[HN Gopher] The Merge is approaching, and comes with changes to ...
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The Merge is approaching, and comes with changes to Ethereum
Author : kristianpaul
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-08-20 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ethereum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ethereum.org)
| fizzynut wrote:
| Given that the merge reduces the electricity cost for new
| Ethereum by ~1000x, won't the price just tank in a race to the
| bottom?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| In theory the price of any cryptocurrency is close to $0 as
| they are all fundamentally swappable, especially when used as a
| means of moving fiat between two parties.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The supply of ETH is only related to electricity when it's
| possible to mine it with electricity. Otherwise, what keeps the
| price of crypto up is people competing to get currency for uses
| like remittance. Since sending money to another country using a
| cryptocurrency ties up an amount of currency for a period of
| time, users have to compete for the available tokens in order
| to exchange with them.
| fizzynut wrote:
| That's my point though, after the merge the proof of stake
| nodes are earning a lot of ETH for a fraction of the previous
| cost, the only way price should stay stable is if everyone
| with a stake agrees not to undercut each other.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _earning a lot of ETH for a fraction of the previous
| cost_
|
| That will only be true if mining is a significant
| contributor to the availability of ETH. Instead, I think
| that most ETH comes from sellers of existing tokens rather
| than miners.
| hackernudes wrote:
| Is someone out there buying ETH because of the power that went
| in to mining it? It's more about supply and demand, I think.
| The supply of ETH does change after the merge, but from what I
| understand there will be less generated than before.
|
| All the tokens and contracts that use Ethereum will still need
| to pay gas fees and now instead of miners earning ETH, stakers
| will.
| fizzynut wrote:
| Those with a "stake" of ETH will be gaining $xxxx of ETH for
| a cost of $x, so why would you not sell for a giant profit?
| latchkey wrote:
| Taxes
| datalopers wrote:
| This seems plausible as the prices historically for both eth
| and btc have followed the cost to mine. A significant portion
| of the crypto world is directly propped up by miners in an
| effort to drum up demand.
|
| Things will change monumentally so it'll be very interesting to
| see what does happen.
| seydor wrote:
| aqme28 wrote:
| What are you talking about?
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Acronym could be better, but not sure what the rest of your
| comment is getting at.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Ethereum in its current state is using proof-of-work (PoW) to
| ensure consensus amongst the thousands of nodes in the network.
| While PoW is reliable and secure, it is also extremely energy
| intensive. To produce each block on the network participants are
| required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a
| complex mathematical problem.
|
| Alternatively, proof-of-stake (PoS) guarantees the security of
| the network in a different way. In PoS, anyone with 32 ETH can
| deposit that ETH to become a validator, a node that participates
| in the network's consensus algorithm. Finalizing a block requires
| 2/3 of all active validators to sign off on it. Should a
| malicious actor try to tamper with the underlying protocol by
| using a large number of validators to revert a finalized block
| (the equivalent of a "51% attack" in PoW) their funds are slashed
| -- meaning they lose a portion of their staked ETH. This makes
| attacks extremely expensive; it would be like a PoW system where
| if you use your mining hardware to attack the network then your
| hardware catches fire and is destroyed.
|
| PoS does not require the same energy-intensive hardware as PoW.
| Any relatively recent consumer hardware should be capable of
| running the software required to operate a 32 ETH staking node.
| If you deposit more than 32 ETH, you will be assigned multiple
| "validator slots" by the protocol, but you will still be able to
| run them from a single computer, though hardware requirements go
| up the more you stake. Most estimates put the expected energy
| savings from the switch to PoS to be around 99%.
|
| If you have any additional questions please let me know!
| sprkwd wrote:
| I'm literally an idiot. Make this sense for me.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > If you deposit more than 32 ETH, you will be assigned
| multiple "validator slots" by the protocol, but you will still
| be able to run them from a single computer, though hardware
| requirements go up the more you stake.
|
| Is there a good place to read more about this hardware
| requirements as a function of validator slots? A concern in my
| mind with PoS is what is the incentive to expand the physical
| hardware footprint of the network. I understand this implies
| more energy usage, however it is a requirement for a
| decentralized, distributed, and resilient system, otherwise it
| can very easily be physically attacked if the footprint becomes
| overly concentrated with a few very powerful nodes.
|
| Unless the hardware requirements are a convex function of total
| staked then if me and you both want to stake we will see the
| hardware and network/bandwidth costs as something we could
| share, which if everyone calculates the same, the network will
| physically shrink.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| The HW requirements increase very very minimally.
|
| See this response on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstak
| er/comments/nk9qzt/multiple_...
