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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by kodah on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @10:58AM (#27195489)
> 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.

Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by shanecoin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:08PM (#27196661)
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...

Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by baby on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:27PM (#27198074)
I don’t think PoS was a thing when Ethereum was invented.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by joshmarlow on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:02PM (#27198575)
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.

Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by baby on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:31PM (#27204219)
Interesting, in any case I don’t think any decision was made to ease the transition at the time.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by rfd4sgmk8u on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:08PM (#27198683)
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.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by baby on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:31PM (#27204221)
Mkay
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by svachalek on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:56AM (#27196410)
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.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge by kodah on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:07PM (#27196645)
Kinda what I figured. Thanks for the response.