Once you make changes to a chain its not easy to fix without making a huge mess. Hopefully the migration with be done by Q1 2022.
The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact plan has changed since then.
Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork alive.
Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.
They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years.
The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners.
Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.
They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.
PoS has always been on the roadmap even before their ICO. But yes, with a MUCH more optimistic timeline.
2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.
The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.
They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so.
And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends...
It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.
Vitalik et all have been talking about pos for years. Meanwhile a huge portion of the cryptocurrency space went there already (years ago) and left eth behind. POS isn't some new technology.
Fees don't come from whether it's pow or pos, they come from volume and the need to prioritize transactions.
Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before.
There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of multiple options, rather than figuring out how to do it at all. As I mentioned in another comment, someone built a running proof-of-concept in about a day.
The hard part is figuring out how to execute arbitrary code and synchronize it across all shards, without removing the benefits of having shards in the first place.
Around the same time is the migration to data sharding, which multiplies data storage by 23X initially. That's without code execution on the shards.
Zkrollups in production now do the execution off-chain. On chain, you store compressed state data and a compact proof that everything executed correctly. That's good for a couple thousand tx/sec today, and 23X that after data sharding. Given that, Vitalik has argued that shard execution may not even be necessary; it wouldn't add nearly so much transaction capacity as we'd have already.
Here are the papers on how Ethereum consensus actually works:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052
And here's more detail on rollups:
Because it makes so much sense to dedicate equal or if not vastly greater resources to playing games?
So no, not equal, not greater, in fact lower. And I think the Graphics Processing Unit should process graphics, don't you?
Mining needs more resources to solve a brute force problem whose difficulty is increased just for the sake of making the problem even harder to solve.
And they probably didn't factor in ASIC miners and large mining pools, either. Proof of Work is legacy technology at this point, it's a good thing Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake along with most of the ecosystem.
Ethereum is instead solving it by having an initial proof-of-work period and then moving to proof-of-stake after some amount of mining and wealth distribution has already happened.
ADA and XTZ did pre-mine their initial distribution, and now they distribute coins through stake rewards.
Five months later I still have my eBay searches saved, and the exact model I bought is now regularly selling for 40+% more than it cost me. There's one right now with a few hours left on the clock, currently going for 50% more than I paid, with 75 watchers and 51 bids. It's wild.
It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological devices.
I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold mining.
So yes we do have alternatives to gold. Things such as Bitcoin and crypto, which keep going up in value, while gold speculation has stagnated and is even going down. Weakening dollar and massive debts due to the pandemic should mean gold skyrockets, but people are buying the alternatives. It looks grim for gold. Tesla didn’t buy gold, they bought Bitcoin.
How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres.
I’m not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even military) protection under just the dollar column - if you steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage the legal system to pursue you.
About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin equivalent
So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.
Also, a minute with Wikipedia and a calculator will show you that transmission losses for the longest possible straight distance in China are <5%.
So what's your point?
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...
There's an emissions cost to producing the equipment required to construct the hydro plant.
There's an emissions cost associated with constructing the hydro plant.
This is multiplied if you are building it in an area without heavy industry (no existing demand, remember?) - because you have to construct your own support infrastructure and road network to build and service the plant.
Not to mention the impact of the now flooded 'wilderness' (which is highly likely to contain carbon sinks).
Or the impact to forestation and vegetation downstream.
You're arguing with a discussion that didn't happen.
You then proceeded to excoriate me for not addressing everything in every discussion that has ever happened in your mind about bitcoin.
There are others that are.
The reality is the same.
Enviromental harm is the reality of bitcoin. And should be on the addressable agenda.
I don't know how can you say that after volatility in banking systems crashed large parts of economies of at least a few developed countries leading to resurgence of nationalist leaders that fuel and use those sentiments in people damaged by banks gambling on stuff they can't be trusted to count properly.
We'll see how well your wealth gets preserved when China stops buying US debt for whatever reason and oil is sold for euros or yuans. I think there will be proper mess in global economies and you might use a thing that can't be fudged by people.