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| > required to use powerful and energy-hungry GPUs to solve a
| complex mathematical problem.
|
| No mathematical problem is getting "solved".
|
| It is much more akin to playing the lottery: Entirely random
| numbers are being tried out, by sending them through an energy-
| intensive algorithm (being energy-intensive is the algorithm's
| only purpose in proof-of-work), until what comes out is less
| than another number. That other number is chosen according to
| the desired "difficulty", it has no significance beyond that.
|
| The algorithm is literally meant to spend energy, i.e. the
| outcome of the computation has no meaning by itself. This also
| means that proof-of-work cryptocurrencies _actively counteract_
| any advances to make the computation more efficient: The
| "difficulty" will just be adjusted up until the efficiency gain
| is canceled out. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are inefficient
| by design.
| Banana699 wrote:
| This is a lot of words to say that PoW involves an inverse-
| hash problem being solved. Inverse-hash is a mathematical
| problem. Finding the nonce is solving it.
| mondoveneziano wrote:
| I was explaining in layman's terms.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Layman's explanation: POW works by solving a complex
| mathematical problem. :-)
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Eh, a mathematical puzzle is being solved via brute-force. My
| intent was to explain briefly that the problem/puzzle is by
| nature computationally-intensive to the extent that brute-
| force is the most efficient way to solve/complete it.
| wavefunction wrote:
| I am sure staking pools will be available to people with less
| than 32 ETH
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They are, and there seems to be a drive by legitimate actors
| to build them up. For example, Coinbase is building theirs by
| offering up to $50 ($10 every $100 worth) in exchange for
| initial staking of Eth.
| fullsend wrote:
| They already are. The Merge refers to the fact that the PoS
| chain has been running parallel to the main chain for one
| year now. It has been thoroughly tested live and so now will
| be merged back into the main chain like a branch of a git
| repo.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| How can two chains be merged if one is a fork of the other
| without having instances of double spending? With source
| code in Git you can manually pick which version of each
| line you want in the merged result, but here it's not
| possible to do that if services or merch have been
| exchanged with coins. Except if you're fine with having to
| deal forever with coins and merged-from-the-fork coins on
| the eth blockchain?
| mcmeowerson wrote:
| As far as I understand it both forks have the same
| ledger, its only the transaction validation method thats
| changing. The PoS fork is mirroring all of the PoW
| transactions so no double spending or extra coins.
| dsimmons wrote:
| Some of the better known ones are Lido and RocketPool.
| uncletammy wrote:
| Care to objectively articulate the arguments against switching
| to proof-of-stake? Why is it controversial?
| rglullis wrote:
| It's only controversial in the minds of purists/"maximalists"
| who are too invested in BTC. Their arguments would be
| something like:
|
| - PoS is not "decentralized" nor "democratic", because it
| means that only those with capital can participate in the
| network consensus building. This is "technically correct",
| but (a) it ignores that existing PoW also require _massive_
| amounts of capital to deploy mining facilities and (b) it is
| not democratic because only those with access to cheap
| electricity will profit from being a miner.
|
| - PoS implies that those staking their crypto are "investing"
| with their tokens, which would make the token a "security"
| and not a "currency". This distinction could make it easy for
| the SEC and governments to intervene and create regulation
| that would require stakers to only participate if they
| implement changes at the protocol level. E.g, it could happen
| that a staker would reject to validate any block containing
| transactions to smart contracts that got sanctioned. This is
| a more real concern, if you think about all the big players
| (read, centralized exchanges) who are staking ETH on behalf
| of their customers and therefore will have non-negligible
| control over the network. In this case, the community
| expectation is that (a) users of staked ETH pull out of the
| exchanges and run their own validators and (b) the exchanges
| realize that they will be shooting themselves in the foot,
| and therefore go on to fight whatever legislation that pushes
| on that type of control/censorship at the protocol level.
