All: this thread has over 1500 comments. To see all of it you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=2" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=2</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=3" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=3</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=4" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=4</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=5" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586&p=5</a><p>(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)
Paxos <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos</a> 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.<p>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:
<a href="https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/" rel="nofollow">https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/</a><p>If the curious reader is interested in reading more about the scope of fraud that the ethereum protocol has fueled read the post here:
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_what_exactly_is_the_fraud_in_ethereum/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.re...</a><p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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
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.<p>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?<p>The marketplace sells access to resources with an off-chain ACL system. It facilitates trades between resource sellers and buyers.<p>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.<p>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?
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, <a href="https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_fee" rel="nofollow">https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...</a> , 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?
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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_announcement" rel="nofollow">https://www.algorand.com/resources/news/carbon_negative_anno...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-fridman-algorand-and-the-blockchain-trilemma" rel="nofollow">https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/silvio-micali-lex-fr...</a>
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.<p>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.)<p>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...<p>[0] <a href="https://decrypt.co/31646/nearly-120000-ethereum-wallets-primed-eth-2-staking" rel="nofollow">https://decrypt.co/31646/nearly-120000-ethereum-wallets-prim...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?
Good. Very good.<p>This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.<p>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 <i>have</i> cryptocurrency.<p>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.<p>I don't think there's any precedent for banning classes of financial products for environmental reasons, but it's time to create one.<p>[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.
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.<p>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?
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".<p>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).<p>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.
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.
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.
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!"<p>Which in the lights of the recent events sounds like: "pump us this time around!"<p>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?<p>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.
Many people are talking about PoW vs PoS here.<p>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.<p>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?).<p>Interested to hear what other people think.
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.<p>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.<p>i've been watching ethereum's progress on this with interest, and fully expect with time that bitcoin will follow.
People interested in POS should look at Nano [1].<p>In Ethereum only "validators" validate transactions - those with more than 32 Eth in their own wallet.<p>In Nano "representatives" validate transactions - but individual users vote a representative to represent them (with their wallet balance as a weighting).<p>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).<p>[1]: <a href="https://nano.org" rel="nofollow">https://nano.org</a>
Ethereum 2.0 isn’t expected to be released until 2022, 2023, or 2024*<p>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.<p>More details here:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_emissions_are_on_peoples_minds_right/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e...</a><p>Sources:
*Coinbase, Stakewise
> If energy consumption per-transaction is more your speed, that’s ~35Wh/tx<p>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.
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?<p>Or to rephrase the question: where can I find the "POS for dummies" page?
Could somebody help me understand the valuation of Ether?<p>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.<p>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.
> Ethereum will use at least 99% less energy post merge<p>I realize that is the text from the article, but what they really meant is "will use at <i>most</i> 99% less energy". The reduction will be at least 99%. The future value will be at most 1% of the current value.
This reduces security considerably. Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that was done <i>historically</i>. 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 <i>current</i> 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.
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.<p>This would immediately make unproductive energy use (<i>cough POW crypto </i>cough) a lot less profitable, without the government having to come in and set prices and regs for every little thing.
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?
> Several teams of engineers are working overtime to ensure that The Merge arrives as soon as possible, and without compromising on safety.<p>Overworking your engineers will most definitely lead to compromises.<p>But good to see that Ethereum came to their senses and are serious about reducing the environmental impact they have.
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.
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).
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.
IF it merges. That's a big "if"
The ethereum Miners will rebel, "The Merge" will introduce catastrophic bugs, 0-days will appear.<p>However, if it does successfully transfer to proof of stake, we're in for a long and exciting ride.<p>Trust is a valuable commodity these days.
Crypto is dumb, although I will try to ride the wave.<p>PoW -- wasteful electrical mining, only big entities can build efficient asic farms. And only in low cost of electricity spots.<p>PoS -- will incentive oligarchal collusion. Basically same as our current financial system.
> Ethereum’s power-hungry days are numbered, and I hope that’s true for the rest of the industry too.<p>Ethereum has been talking about PoS for a long time, so until they actually deliver we should be looking at existing decentralized PoS coins.
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.<p>In other words if PoS is conceptually sound why don't all cryptocurrencies switch over to it?
The "Cantillion Effect"<p><a href="https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect" rel="nofollow">https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect</a><p>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.<p>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.
Also see Ethereum is green: <a href="https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/" rel="nofollow">https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/</a>
This article obscures the truth, which will be obvious soon, that Ethereum will remain multiple orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional banks.
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?
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.