And I am not particularly for any energy conservation measures. Except for isolating buildings because most dirty stuff we burn is for that purpose and not isolating your home is just negligence.
Wasting electrical energy is only bad because it came from burning stuff. But I don't think any fossil fuel power plant was closed because people used less. Maybe some were not built because of that, but then some renewables and nuclear power were not built for that reason as well and I believe that's very bad.
> Wasting electrical energy is only bad because it came from burning stuff. But I don't think any fossil fuel power plant was closed because people used less.
Coal plants are indeed closing because they are no longer profitable. Natural gas is the main “on-demand” power source, and plants raise and lower production based on demand. Increased power consumption will delay the transition away from coal, and keep natural gas plants running more often.
But not to drive up demand there are better ways to do that in case of housing. There are places where more efficient housing can't be built bot because lack of demand but local regulations that serve local wealth owners.
Waste food... Not so much bacause food preduction doesn't really suffer as a result of low demand. We pretty much grow food as efficiently as it is possible and in places we don't we do it for different reasons than just lack of demand. There are food producers that destroy some food they produced to drive up the prices by increasing ratio of demand to supply.
Coal power plants close because there are cheaper ways to make electricity now, not because demand dropped.
Crypto mining operations can provide load on-demand which is almost as good as power production on demand while balancing power grid.
Nuclear power plant plus huge crypto mine can provide as much flexibility as coal power plant if not more.
The price for power is set by supply and demand. Increased demand for power increases the price. This means that coal plants can afford to operate depending on the amount of demand.
Here’s a story about coal plants closing due to lower demand: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/the-covid-1...
Here’s another article about how natural gas plants are replacing coal and nuclear: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natur...
Any increase in demand for power will increase carbon emission by keeping coal plants from shutting down, building more natural natural gas plants, and keeping those plants online more often. Renewables are important, but only satisfy a minority of demand for electricity.
In CO2 free future we'll have all of home heating running on electricity and all of our transportation too. Power generation needs incredible amount of investments over the next 50 years. I believe crypto mining might drive those investments so we are ready for that future.
Even now there are instances where flexible demand of crypto miners helps balance the grid now: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m...
In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper) renewables are going to be priced out, it just takes some time. That said other protocols much less computationally intensive, such as "Proof of Stake", are starting to be tested.
Anyhow, good idea NVIDIA!
I dunno. Suppose Acme, Inc. starts selling a giant red button. When pressed, it means my boss will decide to give me the rest of the day off, no strings attached. There's a little disclaimer in the fine print that warns that whenever the button is pressed, Acme, Inc. will roll a 6-sided die. Whenever a 1 is rolled, a small child in Kenya will be executed.
Individual users of the product can claim that they aren't directly responsible for the externalities, because "I'm not the one performing the executions!" or "my dice roll was a four!".
Or, perhaps there are business users of the product, who are motivated by cost and nothing else. Good luck convincing a company that ethics are more important than its bottom line.
Sometimes users of a product are so detached from its consequences that they're willing to accept them, even if the true result is horrible. We should certainly hold companies accountable for exploiting human nature in this way.
So where exactly did you read that in the Bitcoin whitepaper? Because everything else is just guessing.
"Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.
I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste."
I think we're long past this point and we have better alternatives to PoW now.
There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365246060) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu / (365246060) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person for the total food and primary energy consumption rate.
11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts
So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to be the same first post in every thread on crypto.
Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect calculation, if so, please point it out.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employe...
[3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
[4] https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-pro...
I fail to see how this is relevant to the question of how bitcoin compares to the banking system as a system for storing and transferring money from an energy perspective.
The relevant comparison would be to compare the costs of doing a similar volume of similar operations using bitcoin and the bank system.
Ok.
I mean, how do you do for example mortgages or corporate finance with bitcoin - without hiring all the people and using all the resources current financial system does?
Frankly, more proper comparison would be the resource consumption of using gold in the financial system.
On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that.