| rakoo wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation! I have a few questions:
|
| - how does the punishment work ? Do all nodes see that a
| malicious actor changed the chain and write the bad ideas in
| some ledger meaning "these nodes just lost X ETH" ?
|
| - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what does
| he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control what
| block is accepted
|
| - is there an advantage to run more than one validator, if you
| have the money (EDIT: and you don't want to attack the
| network)? Basically, does having more money gives you more
| (power, control, anything) ?
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| 1. Punishment mechanisms here are kind of complicated, but in
| short, you're punished for mainly 2 reasons: being an offline
| validator, or for an attestation violating.
|
| Slashers are entities that enforce the two above rules. If a
| slasher determines that you're node is down, or that you're
| committing an attestation violation (i.e. that you're signing
| more than one attestation in a given epoch mainly). The
| slasher actually does not get rewarded here. The block
| proposer who takes the broadcasted slashing and and adds a
| proof of it to their block proposition, and get what's called
| a whistleblower reward. Slashing is not meant to profitable,
| and the whistleblower reward is quite small. We don't need a
| million slashers, in fact, we could operate with just one...
| expect the Eth Foundation to run them, among other large
| players who can spare the resources.
|
| Owning 2/3 of nodes economically is kind of silly. You
| essentially just 51% the network, and everyone else leaves.
| You're then stuck with a worthless personal currency. Have
| fun!
|
| More than one validator means more validator rewards, and a
| bit more "power" in that you're a larger component of the
| general validation network.
| entrep wrote:
| > - But if the malicious actor owns 2/3 of validators, what
| does he care what other nodes do ? They effectively control
| what block is accepted
|
| As I understand it, anyone who owns that amount of ETH would
| probably be interested in contributing to the trust of the
| Ethereum blockchain.
| boosteri wrote:
| Why would it need to be a significant amount of ETH? Could
| someone coordinate an attack on validator nodes, making
| themselves 67%+ temporarily?
| yunohn wrote:
| Sure, but that wasn't the question. How does the punishment
| play out, assuming they're acting in bad faith?
| rglullis wrote:
| If you have 2/3 of the validators, there is no way that
| you can be punished. You will effectively be able to
| produce the blocks and tell the network that they are
| valid.
|
| If you don't have that, the most that you can do is to
| attack the network by proposing bad blocks to slow down
| block production. Anytime that a (selected) validator
| proposes a bad block, the other validators that catch
| your mistake will snitch on you (through attestations)
| and the validator will get their stake funds slashed. The
| more your funds are slashed, the less of a chance you
| will have to be proposing new blocks in the future.
| falcolas wrote:
| What reason would anyone have to believe in their
| benevolence? It would be safer to believe in and use their
| greed and self preservation.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| No one would use a network with this level of
| centralization, or at least, it would be unwise to.
| bluquark wrote:
| This reminds me of the nerve-biting period up to the James Webb
| launch. The devs put off this transition for so many years trying
| to plan for every contingency, but we still can't be certain they
| didn't miss a crucial flaw.
|
| In a system where the only thing holding back malicious actors is
| technical constraints, it only takes one bug or one misaligned
| incentive for a vicious cycle to take down the entire Ethereum
| ecosystem. An exploitable detail in the PRNG used to select the
| validators, for instance.
|
| And like a space telescope, there is no opportunity to
| realistically experiment with the change beforehand, nor an easy
| way to make adjustments after launch.
| latchkey wrote:
| It is order of magnitude easier for them to make changes after
| launch since the code and developers are here on earth and not
| floating in space.
| sktrdie wrote:
| I don't get proof of stake. What's stopping anyone from
| presenting a new chain made up of thousands of fake transactions?
| And why wouldn't such chain be accepted by the network? Is it
| just "checkpoints" hardcoded in the software that don't allow
| this?