I did not read through every posts but I have seen a lot of ignorant comments regarding PoS and dPoS. Also I am very surprised that Tendermint (dPoS consensus), Cosmos (decentralized network using Tendermint) and Cosmos SDK (used by many projects, e.g. BNB) do not seem to be mentioned anywhere. I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to have a look at it.
As per <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408</a> encouraging folks to state their stake in the comments.
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?
Does anyone know of an estimate of how many individuals actually hold ETH?<p>The transaction fees are absolutely ludicrous. I can’t imagine the dispersion is actually as high as some people seem to think it is.
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.
Ethereum doesn't have an energy problem, energy have an Ethereum problem.<p>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.<p>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.
> Under Proof-of-Stake, when the price of ETH increases, the security of the network does too<p>This does not follow. Security level is independent of miner reward value under PoS.
Question from someone relatively clueless: Does that mean that NFTs also will use negligible amount of electricity once that's completely gone through?
Can someone point out what exactly changed at low level code to achieve this optimization in energy consumption or they altered the algorithm altogether ?
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.
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.
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.
Sure, and become permanently controlled by the founders, who control 60% of the outstanding supply. Proof of Stake enables any party who at any point controls more than ⅓ of funds to rewrite the chain from that point forward, so this is an objectively terrible idea from an engineering perspective.
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.<p>EDIT: Instead of down-voting, maybe prove me wrong?
Dang keeps saying that he doesn't like obvious comments but he keeps posting comments like this: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/jdNHIy0.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/jdNHIy0.png</a> ... and pagination has been an issue for a long time.... not sure what it brings.<p>Just search for "(Posts like this will go away once we turn off pagination.)" is you want to find other occurrences.<p>Just put the pagination link at the top too if you think that it is an issue instead of sticking your post to the top every time pagination is used? Or just fix the website... how expensive can it be to display 1000 comments with no images.
Its price will also tumble 99% .<p>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<p>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
Your post advocates a<p>(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante<p>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.)<p>(X) Scammers can easily use it to defraud users<p>(X) Smart contracts and other legitimate cryptocurrency uses would be affected<p>( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money<p>(X) It is defenseless against network-level attacks<p>( ) It will stop scams for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it<p>( ) Users of cryptocurrencies will not put up with it<p>( ) Microsoft will not put up with it<p>(X) The police will not put up with it<p>(X) Requires too much cooperation from exchanges<p>( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once<p>( ) Many cryptocurrency users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers<p>( ) Scammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists<p>(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business<p>(X) Replicated state machines do not scale<p>Specifically, your plan fails to account for<p>( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it<p>( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for cryptocurrencies<p>( ) Open relays in foreign countries<p>( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all private keys<p>(X) Asshats<p>( ) Jurisdictional problems<p>(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes<p>(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money<p>(X) Huge existing software investment in PoW<p>(X) Huge existing software investment in composable smart contracts<p>(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than PoW to cheap fork creation<p>(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email<p>(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes<p>(X) Eternal arms race involved in all network-healing approaches<p>(X) Extreme profitability of scams<p>( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft<p>(X) Technically illiterate politicians<p>(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with scammers<p>( ) Dishonesty on the part of scammers themselves<p>(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering<p>(X) Bitcoin already exists<p>(X) Error states that require manual intervention to fix<p>and the following philosophical objections may also apply:<p>(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical<p>( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable<p>( ) Block headers should not be the subject of legislation<p>( ) Blacklists suck<p>( ) Whitelists suck<p>( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud<p>(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks<p>(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually<p>( ) Sending transactions should be free<p>(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?<p>( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses<p>(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem<p>( ) Temporary/one-time addresses are cumbersome<p>( ) I don't want the government reading my cryptocurrency transactions<p>( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough<p>(X) The rich should not get richer<p>(X) Money and finance are legal constructs, and should not be replaced by undemocratic systems<p>Furthermore, this is what I think about you:<p>(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.<p>( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.<p>( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
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.
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?
<a href="https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-Fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...</a><p><a href="https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/the-censorship-resistance-argument-for-bitcoin-over-ethereum/" rel="nofollow">https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/the-censorsh...</a><p>ETH is competing against USD, not against BTC.<p>Bitcoin is competing against gold.<p>Different races. different goals.<p>Different risks.
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.<p>Two primary concerns, technical feasibility and political strife:<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
People seem to forget that this energy use is a consequence of miners wanting coins because of the subjective <i>value of the reward.</i> 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.<p>Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true <i>even</i> 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.<p>The real way to address energy use is to introduce seignorage into the system. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage</a>) in order to do this, you must give some of the new issuance to people who are not part of the system of validation.<p>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.<p>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 <i>real</i> business transactions due to the deflationary nature of the tokens.