately written in
| a language difficult to introduce bugs in. Over decades
| of development and 420,000 total lines of code, it
| appears that a total of 17 bugs ever made it into
| software used during a launch, with an average of about 1
| bug at a time existing in the codebase. Processes to
| prevent errors from being introduced played a huge part
| in this, but the comprehensive verification and
| simulation process was also necessary to achieve such a
| low defect rate.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
| nradov wrote:
| The NASA Manager's Handbook for Software Development from
| 1990 is a great resource. We have better techniques for
| some areas now but most of it still holds up.
|
| https://sw-eng.larc.nasa.gov/supporting-products/archive-
| of-...
| ysavir wrote:
| That's amazing work and dedication.
|
| But I feel it fair to consider an organization like NASA
| as an exemption from the norm. This level of detailed
| error catching doesn't make sense for, say, a facebook
| clone startup.
|
| That said, someone should send this comment to a Tesla
| engineer.
| ysavir wrote:
| So now you have to do extra work to catch errors, which
| is a compromise in its own right.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| hence the inefficiency comment?
| ysavir wrote:
| That makes sense, but the point is that it's still a
| compromise. Even if we're saying that people _can_ work
| overtime to get things done, there 's typically
| diminishing returns on each additional hour worked, and
| still no guarantee that quality hasn't been impacted.
|
| If you ask people to work 12 hour days instead of 8 days,
| does each day provide 8 hours worth of work, 12 hours
| worth of work, or another value? Can we reliably say that
| any problems arising from working over 12 hour days are
| caught and handled at the same level as they would be if
| people were working 8 hour days?
| soperj wrote:
| so the solution to overwork is more work?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| yes? That was literally my point, its less efficient, but
| can be okay in terms of final output.
| Nursie wrote:
| Not sure that holds up to scrutiny, as often when people
| are tired and overworked their output can dip negative.
|
| It's fine for a few days, but after that it's a false
| economy.
| kodah wrote:
| > But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are
| serious about reducing the environmental impact they have.
|
| Is it not possible there's good reasons they didn't move to
| proof of stake sooner? "Came to their senses" seems to imply
| they had no good reasons.
| shanecoin wrote:
| It has been the goal since day one.
|
| The Ethereum protocol was designed with PoS in mind and has a
| built-in difficulty bomb[1] to prove it. In short, this
| difficulty bomb makes it exponentially harder to mine ETH
| over time. The goal of this feature was to encourage all
| participants of the ecosystem to transition to PoS as quickly
| as possible.
|
| Given that, the implementation has not worked out totally as
| expected, as the difficulty bomb has been pushed back a few
| times over the years. However, to answer your question, the
| reason they did not move faster is because this transition is
| hard and plays in some uncharted territory.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/fullstacked/the-ice-age-is-coming-
| ee5ad5f...
| baby wrote:
| I don't think PoS was a thing when Ethereum was invented.
| joshmarlow wrote:
| It's mentioned in the whitepaper -
| https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
|
| > Note that in the future, it is likely that Ethereum
| will switch to a proof-of-stake model for security,
| reducing the issuance requirement to somewhere between
| zero and 0.05X per year.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| It absolutely was, Peercoin (PPC), and even DPoS (BTS)
| predates ethereum too. What are they worth today? PoS is
| a scam -- also Diem is worse -- it is dystopia.
| svachalek wrote:
| This has been the plan for a long time. But this is like
| Google deciding to switch to Microsoft Windows, it's not
| something they can just decide to do one day. There's a
| process. It's a massive effort and hundreds of billions of
| dollars are on the line.
| kodah wrote:
| Kinda what I figured. Thanks for the response.
| throwkeep wrote:
| Overtime != overwork. You've probably programmed something, at
| some point, where you were excited to work on it from morning
| to night? Where you lose track of hours, forget to eat meals
| and completely in the zone? That could easily be the case with
| these engineers, working on such a historical project and
| consequential update.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I have. My whole team at once? Not really.
|
| Unless management is really vigilant, when people are working
| overtime everyone on the team feels pressure to do the same.
| greyhair wrote:
| I have been in that zone for two or three day stretches,
| but never beyond, and never in sync with a full team. I
| have experienced two forms of team wide over-time in my
| career. The first lasted (for me) about seven months, then
| I quit. I couldn't take in anymore and the project (large
| team, 150 people) was on fire. That was completely
| unsustainable. The second form was a periodic event that
| happened every two years when we released a new silicon
| design (chip vendor). The day that the first silicon was
| mounted onto boards began a cycle of ten to twelve days, 14
| hours a day, lunch and dinner being one hour status
| briefings. All hands on deck. At the end of those ten or
| twelve days, either the silicon was fully validated, or all
| its known flaws were identified. And everybody on the team
| took a couple days off to breath. That was sustainable
| because it was infrequent, planned, and closed ended. I
| went through four of those cycles. They were exhausting and
| thrilling at the same time. And thankfully, infrequent and
| closed ended. There was always a light at the end of the
| tunnel.