| pkulak wrote:
| Nothing. But nothing moves forward without consensus. So you'd
| need 51% of the network to agree with your made up chain, which
| would mean controlling about $100 billion in Eth. And then
| you've managed to destroy a network that you have $100 billion
| wrapped up in... so, good job? And if you try with less than
| 51% and the rest of the network slaps you down, you lose your
| stake (or some portion of it).
| bhaak wrote:
| All the nodes that have been online long enough will know that
| the fake chain is fake. Because it doesn't match the state that
| they have been observing all along.
|
| So as long as you have no extended downtime, your nodes know
| what the right chain has to look like. Ethereum dynamically
| adds checkpoints so that block reorgs can't reach too far into
| the past but that is mostly a convenience function as it alone
| couldn't solve this issue.
|
| Now, there is a problem if you are a new participant. Then you
| can't decide which chain is the right one. You could observe
| for a while and choose the one that has more validators but in
| theory, there's the possibility that there's a contentious hard
| fork going on.
|
| In this case you need to get the information which chain is the
| right one from outside sources. E.g. like your preferred
| exchange or the official subreddit.
|
| This is the most glaring difference between POS and POW. With
| POW, you don't need any outside information as you can just
| verify which chain needed more work to be created and this is
| by definition the correct one.
|
| POW leverages physics to be completely self contained for the
| price of energy consumption.
| samkon wrote:
| Any node that did this would have their stake slashed by the
| rest of the network, because it would be easy to prove that the
| chain was invalid. The network finalizes the blocks that are
| added to the chain, there are no deep chain reorgs like in
| bitcoin - so any significant alternate history is easily
| identified.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| It's bullshit: https://yanmaani.github.io/proof-of-stake-is-a-
| scam-and-the-...
| 6c737133 wrote:
| A magnificently misinformed waste of bytes. Thanks for
| sharing.
| clord wrote:
| Say I have a few GPUs churning but my payout date is late 2022.
| Should I just give up now?
| falcolas wrote:
| Poor miners.
|
| /s
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| I can't tell you how much I enjoy refreshing these crypto
| threads. Comments are turning from black to gray to black again
| like I'm at a disco.
| cowtools wrote:
| Something I like about HN is that down-voted posts will often
| come back from the grave. For some reason voters have a lot
| of sympathy.
|
| Back on reddit, people use votes as a way to signal to each
| other what to believe in: instinctively, you upvote popular
| comments and downvote unpopular comments. It's really the
| first few voters that decide what people see.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Curious: will it be more energy efficient?
| y42 wrote:
| Quote
|
| The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%.
| swarnie wrote:
| Does the merge come with any real world benefits? Besides now
| not needing the yearly power consumption of Belgium.
|
| Like... Can i buy bread and milk with this thing any time
| soon?
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > Misconception: "The Merge will reduce gas fees."
|
| > False. The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not
| an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in
| lower gas fees.
|
| > Misconception: "Transactions will be noticeably faster
| after The Merge."
|
| > False. Though some slight changes exist, transaction
| speed will mostly remain the same on layer 1.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| No. It's still a cryptocurrency.
| timbit42 wrote:
| The only benefit of the merge is energy consumption will be
| reduced to about 1/1000th what it is now.
| jmathai wrote:
| Multitudes of miners will no longer race to find the next
| computationally expensive hash. Proof of Stake does address
| the energy concerns of crypto.
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| GPU based mining of ETH will turn off, literally, in 15s (one
| block). But the thing is, it will just move to other coins, for
| now. Once those are not as profitable, things will rebalance as
| people shut off their GPUs.
|
| Future, ETH will grow with power requirements too... just a lot
| more slowly... ASICs for zero knowledge are coming, which will
| create a bit of an energy race. Staking will always be
| increasing... which will require compute and power.
|
| At the end of the day, overall, the existing power usage won't
| actually go away... it will just get moved to other things.
| Always remember that power companies are incentivized to sell
| their power to the highest bidder...
| zaptrem wrote:
| Can you give more info about Zero Knowledge Proofs would
| require ASICS?
| latchkey wrote:
| https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
|
| "Type 1 aims to replicate Ethereum exactly, and so it has
| no way of mitigating these inefficiencies. At present,
| proofs for Ethereum blocks take many hours to produce. This
| can be mitigated either by clever engineering to massively
| parallelize the prover or in the longer term by ZK-SNARK
| ASICs."
|
| ...
|
| "Personally, my hope is that everything becomes Type 1 over
| time, through a combination of improvements in ZK-EVMs and
| improvements to Ethereum itself to make it more ZK-SNARK-
| friendly."
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > As we approach The Merge of Ethereum Mainnet, you should be on
| high alert for scams trying to take advantage of users during
| this transition. Do not send your ETH anywhere in an attempt to
| "upgrade to ETH2." There is no "ETH2" token, and there is nothing
| more you need to do for your funds to remain safe.
|
| Yeah... this is going to be a shitshow. Who wants to set the
| over/under on $millions that get stolen? Which exchange or fund
| will lose a vast chunk of its holdings?
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > Who wants to set the over/under on $millions that get stolen?
|
| If you can think of a way to measure it metaculus would be
| interested properly.
|
| > Which exchange or fund will lose a vast chunk of its
| holdings?
|
| I'd place this at roughly at 0.01% chance for any major
| exchange or fund
| [deleted]
| ben_jones wrote:
| > I'd place this at roughly at 0.01% chance for any major
| exchange or fund
|
| Over 0.01% of major exchanges and funds have been hacked or
| scammed _this month_.
| numlock86 wrote:
| > The Merge will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by ~99.95%.
|
| That's something Bitcoin needs ... or even better get rid of it
| altogether.
|
| https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index
|
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
| smashem wrote:
| End the FUD https://endthefud.org/
| numlock86 wrote:
| > The delusional shitcoiner's funny compilation
|
| Yeah, thanks for reminding me. We all had out good laugh at
| that site at some point.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I really enjoyed mousing over each link and looking at the
| sources.
| [deleted]
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I believe that after the block size wars that resulted in
| Bitcoin cash and bitcoin (the chain that chose the path of no
| change) the bitcoin community ossified into a community that is
| actively resistant towards changes, and bitcoin cash is much
| smaller and suffered from many subsequent forks.
|
| Without significant outside force bitcoin will not change to
| proof of stake, they are currently framing proof of stake as
| useless and insecure, IMO because of motivated reasoning from
| the stance that bitcoin is perfect, therefore any deviation
| from what bitcoin has is a mistake.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _That 's something Bitcoin needs ... or even better get rid of
| it altogether._
|
| As the price keeps falling, presumably so will energy
| consumption. The energy consumption problem fixes itself as the
| bubble bursts and people lose interest and mining becomes
| unprofitable, without the need for regulation.
| cowtools wrote:
| If the price continues to fall, the bitcoin network will
| become susceptible to 51% and selfish-mining attacks.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The hardware to perform PoW already exists. All someone needs
| to do for a 51% attack is buy up the old mining hardware that
| is being sold for so cheap.
|
| Every "bust" period for BTC comes with the risk of a 51%
| attack / centralization.
|
| If the difficulty falls by 90% because 90% of miners were
| shut off, you only need to buy 5.6% of those thrown-away
| miners to cause a 51% attack on BTC.
| icoder wrote:
| Assuminge no one buys up any of the other 94.4%
| dragontamer wrote:
| It doesn't matter if they buy it or not. If they're
| waiting for profitability, they won't turn those machines
| on. Or do you think people will spend $100 on electricity
| to mine $10 of BTC just to keep the security of the token
| high?
|
| A hypothetical 51% attacker isn't doing it for profits,
| they're doing it for some other reason. Whatever that
| reason is, the 51% attack gets cheaper-and-cheaper each
| time these "bust" cycles happen.
| wyager wrote:
| Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security
| properties for a monetary system. Proof of stake suffers from
| the "nothing at stake" problem, leading to grinding attacks
| etc.
| Victerius wrote:
| > Proof of work is the only way to get acceptable security
| properties for a monetary system.
|
| Every country's financial system: ahem.
|
| The U.S. dollar doesn't require giant energy-hungry server
| farms to be secure.
| cowtools wrote:
| The U.S. dollar is backed by a military many times more
| energy intensive.
| Victerius wrote:
| What?