| hanniabu wrote:
| This is a different dynamic than traditional organization.
| It's decentralized with contributors around the world. You
| have no idea how much others are working and many are
| contributing because it's something they're passionate
| about.
| CarlBeek wrote:
| Only time will be able to arbitrate this one, but we have
| consistently pushed out time-lines to ensure that Ethereum
| remains safe. Ethereum core development definitely favours
| partition tolerance and safety over liveness.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| A more energy efficient pyramid Ponzi scheme. Congratulations.
| grubles wrote:
| Bitcoin layer-2 massively reduces the amount of energy used per
| transaction. For every on-chain Bitcoin transaction, potentially
| millions upon millions of Lightning transactions can occur.
| roskelld wrote:
| It should always be clear that bitcoin doesn't have an energy
| use per transaction. The energy use of the network doesn't
| increase with the number of transactions conducted.
|
| It's absolutely true that the layers built on top of bitcoin do
| and will continue to present scale, allowing for more and
| faster tx per second.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Ethereum's power-hungry days are numbered, and I hope that's
| true for the rest of the industry too.
|
| Ethereum has been talking about PoS for a long time, so until
| they actually deliver we should be looking at existing
| decentralized PoS coins.
| suikadayo wrote:
| It already exists https://beaconcha.in/
| sp332 wrote:
| There is actual, visible progress, plus a built-in self-
| destruct that will make continuing on the current chain
| basically impossible.
| crazypython wrote:
| They've moved the self-destruct deadline multiple times.
| sp332 wrote:
| There will be a new PoW chain and a new PoS chain. The old
| chain will technically exist but mining on it will be
| impractical. There is no longer enough interest from miners
| to make the new PoW chain the majority, so the winners of
| this hard fork will be recognized as "Ethereum" and the
| other miners will be relegated to a less influential chain.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399
| Vespasian wrote:
| That's true but to be honest they pushed back the self
| destruct several times in the past and will do so again if
| needed.
|
| Still it's very likely that this time the switch to PoS might
| finally happen unless something unforseen happens.
|
| The development was speed up by a (most likely) failed
| attempt / pr-stunt of miners to block an unrelated change
| which will reduce their profitability considerably in July.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I wonder how this will impact mining? Will GPUs suddenly flood
| the market as it becomes much less profitable to mine? God I hope
| so the GPU shortages have been crazy.
| josefresco wrote:
| I've be lurking heavily in the crypto-mining communities for a
| few weeks now. Most are saying they'll just "move to a new
| coin" which is basically all they CAN do, unless they cash out
| early and sell their hardware. Nvidia is releasing* "LHR" (low
| hash rate) cards to give gamers some relief (assuming they
| can't be jailbroken).
|
| *https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Its difficult to calculate exactly the % of GPU miners that
| are mining Ethereum, amongst all possible choices. My
| estimate is 50% - 90%. (Maybe someone can reply with better
| data?)
|
| When Ethereum can no longer be mined, the returns on mining
| the remaining 'altcoins' will fall equal to the level of new
| mining power that enters.
|
| Which might very well make GPU mining uneconomical across the
| board.
| josefresco wrote:
| > the returns on mining the remaining 'altcoins' will fall
| equal to the level of new mining power that enters.
|
| Can you expand on this?
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| All of the people currently mining Ethereum will switch
| to mining other coins.
|
| But, the mining rewards for those other coins are
| typically static.
|
| So you'll have a dramatically increased number of GPUs
| chasing the same number of coins - which is going to
| result in increased mining difficulty and reduced
| profits, potentially dramatically reduced.
| pavon wrote:
| Unfortunately, NVIDIA already accidentally leaked a driver
| with without those limitations within days of releasing those
| cards.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/nvidia-
| accidenta...
| ihuman wrote:
| That driver was just for the 3060 LHR. The 3080, 3070 and
| 3060 Ti LHR will require newer drivers. It's still possible
| for NVIDIA to mess up and release a newer driver without
| those limitations again, though.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Unfortunately mining is only a small part of why GPUs have
| been so expensive, but hopefully this will contribute to
| making them cheaper in the long term. If they don't mess up
| again.
| josefresco wrote:
| I get that (chip shortage, covid demand surge etc.), but
| there's a clear distinction of availability between GPUs
| that are suitable/unsuitable for mining.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Some of these earlier cards already have been jailbroken.
| Ultimately, it's a question of whether it makes sense for
| miners to sponsor a cracking effort vs the cost of buying the
| more expensive cards outright.
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