| Macha wrote:
| So if the us replaced the dollar with Bitcoin they could
| eliminate or downsize their military?
|
| Doubtful
| novantadue wrote:
| We wouldn't have to overthrow mid-east dictators every
| time they threaten to price oil in Euros -- but obviously
| this wouldn't help much because we'd still need to
| maintain superpower status or risk losing the world
| order.
| cowtools wrote:
| I agree with the point you are making here. I just think
| that Proof-of-Work is usually a better choice for a
| cryptocurrency than Proof-of-Stake.
|
| Conventional currencies (notably the US Dollar) are also
| backed by signifigant military (and thus electrical)
| power. I would posit that Fiat currencies are nessisary
| in some sense, but not that they are more efficient to
| maintain than cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies tend to
| piggyback on the infrastructure and economy that are
| built on fiat (e.g. The internet).
| jcranmer wrote:
| Fiat currency is not backed by military power. Note that
| there exist several countries without militaries, and
| none of those countries have worthless currencies. And
| there have existed countries that put significant
| investment into their military and still wound up with a
| worthless currency at the end.
| cowtools wrote:
| Those countries exist as client states to countries with
| militaries.
|
| Yes, the militatary spending is nessisary but not
| sufficient to sustain a currency.
| smashem wrote:
| You really believe that the USD, as the world's reserve
| currency, doesn't require its military to keep it that
| way.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Yes, I do, actually.
|
| The US economy is the world's largest economy in gross
| value, is the largest or one of the largest trade
| partners of much of the world, and has very limited
| policies on capital control or other monetary
| restrictions. This means that there is going to be more
| depth on trading pairs via USD and even small currencies
| than you would likely have with other countries, you
| would have very little counterparty risk holding USD, and
| much trade will end up being denominated in USD anyways.
| So you'd be a _bloody fool_ not to hold USD.
|
| Magically blinking away the US military would not change
| any of the above consideration one iota.
|
| So let me flip the question around: why do _you_ believe
| that the US military is essential to its role as a major
| reserve currency?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > Magically blinking away the US military would not
| change any of the above consideration one iota.
|
| Let's flip the question around: what happens when oil
| producing countries try to sell in non-USD? _US military
| has entered the chat_
| jcranmer wrote:
| Answer: nothing. No country has been invaded by the US
| military, or any other military for that matter, after
| selling, or even attempting to sell, oil in non-USD. Not
| Russia, not Iran, not Venezuela, not Iraq, not Libya,
| none of them.
|
| (And I include the last few because there's no evidence
| they even attempted to sell oil in non-US currencies.)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Granted, it is not a server farm, but the US military isn't
| exactly carbon neutral.
| smashem wrote:
| There are server farms within the military, so by proxy,
| the USD does require server farms. Then the private
| financial institutions have server farms.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| Does the army and law enforcement not use energy?
|
| Do banks not have server farms?
| Victerius wrote:
| Okay, back up a little. Crypto miners mine crypto in
| order to become rich. With national currencies, this is
| impossible. Citizens cannot create their own currency,
| and that's a good thing. If money could be easily forged,
| it would either be worthless, or a speculative
| instrument, like every crypto in existence. National
| governments are the source and the only legal creators of
| money.
|
| Crypto mining also makes the blockchain secure. What this
| means is that a malicious individual cannot, say,
| transfer crypto from another person's wallet to his own,
| or alter the software algorithm that controls the
| creation of the cryptocurrency.
|
| Proof of work cryptocurrencies require miners to expend
| an enormous quantity of energy in order to prevent
| problems that national currencies don't have in the first
| place. Cryptocurrencies have no advantage over national
| currencies except for anonymous online transactions.
| smashem wrote:
| > National governments are the source and the only legal
| creators of money.
|
| And those closest to the money printer benefit. And hint,
| the average joe is furthest from the printer. The future
| of the average joe is stolen via currency debasement and
| inflation, but those closest to the printer get richer.
| jcranmer wrote:
| How would moving to cryptocurrency reduce the need of
| energy for military and law enforcement, or the need for
| server farms in banks?
| samkon wrote:
| Securing private keys is much cheaper than securing
| physical property.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't think that was the point. The point was that you
| can't have security without energy expenditure.
| smashem wrote:
| True, the USD just requires violence and cohersion.
| Loveaway wrote:
| Fiat currencies are backed by huge financial sectors. If
| all you need are numbers in a database, what are all those
| towers in NY for?
| wyager wrote:
| Are you familiar with petrodollar warfare? It consumes a
| lot more energy and resources than bitcoin.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Good discussion on the topic below (~10 minutes).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-_CuPtzoDU
| repomies69 wrote:
| Bitcoin is never going to change from PoW... That's the point
| of the system, Bitcoin is unchangable, unlike Ethereum.
|
| But you are free to create your own PoS cryptocurrency. If some
| PoS system offers the same security features as Bitcoin, people
| will just switch from Bitcoin to that.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Bitcoin has changed in the past. The block size, for example,
| is something that was modified a few years ago.
|
| See also the "block size controversy" [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
| lapser wrote:
| Bitcoin is still software. Software can change. It's the
| people who refuse to change it
| MBCook wrote:
| A huge chunk of the miners fought tooth-and-nail to not
| increase the maximum block size. The chance of them
| agreeing to something like this seems very low indeed.
| earnesti wrote:
| Yes, other way to put it is that the incentives for the
| software are designed in a way which makes certain changes
| extremely unlikely. However some changes are happening all
| the time (features added via a soft fork)
| konschubert wrote:
| Bitcoin will either die or will eventually have much higher
| transaction fees compared to Ethereum. Because somebody's
| gotta pay that power bill.
|
| Maybe that won't matter, but I hope it will.
|
| https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2018/11/28/proof-of-
| stake...
| [deleted]
| simias wrote:
| Security is not the main reason for Bitcoin's success within
| the cryptocurrency scene, it's that it's the first and most
| recognizable name. But because its creator is AWOL it's
| incredibly difficult to push for any fundamental change to
| the protocol without creating huge divisions and probably a
| very controversial fork (of which there already have been a
| few). Unless Satoshi themselves decides to make a comeback, I
| don't think it'll ever happen.
|
| People are not using Bitcoin because it's the most advanced
| or secure cryptocurrency, they use bitcoin because it was the
| first and will probably be the last to go whenever that whole
| flaming garbage bag of a "technology" hits the bin.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| How are gas fees going to be calculated, and how do you plan to
| control spamming the network similar to what you see with Solana?
| 0x64 wrote:
| Block times become exactly 12 seconds, that's it. Nothing else
| changes: it's the same Ethereum, just greener and very slightly
| faster!
| dsimmons wrote:
| Gas fees don't materially change under Proof of Stake. It's a
| common misconception that The Merge reduces fees (it does not).
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| So what is the point of high fees under proof of stake?
| Before it was to reward the miners. Who exactly is being
| rewarded high fees once it changes and for what purpose?
| ur-whale wrote:
| Time to short NVidia
| dsimmons wrote:
| In the short-term, it's likely already priced in: folks have
| known this is coming for a while, and especially over the past
| 2-3 months where it became "real" versus "coming soon".
|
| Longer term, there may be uses for GPUs when it comes to zero-
| knowledge proofs (think: expensive to produce, easy to verify),
| but we still have a ways to go in that department.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Quote from the blog linked:
|
| >The target date is September 15, 2022, but this estimate might
| have even a week of error.
| dsimmons wrote:
| It depends on a host of factors, so it's hard to predict
| exactly.
|
| As an example: it depends on the rate at which existing Proof
| of Work miners move the chain forward. We can make an estimated
| guess based on the current hash rate, but miners may begin to
| drop off early and try to "beat the rush" to sell their used
| hardware before everyone else, so the hash rate could drop more
| than anticipated.
| 0x64 wrote:
| The current estimate for the upgrade can be found at [1]. It's
| not a regular upgrade that happens at a specific block height,
| hence the variance. Instead, the consensus is flipped over from
| PoW to PoS at a specific total difficulty, also known as mining
| difficulty. One of the reasons is to avoid miner attacks around
| the merge event.
|
| [1] https://bordel.wtf/
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